SUNDAY, 22 MAY 2010 - It's funny how 26 alphabets can form different meanings.

They can be leads for journalists, they can be spoken by scholars, and they can simply be information to the general public.

In the end, it is all just for fun.

My life is a game, now that I've come to realize.
Well, so is everybody else's.

As I am sitting here by a gate at the the San Francisco International Airport, waiting for my flight to New York for a vacation with Jeffrey (my second elder brother) and my mom, I watched the flying planes and the taxiing jets out of the glass windows in front of me.

In this lobby, I somehow felt I'm home.

Not exactly as how it feels whenever I am back in Jakarta, Indonesia, where I can say that it's merely an entitlement of my citizenry, since my original heritage is Chinese.

Then I began to question my presence - eventually, my existence.

In the here and now, our Information Age has called upon me as a journalist to re-write whatever that was already written by historians and philosophers, or what I personally call the traditional Peoples of the Book from the Holy Bible.

How did all those information disappear through the passage of time and space?
Am I running away from something, or am I merely running back and forth in the circle of life?

I've grown a passion in running, just like a little child.

As a kid, I was lucky for having the luxury to travel across many lands and oceans through thin air.

Looking out at the glass windows, I imagine myself on one of those airplanes.
I always feel myself above those fluffy clouds.
Chill-out? Uplifting trance? My types exactly.



Words always have their own mysteries with every alphabet I have writ, as if each new discovery unfolds through the simple act of letting my pen dance in its own ways on the air - in sync with my right hand - and then coming back down to earth on this blank piece of paper.

Growing up in Singapore, moving back and forth from there to Jakarta, then stayed for a while in Jakarta for some time before I live in West Lafayette, Indiana, then now in San Francisco, California... 20 years of my lifetime can have so much mileage on my present Silver KrisFlyer membership with Singapore Airlines, well, more or less the same as so much running mileage on my Nike+ SportBand.

Somewhere in between the metaphor, my knowledge of the English language has aided my mother tongue.
The Mandarin Chinese characters have infused me into the general Asian heritage.

The Japanese culture seemed to make me tick. To that, I don't know why I tend to be mistaken as a Korean here in the Western world. Much as Easterners are foreigners to the Westerners, so is vice versa.

When East meets West, something as peculiar as writing new discoveries using 26 alphabets is happening, especially in this so-called land of opportunities.

The last vacation to India was by far one of the best adventures in my life. Living on houseboats with limited electricity, riding ponies to the valleys, seeing wild boars, peacocks, bulls and camels on every street I look...

Thinking back it all in my head is like watching the plane right in front of me fly its way towards the boundless sky, straight to the endless horizon.
It's like watching the time goes by.

The clock is ticking.
This time, it's the Big Apple for the second time.