Poker - is not at all about luck

“The man who said I would rather be lucky than good saw deeply into the world”

The line is the first uttered in Woody Allen’s film “Match Point” which, while a great film, is not a good first-date movie (a quick perusal of the synopsis of the plot will reveal why). It deals with the unsettling truth that a great deal of what happens in our lives comes down to nothing more than pure chance. Fortunately for me, since I am rather well-endowed (with luck at least) I do not suffer the common narrative fallacy where most people ascribe where they are in life to some combination of their hard work, learned knowledge, or talent. Obviously these are all important things, but luck, which in many cases would be the most important of all, often doesn’t even warrant a mention, or at most is only a footnote.

It has occasionally been hypothesized that I have what is called “Impostor Syndrome“. In a nutshell, it is a condition where a person has trouble internalizing their own achievements and ascribes their social/professional/academic standing to having fooled everyone around them into believing that they are in fact, better than they really are. While it is generally true that my own assessment of my abilities falls well short of where most seem to place me, and while it is also generally true that I feel like I’m an impostor who is continually being given opportunities which ought to be reserved for those with greater potential, I don’t believe that I have impostor syndrome. I merely have a more accurate view on the narrative which has governed my life, and led to where I am now. A view more accurate relative to the general population, especially with regards to luck.

You see, while most people believe that they got to where they are because they were talented, and worked hard, and were determined etc. I know that I got to where I am by a combination of those things and a very, very, very generous dose of luck. Almost every single significant event or achievement of my life, those turning points where I truly felt a different person afterwards, were the direct result of very large doses of luck. Luckily for me, a few of them were obvious enough that I was able to easily see the role that luck played. An obvious example is my crash in a formula ford racing car at Calder park raceway. Long story short: I lost control at the end of the main straight at 240km/h, spun out of control, and hit a concrete wall at about 170. I woke up in an ambulance with no recollection of what happened, a few scratches, (one of which needed stitches and passed perilously close to my Achillies tendon) and a fracture in my shoulder that was small enough that I didn’t notice it until weeks later. The car was obliterated. No amount of skill can control an open wheeler spinning at those speeds. If I had impacted the wall at even a slightly different angle, I would be dead.

At a brunch recently I learned that in the British military when two officers are competing for promotion, in cases where both the candidates are extremely closely matched on all regular criteria, they look back over the candidates history and choose the one who is “luckier”.¹ This got me thinking (and is actually the real reason I wrote this article) and I think I know the reason for this. If one thinks for a moment about the stereotype of a British army officer (think of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Modern Major General) one can’t help but imagine a person with an inflated sense of entitlement. Daddy owns a lot of land, therefore I should be an officer etc. The infamous “charge of the light brigade” lay bare the very worst shortcomings of this brand of thinking and I believe the use of the “luck measure” may be an attempt at eradicating it.

Say you have two cows. One of them is promoted to public office by way of competitive written examination. The other is promoted to public office by way of a lottery. The cow that took the exam is going to (rightly) believe that he deserves to be there and that it is his right. The cow that took the lottery, on the other hand, will have no such illusions. He will enter the job with a mentality similar to that of a person starting a business with a large loan, while the other cow will be starting with a sum of money that was given to him as a prize. Two distinctly different mindsets which would result in, presumably, slightly different results.

Perhaps this is where I get the feeling that I’m always living on “borrowed time”. Samurai used to enter battle with the mindset that they had already died. Strange as that may sound, the idea is actually very similar – you have nothing to lose. Curiously, if you are afraid of dying, you are more likely to die than if you fight with the kind of reckless abandon that a person who already believes their time is up would. So in fact maybe I am an impostor, but so is everybody else – I’m just much more acutely aware of it than others.

What does this all mean? I don’t know. It would be silly to suggest that everything happens because of luck. But it would be even sillier to suggest that everything happens for a reason. We really must learn to embrace randomness a little more. If we don’t, we risk being ambushed by it, but if we do, we can prepare ourselves for it. When I say “prepare ourselves for randomness”, what I’m really saying is to accept that luck plays a huge role in your life, don’t beat up on yourself too much when things don’t go right, and also be prepared to seize opportunities when they do come along.

There’s a great line from a film called “Good Will Hunting”, the screenplay of which won an Oscar. “I mean, you’re sittin’ on a winnin’ lottery ticket. And you’re too much of a pussy to cash it in, and that’s bullshit”. It describes the situation the lead character, Will Hunting, a genius mathematician, is in when his best friend confronts him and challenges him to recognize his abilities and use them. Meanwhile, he is facing a similar situation with a girl where he is afraid to confront the fact that he has feelings for her. The film is great, although the line bothers me slightly in that the kind of luck I’m talking about isn’t like a lottery ticket in that lotteries are fundamentally zero-sum and very predictable kinds of luck. For any given lottery, you can make a reasonable guess at the upper-bound for the prize because it will always be lower than the total taken from tickets sold.

Even though the kind of luck I’m talking about is fundamentally impossible to predict, it can still be harnessed. If I roll a fair die, I’m going to get a six about one sixth of the time. In other words, the chances that I won’t get a six will be five sixths. If I have ten dice, then the chances that I won’t get a six will be five sixths to the power of 10. As I keep adding dice, it quickly becomes almost impossible not to get a six. Where am I going with this? The real reason that I like living in big cities. The scope of human interaction is so much larger in a big city, and the rate at which “stuff happens” is just so much greater, that the chances that an unbelievable opportunity will come up, while still quite slim, are much greater than if you lived in a small town in rural Holland (just to throw an example out there).

And that, your honor, is why I want to move back to New York – to get lucky.

view from above

“I might’ve lived my life in a dream, but I swear this is real”
~ R.E.M. (from Leaving New York)

New York is a very special place. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out, but it also has a very special personal significance to me. There are a handful of events in my life which really shaped me as a person. These are events which, had they not happened, I would be a significantly different person today. Many of those events are described on this website such as the one time I went for a swim and almost didn’t come back, while others are not, either because I haven’t got around to it yet, or because the content is not suitable for public viewing (wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more). While I will make no attempt to describe it in detail here, the year-and-a-bit that I spent living in New York is one of those life-shaping events.

My first visit to New York occurred on March 20th 2007, during my 5-month odyssey through Latin America. I know what you’re thinking, “there may be many Spanish-speaking people in New York Daniel, but it is not in Latin America”. This is true. In the middle of this odyssey, I had a half-time break during which I traveled to New York among a few other US destinations. In fact, I came to New York via Boston on the chinatown bus – only $15. It dropped me off in the middle of a very dense chinatown where everyone was speaking cantonese, and all of the restaurant and shop signs were in chinese. For a moment, I felt like I back in Hong Kong.

I immediately warmed to the city. It was everything I imagined it to be, and more. It was surreal – I felt like I was walking around in a movie set. It really was a city that never slept, which suited a nocturnal being such as myself. The constant activity of the place was energizing, empowering even, I felt like I could do anything, anytime I wanted. And the food! Oh, the glorious food! On three consecutive nights, I dined at Per Se, Daniel, and Jean Georges (all of which are now 3-star Michelin restaurants) and during the day I just wrote down long lists of sights to see, and saw them. In fact, there was only one location on my list that I didn’t get around to – Columbia University. When I left, after four jam-packed days, I was exhausted but very satisfied. I wanted more, but I was also sad because my only real shot at living there had passed me by when Columbia rejected me for their PhD program in Sustainable Development.

Curiously enough, on May 4th that year, I learned that I was accepted to a masters degree at Columbia. I was ecstatic, moreso because I had actually visited New York and knew what the city was like. I returned on a warm August day under slightly unusual circumstances. I had just been to the world inline speed skating championships in Cali, Colombia and was not only very tanned, but very distraught because I had had the misfortune of having my laptop, camera, and ipod stolen from my (locked) hotel room. I arrived at 1am on a Monday morning, and by about 4pm, I had almost all of those items replaced, and then some. The feeling of being able to do anything, amplified by being at a university that I honestly never thought I was good enough to get into, was returning.

Leaving after that year was difficult. On the surface, the decision should have been an obvious one – I had been offered the opportunity to speed skate professionally, full-time, and train for a shot at the Olympic Games. But still, I hesitated, and it wasn’t until a few forceful “you must go” prods from my Columbia professors, did I really wake up and make the right decision. Before I left, I held a party in the form of a (surprisingly) well-attended karaoke night. That’s when I really realized how much I would miss the place. The city is amazing – I loved it even before I knew ANYONE there, but now I had made many friends, and friends who I may never see again owing to the transient nature of the place. It was never quite this bad with Melbourne, but that’s probably because, being Australian, there is always the (very likely correct) assumption that I will eventually return. With a place like New York (and the difficult visa requirements of the US), you just never know.

I’ve been back twice now, both times for brief visits. Leaving the city after these occasions was surprisingly the most difficult. Why? Perhaps it is because the brief nature of them, and the necessarily rushed efforts to see as many people as I possibly could in an impossibly short space of time reminded me of just how brief and fleeting life really is, and how important it is to really cherish every moment (trust me, when you’re sharing food with a gorgeous girl for what could only be two hours tops if you’re lucky, you learn to cherish every moment ). Perhaps it is the realization that you didn’t just make a bunch of new friends in the crazy city, but that you really meant something to them (or at least enough for them to appear ostensibly happy to see you).

