A Quarter

This is me. Having an existential crisis at 4:46 in the morning. Because what better things I have to do at 4:46 in the morning besides delaying sleep.

Ah. Sleep. My favourite and least favourite thing to do.

(I do realise that this space revolves heavily around this topic, now if you could please pardon my passion that would be great thank you)

The plan was to wash up and go to sleep right away. The plan failed to be executed. Instead I watched Mr. Beast buying everything there is to buy in a grocery store all the while thinking what must a 19-year-old have done right to be able to buy everything in a grocery store. And here I am a quarter of a century year old not knowing what is next, not knowing what I want next to be. (In case it wasn't clear enough, no I cannot afford to buy everything in a store.)

In the past hour I have paid gratitude and appreciation towards my job in the form of moments of silences. My fantastically, terrifically wonderful job. A job not only I still have, but also have started to miss since two years ago. In Mr. Beast's universe, you know you've made it when you can simply buy a house or two and give it away. In mine, you know you've made it when you can't remember when was the last time you were C3*.

The silence was first broken by the interaction between my hands and the foil wrapper of my newly acquired Mars Pods, followed by the gigantic crunch (and subsequently, crunches) produced by the act of my teeth breaking down those little pods into littler pods and then into... disgestables.

Somewhere in between the action I deleted my 3-day-old LinkedIn account.

You know what else I wish I could delete? The entire season 8 of Game of Thrones. Just. Blah. When episode 3 came out, I was fine with it. When episode 4 came out, I accepted it. But episode 5 was bizarre and episode 6 was. Just. Absolute nonsensical turd. And I couldn't stop thinking about it. (My favourite song this season, by the way, contrary to popular choice, is The Bells) I think about it when I go to shower. I think about it when I'm in the crew bunk. I think about it when I try to order food. I think about it when all I want to is fall asleep. I think about it when I have nothing else to think about. 

These are the things that fill up my head these days. 15-year-old-me would be livid.

Thank goodness I'm ten years older than her now.

(P.S. Thank you for providing me with readership, as an incentive for continuity here is a scene that made me smile and forget about season 8 for 5 minutes this week.)

* not a desirable work position

do you sometimes

almost 

forget that

you have work tomorrow

Life in a Day

Here's how it goes in a day of my life: I wake up past noon, I count my remaining TUC (time of useful consciousness) until I have to sleep again, and I prepare for the night. I usually have about four hours to play with until I need to hit the sack again, and it's always never enough. Today I got up at 2+. My reporting is at 2355 tonight. This means I need to get out by 10:30pm, which means I need to wake up by 9pm, which also means I need to sleep by 6pm if I want to have a chance at a very good rest before work. (It also means that while everyone else is out there counting down and celebrating, we would have only been 5 minutes into work. Well.) So according to my calculations, my TUC is less than four hours. And if we are to abide by my calculations strictly, I'm supposed to be sleeping right now. But I'm not, yet, because I always feel like there's not enough time for everything. First thing I did after I got up today was to eat some good digestive biscuits from Marks & Spencers (only 75p, wow), and then I started to prepare for work. First I dread preparing, then I wrote down the name list, next I pasted the stickers on the bar order pad (my least favourite part of preparing), then I folded said stickers individually so that it's easier to be torn out later (my least favourite part of preparing), then I wrote down seat numbers for both aisle (my least favourite part of preparing). And then I had to pack, so I did (also my least favourite part of preparing). (I really hate preparing for work.) Subsequently I painted my nails. All twenty of them. Then because I'm going home after this, I needed to pack extra clothes and some extra junks I bought on previous trips to bring back. And because I only have a limited cubic centi meter to fill up, I need to decide which junk to bring with me, and which will be remain in my nail-polish-smelling room. Today I'm bringing three Christmas presents along with me, I hope my beautiful handwork of wrapping doesn't fall apart. I also hope the contents don't die. I'm kidding. I am against buying living things for people. Except flowers. Because flowers are lovely and brighten up people's day and is just a short-term commitment. I will never buy tortoises as a present to others.


