Lobo's Lessons

I have been putting off writing this post for a long time now. I told myself the timing was never right. Or that it was too soon. Or that I had too much going on. Which I did of course. But today marked a significant milestone in my life here in NZ. We had sent the boxes containing our personal effects that we had collected over the past three and a half years for shipping. A hard month and a half of packing, and a mad sprint to the finish yesterday, where Salmah only slept 45 minutes in 24 hours, and then had to rush off for her final day at her job at 4am in the morning, bless her soul. But we made the deadline. And now in as the adrenaline is ebbing out of my veins, I finally get a chance to contemplate on the past three and half years as a Kiwi, and how life was going back full circle, as I prepared to leave these shores. It is impossible to capture every single experience in a single blogpost, but there are those moments that are impossible to delete from one...

Two days ago, I broke my little toe, and fractured the toes beside it in 2 different places, after slamming it into a doorframe, while I was half asleep and rushing to see what my baby son was crying about. Turns out his mother was in the room with him, but was preparing my other 2 sons to go to school. So the baby was just being a baby. And I had broken my toes for nothing. It wasn't much fun, and it hurt like having a steamroller have its way with my foot. Fast forward the first 2 days of absolute misery, waiting on a wheelchair at 2 different clinics and lastly the hospital. Fast forward the day after in my PJs, feeling painful, and miserable, full of self-pity and loss of self-worth. It is now Day 3. The deadline is closing in and I have so much that I haven't done. We are leaving NZ for good in just over 3 weeks' time. So much to do. Packing. Shipping. Writing PhD. Most pressing is the fact that I have to sell my beloved Honda Odyssey in a few days'...

When one mentions the R word (research), a lot of people get images of people in lab coats holding test-tubes, or a formal interview at a plush office, sipping tea or coffee made by the secretary of the CEO being interviewed. Well, there is that... Yes... but there is also much, much more. Today's research session can attest to that. Let me explain. Today was a tough day. Deadlines galore. I had a teaching session that I had to prepare for. I had to actual teaching session itself. Then I had a meeting about a book that I was copy-editing (to be published in Bangladesh by the way) which was the followup to the 4 hour meeting that I had yesterday. And then there was a going-away party for a few friends who were leaving the country to do research in more exotic shores. Which was really enjoyable by the way. Good food good company. Good singing. A good time. But it was good to be able to drive home and think about spending the night with the family. I reached ho...

Image by Mentalpirate I was on a roll last week, writing close to 5000 words in 3 days, and I felt bloody good about it. You see the thing about feeling good is that it can lead you off track, and make you think you deserve a break. And like the most natural reaction to hard time labour, you feel you've earned it. You stop your writing and think - "Know what? I'll just take the day off and carry on where I left off yesterday. No problem. No fuss. Done and done." And you take it. You take that day off. You spend it with the family doing the things that you should be doing as a family, taking them out to the park, shopping mall/movies, and you chill out for the rest of the day. And at the end of the day, you tell yourself - I'll pick up bright and early tomorrow and continue. No problem. No worries. Except that because you've grown accustomed to working at night (the only time your kids are in bed), you can't just fall asleep, just like that. ...

I hate touch-typing. I guess I never had the patience to stick it out when I was doing my degree, and this followed through to my masters, my job as a tenured academic… and now this ghost has come to haunt me here. It has come at last to the land of PhD, where I am struggling in my final year writing up the thesis. But why bring this up now? Haven’t you managed well enough so far? Why shoot yourself in the foot now? Well, frankly, it’s to do with my wrists. And my neck. Several years back I developed carpal tunnel syndrome, which I first realised when I was playing video games on my Xbox. And then it became painfully obvious when I bought my first motorcycle where I could only ride a few minutes before I lost all feeling in my hands and arms, especially the left one. And doing all this typing writing up my thesis isn’t helping either, as the pain became more pronounce the longer I spent time on it. And did I mention the neck? Do you have any idea how painful it is h...

Image credit here . In a PhD, we are expected to write close to 100,000 words. In a Masters we are expected to produce 30,000 words. Imagine all the effort and pain it takes to write even a single paragraph of an academic masterpiece. Your theoretical framework, your methods and methodology, your research context, research participants, analysis, discussion.. the list goes on and on. In imaginary terms, with a PhD you try to come up with substance that can produce the mass the size of the Earth, and the thickness of your final thesis reflects this. Now imagine that you have to take this planetary sized mass, and compress it. Compress it until the very ground you walk on shakes and moans, buckling under the strain. Compress it until everything comes to a juddering stop. And you are left with a ball the size of a marble, but containing the mass of a whole planet. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the Thesis in Three. Three minutes to sum up your life's work. Three minu...