Another thing that perhaps entices me to the city, is that it feels like “home”. A long time ago, at my first Amnesty International Australia Annual General Meeting (try saying that ten times in a hurry), I was sitting, chatting casually to the former president of AIA, Cathy Kingston, and she told me that I was a “misfit”, and that it was ok to be a misfit. (Incidentally, this is another one of those defining moments of my life). I had never felt that I really “fit in” anywhere. I never fit in in Hong Kong (where my relatives would constantly berate me for not knowing how to speak Chinese even though I did), and I didn’t really fit in in Australia either (although in several specific groups, namely MUMS and MUCAAS, I very nearly did). In New York I was probably the least-alone in my mis-fitted-ness, and that was probably a major contributing factor to why I felt so at home there.

I grew up in Hong Kong, a city of life which feels, in many ways, much like New York. But Hong Kong today is nothing like the Hong Kong I grew up in, and I’m not talking about all the new buildings. I’m not even talking about the switch in sovereignty from Britain to China. I’m referring to the fact that almost all of my friends from when I lived in Hong Kong have moved elsewhere, especially the ones whom I would consider close. Maybe I’m simply afraid that New York will become like another Hong Kong, another ghost town, because I recognize the transient nature of the populations in both cities. That transience, the way that the city seems to live and breathe and circulate with people as its nourishing blood, will always make it extremely difficult to leave.

I am not ordinarily a betting man. But when Swedish speed skater Claudia Wallin suggested we place bets on placings for the Dutch single distance championships, I couldn’t resist. Memories of chocolate bar prizes from high school footy tipping flooded back into my head (yes, everything is about food in my life). For the first two days, the betting was close and I had eked out a narrow lead thanks to almost guessing the correct finishing order of the top 5 men in the 5,000m race. On the final day of competition, however, Claudia snatched victory from the jaws of defeat by backing a handful of unknowns who ended up surprising everyone – including those in the press room where I was hanging out with my photographer’s press pass. But rather than feeling bitter at my defeat at the hands of a small Swedish girl, I’ve decided to try to take something positive away from the weekend (aside from all the free food that is served up in the press room).

In a sport where you travel around a 400m track made of ice at close to 60 km/h, balancing on a sliver of steel which is about 1mm thick, it is easy to forget that the people hidden inside the aerodynamic racing suits are just like you and me. Sure, they spend countless hours in the gym, on the bike, and on the ice refining their physical condition and technique, but come race day, they still have to put it all together. Now, I’m probably one of the most un-jock-like elite sports people ever to have existed, but I would actually be one of the first to jump to the defense of sport, and especially elite sport, for the life lessons that can be learned. Sadly, many of these lessons are often missed, and mostly because of a lot of the ridiculous misinformation that abounds about elite sport and what it entails.

Human beings are not machines. This is a mistake that is frequently made, even by very high-level coaches and athletes. If we really were machines, then the teams with the largest budgets  would win all the time because they could afford all the best facilities, equipment, and athletes. In other words, they would just outspend everyone on the inputs, and could reasonably expect the best outcomes. This almost never happens. Of the three aforementioned underdogs who did well on the weekend, only one was from a fairly major professional outfit – Rhian Ket, of APPM. Even though APPM is a great up-and-coming team, it is still nowhere near the likes of TVM or DSB in terms of budget and, dare I say it – prestige. The other two had a number of personal sponsors, but nothing like the support of a full-blown team. Obviously the big teams did very well, but the fact that relatively unknown skaters could seemingly come out of nowhere and challenge (and in Ket’s case, win) the big names is clear indication that nobody has it all figured out – another very important take-home lesson for life.

In sports which haven’t been around for a long time, or in sports where the number of overall participants is small, it is not unusual for unknowns to very suddenly become very good. Developments in technique, coaching, and simply having a smaller talent pool to compete with allows for this kind of variation to be fairly normal, even expected. Take for example speed skating in Australia; there’s no way in hell that I would be on an olympic training squad if speed skating was as popular in Australia as cricket was. But in Holland, where speed skating really is as big here as cricket is in Australia (or baseball in the US, for those of you who don’t know what cricket is), such happenings are far more unusual. Almost everybody here skates and speed skating has been and organized sport for well over a hundred years. In that time, significant progress has been made in technique and coaching methods. As little as 20 years ago, skaters used to train three times a day and hardly ever rested. The belief that training harder and for longer guarantees success is one of the most ridiculous myths that gets passed around. Part of the reason for this is that, for the vast majority of the population, whose training volume is almost negligible, this rule of thumb holds. However, for athletes who train fairly regularly, there are decreasing returns to scale, and over-training, by definition, actually has harmful effects on performance.

What does it take to win? There are many obvious things – focus, commitment, concentration, time, and money. There are also many things which are difficult to teach or learn, such as knowing one’s own limitations, being able to feel what one’s own body is saying (i.e. “eat more”, or “take today off”). Between athletes and coaches, knowing when not to train is always a dilemma. Most good athletes are highly motivated people, and it is often one of the most difficult things for an athlete to do – to stop training. To do so effectively requires realizing that stopping now often results in not having to stop later, and often for a much longer period of time (usually from injury or exhaustion). In highly technical sports (most of them, but especially speed skating) the ability to relax, to clear your head of clutter, and to be able to “feel” the ice, is also important. So many things have to come together to create a winning performance that most of them really must happen out of habit rather than being consciously brought to bear. At the elite level, nobody is strong enough to win on the mere strength of their talent or physical conditioning.

It is also impossible to cram for sport. I have lost count of all of the important examinations and essays that I have gotten through by simply sitting down in a library somewhere with a large pile of books, and working continually and obsessively, sometimes for over 40 hours at a time (although I wouldn’t recommend going for more than 30 – your brain becomes too useless to even spot simple spelling errors). It is just about impossible to change the result of a race by training intensely the day before. Actually, that isn’t true – if you try that, you are likely to change the result – but not in your favor. Sport is absolutely unforgiving in that regard. When you step on the line, if you stuff up, nobody will care if you trained more or less than anyone else. There is a ridiculous notion circulating in our education system that so long as a student puts a lot of effort into their work, then they deserve a high mark. There are no such illusions in sport, and at the very highest level, the athlete who trains hardest doesn’t always win.

Last weekend, three unlikely heroes unexpectedly made it into the top 4 in their respective events at Dutch nationals (a top-4 finish gives the skater a berth to represent their country at world cup events). They were able, under extreme pressure (nationals are televised live, nation-wide), to string together a confusing and intricate tapestry of, perhaps not all, but enough of the pieces whose sum is a brilliant performance. They all had to skate huge personal best times to do it. Even in such a big sport, with such a deep field of talented skaters (qualification times for Dutch nationals are faster than those for world cups!), with big teams and bigger budgets, it is still possible for an underdog who “gets it together” to leapfrog up the order. Perhaps me and my fellow Australian teammates can draw inspiration and learn from this, in our quest to make it to the Vancouver Olympic Games.

(for those of you who are only interested in my) photos:

http://darkroom.danielyeow.com/nk-afstanden-2009/

The team has recently moved into our latest, and (hopefully) most permanent accommodation yet – flat oranjewoud. This move has caused me to reflect on my recent, rather nomadic existence. So I present a feature article on the various places I have lived in recently.

They say that a man’s house is his castle. I haven’t lived at “home” with my parents since I was about 14 years old when I moved from Hong Kong to boarding school in Melbourne. Accommodation took the form of dormitories shared with progressively fewer people as one advanced in years. While at Melbourne University, I lived in a three-bedroom apartment overlooking the Royal Exhibition Gardens. This is easily the nicest place that I’ve called home.

It was host to my 4-times-a-year solstice and equinox parties which took place on the saturday night closest to the spring/autumn equinox or winter/summer solstice. These gatherings were attended by a very diverse group of people and often included singing, dancing, and jamming on various musical instruments including, of course, the piano. Oh, there was also alcohol at these parties. I should probably mention that.

Possessing three bedrooms also allowed it to provide accommodation for visitors. For long periods of time, I would host a friend or two just for a bit of company. At parties, it was not unusual for people to spread themselves out over the living room floor.

After living there for seven years, I moved to New York. I lived on the upper west side of Manhattan on 86th street, between Broadway and Amsterdam Ave. Because rent in Manhattan is kind of ridiculous, I lived in a ground floor studio apartment with no natural light.

I lived there for about a year and slept on a couch (which I eventually sold to a friend, and crashed on it many times in subsequent New York encounters). There was actually another chair in the room which folded out into a stretcher-sized single bed (you can just see it in the foreground).

Even though this accommodation was considerably smaller and less glamorous than my Melbourne apartment, I still hosted many visitors who would visit New York. I think the fact that New York is a fairly major tourist destination helped a bit, and the location on the UWS was pretty darn good. Not that you ever really have to worry in a place as densely populated as New York, but the apartment was close to everything…

Except a speed skating track. So after living there for just over a year, I moved to the Netherlands. Now my choice in accommodation was non-existent here because it was all provided for as I was now a heavily-sponsored elite athlete (supposedly). Our first base was the “city” of Enschede, and our resting place was Resort Bad Boekelo, which used to be a giant water park but had since been converted to a complex of serviced apartments which were actually quite pleasant, even though they were a long way from everything.

Between two and three people shared a two bedroom apartment, and I had a bedroom for myself.

Although I did struggle a bit to fit everything in; that’s what she said.

After living there for most of the winter, we moved to apartments much closer to the city center (Bad Boekelo was a 40 minute bike ride from everything), although initially, we had a shortage of furniture.

These apartments were in a new housing development and lacked basic things like curtains, lights, and any furniture. For a week or so, I slept of a sheet of cardboard.

