I’ve always stood by the fact that there are no good years or bad years. It’s mostly due to the fact that I’ve never actually experienced a sunshine and rainbows all year-round kinda good year nor a bad one that I can eternally attach that label to all 365 days of it. To sum up 2009 as best as I can, it was -

• An extremely frustrating academic year –
where I failed a subject, subsequently had my scholarship terminated, and still didn’t do well enough the following semester to earn it back. No surprises on what will happen in 2010… I’m still waiting, preparing myself, for that formal letter of which the revocation will most likely be signed off by the faculty head.

Sometimes I wonder what will happen if I hadn’t taken up that damned subject that I knew I wasn’t going to do well in, that I didn’t even have to take! If I weren’t so naive as to give myself a second go at this accounting crap, thinking that maybe this time I’d be able to redeem myself, then I wouldn’t fail it. And I wouldn’t have to give the scholarship up. And it would also mean that instead of doing summer school right now, I would probably be interning at GE like I’ve always wanted to. Bright-eyed and hopeful was what I was when I was anticipating starting my very first semester in Melbourne Uni, with a recognition of my past academic efforts at my helm, it felt good. 2009 was all about learning that I still have so much to learn. Though, thankfully, unlearning how to feel bitter and sorry for myself was something I picked up quite quickly along the way.

• The year I started to worship leggings and stockings –
so much so that I thought that every pair of jeans that I have are getting a tad bit redundant. That aside, I still love my denim babies. :)

Stupid boyfriend also made a condescending remark one day regarding the over-excessive donning of leggings:

“Why do you keep wearing leggings? Is it because you can’t fit into your jeans anymore?”

• A year of perpetual procrastination –
in obvious ways, this has partially contributed to the fact that I couldn’t achieve my impossibly high target GPAs. In other less patronizing ways, I also put off a lot of things that I could have get done or done better. Little nitty-gritty everyday things such as read more, write more, upload photos on Facebook, spend time with God, learn how to use the G10 to its capabilities, call an old friend up, mend a (somewhat) dysfunctional friendship… Seemingly insignificant things that we always thought will find a place for itself tomorrow. And tomorrow. And tomorrow.

• A year accented by newness -
throughout the year, I’ve been blessed with many a new things. Tell me, what’s there not to like about something, anything, that is shiny, glossed-up and most importantly new?! There were colourful additions to the wardrobe and scarf hanger. The shoe rack in the apartment that had once been in a dismal barren state has been filled up with fresh soles. All these new-found pleasure in shopping created a thirst in me that I will continue to bring with me into the new year. Apart from materialistic pursuits, I can never be a more lucky girl than to have new girlfriends to gossip and whine to over bubble tea and wedges (you know who you are!). Also, at the very end of the year, we finally moved to a new family home, after all these years of waiting for the S&P to finalize, house to start construction, the delayed handover of keys, renovation works to complete. When the arduous waiting finally lapsed, there was the newness of living in a gated community, of a bigger room with an attached bathroom, and of stepping onto freshly-laid tiles.

Timing might be a little off, to only be wrapping up 2009 and starting out on new year resolutions almost thirty days into the year – so I guess it took me a month to finally make sense of what the last year meant to me and another hour to type it all out – but here it is anyway.

In 2010, I will:
• take a subject that I actually like and want to
• be more green, ie: completely eradicate need for the dryer, wash clothes at 30C, use less paper.
• graduate
• get a job
(the above two seems like the obvious in its progression, but still!)
• be desperate – for faith, for balance
• reignite an old hobby/interest (this one is kinda in the works already)
• say the things I want to say, aloud

Though I’m gradually warming up to the idea of going back to Melbourne prematurely to start summer semester there, I won’t lie and say that I’m happy to be thrown back in Aussieland this soon. I’m bitter, I’m in a little bit of a disarrayed mess and I’m not emotionally ready to leave home once again. When I boarded the plane to come home, I had a 5-week count on my hands. Now I’m left with one and with many many many things I haven’t done and people that I haven’t met. I’m shortchanged; this interval at home isn’t enough to compensate for the times that I will spend away from it in the coming year.

Right now, I want to be away. Away to a place where moments are captured to a still and where the sun falls on my left cheek without fail. I haven’t gone to enough places to be able to rave about a city where time stops moving and the clouds are always a prefect cotton white, but I know a place where I found love. It’s not the most organized city or the cleanest, but in all of its imperfection and shortcomings, I see a beautiful mess.

