I returned home to Tokyo last night after a fairly grueling six days of class in Singapore. As some of you know, I’m currently studying for my MBA at the University of Chicago, which has a campus in Singapore (as well as London). Beyond the great reputation of the school, one of the things that appealed to me about the program was the fact that I would receive the same MBA as the full-time students even though my program is an executive one (which is designed for mid-career working professionals). Naturally, this means that the executive curriculum is essentially the same as the full-time one, which means our one-week modules are highly compressed and action-packed. Each day lasts about twelve hours on average (9 AM to 9 PM), though sitting with study groups until the wee hours isn’t out of the question. So what I figured initially was a strength of the program has turned out, in a practical sense, to be a total pain in the ass. If anything, this little endeavor will be quite the lesson in time management.
The madness of this program really struck home as I walked back to my hotel after a thirteen hour day of statistics and microeconomics on Friday. I was fried, tired and dreading the massive tuition check that I had just realized was due the following week. And as I noodled Bernoulli functions and the deadweight losses that arise in the presence of price controls, I was enveloped by a crowd of happy-go-lucky Singaporeans who had flooded the streets to celebrate the end of another workweek. As I weaved my way through the jolly crowd, I was overwhelmed by a sense of jealousy, for not only did I have no plans for the evening to blow off any steam, but I had another solid ten hours of class ahead of me the next day (Saturday). It was around this time that I began to question my own sanity.
The world, however, was made right upon my return to Tokyo. Though the trip back to the city from the airport was stupid long (as always), I finally made it back to our little part of town around 5 PM last night. My two lovely ladies, Lizzi and Hurley, greeted me outside of the Grand Hyatt (where the bus drops me off), which was a beautiful sight to see. Lizzi was glowing and Hurley damn near passed out with excitement to see her dad again. Seriously, I don’t think I’ve ever been greeted with such an outrageous display of giddiness in my life. If Hurley were a human, she would’ve caused quite the socially unacceptable scene. Jumping, crying, licking. It was a mess. But since she’s a cute little dog, people just stopped and awed at the adorable little furball caught in a state of ecstatic oblivion. Speaking of Hurley, I’m writing this while sipping some wine on our balcony on a pleasant Tokyo night, and she’s staring at me through the glass door with a tennis ball in her mouth. Is she trying to tell me something? In any event, once we made it back to the apartment, Lizzi poured some cold Miller Lite in frosty mugs, grilled up some superb turkey burgers, and fired up the Slingbox so we could watch the Irish destroy Nevada. All in all, a great ending to a challenging week.
By the way, I noticed a few random things while in Singapore. To begin with, it finally hit me how ridiculously cold all the buildings are in the city. Everywhere you go, you are guaranteed to be greeted by a wall of frigid cold air upon entering a building. I sit in class all day freezing my ass off, and my walks home are punctuated by blasts of cold air as I walk past buildings with open doors. Maybe they do it to compensate for the typically hot, muggy climate in Singapore, but my guess is they’re guilty of some overreaching here. I can’t imagine what some of those electricity bills look like, and I can’t help but wonder if the Singaporeans are at all interested in reducing their carbon footprint a la the Japanese. I also saw a lot of random t-shirt/person combos that didn’t quite seem to match; that is, I observed several older, scraggly looking women with t-shirts that didn’t quite match their demeanor. One particularly miserable-looking woman had a t-shirt on that read “I’m not Irish, but kiss me anyway”. Another nasty-looking woman had a shirt that read “My dream is to be yours.” I was also taken aback by the ringtone of another older, drab-looking woman who was an airport employee parked on the gangway leading to the plane. She couldn’t have looked more boring and uninteresting. But as I made my way past her, her mobile phone began ringing to the sound of C&C Music Factory’s Everybody Dance Now. The scene was just as incongruous as it would be if George Will’s ringtone were set to 50 Cent or Eminem. Just not quite what one expects, but kind of fun since it elicits a nice little giggle.