We eventually furnished these apartments and they turned out to be very spacious and liveable. They were also a 10 minute walk from the town center, which was very convenient. Unfortunately this was to be short-lived, because as soon as we came back from Calgary finale, we had to move again, to our current base of Heerenveen.

We lived at a hotel called the Heidehof for almost two months (we were told we’d be there for three days) before we finally moved into our new apartments at Flat Oranjewoud. It’s an old people’s home, which goes some of the way to explaining the smell. On the plus, I now have my own apartment, although the bathroom smells so bad that I don’t really ever want to go in.

Hopefully we’ll be here all the way until after the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. The old people are nice and the view is extremely relaxing. Location-wise, it isn’t bad – we’re about 5 minutes by bike from Heerenveen’s town center, and about 2 minutes by foot from Thialf, one of the world’s most awesome ice skating tracks (those who have been following my facebook photo albums should note that this is the same track where all those competitions that I shoot take place).

Jeff Widener/Associated Press

June 4th 1989 is a date that will forever be remembered in infamy in history. It was the day that the Chinese government cracked down violently on the pro-democracy movement began by students, but eventually growing to include a broad cross-section of the population of the world’s most populous people. That day, tanks rolled in to the capital to (quite literally) crush what was, in effect, a peaceful social movement with legitimate grievances and legitimate demands.

On the same day, unbeknown to most of the world, this date had a profound impact on the short history of one seven-year-old living in Hong Kong at the time. Seven years is not a long time to have lived for, but it was plenty a long enough time to die for, and in that context I was able to understand what was happening – that people were dying. It was a powerful lesson in political realism – two groups of people disagreed, the group with tanks kills the other group and wins by default. The brutality and injustice of this event so traumatized me that I remember crying. Twenty years on, the memory of it still traumatizes me.

Obviously nobody likes injustice. No reasonable person would dream of saying that they would prefer to see thousands of innocent people killed over such an event not happening. Yet many people are content to go about their daily lives without contributing the slightest effort towards alleviating the unimaginable suffering of others. This particular case of the brutal and unjust slaughter of innocent people was one of many, and I understood that at the time, but for some unfathomable reason, after June 4th 1989, I was a very different person, and was now destined to choose a very different path.

When discussing complex events in world history, the lines of cause and effect are often blurred. After all, who is to say what the cause of any given event is? World War I is the oft-cited example as it illustrates the point very well. Simple-minded folk often point to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary as the cause for the war, but to see it this way is like saying that electricity causes computer viruses. Many different things contributed to the start of World War I, such as the unification of the German-speaking peoples into a single nation-state, the creation of the Von Schlieffen plan, even the formation of numerous alliances in balance-of-power politics can be cited as causes for the first world war.

The reason I bring this up is because I am often asked about how I got into Columbia. If I am at a party, I will often answer with “I don’t know”, or something similarly vague. (If I am being “hit-on” by someone in whom I have no interest, I will often reply with “I majored in mathematics” which will kill almost any conversation, but that is another story entirely). The truth of the matter is that my path to Columbia University was a meandering and complex one, and one that is difficult to explain in a short time. Until recently, I don’t even believe that I had a good answer to the question, but reflecting on my life, and in light of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, I now feel comfortable in finally giving the long form of the answer.

My path to Columbia was not a conventional one by any stretch of the imagination. I was not a distinguished student as an undergraduate. In fact, my academic record prior to graduation was very poor indeed. At the University of Melbourne, my alma mater, there is a body known as the “Unsatisfactory Progress Committee” or UPC for short. The role of this body is to interview and review underperforming students and determine a course of action which is in the best interest of everybody, supposedly. One’s first appearance before the UPC is ordinarily fairly tame, with a slap on the wrist and a “change your study habits or else” message of some kind. The second visit is far more serious, and it is not uncommon for enrolment to be suspended temporarily, altered in some way (full-time to part-time study), or in some cases terminated. A third appearance is a rare occurrence, and one which ordinarily results in expulsion from the university. I am one of the very rare students to have emerged from my third appearance with my enrolment intact. But to understand how I managed this magic trick, we must first reflect on my past.

Just prior to commencing my first year at university, I attended, somewhat reluctantly, a speaker’s night hosted by Amnesty International. Although fairly liberal in many aspects of thought, I would have considered myself a centrist at the time, and looking back, I had slightly conservative leanings in certain areas due to my schooling and upbringing. I didn’t pay much attention to what was said, thinking Amnesty as just another left-wing organization with good intentions but no real substance. If I joined, it would likely disqualify me from any kind of high-paying employment in the type of large corporation that left-wing organizations typically take issue with. One thing that was said, however, did stick in my mind – that Amnesty may be ineffective, but if it accomplishes even 10% of what it sets out to achieve, then doesn’t even that small amount of good amount to something significant. I toiled with this in my mind for weeks but could only ever answer it with “yes”.

This eventually spurred me to join the Amnesty club at Melbourne University, but that was not the only reason. New York Times writer James Traub was a guest speaker during my Contemporary Diplomacy class at Columbia and, when speaking of the role countries played in the United Nations system, articulated it well thus, “you should not always insist that people do the right things for the right reasons”, an invaluable lesson in international diplomacy. And so follows my confession of the second significant reason that I joined the Amnesty club – there were a lot more girls than there were guys. After many years of involvement with the Melboure University group, I should add another important life-lesson to be learned from my experiences – increasing your odds does not always guarantee success.

Fast forward to my second (or sophomore, for you American folk) year, and I am now a regular member of the club. The annual general meeting had come around and it was time to elect the new committee. A new president was found quickly in Alice Pung (yes, the author of the book “Unpolished Gem” which I highly recommend) and it was now time to elect a secretary. I had no real intention of running but I decided that it couldn’t possibly be very difficult and that the experience would be educational. I seriously thought that! So a quick glance at Alice, and I got the nod, and with it the nomination. After joining the club partly for the favourable male-female ratio, all I could think about was the potential for self-improvement as a committee member.

The next year, I was elected president of the group. The election was a very close one involving a tied vote. In the end, I probably won out because I was the more charismatic of the candidates, and possessed a greater skill at public speaking. At the time, and because I was good friends with the person whom I defeated, I felt that these attributes had contributed to an unfair advantage. In retrospect, they were advantages, but they were not at all unfair. As president of a group, especially a volunteer-driven movement such as amnesty, it is very important to have a charismatic leader who is also a good speaker.

My tenure as president was something of a watershed period for the group, and I would only realize this years later. More out of laziness than anything else, I began having regular board meetings so that I could delegate tasks to people. We would have brainstorming sessions where all manner of audacious ideas would be dreamt up and planned out. Our membership grew, as did the number of regular attendees. Our presence on campus also expanded and I organized and MC’ed the first in a series of trivia nights which would eventually become annual fund raisers for our group. At the time, none of this seemed out of the ordinary to me, and it was only brought home to me years after I left when the group went through a particularly low period.

Of all the crazy things I envisioned, there was one whose significance was immediately apparent to me – “Stand Up For Your Rights”. The process of conception to fruition of this defining event is something of a microcosm of my life. It was an unquestionably audacious plan – fill a theater with a thousand people and have some stand up comedians perform for free as an amnesty fund raiser. I had gotten the idea from the DVDs to the Secret Policemen’s Balls (which I got for my 21st birthday a few months before), a series of similar events held in the UK, also for Amnesty International, and my ideas for the process had come together over the course of some very random meetings and telephone calls with complete strangers. At the time that I began organizing this, I was just naive enough not to know how difficult it was going to be. I’m not going to lie, it was very difficult. To cut costs, we would try to have volunteers run everything. Of course, if the plan is so ambitious that nobody believes that it can be done, nobody is going to volunteer for it. I’ll give you one guess as to who ended up doing most of these jobs.

The process of such a large event necessarily brought me into contact with the state, and eventually, national governing bodies of Amnesty International Australia, supposedly one of the younger, more dynamic country sections of Amnesty International, the global organization. The initial reception was cold, to say the least. I was literally laughed off – ironic. I continued to badger them, along with those in the comedy and theatre management industries. I don’t know what gave me the energy to do this. In three weeks of Melbourne International Comedy festival, I saw over 50 hours of stand up comedy. I made it policy to personally ask all the comedians and their managers to be part of my comedy gala.

After many months, people finally started to come around. My relentless passion seemed to be rubbing off. During this time, I learned many important lessons about politics, such as the importance of controlling the flow of information, and the art of diplomacy. Curiously, despite being 21, I suffered from a severe lack of credibility. Everybody seemed to doubt the one thing that I was actually confident about – my numbers. Did they really think that, just because I was 21, that I had somehow made a mistake? There were many heated arguments over this, but I was shrewd enough to keep my opinions on others’ negative attitudes to myself.

I asked myself, “why am I doing this”? I realized that amnesty may have been one of the only organizations that I would have done this for. Early in my tenure as secretary of the Melbourne University group I invited Saskia Hunter, at the time a board member of the state branch and co-convenor of the Asia-Pacific campaign to speak. Instead of giving a boring, depressing, technical exposition of the human rights situation in the Asia-Pacific region, she gave a moving speech about the founder of Amnesty International – Peter Benenson. I’ll leave his story for the interested reader (and I encourage even the not-so-interested reader to look him up, the story is extraordinary), but the point she emphasized was never to lose the belief that one person could make a difference in the world, and the example of Peter Benenson founding Amnesty International was obviously a powerful one. The real answer was that I was doing this for me, because I had to convince myself that, even in this cynical world, one person can still make a difference.

