Country Music and the End of Abstinence from Coffee

From a few hours ago:

My mood is on a definite Up right now, and I know I’m going to be feeling really mellow later. This isn’t a strictly-speaking happy kind of ‘up’; it’s more of a pleased-with-life-and-smiling kind of up. I suppose the feeling comes from me laughing at a kind of inside joke between myself and the rain pouring outside; it’s a good joke, but it’s the kind of joke that I’ve been tired of thinking about lately because there aren’t that many who’d get it and few enough I’d share it with and most of the week I’m stuck somewhere away from them.

I managed to write that down before this country song suddenly started in my head. I don’t know where it came from exactly, although I suppose it has to do with some of the thoughts I’d been thinking of writing about mixing with the Friday Night Lights I’ve been watching. (I started watching it on Friday but I’ve watched quite a bit of it already. It’s quite awesome. I know I’m more than a year behind.) But it was exciting because it’s the first time I’ve managed to start writing a song with the words first. So, that interrupted me.

In other news, not a drop of anything caffeinated passed my lips for five solid days. (Cue applause.) That commendable effort was bolstered by the departure of my appetite brought about by my illness. And it ended spectacularly tonight at my favorite coffee place (remembered here, heh). The brew for today was the same as the one I had the bad judgment to try at Jurong Point two weeks ago, but they didn’t screw it up here (that’s why it’s my favorite), and it was terrific. It could’ve been the best cup I’ve ever been aware of having. Or, as Kenny reminded me, it could have been the sweet, sweet taste of addiction.

But yes, it’s been a good day after a comfortable, but dull and sometimes painful week. I still haven’t written down some of the stuff I’ve been meaning to, but I suppose the important ones have been covered some place or other. Here’s to the last day of the weekend and the last week before Grandslam!

My stolen week of home comfort is nearing an end. It is the weekend and come Monday morning (good fortune) I’ll be back in there.

Hear Me Whine

Yesterday was terrible. For some reason, I wasn’t able to sleep more than an hour and a half at a time on Tuesday night, so I woke up on Wednesday morning still feeling weak and tired. The temperature went all the way up, and I didn’t want to move anywhere without my blanket, or three layers of clothing. Worse still, I couldn’t even put my breakfast in my mouth without intense nausea, so I skipped that, and I’ve been subsisting on plain white porridge since then. Right now, though, I’m actually feeling quite a lot better, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed and hoping that the worst is over. Hopefully, my appetite will return and I’ll be back on real food tomorrow. I think the chances are good if I manage to get good sleep tonight.

Home Quarantine

The Panadol (well, Zerin, actually) is keeping the temperature down. I discovered ‘antipyretic’ while reading the label. The meaning of the word was clear, but it was funny because, just the Saturday before, we (Juliet company, SISpec) were happily cheering, ‘The Juliet on FIRE!’ on games day. (Don’t ask me about the ‘the’.) Yesterday, there were six of us burning up before we were sent home. I’ll be home, and nowhere else, until Saturday.

I suppose there’s no point bemoaning my ‘good’ luck, even if I don’t think coming within a day of status to having to redo my course is a good thing. In any case, the enjoyment of home comforts is all but driving away my niggling worries about OOC-ing. I am very relieved that I don’t have to go through the very painful experience of taking a cold shower while feverish again.

While at home today, I was catching up on stuff I’ve not had the time to do recently. Like posting here. But my throat is telling me I should go sleep and leave the rest until tomorrow.

How I Spent Friday Afternoon

After lunch at home, I took a walk:

Route in red.

There were plenty of detours along the way, the longest being the loop to Marina Bay station. That brought me right through the IR construction site, which was extremely dusty. I’d just walked by the office towers in the CBD proper, and it was kind of interesting to anticipate that all the construction will, if things go according to plan, result in another area of buildings and towers. There were other interesting spots along the way, like the shophouses along Neil Road and Everton Road, and the little square of grass by the river near One Fullerton. After that I had coffee.

The Old Republic

This looks like it’s going to be awesome.

More MMO action, with lightsabers. But, there are lightsabers!

Resting Uneasy

The past eight weeks have not been a test of strength or will as much as they have been a test of patience. The initial weeks were easy going, but thereafter I experienced a mounting frustration at the pervasive selfishness and lack of self-discipline and pride. What was worse was that these attitudes and the problems that clearly arose as a result were not addressed in any meaningful way; this only encouraged their perpetuation. 