[to be continued because I intend to have a great time at work tonight and the first step to such success is to have enough sleep, kthxbai brb]

breathe for a minute

seriously
when will i be able to blow my nose
like everyone else 

- my first attempt at poetry



the birds are chirping
why am i not sleeping

- monologue at 5:47am



my dreams are made of gold
- none of which i possess

When instructed to reach out to a specific chocolate bar and pop it into my mouth, the motor nerves in both my hands complied obediently. It was only when I felt the nougat and all its glory (so cleverly hidden beyond the fancy triangular shape) binding the upper and lower right corner teeth of mine for a little unnecessarily too long (1 millisecond) that I remembered that I had, indeed, brushed my teeth, a dreadful responsibility usually not yet executed at this hour. I immediately pretended not to remember about it. Half an hour thereafter my stomach would find another three uninvited (mini) bars of Twix in it. Caramel proved to be a better binding agent than nougat.

These days I dread everything. It's such an un-adult thing to say, but it is what it is. I dread waking up, I dread cleaning my room, I dread getting food - most of the time I STILL DON'T KNOW WHAT I WANT. In short I dread carrying out basic human functions, and you may or may not attempt to translate that further. And yes, I have finally reached that stage where I dread going to work, not at all to my surprise. I knew this day would come, I knew it all along. (No it didn't come fast) In the early days I did experience such dread, but four solos later I met this really nice and caring senior who restored what's left of my faith, and I had been looking forward to going to work ever since, to work with nice people like her, you know. And then, life went on well. And then, I sort of (but no, not really) got upgraded some half a year ago (okay, to put it better - the colony of people I deal with got upgraded), and that's how I got into this very state, a suspicion I had developed some time ago when I swam slightly deeper into my silent monologues, but did not have the means to launch an investigation upon.

(From now on I shall let my soulless body dwell in the hands of fate, wherever it drops me I shall land gracefully, like the 10000th aircraft made by Airbus, with an excellent pilot on an excellent runway.)

I know, I know, I can't change circumstances, but I can change myself, right? Right. Okay. Rant over. Anyway, you know that feeling, the one that you have at least, at the very least, once, in your lifetime, the sudden exciting urge to create something? Yeah I had that at 3 in the midnight after my first chocolate bar, and that is how this had come to exist. Given that I don't know enough to create anything else of any form, this is the least I can do for myself. It's either this or trouble.

I need to stop buying chocolates.

I learned that writing is the consolation prize you are given when you don't get the thing you want the most. - Lang Leav

I wish I had never stopped writing. Slightly inspired and mostly unsettled, yet again, I make my guest star appearance here. I have come to realized that my other channel of output will from time to time be on limited access mode, so at the end of the day (literally and figuratively) I'm all I've got. I spent my night doing laundry and engaging in stickers-sticking activity. It's not all too bad. Sometimes I think I am bad company to myself, but it takes times where work demands my presence around people I have never seen my entire life and have absolutely zero interest in committing any form of human relationship with but utterance of no less than five sentences to, each, is necessary to remind me what an offensive thought that is. I love my own company and being able to be in it is privileged bliss. But right I'm not at work and I fail to feel that way.

I'm Employed

If you think that I would let the year pass by without dropping a word or few here, you are probably right. Unless this time, I am able to dedicate my full concentration into actually finish writing here without being distracted within the next hour, because after that I will need to sleep - work, or rather the preparation for it, starts in eight hours. If you don't really think much about me, I probably deserved it.

In contrast to my previous three ambitious attempts to summarize my entire year into a mini novel, I will try to make this short and quick. Because if it did not work the previous times, it wouldn't work now either. Also because I need to sleep. This will probably be the last sleep of the year hence it's important I that I do it right. I do not even know where I will be when everyone else counts down to the new year. I am definitely not into that sort of thing but I just find it very sad that when someone somewhere in the future asks me where did I spend my last day of 2017, telling them 'I don't know' would actually be an accurate answer. In shock and disbelief, they will ask me the same question ten more times, to which every time I will answer, 'I don't know'. Thinking that I'm a lying little prick (they would have gotten two thirds of it right), they will have no choice but to buy a polygraph and hook me onto the machine, ensuring that I am not under the influence of any alcohol or McDonald's or hairspray, and ask me the same question one last time. I will answer, 'I don't know', and they will discover the saddest truth of their life. They had spent their money on a stupid polygraph which could have been used to buy me McDonald's gift voucher as a consolation to me for not knowing where I was during new year's eve.