The committees cancelled my comedy night over some cold feet. But I would not relent, and brought it back to life with some creative mathematics and an iron will. When the 25th of October came around, Stand Up For Your Rights became a reality, and a resounding success. I cried. It seemed so trivial, but it was also so significant in my mind. Wave after wave of applause punctuated by deafening roars of laughter filled the air while I briskly walked to and fro backstage. I could not believe it. I could not believe that it was happening, and I could not believe that I was almost solely responsible for making it happen. We ran substantially over time, but nobody seemed to mind. Right from the bump in, through my strange motivational poem for the volunteers, right to the final curtain, the air was electric because, for once, I wasn’t the only person who realized the significance of that night.

It was the single largest expenditure in the Australian section’s history. I have always felt that that said more about the Australian section’s spending habits than it did about the cost of my night. It made almost ten thousand dollars in profit, but more importantly it changed the organisation. It made people believe that it was worthwhile to dream big, and to be ambitious. An organization like amnesty should not be afraid of organizing big events. It deserves to and, if it has any plans to continue to be relevant and keep its reputation, it really has to. I organized two more occurrences of Stand Up For Your Rights, and it has since become an annual event. I also joined the state’s governance committee and enjoyed being active in policy formulation and in continually stirring the pot by challenging accepted norms and ways of thinking.

Halfway through 2005, during the 6th year of what is normally a 5 year degree, I got the call. I was required to appear before the unsatisfactory progress committee for the third time. Shit. As I sat outside the room, waiting, I thought about what I might say to justify my lack of progress. The girl who exited the room immediately before I went in was sobbing uncontrollably as she came out. I went in and sat in the now-familiar intimidation/interrogation room. There are four large desks set in a roughly semicircular fashion with a single chair with no arms in the middle. Behind these four large desks sit three senior academics and one student. I wanted to stay standing in the middle, but was instructed to sit.

What happened? I explained. Why has it happened? I explained further. They didn’t seem very sympathetic to my cause. They told me that they had good reason to terminate my enrollment. At this stage, I had already accumulated enough credit to obtain a Bachelor of Arts, so to quit would simply forfeit my Bachelor of Science degree which I was one semester away from obtaining. In my daydreaming, I briefly considered this option until something that one of the academics said caught my attention and jolted my back to reality in a very uncomfortable way. “We cannot allow you to continue as it would damage the reputation of this university”. This made me very angry and I made a point to ensure that those to whom I was speaking knew that this made me angry.

Are you out of your mind!? I am at this university, taking on some of the hardest subjects that it has to offer, and sure, I fail a few every now and that, but you have the audacity to tell me that I would be bringing this university into disrepute!? (at this stage, one of the academics tried to say something, but I cut him off) There are drop-kick idiots out there who come here and do bullshit degrees in commerce, leech off their friends in group project subjects, learn useless managerial double-speak, and then leave with very decent academic records but having not learned a thing, and you’re trying to tell me that I am bringing this institution into disrepute (I think I was shouting by this stage). Now listen to me (at this point, one of the academics made a very concerted effort to interrupt me, he may have even stood up, but I stared at him, and he was quiet again, so I could continue), I am going to finish my degrees. I am going to take these four subjects next semester and I’m going to pass all of them, then I’m going to do honours in mathematics (one of the academics chuckled at that one, but I stared at him, then he looked away sheepishly), after which I’m going to graduate school. You can worry all you want about the reputation of this university, but there are better things you can do with your time, than try to intimidate me in this room, and kick me out. (my memory is strangely vague on the details, but throughout this paragraph, I may have used stronger language than this)

I was allowed to stay and finish my degree, and I did. The next year I went on to do honours in mathematics.

In early 2006, the Law Society of Victoria (the state of Australia where I live) opened the “Human Rights Law Resrouce Center” with a fancy gala dinner to which amnesty’s National Executive Committee was invited. As the youngest member of the state committee at the time, and having gained notoriety within the national governance bodies of Amnesty Australia, when word of a few extra invites surfaced, quite to my surprise, I was one of those who was picked. Perhaps it was out of convenience because I was a student with a lot of free time, or perhaps someone thought it would be amusing to see how out-of-place I would look at a law society dinner, nevertheless, I accepted with enthusiasm having been to boarding school and having quite an overinflated appreciation for free meals.

The dinner itself was good, as one expects from the well-heeled law society. The guest speaker was even better. Tim Costello, a baptist minister, brother of the then-treasurer Peter Costello, lawyer (of course), and CEO of world vision in Australia, gave a stirring speech about the need and neglect for economic, social, and cultural rights in favour of civil and political rights. Ordinarily, I am a very shy and introverted person (can’t you tell?) but the experience of years of approaching comedians after stand up gigs emboldened me to approach the night’s keynote speaker for a chat. I told him a bit about my background and that I was in the business of saving the world, and asked him if there was anything I could do. He asked me what I studied. I replied that I was a mathematician completing my honours year. He seemed genuinely excited, and he told me about a book I should read called “The End of Poverty” by the whiz kid Jeffrey Sachs. I did.

Towards the end of 2006, I was in a bind – I was applying for the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. The scholarship was started by Cecil Rhodes in order to educate future world leaders (at Oxford, of course) and required the recipients to be particularly well-rounded. Part of the application process involves composing a “personal statement” of about 1500 words detailing why you wish to pursue whatever it is you are studying. I couldn’t get my statement to click. I was applying for the D.Phill in mathematics and every time I tried to write a statement, I couldn’t make my area of study gel with my life goals (if you’re wondering about those, maybe you shouldn’t be reading this, or my website for that matter). Then I had an epiphany – I wasn’t very passionate about mathematics. I mean, I really like it and all, but as far as passion was concerned – real passion, the passion that you suffer for – it was for saving the world. So I, instead, applied for the scholarship in international relations.

Needless to say, I didn’t get it. I still maintain that it is their loss (no, really, that isn’t just something I tell myself to make myself feel better). As an afterthought, I thought about applying to a few institutions in the United States, but where? I checked the inside cover of Jeff Sachs’ book – Columbia University. Ok, I’ll apply there. Where else? Harvard and Yale sound nice, ok done. In a very strange way, I never expected to get into any of these places.

Taking advantage of the 9-month gap in academic years between the northern and southern hemisphere, me and a friend who had completed honours in the same year, Nick Sheridan, went on a 5-month odyssey through Latin America backpacker-style. Nick had also applied to several institutions in the US and, along with me, would be eagerly watching our inboxes for acceptance/rejection letters. Unsurprisingly, I was rejected from Columbia, Yale, and Harvard. What was I thinking? Three appearances before the unsatisfactory progress committee probably isn’t part of your typical ivy leaguer’s life experience. We eventually went through the US so that Nick could visit all the places he had gotten into (which further drove home the significance of what I had missed out on). Curiously, when I visited New York City for the first time, of all the items on my “list of things to see in New York”, the only one that I didn’t get around to seeing was Columbia University – it would have been too painful.

Then a very strange thing happened. Just as I was about to leave Boston for Quito, Ecuador, I received an email from someone at the Earth Institute at Columbia saying that they had seen my application, was sorry that I wasn’t accepted, but wanted to know if I wished to be considered for a similar masters degree program which was also run by the earth institute. Initially hesitant about going through the whole emotional roller coaster of waiting with hope, only to be rejected, I reluctanty informed them that I would like to be considered for the program.

By the time we were about to leave Peru, I had lost hope. It was past the date that they said they would inform me of a decision, and I had received no news. I even began discussing options with Nick’s dad (who is an academic) about possible courses of action, people I could talk to about other graduate schools etc. Nick and I split briefly because we wanted to do slightly different things while traveling, so I kept traveling through Bolivia and Paraguay, and it was in Paraguay where I heard the momentous news – I GOT IN. (the experience is described briefly here)

Those who know me very well, know that I suffer from low self-esteem, and have issues with self-worth. One of the reasons I believe this to be the case is because I routinely get rejected from things. It is a little-known fact that, on finishing high school, I applied to Cambridge University only to be rejected. Even my comedy night was rejected many, many times… that is, until it actually happened, and when it did, it gave a small part of me hope that perhaps I was worth something to the world. Rejection from Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, while devastating, wasn’t surprising at all, I had come to expect it. When I was finally accepted into Columbia, I didn’t know what to do with myself. Being rejected so many times made me truly appreciate how significant this was, and how fortunate I was.

So that is who I am… what I am. While it seems impossible that the admissions office at Columbia could have extrapolated that from my academic record (which I maintain went missing at some stage in the process), CV, and 500-word personal statement, I feel sure that the events I have described contributed significantly to my admission. I am the guy who’s out there trying to save the world. Willing to endure failure after failure after failure. If history teaches us anything about success, real success – the kind of success that is significant, it is that it comes not to the most talented, or well-connected, or anyone like that, but that it comes to the most persistent, and it comes to those who are willing to put it all on the line. Twenty years ago, in Tianenmen Square, thousands stood in front of tanks and were crushed, or shot. But one man stopped a column of tanks in front of Jeff Widener’s telephoto lens, and that image is the one that endures in the collective consciousness. That image reminds me to this day that it is still possible for one man to make a difference in the world. That image, and everything that surrounds it, changed my life.

Maybe someday I’ll change the world.

A typical week in the life a a Columbia University graduate student.

Let’s take a look at what life is like through the eye of my camera… in invite you into a week in the life of Daniel Yeow.

It all begins here, in my studio apartment on 86th Street. People often say that the state of one’s apartment is a reflection of the state of one’s mind or life. I’d have to say that I wholeheartedly agree on this particular saying. (do you like the panoramic shot? do ya? do ya?)

