Last night, in a quirky sort of mood, I suddenly decided that today was going to be spent the way I always imagined an “Ideal Day” would be spent.

Imagining what an ideal day would be, I would probably spend it doing only the things I like to do, no obligations, no schedules, no rush, maybe not even meeting anyone familiar in the day! I will wake up without my alarm clock, eat a leisurely brunch, read in a nice café with a cappuccino or at home with a lemonade, do my lomography around Singapore, go for a relaxing long run, or an aimlessly long walk, do some spontaneous art & craft at home, but to do nothing if I so felt like it, and to end the day with a healthy home-cooked dinner.

This was how it actually went: Woke up with a start ‘cos mum announced loudly that she had made breakfast. Ate leisurely while flipping through old schooldaze pictures and laughing at them with my sister. I was really nerdy with my big round glasses in school! :p Squeezed some orange juice and relaxed while doing some lazy colouring in my Powerpuff Girls Jumbo Colouring book (btw, this seems really childish but you have no idea how therapeutic colouring is… try it..) – at this point, I was really tempted to turn on the computer but I stopped myself.. addictive and mostly non-fulfilling, the computer sometimes can be… along the way, distracted, I took out my Spanish language book and started learning how to name parts of my body, pointing at them and saying the names out loud while listening to Laura Pausini singing in Italian in the background.. bizarre but somehow quite effective.. halfway through, I suddenly felt like making Indian Chai tea and started boiling a mixture of milk and water in a pot, adding in the chai tea mixture and sugar.. very random distraction… but the chai was nice..

Finally, at 3 o’clock, I decided it was time to go out and take some lomographs of the Thaipusam festival at Little India. At this very instant, the sky started to drizzle in protest and I defiantly decided to go out anyway. I reached my stop, it had stopped raining, but I got distracted by the colourful stalls selling Chinese New Year goodies at Victoria wholesale market, the flea market at Weld Road, the old shophouses at Arab street and started doing my lomography there instead. I used up my film, had to buy a new roll as the colourful Thaipusam procession rolled along (with the pierced menfolk balancing their heavy metal kavadis and the womenfolk with milk pots on their heads) and found that my lomo camera suddenly couldn’t work! So I ended up with no lomographs of the procession.. sigh…

Got home finally at 9 something, cooked a pack of instant noodles and realised that I actually did have fun today and felt really relaxed and fulfilled at the end of the day, even though things didn’t quite go the way I imagined..

I finally realised that the ideal day is a matter of attitude, and not events.. how enlightening…