It's been more than a year since my last post, and I am frankly a little surprised my this blog still gets hits. But what can I say, doing a PhD punches the wind out of you, so much so that you only have a vague memory of what life was like before that. Right now it seems like there are only two phases in my life - PhD, and pre-PhD. The strange thing is, it's not that I've been buried in journal articles and papers for the past years, just swimming round and round, drifting aimlessly as I do so. It's more the little things, that bury me, where I'm just swimming round and round, drifting aimlessly as I do so. Seriously. It's like instead of being on the "where is the next conference" and "when is the next journal due?", we get questions like these: "how am I going to register my son in his new school?", "how many hours teaching am I doing this week?", "have I filled in the timesheet yet?", and "when ...

Image credit here It is now coming up on two weeks since the horrifying 6.4 earthquake , 11km deep, ravaged Christchurch and caused death, destruction and total chaos to the city and its inhabitants. Not in the very least, coupled with the 7.1 earthquake on 4 September 2011 and the 5000 or so ensuing aftershocks to date, it has frayed my nerves almost to the brink of exhaustion. I am unable to concentrate on anything at this point in time, and if that wasn’t enough, the 4.8 aftershock followed by 3 subsequent aftershocks were significant enough to put me teetering on the edge. Initially after the first major Canterbury quake, the aftershocks, though annoying and sometimes a little hairy, were bearable because of the knowledge that they wouldn’t be as bad as the initial quake. Well, after the untold destruction of the 22 February quake, and a death toll approaching 200, that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. Before it used to be “oh, it’s just an aftershock”. Now it’s “is this a b...

I have been teaching the pre-intermediate class for two days now. I only have 2 students at the moment, as on of them has moved to the intermediate class. After two days in I finally get a clearer picture of what is going on with the subjects of my research. Yuichi, the hearing impaired student (HIS) is performing much better than I expected, even given his hearing impairment. His grammar is rock-solid for the level he is in, and he reads and does the written work exceptionally fast. I find that the only difficulty I have when teaching him is when we try to speak to each other, and I believe that will be the best goal I can set – to enable Yuichi to hold a decent conversation with another person in English, without too much dependence on writing things down to clarify (which is the strategy I have resorted to for the moment for when communication breaks down). My other student, and middle-aged Japanese gentleman who goes by the nickname ‘Hoy-hoy’ is a retired medical technician (a gu...

When you're stuck at a proposal your life doesn't seem to move forward. Ask that to the sweating man whose heart is pounding like a hammer while he is down on one knee, holding out a gold ring, waiting for the fateful answer... It's like time stands still. The same concept applies to the man in the office, sweating it out in the hot summer sun, shivering it out in the cold summer rain, typing and typing away, just so that a bunch of very highly placed professors get the chance to critique his work and shred it to bits before they give the OK for him to proceed with the next phase of his life. That, dear friends, is the proposal. And that is how I have been spending these past few months. It's not like I've been slogging day and night over it; I have had time to do other things, but I guess the combination of a few factors has made it seem rather daunting. First off, I am now working on a deadline. I was supposed to have sent the proposal in on 31 December, b...

If you ask me now, I wouldn't really be able to tell what life was like back in Malaysia. It's like it was another life altogether. To tell you the truth, the only bits and pieces that I do remember were going to work at uni, and then going to work tutoring the Koreans, and then going home, and then going to sleep... Oh of course there were the occasional nights out, movies, dinner and so on, but they seemed to pale in comparison to the crushing weight of work and responsibility. And if you were to ask me what I remembered of my son back home, I would say I remember him sleeping when I went to work, and sleeping when I got back from work... but of course there would be the weekends that we would enjoy together, where I would take him to the lake gardens and we would go jogging together with his mother, and we would end the morning with a trip to the local Mamak restaurant, where he would order his favourite items on the menu without fail - roti telur with dhal, and iced M...

Click... First slide comes on and I'm in the zone. As I open my mouth and greet the audience all the apprehension that I faced the night before seemed unfounded. I was in the zone. Each point was explained in just enough detail to get the audience interested, and keep them interested. All the points that needed to be highlighted were emphasised with clarity and precision. And best of all, I reached the end of my presentation at exactly the same time as the timekeeper's bell. Toastmasters trained me well. And at the end of it all, it was just so rewarding to get the audience asking questions, and telling me afterwards that they were amazed at how much passion I had for my topic. The thing is, I was getting bored of the topic and wanted to modify it, but they didn't need to know that... I finish my slot, and head out of the door, ready to go to work... Satisfied and happy with my first conference presentation outside Malaysian soil.

Aotearoa... Land of the long white cloud... The first sight that greeted me as I stepped off the plane in Auckland was beautiful vista of clear blue sky. It was cool, but much warmer than what I had expected winter to be. In fact, it was almost like a cool, sunny spring morning in my memories of my time in the UK. I had spent 11 hours on the plane and crossed God knows how many time zones, but it was all sinking in... All the waiting, all the pain and frustration in the previous months... seemed to dissipate as it finally dawned on me that I was finally here. One of the very first things that I noticed was the consistent reminder to 'Declare it' in the airport. Apparently, you have to declare anything that may be food, or originally organic, and chances are you would be expected to throw everything away before you get to cross the Customs and Immigration. A bit harsh I thought. My travel companion told me the story of how the Indian national cricket team were fined...