After a healthy breakfast of specially-imported Weet-Bix (do you KNOW how difficult it is to find cereal in the US with no added sugar?) my day starts with a subway ride into university on the 1 train. I ride from 86th street to 116th. The subway is a curious thing in that the stations are invariably warmer than the ambient outside temperature.

If you’re lucky enough to get to Uni at 7am due to an inexplicable bout of insomnia (that’s not technically true, I know full-well why it happened), you may witness the sundial without any sun actually touching it. Once upon a time, there was a huge granite ball on the very spot where I was crouching to take this photo… but it has somehow been ‘lost’ in the sands of time.

Turning around, I am greeted by this funny looking statue which sits in front of the Low Library… which hasn’t been used as a library since the 30s but must confuse many people because it has, written in stone, on the outside of the building “Library of Columbia University”.

Walking up the stairs and doing an about-face, we get an expansive view over Low plaza and towards the actual main library of Columbia University – Butler. It isn’t quite as impressive as Low, but functions well as a library. The Low library is home to the largest granite dome in the United States apparently… lets see if we can find it.

I journeyed into the Low Library in search of the dome, but could not find it. Instead, there is this lovely area in the middle called the “rotunda”.

Walking around uni at 7am isn’t all it’s cracked up to be… there aren’t many people around to talk to. The grounds are kept very well-manicured. On the left, through the trees, you can see Earl Hall… which is where many student meetings take place because there are lots of meeting room… which are good places to have meetings.

But life isn’t all about classes and study here at Columbia, it will probably come as a surprise that I have joined the well-known neo-conservative group on campus – Amnesty International. In fact, I am it’s webmaster (any title with ‘master’ in it isn’t likely to keep me at bay for long). Occasionally we have board meetings, sometime they turn into bored meetings, other times, we eat cake and write letters.

In amongst the many lovely old buildings on campus, there exists this oddity – Lerner Hall. A decidedly modern construction, this is the hub of student life… sort of. There are auditoriums, meeting rooms, various eateries and a ‘piano lounge’ where anyone can just come along and play. Technically, at any given time, there are probably many more people in the Butler Library than there are here.

Just across the road, is the School of International and Public Affairs – SIPA. They occasionally hold very poorly-organised events with high profile speakers where the object is to study the game-theoretic behavioural patterns of the students when several hundred students try to fit into a lecture hall which only seats a tiny fraction of that number.

Columbia is an odd place to be at night. Mostly because there are lots of people, not a common occurrence at Melbourne University at night. Perhaps this is just a follow-on effect from being in New York… where there are generally more people about at night.

And sometimes, there are even night markets to go to… yes, there is always “life” (whatever that is) on campus.

Those who have been paying attention to this website will know that my MA is in “Climate and Society”. So what of the climate science, you ask youselves (or perhaps I do, on your behalf). A short (free) bus ride away is the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory which is located upstate, away from the earthquake-observation-wrecking woes of the subway.

They’ve recently become big on recycling here. This year, we won an annual competition among American Universities to be big and efficient recyclers. The trophy is probably about the ugliest thing on this whole campus. But we’re very proud of if, of course.

As much as I like the hypermodern surroundings of Lerner Hall, the cafeteria at Lamont is simply a picture. The entire complex used to be the country estate of some really rich guy, who donated it to the university when he died. As a result of this, many of the buildings look like old manor houses… because that is exactly what they were. The cafeteria building used to be a swimming pool.

The food here is nice, and some of the ‘specials’ have interesting names. The seismology sampler is one of my favourites.

The building I work in is called the “Monell Building” and is one of the newer additions. It is the home of the IRI – International Research Institute for Climate and Society, which is where I do my research. Incidentally, they are also the reason that my course exists. My MA is not a SIPA course, but a GSAS (graduate school of arts and sciences) one which is centred around the department of earth and environmental science (DEES) which started when the IRI thought it would be a good idea to have climate scientists who knew other stuff as well. Possibly with the view that these interdisciplinary people would be able to more effectively implement good policy regarding the environment.

A short walk down from the Monell building is an area where some of us play soccer at lunchtime. The attitude here is very relaxed and the people here are pretty chill, despite some of them having very intimidating academic reputations. If I had to pick the perfect workplace, this would be it. Absolutely postcard-picturesque environment, good company, stimulating work, free shuttle bus to and from manhattan.

On weekends, I meet up with some of my Climate and Society buddies to study together (I’m such a geek). In true New Yorker style, we don’t meet at someone’s apartment (we wouldn’t all fit anyway), we meet at a trendy cafe somewhere and eat pancakes for breakfast.

…and occasionally we let our hair down and hang out and try to forget about all the reading and work that we haven’t gotten around to doing.

Well… there you have it. A week in my life… other things occasionally pop up, like trips to the UN and other such trivial matters, but this is the typical grind…

I went to world championships in Cali, Colombia. This did not go well. It began rather ominously with the missing of a flight due to some rather incompetant miscommunication on the part of the early morning virgin blue domestic staff. I eventually… after a great deal of struggle… managed to get myself to Cali. I didn’t skate particularly well, but that was no surprise considering the amount of training that I had done (6 weeks). I had my camera, laptop and ipod stolen from my locked hotel room (which was, miraulously, still locked on my return) during the 30 minutes that it took for us to eat dinner. Various other things went badly in the running of the competition which will be outlined in more detailed in a strongly-worded letter/petition which I will be writing to the organisers. On a slightly more upbeat note, I did finish the marathon… all 42km of it without being lapped by the main peleton. No small achievement for a time trial specialist such as myself.

New York is a pretty crazy place, and for at least the next twelve months, I will call it home. I touched down at about 1am on Monday the 27th of August. By sunset on Monday, I had brought a new Laptop, registered my existence at the international students and scholars office, applied for a social security number, obtained a Columbia (the university, not the country) ID card and eaten at least one meal. There are few places in the world where so many things can be done in one day. Getting an apartment was another story altogether and I was without a home until only last Tuesday. This was a little tricky because I didn’t have any furniture until the following Friday. Lucky for my friend Peter McNamara who was coming down to watch some football who would arrive on Saturday.

My academic life is certainly a highlight of recent events. My electives are “Introduction to International Development”, “Contemporary Diplomacy” and “Human Rights and Development Policy”. Those with whom I have spoken recently will note that I was supposed to choose two electives and above are listed three. Despite being swamped with reading, I have decided to overload (I may un-decide soon…) mostly due to the fact that my climate science core subjects (like my probability class) are, for mathematically trained people such as myself, extremely straightforward.

Unfortunately, I haven’t yet found a means to connect my “spare” point-and-shoot camera to my computer, so those of you who have been waiting eagerly for photos will have to wait a little longer. I will probably not replace my DSLR arrangement for quite some time, at least until I can get some of the insurance money back from the theft in Colombia (the country).

Asuncion

Do you like apples? Well… I’m going to one, a big one! How do you like them apples?

Fine print: After a long and nail-biting wait, I have been admitted to the M.A. in Climate and Society at Columbia University in the City of New York. I still can’t quite believe it. Some fans have asked me when I begin. Orientation is on the 28th of August and classes start on the 4th of September. I am superlitavely excited about it.

We arrived at the beachouse just past midday . The drive had been long but we had been in good spirits, initially singing along to the radio to keep ourselves awake as we set off at eight o’clock in the morning – very early for the holidays. It was a beautiful day, the air was crisp and the sky was practically cloudless. We stopped for a brief lunch at Wonthaggi before making the final leg of the trip to Brett’s beachouse at Cape Patterson.

There were five of us in all, Brett, Michael, his sister Lisa, who was going out with Brett, Angie who was going out with Michael, and myself. Angie was down from Queensland for a skating comp which was held the previous weekend. I had just returned from two weeks of backpacking around Europe and had thus not skated to the best of my ability owing to the fact that I hadn’t trained for quite some time. No matter, we were all here to catch up on some much-needed rest and relaxation. Angie, not being from Melbourne, asked us why we had to drive such a long way just to get to a beach. To put it simply, we didn’t have to. We could’ve hopped on a tram and been at a beach within thirty minutes. Cape Patterson however, was quieter and was outside of Port Phillip Bay and thus not sheltered from the ocean. In other words, the waves were bigger… this was to later prove an important detail in the events which transpired on that day.

We put our bags down and got changed, not wanting to miss a moment of sunshine. In a decidedly non-sexual way, we proceeded to rub sunscreen on each other. Brett revealed a sunscreen “miscalculation” which had resulted in some very artistic-looking shapes etched into his skin in swathes of red and… well… tan. We scampered out the door and realised quickly that the ground was quite warm. Me, having been blessed with very sensitive feet, quickly learned that the lighter-coloured sand was cooler in the sun, but the opposite was true in the shade funnily enough. We made our way down the walkway to the beach and, after trekking some distance to the west, we finally happened upon a wide expanse of sand which was, surprisingly, quite well populated.

We made preparations to sunbake having slip, slop and slapped our skins to sunburn safety. The fine texture of the sand on my skin was very refreshing after spending two months in the cold European winter. I lay down on the beach, belly up, thinking about the world – its people, cities, countries, everything. Thinking that it was now mostly behind me and all that was ahead of me was clear blue sky. The sound of the waves lapping at the shore was surely therapeutic as I closed my eyes and before I knew it, I was asleep. A fact which I only became aware of when I woke up two hours later.

