Half a Void

I had another one of those odd dreams yesterday. Not last night, because these days I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and then fall back to sleep before the handphone wakes me up--I still haven't put batteries in the alarm clock, and besides the handphone's alarm tone is customisable. At the moment it's a recording of me saying "Wake up. Wake up." in a slightly electronically-distorted tone, but when I figure out how to connect that phone to my computer, it will sing either "There is Life Outside Your Apartment", "I Feel Fantastic", or "The Mom Song"--you know, the one where Anita Renfroe yells "GET UP NOW GET UP NOW GET UP OUT OF BED".

Admittedly those are rather loud noises, but then I needn't worry about waking the roommate anymore because he's gone away; the post-it he left behind said that one of his friends' roommate had gone away on exchange and he was going there, which means he's been waiting to move again since the beginning of the semester. It does put a bit of perspective on why he's not been terribly friendly or why he still hasn't told the bank about his change of address, which I always thought was odd given the impossibly ordered sort of life he seems to lead. Still, he's probably happier where he is now. So that's at least one person out of my life for the rest of it; if I never saw him before this year I'll likely not see him again for the rest of the course, and after that it's even less likely.

Still, I don't like waking up to an empty space. I'm used to having people around, since whenever I go to visit family I end up sharing rooms. The family's size is such that rooms have to be shared or else somebody has to go on the floor or couch or kitchen stovetop or something, which means that by now I'm used to waking up to the noises of people either yelling "WAKE UP!" or snoring or simply being awake with all the little noises that entails. Waking up to complete silence, apart from the fan's whirring, is... new to me, and not entirely comfortable. I suppose that of course there's more freedom to do whatever I want in the room, but I was always doing that already anyway.

...I wonder how the Pig is. It's slightly worrying when the last messages he sent me were decidedly emo; I've enough faith in whatever common sense he has that he hasn't gone suicidal, but it's still worrying. And he hasn't appeared on MSN or Skype in awhile (I use the webcam as a mic these days because my mic-equipped headset is uncomfortable and doesn't work anyway), which is also cause for worry; and the last conversation I had with him was not the most optimistic either. It's very, very worrying, but what can I do about it but pray? Granted, that's probably the best thing I could do in such a situation, but would it be asking too much for an immediate and obvious answer?

Overall my emotions have been fluctuating rather violently over the past... how many days? the past weekend, at least; at the very least, since Friday. Friday there was a surprise quiz (not quite surprise, merely forgotten-by-me) for the elective, which I didn't find terribly difficult except for one calculation question that I couldn't get the numbers to add up for. I hate multiple-choice calculation questions because if the lecturer has made a mistake, the question becomes a huge time sink while you try to figure out how exactly the numbers need to be arranged and dealt with to produce the correct answer. That wasn't difficult, although it was a surprise; but on Friday I was a bit on edge because Saturday promised to be busy. In addition I was dealing with a very demanding person all day that day, and it ended badly--I wanted to go seek them out and pound their face into the MRT tracks and then stomp on them and leap to safety a moment before the train arrived to properly turn them into mush. Friday, therefore, was a day of quite great irritation.

It was also somewhat stressful, because on Friday night I received a phone call to tell me that I shouldn't skip lectures: one of the professors had announced a project, and most of the people I know in class had been there and promptly formed groups, and had not included me in those. I therefore had to start thinking of people who might have also skipped class that day and might make good groupmates.

Saturday I woke early; the Doulos was in town (both literally and metaphorically) and I wanted to visit. For those who don't know, the Doulos is a ship, owned by Operation Mobilisation (OM)--you can Google the organisation. What it has on board is a huge crew of missionaries who go from country to country aboard the ship, and each place they go to they do something different, or so I gather from what I know and have heard. Most often they sell books, which also helps raise money for their work. The books, obviously, were my main reason for going--I've been visiting the Doulos whenever it was in town since very young. It's quite famous amongst Christians, I think; at any rate I have memories of me being very small and wandering around what seemed like neverending shelves of books and wanting to buy a lot more than what I could have. I usually had to settle for just one book, or two, or none.

