First Day Of Spring. 21 March. It's My Birthday.

There's gotta be a reasonable explanation to my forgetting my own birthday. Maybe there were too many things that I had to do, or too many people I had to meet that it didn't matter anymore whether I turned 47 or 67. They say age is nothing but numbers. Maybe it is but I'd rather consider it a milestone to mark how far I've come from a little kid raised by Grandma, Aunt and Cousin. 47 can bring the philosopher or a poet in people. I am neither but 47 does feel to me that I don't have much time left to do the things I've gotta do. The problem is, I don't know what it is that I've gotta do.

Life is about giving it your best shot. Do the thing the best you can. The problem is, sometimes you don't know whether what you are doing is good enough for you because you don't know enough about an industry to measure up your performance after you've passed the learning curve. And you keep meeting people who seem to know what they are talking about until you found out that they don't know any better about anything other than knowing how to talk like medicine peddlers. It's good that I keep meeting this type of species who do nothing except to calculate commission, kickbacks, and cuts. I've learnt to listen and watch. Funny thing is, they've got neither transferable nor nontransferable skills to their name but they drive flashy cars and seem to be doing all right in life. They can cut into my profits to leave me with almost nothing to roll over. Over time, I've learnt.

It's a funny world. You've got a client who needs this equipment. He calls you up because you know the equipment like the back of your hand, and so he cuts a deal with you. That's deal number one. You call up the manufacturer to analyze the drawing. You agree to cut deal number two, which is price and date of delivery. You call up the guy in deal number one to say everything is on. Somewhere along the line, a guy comes up to say, he can get it through the paper process faster than you can blink your eyes, and so you start to think about running cost multiply by the number of days before the whole deal comes to an end where you can start to ask the girl in the office to raise the invoice. And so you cut deal number three. Deal number three rolls over to deal number four and five, until you realise the whole thing has its beginning with the guy in deal number one. Ha ha ha. I love this industry.

One day when I'm done with this, you'd get the names and places of these characters in deal number one, two, three, four, five and six.

It's a long time coming before the invoice.