I woke to the sound of Brett and Michael asking me to come for a swim. Considering the toasty nature of the day, it seemed like as good an idea as any. We walked briskly past several large clumps of dried seaweed on the beach before wading excitedly into the water. The waves had increased in size since midday and we were doing what must’ve been a very awkward looking bouncing moon-walk once the waves began to reach neck-height. I, thinking myself a fairly strong swimmer, began to swim out into the open ocean. With every wave I dived into the crest, relishing the refreshing salty sensation of the cool water over my body.

I stopped to look up, treading water briefly. Mick and Brett were now behind me, but not by much. They had also stopped and were treading water. I, being in an obviously excitable mood, began swimming again. I noticed that the waves I was so enthusiastically diving through were now bereft of the tickly foam that had dressed many of the earlier waves. I stopped again and looked back. Brett and Mick were now further back – much further back. I must’ve swum further than I thought. I decided that I would begin swimming back towards the shore.

I turned and began to make my way through the water. I put my head down and swam a short way in the normal freestyle fashion. I mistimed a breath and took in several mouthfuls of water so I stopped to clear my throat. I looked up, I wasn’t any closer to the shore. In fact, I was further out and had moved some way off the line which I believed I was swimming along. Then the realisation hit me, I was caught in a “rip”. I went to swim again but mistimed it in spectacular fashion as a fairly large wave caught me and sent me tumbling.

It took me some time to right myself and by the time I did, another wave swept me into a disoriented state. Floundering around under the water, I became entangled in some seaweed and, for what seemed like an eternity, couldn’t find the surface. When I finally did, I was gasping for air and even further from the shore. “Swim”, I said to myself “just swim”. I swam a bit sideways in an effort to get out of the rip which I must’ve done to a certain extent, because I was slowly getting closer to shore.

As I swam, I imagined that I was just swimming laps at training or something. One stroke at a time, just keep it ticking away, just keep it going. I looked up, I thought I was closer, but if I was, I wasn’t much closer. I started to quicken my stroke, I kicked harder. I was trying to conserve my energy, but I also desperately wanted to be on firm ground. I’d never been a big fan of boats, now my dislike extended to the ocean in general. At that moment, it was one place I’d rather not be. I wasn’t flailing around, but my arms were starting to get tired, they started burning.

That burning sensation was all too familiar, it was lactic acid. The aerobic fitness of my arms wasn’t quite the same as my legs and they were getting tired. I looked up. I was still a long way out. I started to panic. I started to die. All manner of morbid thoughts floated through my head. I wondered what my parents would think, how my friends might react, about all those people in the world whom I knew who would learn that I drowned because I carelessly swam too far out. I thought about my life, my short pathetic life. It was all behind me now, and, as far as I was concerned, all that lay ahead was nothing by clear blue ocean.

Something happened. A thought? A whisper? I’m not sure what it was exactly. There was too much to do, too much lay ahead. There were all my goals, my sport, my degree, and my lofty ambitions. There was too much at stake. In a moment of pure selfishness, pure arrogance even, I decided that I couldn’t die. I was too important – the world still needed me. I would not allow myself to die, I would not accept defeat. My arms, although seeming to have exhausted all their energy somehow managed to come back to life. “Relax”, I said, “it will all be ok”.

I swam like I had never swum before. I wasn’t traveling particularly quickly, but I was getting closer to the shore. I couldn’t relent, I pressed on. I was out of breath and the world was spinning, but still I persisted. I could only pray that I was still pointed towards the beach. Every muscle in my body felt the strain but somehow managed to husband enough strength to keep things going. I kept telling myself, “just a little more”, “just a little further”. I was increasingly out of breath, I started to take in water.

I could barely see when I dug a hand deep into the sand of the beach. After never being more afraid in all my life, I was now more relieved than I had ever been in my life. I swam a few strokes more, then I dug my limbs into the sand and used what little strength I had left to crawl up the beach, safely out of reach of the waves. I coughed and spluttered for a few brief moments and collapsed, barely conscious and breathing with great enthusiasm. I could hear my heart beating in my ears – easily over two hundred beats per minute.

Brett and Mick helped me up. We all gathered our things and walked back to the beach house. Nobody said anything, but both Mick and Brett knew what had happened although perhaps didn’t know just how close I came to never coming back. Angie and Lisa were probably wondering why I looked so completely exhausted. It was at least another half an hour before I was fully recovered. We proceeded to laze about the beach house and watch the tennis on TV for a few long, relaxed hours before driving back to Melbourne . I had survived, and with a new found respect for the open ocean.

If I was asked then to use one word to describe 2003, I would have said “planned”. If you asked me now, based on the events which have transpired between then and now, I would say “uncontrollable”. The frustration over watching the “fit hit the shan” so to speak, and being powerless to do anything about it is one of the lingering feelings of the year so far. To kick things off, the SARS virus cast a shadow of uncertainty over any and all things in the South East Asian region, and as if that wasn’t enough to earn this year the label of “uncertain times”, the United States of America decided to go to war with Iraq, again. First and foremost was my concern for my parents living in Hong Kong – one of the regions most significantly affected by the SARS “epidemic”. Of course, one of the follow-on effects of this was that world championships could no longer be held in China, due to the fact that it was not a country famous for its administrative transparency, and it was impossible to gauge the severity of spread of the disease there.

Around the middle of the year, my life appeared to come apart at the seams. While doing laps of Calder Park raceway in a formula ford (don’t ask) my rear-end became unstuck at the considerable velocity of 200km/h. The result was a 160km/h impact with an immovable object (concrete barrier) and me waking up in a confused state in an ambulance with a broken shoulder, a stiff neck, minor lacerations all over myself and a $20,000 bill for one totaled formula ford racing car. On getting out of hospital, I checked my university results for the semester to find that I had failed one of my core subjects, meaning that I had to do a major overhaul of my course plan for the next two years. Meanwhile, the comedy night which I was planning was also dying a slow death. All this, a week out from Australian national inline speedskating nationals. Any chance of me making the team this year were looking very slim.

World championships was moved to the little-known city of Barquisimeto, Venezuela. The date was moved to the 1st to the 9th of November, which was perilously close to the date of my proposed comedy night – the 25th of October. Luckily, even though world championships was no longer in China, Hong Kong had already committed to sending a delegation which would have, at the very least, consisted of a single official. To pull out would have constituted a “loss of face”. Using the diplomatic skills I had acquired in my many years of dealing with student union bureaucracy, I managed to convince the Hong Kong skating federation, the members of whom I knew well from the years I lived in Hong Kong, to send some athletes to the world championships. It was those very years living in Hong Kong (14 in all) which enabled me to have Hong Kong citizenship, thus enabling me to represent either Hong Kong or Australia. Getting to the world championships, however, would not be easy. Literally on the other side of the known world, Barquisimeto was four flights and several stopovers away from Melbourne, Australia. Coordinating flights and accommodation was quite tricky, but that was the least of my worries. Having taken two months off all physical activity due to the aforementioned motor vehicle accident, I was not in any physical condition for a skating competition, much less my first world championships.

So it began, six weeks out from my first worlds, I embarked on an ambitious plan to prepare myself for the biggest skating competition in my life. With weight training out of the question at this late stage of the competition preparation phase, skating and plyometrics were my only options. Good diet and regular sleeping habits were crucial in getting the most out of my ridiculously short lead-time. Stressing less would have been nice too, but that particular luxury was one which I could ill afford with my comedy night, mid-semester assignments and end of year exams looming on the horizon. Life, which I had imagined for a university student to be laid-back and easy going, had suddenly stepped up a good few gears to an intensity which I, in all honestly, wasn’t sure I could handle. On October 10th, two mid-semester essays of 2000 words each were due, one of which I planned to finish on the 17th, on October 24th, an end of year essay of 4000 words was due, on October 25th I had to run the single biggest stand-alone event in Amnesty International Australia’s history, on October 27th I had to write 1500 words of take-home-exam to hand in on the 28th, so that in the early hours of the morning of the 29th I could embark on my 50 hour journey (26 hours of which were actually spent in the air) to the other side of the world. It was starting to look like the “get lots of regular sleep” step to a successful worlds preparation was quickly going out the window with the “stress less” item. The Daniel Yeow roller coaster ride was starting to pick up the pace.

Needless to say, the ride was not without a few bumps. To cut a long story short, I did get all the essays in, although not necessarily on the dates that I had intended. Luckily, when I needed to lift for the running of my comedy event, I did. The event was a spectacular success with audience, performers and crew all having a ball of a time. The effort of running the show took its toll, and try as I might to get work done on the Sunday after, I could not stay awake for much longer than the time it took me to eat a meal, or go to the toilet. That meant that from when I woke up early on Monday morning, until my 6am flight on Wednesday, I slept all of two hours. With that all out of the way, I was packed and ready (well, sort of) for my second first in as many months – world championships.

South America is a continent which I have never been to before. Having been brought up in a British colony, attending a British school (and retaining something of a British accent), I was still deep in the (British) ignorance that everyone in the world either spoke English, or was learning how to. Interestingly, although I would consider myself well-traveled, I have honesty never been to any place where this wasn’t the case. The “South American experience” was a sharp kick in the proverbial and quite a wake up call to the fact that many people all over the world get along just fine without the Queen’s English. In a somewhat depressed, distressed and deeply lonely state, I arrived in Santiago Chile for a two night stopover. Luckily the hotel I was staying at (the Ritz-Carlton, no less) had a 24 hour concierge who spoke reasonable English and was able to direct me to a nearby Irish pub. There I met a waitress named Lucy who was from New Zealand who, not surprisingly, spoke fluent English. From her I obtained directions to the sights of Santiago and a bit of advice on how to get around. For this, I was more grateful that I could have possibly expressed in words. Later that night, not being able to sleep due to some acute jet-lag, I trudged back to the pub for a pint of Guinness, firstly to try and get myself to sleep (remember that point about getting sleep) and secondly, just to see a familiar face which was, given my mental state at the time, all that there was between myself and the brink of insanity. The next day saw me walking around the beautiful city of Santiago and seeing the many sights there, that evening, I dined at a lovely New Zealand restaurant (no prizes for guessing who recommended it) and I went to bed that night happy and relaxed.

