Waiting.

I do not like waiting. It's just one of those things in life that you kind of just accept and can sometimes do nothing about, but that doesn't make the act of waiting any less unenjoyable. We've all done our fair share of waiting throughout our lives, of course, as have I, and I like to consider myself a person who's quite good at it. Unlike other things I'm good at, however, waiting is something that I would much prefer to avoid doing whenever possible.

Linguistically speaking, waiting is a verb, or a word that indicates an action. I find that to be a bit paradoxical really, because, in my case anyway, waiting usually involves me doing precisely nothing. I have that ability to simply zone out and literally not think about or do anything, and this particular ability is my regular go-to whenever I find that I am forced to wait for something. It's quite handy when I don't feel like wasting my phone battery through aimless scrolling on social media or playing the one mobile game that I have.

I've been trained from an early age to remain vigilant in the face of an extended period of waiting. Looking back now, the time I used to spend waiting for my mother or either of my grandfathers to come pick me up from school might not have been all that lengthy, but back then it seemed like forever. My sister and I used to find comfort in Billy Joel's "The Longest Time", although years later I discovered that the context of the song was quite different from what we used it for.

I incidentally just read about Arsenal, the football club I support, employing an Austrian 'gridlock consultancy firm' to design a new queuing system to reduce waiting times on match days. The fact that such a service even exists is actually sort of amazing to me, but I guess it makes complete sense. People specialize in everything these days, and due to supply and demand, the fact that a lot of people, like me, don't like waiting, there was always going to be someone finding some way to make money from addressing that.

Having said that, though, waiting is just part of life; there's only so much you can do to speed things up, but most of the time it's impossible to eliminate the wait altogether. The world today, among other things, is characterized by its need for instantaneousness; everything has to be done now, now, now. It's a viewpoint I personally agree with, as I don't really see why something that can be done quickly, well, isn't being done quickly. However, I do accept that there is always a certain amount of waiting that needs to be done - I just always prefer that it's as small an amount as possible.

Sometimes, though, there's really nothing you can do to reduce your waiting time. I'm currently waiting for the proposal for my Master's project to be approved before I can properly start with my research, and I've been told that the approval process typically takes a month, though mine might just be able to be completed slightly sooner. This was last week, so I have potentially three more weeks in which I have no choice but to wait.

I could, of course, get started on my reading, which is what my supervisors have advised me to do. It would at least be better than simply doing nothing. With me being me, however, exactly no relevant reading has been done. I've pretty much been doing what I usually do when I'm waiting for something, which is basically nothing.

I guess I've been hardwired since young to do nothing while waiting for something, but it's a habit I'm trying to break. I intend on being at least a little productive this week, if only so I can tell my supervisors that I've actually been doing something besides watching YouTube videos all day. Rambling about the act of waiting is one way to get the juices flowing, in any case.

Warming Up.

I left home for Nilai this morning to get a reference form from my former lecturer, which I needed in order to complete my application for my MPhil program. I'd actually hoped she could just scan it and email it to me so I could just send it to the university I was applying at online, which is what I was doing with another reference form from another former lecturer. As it happened, she insisted that I come get it from her in person, and sure enough, I received it sealed within an envelope.

What that entailed was that I was going to have to physically deliver the envelope to the university, so I figured I might as well just print out the other reference form and deliver that along with it. The only problem was that it took until almost lunchtime for my other lecturer to send me that other form, so by the time I'd received and printed it out, I wasn't gonna make it to the university in time to catch the staff there before they went out for lunch. I was just going to have to wait until after lunch to go there.

While waiting, I decided to go have lunch with my friend, who was also a course junior from MIU, and had recently graduated after finishing his internship. The guy had recently managed to dig up his old Pokemon cards and had been spending the weekend raking in a ton of cash from selling them off. Incidentally, we were having lunch where we were while waiting for a couple of his customers to come and meet up with him.