I still worship McDonald's. It remains the fastest and easiest way to make me happy, and most of the time I really need to be happy. 52 is my rough estimate for the amount of times I've stepped into a McDonald's this year, although something tells me that the actual number may be higher than that. Another thing that makes me happy is sleeping, which I am going to do very soon and I cannot wait for it to happen. Sleeping is very tricky though, it really has to be the right amount. More often that not I overdo it and feel very lousy after, which would make me resort to my other source of happiness. This is also why I think 52 may not be very accurate after all. There will also be times where this happy activity just refuse to take place, and that's when angry comes in. But today I'm not going to talk about that because I need to sleep real soon.

While I try to remain low, I am not hiding anything. The truth is, I am just tired all the time. Tired from work, tired of work, tired from, and tired of not working. I really am tired all the time, and I don't think there's a proper solution for it. It's not like I can sleep whenever and wherever I want. Like most of the things in life, it's just a matter of getting used to. It's been a year and a half since I've been employed and contrary to popular belief, no, my soul has not been discovered yet. If anything it's getting further and further away. I feel really lost and I hope you read past this sentence as if it's not the entire point of my writing. Ha. I also feel detached from people but I am okay with it. Most of the time now I like to be left alone, because I'm already stretching my quota seeing three hundred faces a day. It really takes a toll on your health, spiritual and mental. If things were up to me I'd very much like to see only few specific faces a day which includes my dog's. At this point in life I can positively conclude that not more than twenty people will attend my funeral, should there be one someday. And that's not even the sad part. The sad part is, if more than twenty people attends it, I would get angry. I would really get angry while being busy rotting six feet under. Which is exactly how I pass my time these days, really, only I'm many storeys above.

If you have made it this far into my writing, I guess it's only appropriate that I tell you more things you can live without knowing. Gleba is a real word, the left side of a ship is called port, the right side of a ship is called starboard, and I have been co-habitating with two strangers for as long as I've been in the work force. Sometimes (twice a day) I wonder whether I'm a good tenant, since all I do is sleep and put things back where they belong after use. They call me Jess because that's how I introduce myself to people I may not want to commit a proper human relationship with and now I am stuck with Jess for the rest of my time in the household. I don't know how to go back from Jess to Jess Minn. You don't just tell people to not call you something and call you something instead. 'Hey, from today onwards, please call me this, not that.' Unless you're a caterpillar. One day you're a caterpillar, and then one day you're a butterfly. I know there's some cycle in between but I am too lazy to google it. The point is, I'm not a caterpillar. I can't just tell people to call me something else. But I think I can live with it. They are probably not going to attend my imaginary funeral.

If the person in paragraph two must really know, I spent the eve of new year's eve in London, and on that night, I wrote about the person in paragraph two here in paragraph two. I will also be in London on the morning of new year's eve, until 0910 GMT. If I am serious about this I could find out about the flight route on Flightradar or something but I don't really care. All I care about now is my imminent sleep. When I touch the ground again on new year's day morning and have access to onions and bacons and what not, I will attempt to make a good pot of carbonara, despite my lack of practical experience in the kitchen for the past year. And that is what I have planned for the new year.

Believe it or not I have Mozart plugged into my ears right now - at 3:39 in the morning. I feel oddly good. Why have I never thought of this? It all started with Batman V Superman, a movie I had just watched hours ago which I don't even bother to rate. One thing that particularly caught my attention was this actress, more specifically, her voice. The more she spoke the more I'm convinced that this voice, this voice does not belong to her. I have heard this voice before and it just doesn't match her face. Tucked away somewhere in my brain, I had a much more suitable candidate for this voice, the way she spoke. By the end of the movie I googled and boy was I right. The voice belongs to Mrs. Incredibles from The Incredibles. Elastigirl. Helen Parr. When I came back and was at my desk doing my usual stuff (nothing) this particular scene flashed by the back of my eyes. The scene where Jack Jack's babysitter said, 'Mozart makes babies smart' over the phone.

I was, afterall, once a baby.

In other news The Incredibles 2 will be released in 2019, fifteen years after the first movie. I'll be done leaving the world behind by then, ha.

Morning

I haven't experienced many mornings for the past two months. Those filled with sunshine, birds singing, and a purpose. My mornings were mostly dark, mostly dancing between the lines of late and early, and too often accompanied by a brief, melodious prayer from a distance away. I wake up in the afternoon, even though my digital alarm clock was always set to ring hours before that. It didn't matter. I still struggle to understand why would people choose to waste their time doing something they know to be so redundant, so meaningless, and yet - they still do it. Does the element of hope come to play here?

