After the ensuing madness of online air-ticket buying fiasco, I finally purchased a seat for August 30th to Portland from Singapore before rushing off to school for my 10 minute appointment with Dr Yew about a topic that I hadn’t thought of yet. A visit with the doctor with a huge metal syringe full of water injected into my ear later, I started feeling giddy and my words sometimes came out incoherent. I left school at 4pm and by the time I got home, I couldnt fight off the nausea. Missing Patrick’s phonecall 2 minutes after really didn’t help either and I felt my forehead getting warmer. I am beginning to think that I am allergic to school, nausea and all kinds of maladie flower within me at the end of every school day. Perhaps the daily routine of classes, of videos proudly marketing the guilt of consumerism of wanton life, of fingernails clicking away distractedly on silver keyboards conceal the anguish of missing him. As we sit in air-conditioned classes contemplating the grave consequences of poverty, I guilt uncomfortably while my thoughts are fixated on what to get for lunch. I fight a moral battle every lesson and this is taking its toll on me. Before school started, I persuaded myself to think that the absence of intellectual stimulation from academia was a disease slowly eating me from inside. Then school finally began and my sad little excuse for misery fell apart. Now I have nothing to hide behind and I have only my own mortality to face up to. Perhaps not knowing what the problem is but spinning a lyrical yarn can absorb some of the pain. Perhaps the search for the right words pithy of this sense of hollow melancholia can create a poetic something. I keep telling myself that I won’t be here for much longer and someday perhaps I’ll be forced to eat up my words, oh the girl who always said she’ll never miss Singapore, with a bitter dose of nostalgia. I refuse to write I miss Patrick because it sounds so trite and whiny. And with the same pride, I refuse to say it out loud to anyone, or even to myself because I don’t want to listen to these hopeless, hollow words.
How many days more of this can I possibly take. If there’s one thing in the world I cherish more than Patrick, it is the happiness of coming home to empty solace. I use to make the effort to come home from school earlier, so I could be alone in a solitude that the house offered me; away from the incessant noise that is Singapore. The parents would be at work, Daniel at our grandmother’s and Hilary at school. But gone are the days because at the threshold of Daniel’s PSLE, my mom has taken 5 months of leave. In the mornings, it is just the two of us. She pads around the house, randomly sweeping the floor with a clockwork mop that makes a mechanical clickety clack sound. That or she talks on the phone to random people ; salespersons, travel agents, working colleagues, or ex classmates. Whoever at her time disposal, the telephone is only an arms’ reach away. Mistakenly, my mother thinks that having just the two of us at home offer her the intimacy of mother-daughter talk. Unfortunately, I refuse to partake in this. This is not without reason, pardon me I can’t talk to someone who repeats my answer 3 times as if incredulous at everything I say. My thought discourse can certainly be shocking at times making people wonder if I am mentally sound. And in some ways, they are not far off from the truth. I cannot however, hold a decent conversation with a woman who chooses to repeat what I say thrice over, and then proceed to ask me the same question only rephrased in an absurd, helter skelter manner. She also tries to impart to me life’s valuable advice about divorces, materialism, and ironically waxes lyrical about my aunt’s household robot. When Daniel gets back, the entire house is thrown into a noise frenzy. The cretin is unable to speak coherently, instead he communicates with others around him by yelling at the top of his lungs. Obsessed with everything military, he lines his toy soldiers up all over the house furniture. Last night, in the fit of rage I took the pleasure of razing all his militia to the ground. One day when I feel mean enough I will incinerate his men.
Everyday I die a little. Somedays, I sink into a deep depression. Today was an exceptionally shitty day, and no there is no way I can be eloquent about it. After running for the bus in a bid to catch up with a familiar face, with hair flying all around my perspiring visage I of course, missed the bus arriving to class 10 mins late. Dr Yew was exceptionally boring today so I spent the lesson frying my brains out with stress over graduation requirements, and going to the dean’s office without finding anyone of course because that’s the way bureaucrats work; they leave for lunch early before the stipulated time of 1pm and come back at quarter past 2. Lunch was better, perhaps it quelled the angry hunger within me or maybe because I actually had some human contact. I also saw the strange guy who is always on my bus after no seeing him for the whole of last week. Curiously, he seems to always hang out with a bunch of Chinese, pale faced and stricken with work anxiety the little group is always quiet and he sticks out like a sore thumb. I’m still trying to figure out his ethnicity, perhaps eastern european or jewish, middle eastern? It intrigues and secretly pleases me that he stares at me at length. What girl doesn’t like to be flattered like that? The only contact we’ve had was 3 weeks ago on a Thursday when I dropped my ISM report unknowingly and he had picked it up, and handled it to me. Deep in thought about Khao San and the Burmese opium syndicate, I distractedly muttered my thanks. It was not until the following tuesday that I noticed him again, staring at me as we walked past each other in the FASS corridor. Today, again he stared at me without offering even a smile and I thought to myself that this was starting to get a little creepy.