I mentioned in a previous post about a conversation we had previously about possible future careers. It's been a couple of months since then, and I guess you could say things have gotten less murky regarding what I see myself doing with my life. My friend was telling me that I should just go ahead and become a lecturer right after finishing my Master's, mainly because he thinks I'm good at teaching and also happen to be a very patient person.

Fair enough, I do enjoy teaching - I genuinely loved helping people out with their studies back in school, and that continued throughout college and university. And I do feel that I have more patience than most, but mainly because I just prefer to spend my energy quelling my rage instead of feeding it. I've also previously stated multiple times in this blog that I see myself as ultimately becoming a lecturer...but straight off the bat? I'm not too sure about that. I still think I should spend some time working in the financial industry first, which seems to me like the responsible thing to do with the (little) knowledge I possess about it.

One route into the industry that I'm planning to explore is that of a certified financial planner (CFP), which, on the surface, is a qualification that seems to be quite obtainable. Being able to manage your own finances is an important skill to have, and to help people with that seems like a role in society that I would actually like to fill. I was explaining an investment-linked insurance plan to a friend the other day, and I quite enjoyed it. Told you I like teaching.

For now, though, I'll just wait on the offer letter from the university for my MPhil, which I'm told can take up to a month because of approvals and stuff; during that time, I should probably just start what I can on the research. Once everything starts, things are probably gonna get really busy, so I might as well start warming up.

Running.

I was walking home from Friday prayers today when, upon reaching my street, I suddenly felt the urge to run the last fifty or so meters to my front door. It's actually quite normal for me to run home after my now-increasingly-less-frequent visits to the nearby playground to play football, so maybe that's where it came from. At that point in time, however, I decided against running. It seems the older you get, the more reluctant you are to sweat.

Sudden urges to run are nothing new for me. I recall going to the beach when I was younger and just running across the sand for no reason. I just felt like running, so I did. Those were simpler times.

Having said that, I actually don't really like running. Running as a form of exercise just isn't my thing, as I find it to be quite boring. I've tried running regularly for fitness purposes, but up until now I just can't commit to it. I'm a willing runner when I play sports, though, because at least then running serves more purpose than simply getting from Point A to Point B. Outside of sports, I never really run unless a sudden urge propels me to.

Doing things simply because I feel like doing them and for no other reason isn't something that occurs too often. I've always been more of a rational, analytical type who thinks before saying or doing anything. Heck, I even rehearse possible conversations in my head sometimes in my free time. Nevertheless, I find being spontaneous every now and then to be good for my sanity. Overthinking tends to happen when you try to think everything through; sometimes you just need to have a little faith that things will somehow work out, even if not in the way you think.

***

I had to make a big decision recently regarding my future. On one hand was the MPhil research work I mentioned in my last blog post. On the other was a job at a prominent Malaysian investment bank, for which I'd gotten past an interview a couple of days ago and had been invited to attend a second and final interview next week. Sure, simply getting called for a second interview is no guarantee that I was definitely getting the job, but at least there was a chance that it might happen.

It wasn't as easy a decision as I first thought it would be, but I ended up declining the interview invite in favor of focusing my attention on getting started with my MPhil. I'd only attended the first interview for the experience anyway, as I had already more or less made up my mind to further my studies, and I'm glad I did because it was a bit different from the one I attended for internship.

An additional effect from attending the interview is that the door to me working in the financial industry has remained open. In the first few days or so upon receiving the MPhil offer, my head was buzzing with the very real prospect of me finally finding my true calling as an academician. It seemed to make sense - I love learning and knowing about things, after all. It also seemed to be quite possible that I would go straight into an academic career right after completing my MPhil, which is something that made me feel a bit uneasy as I still felt that I should give working in finance a go. Thankfully, attending that interview reminded me why I even wanted to work in finance in the first place, and I guess I'll have another big decision to make in about two years' time.

I would like to go into academia someday, but I really feel like I should begin my working life with a career in the financial industry before doing anything else - it somehow feels irresponsible if I don't. My feelings on that could change after MPhil, but I guess we'll see in a couple of years.