The Singapore Flyer

My niece, Mala, is visiting from Auckland, New Zealand, with her two children – Ananya and Avinash. Though the children have visited before, now they are both older and not so shy of me.

We celebrated Ananya’s 10th birthday last Monday and as a treat we (together with my sister Vasantha who was visiting from India and her husband) went for a ride on the Singapore Flyer last Tuesday.

It was an interesting experience and I think we chose the best flight time – 7.00pm – as it was daylight as we went up and it had darkened by the time we began the descent so we got to experience both the day skyline and the night one.

It would have been a really pleasant evening except that the ride was spoilt for me by a group of Indian tourists who were in the same capsule as us. One man in the group spent not even 10 minutes looking at the sights. He was focussed solely on taking photographs and kept marshalling his brood of 5 adults and 3 children into different vantage points. He wasn’t interested in the view and oblivious to the fact that that was why the rest of us were on that observation wheel! He directed his photo shoot in a loud voice, kept getting in people’s way and was just such a pain. To top it off he was an indulgent father and the children were allowed to run around the capsule shouting and then twice his daughter had a screaming tantrum. I just wished I could shake that man. He had just no idea that the capsule was a confined space and while his children running around and his family posing at different places would have been fine if we were at the Botanic Gardens, this was a capsule in the sky, for goodness sake! Aargh!

What Empty Nest???

To all those who ask me how I am coping without both my daughters I have to answer – very well, actually. Lest my darling daughters get upset, I have to clarify that I do miss you both dearly and I do miss Maya and Ro as well, but I am not in a deep funk about it. Yes, the ‘empty nest’ feels strange at times (and a big realisation that hit me was how much of the silences between my husband and me had been filled up by my children’s voices) and yes, I am looking forward to when my girls are home for the holidays, but I don’t spend my weekends twiddling my thumbs and crying. I attribute it to 3 reasons –being prepared, technology and God.

I think one reason really is that I had by chance hit on a useful strategy in parenting – I read ahead of the stages my children were in, instead of reading about the stages my children were in. This was by accident really, because I read so much while I was pregnant about the first trimester, second trimester etc that I got bored and started reading ahead. So by the time Jennani was born I was reading about toddler-hood and then early childhood etc. So by chance I had hit upon a way that kept me prepared for what was to come and when the challenges happened I wasn’t caught by surprise and I had time to mentally prepare myself for colic, temper tantrums, reading needs, adolescent needs etc.

So I saw this empty nest coming quite some time ago – round about the time the girls were in their teens and didn't come home straight after school :) Being emotionally and psychologically prepared for this season of parenting has helped me a great deal because I managed to do the one most painful thing about motherhood, letting go, a little bit more easily than I would have otherwise I think. So I started getting involved in other activities like exercise, serving with the youth in church, renewing friendships and most important of all, learning to enjoy the solitude of my own company.

Then there is the whole wonderful world of technology. I am in danger of becoming an addict, I think. And yes, I think the label that Praveen gave me (techno cavewoman) still lurks in the background somewhere but increasingly I'm exploring new stuff online that keeps me occupied for hours - even distracting me from this blog some days :) Then I have taken to watching movies by myself - a wonderful, liberating experience. I get to watch movies that I want to, without considering whether my husband would like it or whether it was suitable for my children (though now this is no longer a consideration as they are both above 18). So 2 Saturdays ago I watched 'Grace is Gone' and last Saturday I watched 'The Bucket List'. Both great movies that made me cry and very glad that I watched them as well. Then of course there is Skype! LAst week Jen, Rubhi and I managed a 3-party video conferencing thanks to a free website that Rubhi found and that was great! Yeah so between Blogspot, Gmail, Facebook, Skype and Web 2.0, I must say my evenings and weekends are full.... :)

Above all, what gives me the greatest peace is the time I spend with God. I am a born worrier and have always found something to worry about. But the choice to send Rubhi to Melbourne is undergirded by a strong sense of peace despite others' questions as to whether she is too young and whether I could afford it because I have a sure sense that this is God's plan for her and that He would provide. As I look back I can say with certainty that in each season of my life, God's guiding hand has been there even when I did not recognise it. And in this season, I feel drawn to spend more time studying the Bible and to spend time with the young people in the cell group I mentor. In fact, far from having lots of time and not knowing what to do, I still find there isn't enough time as there is so much to learn and so little time to do it in. Of course by divine design my home isn't technically empty as I have Johnson staying with me now and I must say that it is a unique experience having a young man staying with us.