When I finally went back at 2pm, a lady at the counter was a bitch about things. My day couldn’t have been more perfect. I’ve always loathed working with low level bureaucrats who with their insecurities and crappy pay , assuage their misery by picking on harmless students who are nothing but polite. Albeit, coldly so.
Other annoyances include the passport-visa issue. It seems I will have to forsake the $70 I paid for my new passport because it is a small price to pay compared to another air ticket for me to fly back to Singapore and then to the US gto renew my 90 days visa waiver limit of staying in the US. With the visa, I have 6 months. Second mini issue to grumble and sulk about; northwest has cheap tickets to portland in July and September but not August. I contemplated waiting it out till Sept 11th ( little wonder why the tickets are cheaper ) but 2 more months of this household madness will kill me if I don’t decide to take my own life first. So August 25th it is. Afterall it’s only a difference of $200 between heaven and hell. Not that portland is heaven but at least the climate there isn’t unbearable unlike this place.
I have a splitting headache now, coupled with an earache that is really making my life unbearable. As an afterthought, I’d like to add that all the mistakes in my life started in university. NUS really blows and this is how much.
Yesterday, I felt contented but increasingly throughout the day I became annoyed with life more and more. Today I woke up, tired and reluctant to go for class with the harangue of the passport issue still hovering over me like a ghoul. At the bus interchange, I saw a familiar face and wanting to speak to him I ran after him across the road only to have him board the departing bus. In class now, I am online looking at air tickets to portland and of course there are no cheaper tickets for august flights ( why?! ) but instead for july and september. And to top it all off, after trying to reclassify my modules again i realize that I have one extra module. Meaning I neednt have taken this module, saved $611, graduated this year, gone for my ceremony, left early for portland with CHEAPER tickets this july, been less miserable in portland.. .
Life has just kicked me in the ass once again.
There is a group in class that towards which my distaste is increasingly growing. 2 girls and a guy form a triumvirate of ugly people who are too cowardly to voice their opinions in class, and instead hide behind timid giggles not unlike kindergarten children. Rendered voiceless in class because of their cowardice, perhaps this is their way of seditiously resisting the current power order. It is however, tragic that they are not blessed with better looks. Harsh fact of reality : good looking people are at the top of most power structures. Power either favors looks or money and chances are, people with money usually have the looks to boot. Did I mention that I can’t wait to get this class over and done with? There is little or no intellectual stimulation in this class for me; not to sound pompous but I know so much more than everyone else in class about staid political science academic topics like Terrorism. And I should, being a political science major and all.
I think I shall feign a job interview this afternoon to avoid having to sit through 2 more painful hours of this nonsense, and instead go buy that dress I’ve been eying 
Classé dans : travels
I am counting down to the day I leave Singapore. C’est vrai, je partent Singapour beaucoup mais cette fois il est indéfini. I rarely if ever feel homesick. The closest I’ve been was in Europe but then again I choose to think that rather than the desire to come back to Singapore,it was the terrible longing for a place I could rest my tired head and just lay under a heavy web of darkness, close my eyes and fall asleep. Truly when I came back to Singapore, I had to content with this dark misery rising up within me and I almost convinced myself to fly back to Maryland. Just because.
I sleep best in Sarah Sanchez’s room. In between falling asleep, I use to wonder drowsily to myself why I sleep better in Sarah’s room than my room in Singapore or even in our room in Maryland. I’ve come to conclusion that without the damn animal, Frank pounding and hurling himself on the stairs at insane 4am in the morning I will sleep soundly and uninterrupted. You see Patrick and I sleep in the basement downstairs and when Frank goes into one of his crazy jaunts I am awoken directly below. Other than that when Frank is in his cage and everyone is gone out of the house , I sleep very soundly in the dark, cool basement. I don’t sleep so well in Singapore because the sunlight streams in, through my thin eyelids and voila I am woken up.
The days are slowly trickling by and I am Portland bound in 50 days. Singapore is too tiring. Too noisy. Oh my, everywhere noise pervades the senses. In the train, a hundred and ten announcements come on and invade your ears, people rush in awkward and warm in a poorly air conditioned carriage… Et moi? I just sit and wish I was elsewhere. Anywhere.
Ugh.
