Another chapter closed.

It's 4pm and I'm laying stomach down on my bed, trying to nurse cramps that come unknowingly once in a month. I hope I'll be better by tonight, because I'll be watching fireworks from Central Park if everything goes well. It would've been a more apt first Big Apple new year's in Times Square, but just listening to horror stories about having to camp out 10 hours earlier just to count the seconds down to 2008 inevitably crossed it out as even an option.

But anyways.
I don't usually do new year's celebrations. I don't even remember what I did last year, I think I probably just stayed at home. In 2005 I was at a rock gig in this art gallery in the middle of KL. Hmm. But that's about it.

Just felt the need to look back on the year before the clock strikes 12am, and the curtain is closed on 2007. I guess it's been good, so far... I know I've made so many life changing decisions that have affected me throughout, but I wouldn't go back and change anything. Well maybe except that one particular incident.

After 3 and a half months of interning in KLue writing mindless articles/socialising/picking up calls and stuffing envelopes, being in McCann-Erickson for 8 solid months was truly a learning experience which I wouldn't trade it for anything else. I guess it was a love and hate relationship with my first real job, but I did learn a lot. From dealing with people and picking out my battles - I'd like to think that I've grown up, having a job that made me feel slightly more important that I'd take myself. And being able to work with award-winning advertising creatives was of course mind-blowing, and I honestly thought my path was set.

I cried like an idiot on my last day. If I have to pick one of the hardest decisions that I had to make in my life, that would have been it.
I hated leaving - because I feel that I still have so much passion for advertising, and I didn't get enough time to prove my actual worth.

But I knew I needed to make this move for myself.

Just for the sake of remembering:
Seeing him for the first time at that Red Kebaya screening in December 2006,
Getting annoyed with him when he introduced himself the first time I came over his studio for a recording ("are you the Malay writer?" "NO. Grr")
Him standing in line for hours getting my Muse tickets in January, watching 300 together and the rest I would say,
is history.

Despite being able to come to NY to polish and learn the craft of my other love - filmmaking -
I'd still say he's the best thing that happened to me throughout the year.


And that, that I wouldn't change for anything.

Au revoir two oh-oh-seven!
You shall be sorely missed.