Next, it was off to Caracas, the capital of Venezuela. If there was ever a place which would drive me insane, it would be the airport at Caracas. Crowded, disorganized, poorly lit, poorly run, poorly bloody everything. In a word, mayhem doesn’t even do it justice. When I approached the desk to check in for my domestic flight, I was told the flight from Caracas to Barquisimeto for that day was full, which was not what I needed to hear. Luckily, Venezuela is a country where the rules are “flexible” and a two hundred US dollar “present” was enough to find a seat on a full flight. Waiting at the gate at Caracas was heartening though, as time went by, more and more fellow speed skaters began to gather. Why, of course… why else would anyone want to go to Barquisimeto?

Arriving at Barquisimeto was far less traumatic than I had anticipated. Upon arrival I was greeted by friendly, attractive translators which was assuring. Along with the official staff, there were a plethora of security personnel which was assuring, although it begged the question as to the reasons for their necessity. I was later to learn that one of the Americans was robbed at gunpoint by a thief posing as a policeman. At that stage in the night, I was too exhausted to think about my security, and as such I purged all thoughts from my head of kidnappings, hostage-taking and border hostilities with nearby neighbour Columbia. All I needed now was some sleep, and maybe some company – in that order. I shared the bus to the athlete’s village with some friendly juniors from team Mexico. Here I learned my first lesson about road rules in Venezuela – there aren’t any (the second one is something along the lines of “if you have a police motorcycle escort, then you have right of way”). On arriving at the village, I was greeted by the rest of my Hong Kong team comrades who, I quickly realized, had even less of an idea of what was going on than I had, which, given the circumstances, is saying a lot.

Day zero, the 31st of October was without significant happenings. Nevertheless, the small things which happened on that day did much to lift my spirits. Two things happened that day, in the morning the official track warm up time for all the countries, and in the evening, the opening ceremony. During the warm up, a feeling of familiarity was beginning to be felt. This was further reinforced with the arrival of the Australian and New Zealand teams at the track, two teams which three years of Oceania championships experience has made me quite familiar with. I was now among friends, and like a warm blanket to a cold body, that gave me comfort and confidence which were two things in desperately short supply at the time. The opening ceremony was an occasion which surpassed my expectations. To march out to a full cheering grandstand of people was something which I had never imagined would happen, especially in Barquisimeto. The fireworks display which concluded the ceremony was a pleasant finish, and one which was of a quality which was unexpected for such a small town. After arriving back at the athletes village at the end of the night, I fell into a deep slumber, easily the most sleep I’ve ever gotten on the night before a time trial.

The first day of track was eye-opening. Although the track’s slipperyness was felt by all, some handled it better than others. I was one of the “others”. Not being a particularly good banked-track skater, my awkwardness was further exacerbated by a complete inability to settle into any kind of form on this unfamiliar and slippery surface. Then end result – 30th with a time which was a touch over 30 seconds, my best ever banked-track time trial to be sure, but certainly not my best skating. Though the rest of the Hong Kong team didn’t fare much better, my comrades on the Australian and New Zealand teams did, although only one would have openly admitted to being satisfied with their time trial (Kalon Dobbin… but only because he won). Later that night, the 15k elimination. Not being a particularly good distance skater either (one wonders why I bother sometimes) I did not expect to do very well. For once, my expectations were met as I was either the first or second eliminated. I was thankful for the fact that I was actually eliminated and not pulled off for being a lap down.

Day two opened with the heats for the 1000m. I’m not sure about anyone else, but when I think of 1000m, I think of drop tests – tests in which one has to go 100% right from the start and splits are taken every 100m or so to determine how quickly one “drops”. I was a base jumper. As usual, my Hong Kong team management didn’t have much of an idea of what was going on, so Australian coach Desley Hill filled me in on which heat I was in and who was in my heat. The kilos, as they were affectionately known, are run in heats, then semis then finals with progression determined by one place and the next fastest times. Me and fellow Eltham club member Michael Byrne, were both in the last heat. For some unknown reason, I derived some comfort in being in a heat with Mick, perhaps the familiarity in an unfamiliar environment. My race instructions were simply sit in, and if the pace is too slow, take off like a “sick chicken”. Right from the gun, the pace was hot and I dropped off, but like a fallen water skier who won’t let go of the tow, I dug my heels in and reeled myself back onto the pack. By the time I had caught them, there was one lap to go, and I was blown (figuratively speaking) so the sick chicken would have to wait. While there was no way I got into the semis, I was strangely pleased with the way I had skated, a very rare feeling for me. That night, persistent rainfall prevented me (oh, and everyone else as well) from skating the 10k points elimination so that would have to wait until day three.

The next day was packed to the brim with events. Starting with the 10k points elimination, an event in which I was not much of a feature. Nonetheless, I consoled myself with the fact that I was getting lots of valuable race experience, even if it usually constituted a mere 5-6 laps of a 10 or 15k. The race which preceded mine, the senior women’s 10k points elimination was a farce, the likes of which I had never witnessed before, and will probably never witness again – a race with more falls and scrapping than I have ever seen. Ten people are supposed to finish these points elim races, ten people didn’t make it that far in the women’s race. Our race was thankfully less eventful, with myself going out in the first double elimination. The 1000m finals revealed to me one of the greatest things about going to worlds, next to skating in them – watching your friends get medals. Watching Josh Lose and Mick Byrne win their silver medals is an experience which rises above all other significant happenings at world championships, and that’s saying something. I suspect that only when I, myself, am standing on the dais, will I understand what its like, and only then, will I have a world’s experience to match. The 500m were, like many of my races, run in such a fashion that people would have scarcely noticed, had I not been in my heat, such was my impact. Still, skating two and a half laps of the track at world championships to the sound of a crowd cheering is a wonderful experience, even if the cheers aren’t necessarily directed at you. Lunch that day was spent with the Australian team. The observant Germans, with whom the Aussies shared a bus, were very friendly, their junior girls pointing out that I might be on the wrong bus. Fortunately, I am able to speak a bit of German, and I was able to assure them that I wasn’t hopelessly lost, but was on this bus by design. The evening’s relay finals and 500m finals brought both excitement and disappointment. Excitement from watching Australia nearly win a gold, but instead settling for a bronze, disappointment from seeing Wayne Begg flat on his face from the start of the 500m final and a brawl nearly resulting at the end of the race. And so concluded my track worlds.

The rest day was fun. Pauline Robertson, the Australian team manager, extended to me the kindness of an invitation to spend the day with the Australian team and watch the premiere of Matrix Revolutions. It was a good day, I hung around with my friends on the team and for fleeting moments during my time there, I really felt like I was part of the Australian team which, to this day, remains one of my dreams. While the movie wasn’t great, the experience of the day was and I was physically and mentally refreshed.

The first day of road racing brought with it many expectations. The 200m time trial is an event which seemed almost custom-made for a person of my physical abilities, well, perhaps if good technique wasn’t a requirement for skating fast. Unfortunately it is. Watching times in the mid 17 second range being posted had me telling myself that I had to lift, that I had to take it up just one more notch, from my usual mid 18 second 200m time trials. Whatever I did mentally to lift for my time trial, it did not filter down physically as I hoped it would, in fact, it seemed to do the opposite. My time trial was an underwhelming 19.1 seconds, my start not even living up to my expectations. Watching Duggento set a new world record at 16.999 seconds was surely the highlight of my day, watching a bunch of juniors post times which were faster than mine, was not. The 5k races were not fun to skate in or to watch, and although the idea of having a race where everyone coasts for 4000m and sprints the last k or so should have suited me as a sprinter, the way the races panned out, they were really quite boring. Of course, I was off the pace as soon as it picked up towards the end, my 4k sit-on an interesting but ultimately unexciting experience.

The 500m kicked off the second day of racing. Despite my abysmal performance in all the previous races, I was quite optimistic about my prospects in the 500m race. I’ll explain, the start line was at the start of a straight which was at least 100m long. This would favour people who have a good start in a straight line – people like moi. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the easiest of heats. The Venezuelan skater who won the 500m and Steve Carter from the United States were both in my heat. My plan was simple, nail it off the start get a gap, and try to make it difficult for anyone to pass me. As the gun went off, my plan quickly evapourated as my wheels slipped against the ground causing me to miss a step off the line… and it was all over, before it had even really begun. The 20k eliminations in the evening were fun, watching the juniors before us was nail-biting as Josh and Ryanne both decided to employ the strategy of sprinting at the last possible minute and hoping for a forgiving line judge call. The Hong Kong junior boy was also the source of much amusement when he refused to leave the track when he was eliminated, more from not really having a clue what was going on, than from any malicious intent to cause any trouble. My race was somewhat easier to call from a line judge point of view. I was quite clearly off the back when I was eliminated, although I didn’t do that out of a concern for easing the burden on the line judges.