In a matter of hours, I will experience morning once again - the bright type. I will set my alarm, and I will be awaken by it, because I want to be awaken by it. I want to be awaken by it because I cannot wait to have a glimpse of what my entire year will be like. I want to receive the news. There can only be two possibilities: it's either good news or bad news. So simple, yet the grand distance between the differing implications of both. For the past week, I had been advised to draft out my plans for both premises. I dreaded doing it, but in the end managed to come out with at least something, and here's how it looks like:

Premise A: I pass.

Hi Ms X,
I refer to your e-mail below and

I have just received my results and am delighted to inform you that I am able to join your company any time from now. When should I go for the medical examination? Is there anything else that I need to provide/do?
Thank you for your understanding once again and hope to hear from you soon.

Premise B: I fail.

Hi Ms X,
I have just received my results and regret to inform you that I am only able to join the company after the second week of March. May I know what 

I don't even know 'what'. It ends there.

The news is expected to make its almighty presence at 8AM. Until then, until I open that fateful e-mail, my results are both of the above. Right now, right this moment, its both good news and bad news. Just like the cat in the box. But once I open it... that privilege vanishes. It will only be one of it, and it might not be the one I had hoped for. What, then?

Prelude

Eleven days into the new year and I have yet to do anything... significant. Unless having McD is counted. Then yes. I have eaten 3 meals of McD this year. This averages into 1 McD for every 4 days I breathe. Which is pretty rewarding, but I cannot speak for my future self. With no more classes to attend for the rest of my life (well, not the conventional type anyway), time seemed to have lost its dimension. I wake up mostly in the afternoons, and uh, I let time pass. By doing so, I'll be drawn nearer to certainty - Monday the 18th (results day ha ha..). On that fateful day, the pixels should start blurring into one, and hopefully (a very, very optimistic hope) it leads me to where I want to be.

2015 was exciting. I've learned things that I never knew about myself, and I've done things I never imagined I would. Although minute in comparison with possibly everyone else in this world, I'm grateful for everything that has taken place, and for the people who supported me and encouraged me along the way.

If you must know, I am not the type of person who plans ahead because I don't want to have expectations. I don't want to have expectations because I know the very backbone of our perception on 'happy' is built around it. If I knew that I wanted a hot mocha, and ordered a hot mocha, but ended up with a mocha frap, I would not be happy. Because what I planned for when I placed my order was to receive a hot mocha. I would be disappointed, because I had expectations. So as a measure to mitigate disappointments in life, I try my best to not expect anything. I'll take what life gives me, I'll go where life brings me.

But this year, oh this year, I'm leaving the world behind. I'm taking life to where I want it to be. This year, I've made plans for a... a detour. And I am terribly excited for what's to come. I know I would be crushed and go back into my tiny hole of darkness if things do not turn out the way I want it to be, but this has made me feel the most alive and motivated in a long while. To be able to have a dream again, to have something to look forward to and to hope for, is a pretty good feeling, I must say. I am well aware that some people may not agree on this and some may even judge me for it, but ah, if only they know how much this means to me.

When the time comes, everything will fall into place, and we will see.

Penang, June 2015

Now isn't exactly the time for this but this tab has been opened and reopened for the longest time. Each time I open Chrome and see these endless tabs I feel like my computer's expiry is imminent. Just like my college life (YES!).

I want to relate how I felt when these photos were taken to how I feel this instant as these syllabuses are typed, but I can't. We are now two different entities.

Exactly six months ago I was probably building up my excitement for this trip. Right now I'm mentally building the arena in which I will soon throw a farewell party to these... Materials. Books, notes, stationeries, papers, articles, you name them. There will be balloons.

So, back in June I entered the famous Penang territory for the first time in my unexciting life. It was a trip too hot and too short. I remember being toasted. (Someday I'll be toasted to.) That was the day I decided that sunblock does not do its name justice, at all. I kept in mind that I ought to utilize every second I dedicated to this little island, so despite the intense heat I kept going, drenched on the outside and dried to the bones on the inside. The Ayer Itam Asam Laksa was my favourite of all the food we tried. I would happily down ten bowls of it had I been blessed with the stomach that of a carnivorous cow. In the span of one and a half day we visited a t a temple, walked through some jetties, discover some street arts, went to a concert, wasted some time at a mall, tried out a cafe and had tonnes of food, of which most I decided wasn't picture-worthy. From this trip I've learned that careful planning is always good.

I'll be back soon.