What do the following have in common? Sex and the City, Friends, How I Met Your Mother and Desperate Housewives? Apart from their soaring success throughout the entire life span of the shows, okay maybe not the last one, these popular TV programmes which each has had a vital role during the different phases of my life, had always seen a close circle of friends gather at a common place – Central Perks of Friends, the fictional coffee shop where the girls eat and talk in Sex and the City, the MacLaren’s Pub on How I Met Your Mother, and Gaby’s house for the weekly poker game in Desperate Housewives – and at such regular intervals, chanting the juicy experiences in their lives.

Chinese has a saying. Drama resembles life as much as life resembles drama. The wonderful picture these shows have painted in my imagination about how it is possible, even at the most ethnically crowded, traffic congested, junk food and rubbish piling metropolis in the world, one would be able to find a few close friends whom he/she can always depend on, when all else fails to supress the loneliness of living independently in a big city, has not really materialised after all these years of living abroad all by myself. I couldn’t help but wonder, is this just the idealism fictional TV programmes deceive us to believe in, or have I just been unlucky? Could it even be the case that I am just lazy?

No, it is not that I don’t know, or have not met random people, or regular acquaintances for unplanned or scheduled activities, but these sort of time filling agendas are different from gathering with close friends and talk about anything, literally. Yes, I am not alone, but I am lonely. And having friends boarding on the flight of relationship one after another hasn’t helped alleviating the issue either.

It’s the time of the year where the Chinese celebrates mid autumn festival, a celebration which normally sees the reunion of friends and family. I am spending mid autumn festival alone again for another year, but I don’t think there is much I can do about it. Until I gather sufficient close circle of friends to regularly meet up at a cafe somewhere in town, I think I will just have to go down to the shop in China Town, buy myself a mooncake, and happy mid autumn festival alone, but fabulously.


Here, sharing a funny video which I think fits this post interestingly...

Let me tell you what I have done in the past 60 minutes before I started writing this.

- I told myself that I *have* to update my blog, because after my recent reading of The Rules of Wealth, I realised how important it is to cultivate a skill that you enjoy and which no one can take it away from you. Writing was the first skill that popped into my mind. I am by no means a writer material, but writing has always been a great resource of pleasure. I care very little if anyone is actually reading or following my blog. It’s just something I enjoy doing.

- So I have decided to write and stick to it, but inspiration was finding it hard to reach my door, at least for today. So I went blog-shopping. I started with my friends’ blogs, and thought it is a great channel to keep myself abreast with the latest development in their well-beings too. However, it seemed like their blog-spheres are drying up. Is it because they are busy and happy with their lives and thus eliminating the need to obtain attention via the virtual world? This thought led me into questioning if I am happy?

- And so I googled “happiness” and arrived at an essay which quoted a survey that says: If you are younger than 33, the chances are you have not experienced true happiness. It made me wondered if it guaranteed that we will find happiness after 33, with crying baby every night, school kids and their academic performances to worry about, thinning hair or receding hair line, metabolism slowdown which rapidly expands waistline, not generating sufficient income for retirement, mortgage debt, etc. And why does happiness has to be associated with age?

- Having thought about the list of unhappiness, which I can go on and on and on about forever,  I was horrified with all the gloomy possibilities. So I quickly went to Amazon and searched for “Happiness in books”. I was inundated by the sheer number of choices – The How to Happiness, Happiness: Lesson from A New Science, Instructions for Happiness and Success, The 18 Rules of Happiness… There are actually instructions and rules to be happy? I am not convinced that I will be happy after reading these books, although I am pretty certain these authors are happy seeing their bulging pockets by selling all these theories to lost souls.

- As I was browsing through the never ending booklist, I remembered an argument I had with my friend this week. Ironically,  it was also about happiness. He associated happiness with the city he lives in, while I associated happiness to work and things we do and the people we spend time with. But we eventually concluded that the people surrounding us play the most critical role in determining our level of happiness. So if we have a close circle of friends, a person we deeply in love with, we should feel happy eventually.

- In the end, I thought happiness could be a great essay topic. As I approached my laptop and started writing, I realised the time which I have allocated for writing had depleted greatly. I was surprised and wondered if I really had just spent an hour thinking about what to write instead of actually writing? But one thing I have known for sure, if I were still suffering from writer’s block, I could have written about better time management the next time.