The Australian Team in solidarity for Shaun Thompson

The final day of road competition was one of my most enjoyable, and not only because I didn’t have to skate. During this day, after the heats and before the finals, there was a photo taken for Shaun Thompson, one of the Australian skaters who was currently suffering from cancer. I was amazed by the amount of support everyone gave him by being a part of the photo, I was also deeply saddened by his situation. I took it as a reminder to cherish every moment of every day, because while we all die, it is what we do when we live which defines us. J.R.R. Tolkien puts it well – “All we have to decide, is what to do with the time that is given us” (Gandalf). The relay heats and finals were run on this day and they were quite exciting to watch. Watching the Australian team narrowly make it into the final was heart stopping, but not quite so much as the events of the final later that evening. There had been something of a question mark over Corey Price’s ability to finish the senior men’s 10k relay. Mick Byrne was unable to compete because he was a bit sick so sprinter Corey was tentatively picked to fill the hole the Mick’s absence had left in the team. He had died towards the end of his heat and it was Peter Currell’s strong anchor-leg which got us into the final. As the end of the final slowly approached, Corey seemed to be holding up quite well. Into the second-last change, Australia was lagging slightly behind the pace, when Corey took his tag. Not only did he not die, he lifted and began to catch up. By the end of the back straight, we were back on the pace (which was, by now, absolutely flat-out), then disaster struck. The Columbian skater decided that he would turn the last corner, with no concern for trivialities such as New Zealander Shane Dobbin, who happened to be in the path between the Columbian and his planned route through the corner. The resulting crash was spectacular, with Shane going down and Corey, who was behind him, going into the barrier. Fortunately, no one was seriously hurt, but both New Zealand and Australia’s campaigns for a road relay medal were. And so concluded the road competition.

Waking up early to come down for the marathon was not my idea of fun, especially because I was in the senior men’s division which is run last. The day was another one of those stinking hot ones which Barquisimeto had become so good at serving up on days when shade was in short supply. So I sat under a tree and waited, and waited and waited… and waited. When the rest of the senior men arrived (they were smart, they slept in and came out later) we learned that there existed a subway sandwiches shop at a nearby petrol station so off we went in search of familiar western food during the junior boy’s marathon. As we neared the subway, we happened to walk by the turnaround point in the marathon course where Steven, the HK junior was approaching for the nth time. As he rounded the corner, something was not quite right with the way he was turning, he wasn’t changing direction quickly enough to make it around the turn, so he basically skated straight into the kerb and fell over. Although we shouldn’t really laugh at the misfortunes of others, this was actually one of the most amusing moments of the entire championships and I simply couldn’t contain myself. Eating a meal as familiar as a subway sandwich was a refreshing experience. So, after standing in the scorching sun for three marathons, it was time for me to do my own. As we approached the first corner, I soon learned why my Hong Kong teammate didn’t quite make it around. The turnarounds were very very slippery, to the point where everybody had to T-stop on the approach to be able to make it around the U-turn. With the pace grinding almost to a halt at every turnaround point, then accelerating back up to speed, combined with the intense heat of the early afternoon sun, people began to drop off like flies. I was one of the first to go, after a mere two laps. New Zealand coach Bill Begg commented on the bus on the way back, “gee, none of the Australians made it to the finish”, this comment was accompanied by the shaking of his head. Later, one of the New Zealand team quietly said “well Bill, only one of the Kiwis actually managed to finish, so I’m not sure what your point is”. Anyway, I for one was relieved that I didn’t complete the distance of the worlds marathon, I think it would’ve killed me, in any case there were more important things to think about, like the dinner later that night.

You know what kind of party you’re in for when an official memo is circulated that says “people will not be admitted drunk and there will be no food fighting of any sort”. As usual, I ended up deserting the rather boring Hong Kong delegation to go and hang around with the Australians. When I came and joined them, they were just introducing Dutch skater Roy Boeve to the world of Tequila, always a fun activity. The night was a blast, with a great atmosphere and good music. Danny Finster was a class clown on the night, getting behind the bar and serving up drinks to everybody in an inebriated state then diving into the swimming pool to rescue somebody’s wallet. All sorts of interesting things happened that night, many of which I will not commit to words in this account to preserve the reputations of those involved. That is not to say that everything that happened was necessarily bad or embarrassing, just that I perhaps shouldn’t mention all of it. The party continued into the early hours of the morning which meant that I could basically go straight to the airport from the party after a quick stopover to pick up my baggage. My journey, or adventure rather, home was about to begin.

Barquisimeto airport was clearly not designed for passengers carrying baggage. Skaters carry a lot of baggage, surely someone would have anticipated this and told the airports and airlines to be ready for this. Clearly, somewhere along the line, there was a breakdown in communication and no one was told. Consequently, a great many skaters found themselves in Caracas “international” (yeah right) airport sans baggage. As the flights came in from Barquisimeto, it quickly became apparent that we were not alone in baggage-less strandedness. My problem was that I had a connecting flight to Santiago, Chile and a bunch of flights which joined the dots between there and Melbourne, and I was quickly coming to the realization that I was going to miss those dots. Along with missing those dots, came the prospect of missing some exams when I got back, which was not something which I wanted to contemplate. By mid-afternoon, I had finally gotten my bags, but I had well-and-truly missed my flight. By mid-afternoon, nearly everyone who had skated at world championships was gathered around the same baggage carousel with a very discontented look on their face. It was at this point in my journey that the kinder side of human nature was once-again revealed to me (i.e. not the side that launches a pre-emptive strike on a nation like, say… Iraq). Susan Currell, Peter Currell, Tanya Dobbin and Shane Dobbin (who had earlier that day, let me go first on the earlier flight so that I could make my connecting flight) ended up adopting me for the next three days or so.

Not being able to get me on any other flight, I had to settle for the flight two days later to Santiago and, when I got there, they could only manage to get me on the flight two days later again on to Auckland, then Melbourne. Next stop, the Best Western hotel resort and marina with the Currells and Dobbins. They had deliberately stayed an extra two nights in Caracas so that they could go fishing. Now, I may have grown up in Hong Kong (an old fishing island-village), but I have never been a fan of boats, in fact, I can scarcely recall an instance when I have been on a boat and not been sick. Nevertheless, who was I to pass up the opportunity to go deep sea fishing in the Caribbean? The journey out to sea passed by without incident, and not long after we cast our bait, we had already caught a fish – a nice big 4 foot, 30kg… fish. While moving to another location, the motion of the ocean got the better of me, and I emptied myself overboard, much to the amusement of the crew. After that, I felt much better and was able to get on with the fishing. We chanced upon a school of fish swimming around a “lucky log” and, like any self-respecting fisherman of the Caribbean, we fished them out. All of them. I personally hauled in the grand daddy of the school, and even the smallest fish that we caught was at least two feet long. Our haul in was so rapid, that our crew-man didn’t bother killing the fish, once they were safely on board causing Tanya Dobbin much distress as the fresh and lively fish flipped and smacked around on deck, slapping her calves a few times and making sure that she smelt thoroughly of fish. Our efforts to convince Susan Currell (only female member of the CIC) to come down and fish were in vain, Susan saying jokingly “I’m saving myself for the big fish”. Well, her opportunity came knocking, or biting as it happened, when a big fish did happen to bite. Shane Dobbin, fresh from giving the marathon a miss, stepped into the chair and began an epic hour-long struggle with the 8 foot, 100kg monster which we did eventually catch. At the end of the day, 15 fish, the smallest of which was 2 feet and the largest of which was 8, were lying on the ground at the side of the dock, not bad for a day’s fishing. I had never been so glad for missing a plane before that day.

Fruits of a days fishing

By Wednesday, it was time to get on the flight to Santiago, Chile. Had I not missed my connecting flight, I would have been home by then, but I would have also missed out on the wonderful and unique South American experience of deep sea fishing in the Caribbean. While waiting to board the flight, we bumped into some Chilean officials who showed me great kindness in offering to take care of me if I wasn’t able to get onto the connecting flight to Auckland. One of them, a professor in Mathematics no less, even offered to put me up at his home. I, personally, was not so fussed about whether or not I would have to spend two nights in Santiago, I had done it on the way to Venezuela and it would give me a chance to catch up with Lucy, the waitress in the Irish pub, and see if she really had been following my “progress” on the internet as she had said she would. As it happened, I didn’t have to stay those extra two nights. We arrived in Santiago to find that the flight, which was quite full when we left Caracas, was now… not so full, not so full enough that they could squeeze one extra Australian on board.

Arriving in Auckland was a relief beyond description. Even so, I had to rush in a rather ruffled state through immigration, through baggage claim, through customs, back through check-in, through immigration then back onto the plane to Melbourne. My roller coaster, which had many times been diverted in an unknown direction, was finally beginning to slow down. On arriving in Melbourne, my uni lecturers were more than sympathetic to my situation of being stranded halfway across the world and not knowing any Spanish and arranged to have special exams for me to make up for the exams that I missed. Although some would say that completing an exam under the close and watchful eye of one of your lecturers is intimidating, after all that I had been through in the past month, nothing was really going to intimidate me. Not that, not even doing three exams in three days before I was really recovered from jet-lag. Even now, I find amusing the little things that people get stressed over, and I find myself uttering (rather rudely) under my breath things like “you should try driving in South America”, or “have a go at running a comedy night”. With my comedy event officially in the black, exams over and having a break from skating, some might say that my roller-coaster has finally come to a halt. Well, it hasn’t, its just looking for the next blind detour, the next big mountain, the next nail-biting curve… life goes on, as must we all, no matter what. Cherish every moment, every meeting, every fond embrace, because to do otherwise would be to miss the point, we are here to live, not to merely exist. There’s no such thing as bad luck, just bad perspective – remember, the glass is ALWAYS half full. I’m doing my best to really live life to the full, are you?