monkeycrap's Diaryland Diary
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if i'd say anything to insult you, well, i've tried my best.
Well, life post-thailand has been mindnumbingly uneventful on average. Geoff Dyer described it best.
"There was less and less to do, which was just as well because I had less and less energy to do anything. It became more and more difficult to accomplish anything, which was just as well because there was nothing to accomplish."
However, the thing is, I'm loving every bit of it. I should be, at least. Think about it, i'll never have an opportunity like this, like, ever again. The opportunity to just listen to music, watch tv, read, stone, daydream, stone, daydream, stonezzzz... You get my drift. And unlike school holidays or army off days, you don't have homework nagging at you subliminally to do it (not that I gave in to its demands when I was in school anyway), or to have the crotch-squeezing prospect of having to book into camp to, well, not look forward to. So yeah, i'm enjoying every bit of doing nothing and looking forward to the next day, where the process of nothing doing repeats itself.
Somehow though, it seems that I am quite unable to fully enjoy this privilege bestowed upon me as a reward for suffering the agony of entering army 3 days after prom (and spending 3 christmases in green, if I may repeat myself for the 4380954th time). You see, there's always this voice that's nagging and reminding me to do something with my life, to get a job, to get something done and not waste your youth watching ambush makeover at 12 noon on a Wednesday afternoon. Some people refer to this voice as Mr. Cricket, others call it their conscience. I prefer to refer to it as my mum.
But I should get something done la. And as luck would have it, DR found me something to do for 3 days last week. It was the most exciting job in the world, and I got paid $7 an hour for it. I was to, from 6.30am-9am and 4.30pm-7pm, sit at designated bus stops around the country and record down bus license plates numbers. Cool huh? So yeah, I get paid to read my book, listen to music, write my thoughts down in my pink Elektra notebook, and occasionally look up to take down license plate numbers. Super exciting job, only second to admin assistants in army camps.
But seriously, I love that job and wouldn't mind doing it for a few more days. Well, beach and pina colada and taking note of the hot people would be better, but bus stops are fine too. And there was this one bus stop where I was stationed, at bedok south, 2 stops away from the one at your house, Cal. 6.30 in the morning? Fantastic. Breathing in the cold dewy morning air, watching the sun rise in the sense that the sky turned from pure black to a melancholic, cloudless blue. And the hill (or slope, whatever) as the backdrop. With the old style 2 storey houses with corrugated iron doors, algae infested walls, chrome-yellow spiral staircases on the OUTSIDE of the house and lightbulbs for lights. Gorgeous.
Complemented with the strains of Alanis Morisette (acoustic) and Simon Webbe, it was just, well, near perfect. Jason Mraz was good too, but the lyrics screwed things up a little. I mean, "Hey Mr.Curiosity, well are you killing me, you've took care of the cat already..." Gimme a break.
Then the school goers arrive, completely oblivious to the beauty that surrounds them. I don't blame them. You can't apprecrate beauty when you're part of it. I remember the time when i'd wake up at 5.20 in the morning, get changed, walk to the bus stop (and no, I still don't regret going to AC), and there were some times that it was totally magnificent. The full moon, the wind. However, I was only able to stop for half a nanosecond to take in the splendour of it all, before being reverted oh-so-kindly back to the fact that i'm pretty much screwed for the physics test on that day and that I still have no idea what the formula for gravitational force is. (GMm/r^2, in case anyone was geeky enough to wonder). Anyway. I still think it's a fantastic way to spend the morning, at the bus stop, reading, occasionally seeing rectangular flashes of green thinking it's some nerve disorder in your brain or retina malfunction, only to realise that it's just buses filled to the brim with TJ students making their way to school.
So, i'm officially 21 years old. The gathering/celebrations/bbq/alcohol congregation/cake-as-face-paint-ceremony was so unbelievably great. I was really, straight from the bottom of my heart happy, something that's been increasingly difficult to achieve recently. (Well, rotting at home's good, but that's more of plodding through contentment than being overjoyed). All the people who've made it possible, either by helping to organize or by coming or by paying for stuff or by just calling to well-wish, thank you so, so much. I really mean it.
Being 21, not that big a deal I guess. Although now when you go, "Whoa, she's hot" at the tampines bus interchange, you realise that you've been whoa-she's-hotting someone in school uniform, and realise that she's, at the very least, 5 years younger. And then you realise that she's more than 5 years younger, by virtue of the big number '3' inscribed on her E maths textbook. And that's frowned upon by society, the whole age difference thing. Not good. Although it's not a problem with me la; if i'm gonna start adding age, or height/hair length/eye colour/etc etc etc filters to my, erm, search engine, I might as well, as the Malays say, "Masukan gunung brokbek." (enter brokeback mountain)
Ok gotta go now. Bye.
"As I looked at her I realised that, for me, the sensation of falling for a woman is often touched with this conviction that she will never need me. I wasn't sure what I was feeling, and then the familiarity of this particular aspect of the process - a side-effect almost - made me recognise it, made me realise that, yes, I was falling for her. Appropriately enough, I experienced this as a kind of vertigo - a species of Victorian swoon - induced by the discrepancy between the yearning I felt for her and the hunch that she was not feeling anything of the kind for me." - Geoff Dyer
5:46 p.m. - 2006-03-29
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