Yes, I’m talking about Sydney :) Pictures are from when Jwan was here and we made a stopover in Sydney, before returning to Melb. Gold Coast was a huge highlight for us, but I still have a strange affinity for Sydney that I want to share. This trip really opened my eyes to the beauty that the city so willingly offers, if only you let it. It was especially easy for us; that we had Khadine a.k.a. Special K, a good friend of Jwan from uni, who played tourguide and brought us all over town in her zippy yellow VW.

Stupid rocks at Clovelly which we trekked over in order to get to Bronte. The journey was long and hard, though we had to find out later that there was a shorter, more frequently travelled path along the coast.

But you know what they say about the road less taken? You may stumble too close to the edge but you will never fall. The view, I’m sure, was so much better from the altitude that we were at than it would have been at sea level.

I wouldn’t want to be too eager to publish all of the good ones, so after the cut are pictures that best summed up our time in Sydney!

(more…)

Spent the last few hours of the night reading about Real Options. I’ve probably read through the same material a couple of times now but there seem to always be new information to take in and questions that I discover I still have no answers to. So in the midst of trying to uncover the intricacies of my finance topics, I am comforted by the fact that the very thing that I’m spending so much time and effort in learning right now would not only help me do well in my exams, but also help me make the most optimal decision that I can to something as defining as… finding a life partner.

Here I quote a paragraph from an academic journal by Dixit and Pindyck (1995), published in the Harvard Business Review.

Marriage is another decision that can be analyzed in the same manner. It is costly to reverse, and there is significant uncertainty about future happiness or misery. Therefore, one should enter into it in due caution and only when the expected return is sufficiently high. The criteria should become stiffer as the social cost of separation increase: for example, in some religions or cultures. Courtship is the equivalent of exploratory or R&D investment. Even if the expected return is not very high, one should be willing to undertake courtship because it creates a valuable option – namely the opportunity but not the obligation to follow up or not to, according to the information revealed by the initial steps.

And all that was from an article titled The Options Approach To Capital Investments. The essence of the journal was that it is misleading to make investment decisions based on conventional analytical tools without also taking into account the value and associated benefits of having options in making any decision. So we may just end up rejecting a project that have future benefits when it has been initially thought as unprofitable, and vice versa, accepting a project just because it looks good in the short run.

Marriage, like financial investments, thrive in an environment that is uncertain and where future prospects cannot be reliably estimated. So that’s when options come into play. The inherent characteristics of financial options, as some of you may know, is that its value increases with, among other things, time, information updates and the ability to respond to new pieces of information. Of course, as profit-maximizing individuals, we would only exercise an option when we expect to get the highest returns from it. Putting all that finance lingo into context, it’s the same to say that we don’t just get married to a person just because we’ve been dating for awhile now. Nor the next person who is smart, good looking, or rich. We wait and wait, until we think that okay, this is it. This is when I’m going to get a windfall of a lifetime’s supply of joy and happiness. And the best thing (and also the worst)? If by any chance your “investment” end up being a bad one, all you can lose are the initial resources (oh, our poor hearts) put into acquiring the option.

But how do we know when is the right time? We don’t. But the fact that we have the discretion to “kill” the option or wait some more makes the investment that little bit more valuable. I like how the authors equated courtship with R&D, where the costs are high but benefits and outcomes cannot be quantifiable until later on in an investment’s life. Essentially, that’s what dating is all about. You pour your heart and soul into it, all the time never knowing if you will get out of it more than what you’ve sowed. So by investing in R&D (=courtship), what you’re doing is narrowing down the uncertainty and receive information on the viability of the investment along the way. But the thing with love that sets it apart from money-making investments is that we don’t love someone just because of the promise of a quick buck and potential returns. :)

But marriage, ahh, that’s a different story that more than meets the eye, which requires thorough analysis and deeper evaluation, the kind that high risk investments call for. I’m only barely scratching the surface here because there is so much wisdom to take away. But for now, I really should get back to studying instead of deviating to real life matters and thinking about marriage ohmygawd! And the closing advice from the authors?

To make intelligent investment choices, managers need to consider the value of keeping their options open. In this case, we don’t think there is any option.

;)