5 years

I don't know if I'm being superstitious or not.

Interesting things have happened to me every 5 years.

When I was 5, I started my music education. This was also the end of childhood amnesia.

When I was 10, I got admitted into the gifted program. It's important for me because before that my life was a little bit of a blur, and I was a little mediocre compared to afterwards. This was an environment where I thrived a bit more.

When I was 15, it was one of the most incredible years of my life. That was also the year that I ended my formal music education, and started to collect pop albums instead. It was also the year when I decided I was going to be an engineer, that I was going to excel at music, mathematics and creative writing. I've stopped the creative writing for now, so there are the other two. More details here.

When I was 20, I won a scholarship. This meant I would study in Snowy Hill and end up working for the Factory. My sister left Singapore, never to return. The Asian financial crisis was a watershed, because it marked the dividing line between Singapore being a developing nation – who could take advantage of its cheapness and build a broad based prosperity, to one that was divided into the haves and the have nots. My mother had cancer and she recovered.

When I was 25, I graduated from Snowy Hill and started work at the Factory. The first few years of my work were pretty crappy.

When I was 30, I got my first real assignment, after I was sick and tired of chow kenging through my work and my life. I'd say this assignment marks the time when I got tired of jerking around with my bosses and my bosses got tired of jerking around with me. I'd like to think that by the time I left the Factory, it was on good terms. I also did the half marathon. It was the precursor to me doing the full marathon.

When I was 35, I was already in "Mexico". That was the year of my long job search and it was eventually successful.

This year I turn 40, and I hope there's a pattern, and there's going to be progress in life.