So, yes, here I am on Saturday night, blogging. Just came back from a 3 hour workshop at church (hmmm... that too must have been part of God's plan - to have got us this flat which is a stone's throw from church because He knew I would need to get to it without driving :), watched 'Om Shanti Om' on tv and all is well on the western front! Yes!

My Digital Shadow

So, I learnt a new term today - "digital shadow". Like our "carbon footprint" this is a new term coined to describe the traces we leave in cyberspace. Apparently we leave enough data on cyberspace from all our activities on the Internet for others to collect a great deal of information about us - like what we like to wear, what brands we favour, where we would like to go for a holiday and of course in perverse cases, what our sexual oreintations are :) Every website we have ever visited, every online transaction made, every email sent, every blog updated and commented on, every item googled gives away information about ourselves that can range from the innocuous (so you know I like chocolate, so what?) to the potentially scary (you know the names of my children, where they are and what they are doing) to the damaging (my credit card number is somewhere in cyberspace?)

When I first read the article, I admit I was rather perturbed and it made me pause to think about my online activities. In light of my recent narcissistic activities involving googling myself, I realised with a start that I had willingly put out a great deal of information about myself and my family. So technology has made it possible for me to contact long lost relatives, friends and students, but it has also made it possible for strangers to know me. This is especially true in Facebook where your friends' friends whom you have never met could possibly know about you depending on the kind of privacy levels set on your page and your friend's.

So what does one do then? Retreat into an Amish village and erase all signs of my existence? That's a depressing option. I'm still thinking about it. But meanwhile, for those of you haven't discovered Facebook yet, here is the link to my 50th Birthday party photos on my Facebook...

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=36127&l=a1222&id=607050798

Since I am already casting a digital shadow now, might as well make it a HUGE one while I am still at it :)

Alone

I spent yesterday evening alone. And I enjoyed it. I had relished the prospect of a quiet evening and had looked forward to it really as I was travelling home on the bus. I liked the quietness of the house, the stillness. I made dinner for myself, read the newspapers, uploaded photos on Facebook, read a little and felt sorry when my husband came back.

Was that unusual, I wonder, liking this solitude and being quiet? Would I like it if this was the situation every day? Or did I like it only because I had had a lot of social interaction during the day?

I Googled Me!

I was browsing round my old entries today and chanced upon a comment left on one of my entries by my friend Mini who had randomly googled my name to see if I had “made my presence felt on www” and found my blog! I was both pleasantly surprised (to see that she had found my blog and to discover she too had a blog) and intrigued that I could be found by being googled!

So, I went and googled myself (when did that name of a search engine become a verb, I wonder) and lo and behold, there were all these comments left on my blog up there at the top of the google search list! So then I suddenly understood what Jennani meant when she said she didn’t want her blog to be discovered and read and why she subsequently first locked and then abandoned her blog altogether (sad, sad, sad).

I was at first startled to see my name listed as a google entry. I mean, I am so used to googling for authors, sources and readings that it didn’t strike me that a non-descript individual could be googled. But yes, I do have a presence on the world wide web… Woo hoo! Then I was amused – that the drivel I write and the trivia I blog about is floating around somewhere in cyber space to be retrieved by my anonymous readers. Of course I had always known that what I blog about would not remain private which is why I have a journal and a blog – uncensored and censored versions of my thought life! But somehow, seeing the entries pop up in response to a google search seems to give my words an importance and significance I had not considered. There was also the interesting side to it - I discovered that my dear Angel had enjoyed herself at my 50th birthday party and blogged about it – in a a secret blog I had not known about…. Aha! Caught you! :)

Well, all in, it was an interesting experience. And then I was quite intrigued and went on to google various combinations of my name… hahaha… talk about narcissicism. And I have since discovered a new destination that I now desperately want to go to one day… A beachfront hangout called Vara’s!!! It’s on Cook Islands and it looks really idyllic and I think if I ever have enough money to just have a get-away-from-it-all holiday, I will go just there! Imagine staying on a beach in a place named after me! How cool is that! You must go and take a look at it – and if by my 60th birthday I have not gone to holiday at Vara's, you must all pool money to send me there, ok!!! :)