Last Saturday I therefore went, and spent--let me see--almost two hours aboard, during which I managed to select six books for a grand total of SGD24, which is MUCH cheaper than any bookstore I've ever seen in this country (or, for that matter, Malaysia). I'm currently reading one and have lent another to a friend, and I hope he's reading it. It was a nice, if slightly underwhelming, experience, if for nothing more than the fact that I'm now taller than the bookshelves and they no longer tower over me the way they do in my memories. I was certainly giddy over having got books, though!

And then I got back to the room, and the Pig was online, and we chatted--that was the depressing conversation I mentioned before; the details are of course confidential, but I cheered him up as best I could (it seemed to work, if only temporarily). It was a Skype call, and lasted nearly 90 minutes.

The night was spent quite pleasantly with a few people, none of which have ever been mentioned here; but the one I knew best of them was Almond, and the others were his friends (if I am right, they were from the Christian fellowship). I was there mainly because Almond had been worrying very greatly earlier (he is a freshman, and is connected to me in a circuitous route--he is the brother of a senior friend of Herr Robson, and both Herr Robson and the senior friend attend the same church as I, which is where we first met) about gaining enough participation points to secure a place in the hostel next academic year, and then had proceeded naturally to start worrying about my participation points as well. It turned out that one of those friends knows somebody in the choir and the choir is recruiting, and will provide enough points for a place in the hostel next academic year too.

Yes, I know. I am very strangely connected.

After some time during which we discussed the possibilities and problems (foremost being that next semester I'll be almost entirely away from school and hence unable to attend the twice-a-week practices), I have decided to go for an audition this Thursday; but I have first to contact the friend-of-Almond-who-knows-people-in-choir to arrange for that.

That was Saturday. On Sunday there was church, and then the Bible study group after it, both of which were pleasant--the folks are friendly and the food is good and plentiful. But after that, both Almond and I returned to my room (he had borrowed a DVD from the church library and wanted to watch it) and that was when I found the roommate had become the ex-roommate, but had left a nice explanatory post-it under my mouse. The DVD was enjoyable, but when Almond had left I began to start feeling like the room was a bit empty.

Yesterday I went through the whole day wondering if it was fair of me to join the choir so late in the semester and with the promise of only being really active with them for half a semester (or even less!) and trying to find groupmates for the project; I did, in the end, manage to find a group to join and decide to audition for the choir and see how it goes, but all the same I was feeling rather lonely by the end of the school day, not least because Easy Kill insisted on constantly discussing the project and, of course, I had nothing to do with it so I just sat there being left-out.

But Monday night was nice. As I've mentioned before (I think) I'm one of the small-group leaders in Campus Crusade, and last night was one of the meetings for the small-group leaders; and it was very refreshing. I think one of the things was that it got my mind off of my problems, where it'd been for the whole weekend and that Monday; and quite frankly, it's good to be with friends where you can be ridiculous as you like and nobody minds (or at least, they don't mind too much). It was refreshing.

Which leads me to wonder where that dream I had this morning came from--it must have been morning because I woke up at the end of the dream and it was 8am. The dream's events are as follows:

I and a girl (I remember thinking she was my sister in the dream, but I don't know which sister) were undead, but not zombies or vampires or any such thing. I was simply the way I am now except I didn't need to eat or drink or breathe. We were living in a small, comfortable house with Sweeney Todd and Helena Bonham Carter (not Mrs Lovett, but how I knew I don't know), and every night (my dream had montages of several nights going by) we would have pie. Suddenly I found out that Sweeney Todd did not like undead people, so I and the girl had to eat the pie so that we would appear to not be undead. After that we went to sleep. The next day when I woke up, I had facial hair (facial hair seems to be a recurrence in my dreams), and lots of it: I looked something like an Ewok, except the hair was all black except around the nose and mouth, where there was a perfect elliptical carpet of white hair. I remember being panicked and leaving the house, and wondering how long it would take to tweeze out all that hair. Somehow I then knew that having hair on the face and in that particular pattern would identify me as undead, and I fell into a pond where another man then dived in. He recognised that I was undead because I was underwater and perfectly fine while he was expelling bubbles from his mouth.

Then I woke.