In such an environment, it becomes very easy to do just as well as everyone else, even if that means to cheat where you can and to cheat together. To put it in the terms I did makes things clear-cut, but when one is in the thick of things, the argument sounds more like, ‘There’s nothing wrong with doing enough to get by.’ I think the past weeks have been a test of integrity as well, though not one that I can claim to have always passed. What successes I have had in this area were not of myself, in any case. 

Overall, I think the past weeks have been a challenge, but one that has been far from straightforward. Being straightforward to myself about what I know I should or shouldn’t do or join in has required some effort, but at the same time, doing the right thing or the better thing has not always been straightforward. I find that I’ve had to go about things differently sometimes, because there are things about people and groups of people I could no longer take for granted. 

I think my biggest takeaway from the course is my dissatisfaction, not just with the circumstances, but also with my responses to them. I hope that my conviction that things could have been better and that I could have done better at or been wiser about bringing some measure of change about will serve as some kind of motivation, even as I recognize that most of my frustration was in itself fruitless, and that there is a real limit to what can be accomplished at a given time and place.

Provocation

I quote my post from The Increase:

On the glass wall of the church office, a number of colorful paper butterflies arranged within the outline of a crown were displayed in an area carefully bordered with tape, presumably for the perusal of the students of and visitors to this good Christian school. Each butterfly carried a message, often a hastily scrawled one, about what it meant to have new life. It was Easter. 

One such scrawled message: ‘I’m still searching for it,’ stood out, for several reasons. Among the short, snappy cliches and the oh-so-meaningful mini-epics around it, the message seemed heartfelt. I actually laughed at it at first, almost reflexively, because of the existential angst I could easily imagine it being wrung out of, angst being something my teenage broodings were marked with. My teenage years are almost over, but I haven’t yet grown out of my self-conscious reflexes. 

‘I’m still searching for it,’ is also one of those declarations regularly rehashed in television and in other media popularizing a kind of resolute inconclusiveness. It would just have seemed trite if it hadn’t been swimming in chicken soup, but, because of either the context or the stress I could imagine it being wrung from, I thought it was sincere, and hours later, it got me thinking. 

I think one of the things I realized was that I had drifted into a kind of complacency with regards to my own new life. I think I assumed that if I had asked myself what my new life was, I would have had a good answer. I did have the shape of an answer in mind at the time, something to do with truth and freedom and the realization that in an uncertain world we are only beginning to know where we stand, but, as you can see, it is still barely the shape of an answer. 

The next thing I realized was that whoever it was that wrote the note was writing from somewhere I haven’t totally left either. I still think about life and meaning, even if I wouldn’t say I was still searching for new life. I realized that if I had felt or affected some kind of jaded cynicism at the point in time I glanced at the mass of notes on display, the feeling or attitude wasn’t something that I could be comfortable with having. I think complacency describes the state I was in on this level as well. 

I suppose that scrawled note was the start to what could be called a change of heart.

About Work

This video, from TED, is worth the 20 minutes. Mike Rowe, the host of Dirty Jobs (on Discovery), talks about his experiences on the job, and asks questions like, ‘Is it really true that everything will work out as long as you do what you’re passionate about?’

It’s A Time Thing

Written on the night of 1 April, in bunk: 

Once again, that time of year has crept up on me. I imagine that a victim of a practical joke might feel the way I’m feeling now, although this is partly because of the manner in which I was I was reminded of the significance of the day: it was Mr. Yeang’s message that reminded me, but then I also remembered that I’d forgotten his. The first reminder left me feeling quite cheated. The second one made me feel quite terrible. Even worse, I have the vague feeling that the exact same thing has happened to me before. But then again, if I had remembered his, I wouldn’t have forgotten my own. 

From where I stand, it always looks as though pretty much everyone is constantly aware of where they stand chronologically, but for reasons I don’t understand, I feel like I actually have to consciously stop myself and get a fix on the calendar date from time to time. It is an odd feeling, when you feel like you’re odd. 

2215 (lights-out) is fast approaching. April 1 is nearly over and, well, I have IPPT to look forward to tomorrow. I feel as though I could almost believe that the weekend will be here soon, but anticipation is such an annoyingly ambiguous feeling. I think army life has worsened my time resolution by a factor of seven, because of the whole weekend thing. It could be the anticipation throwing me off, or my conscious blocking of it, which I accomplish by trying not to think about time. 

But now I’ve run out of time. 

The weekend before was a short one, and this weekend I kind of forgot about this until today, so this was posted late.