Fizzling Sizzling Sometimes Drizzling

The weather these days is simply atrocious; it's incredibly warm in the day, nearly to the point of boiling, and then it rains and the temperature plunges. Sicknesses and sore throats and suchlike are making the rounds of everybody I know, including myself, and it's a pain in the neck--literally. At the moment I've got something of a phlegmy cough as well as an irritating propensity to sniffle, and of course one nostril is completely blocked and drippy. I can't wait for this season of illness to pass.

Today I spent the whole day with the Bible Study folks; the morning in a Christian bookstore with one of the guys, and between the two of us we spent more than SGD150; the afternoon with some of the ladies in one of their houses for lunch and a video (A Case for Christ); and then the evening-to-night in the leader's house for dinner and tonight's session of the Alpha.

But that's not the main thrust of today's post. No, today's post is a rant concerning a personal irritation of mine; one of the books I browsed through in the bookstore mentioned something about one's Christlikeness being related to how easily one gets irritated--by that standard I still have very far to go indeed. I was irritated earlier this week when the Gobbler sent me an SMS at 2am, and it woke me as I leave the phone on loud mode when asleep so that the alarm is audible (otherwise the phone merely vibrates and I oversleep); I was irritated today in the bookstore as I was browsing.

What by, you may ask? Simple, really. There was a mother and a son, and they were looking at books; and whenever the mother asked her son what book he wanted--they were looking at devotionals--he replied with "anything", upon which the mother launched into an extended proclamation of the need for him to be committed and wanting all the best for him and so on. I found it... well, irritating. Infuriating, even. I wanted to go over and tap her on the shoulder and ask her to please help him to make a choice or else to go back home and save her discourse on her son's commitment level and the necessity of having clear goals in life for the nice walls of her house. I wanted to do more than tap her on the shoulder, really, but I'm not such a horribly violent person as to indulge that impulse--still, the impulse was there. As it was I merely clapped my hands to my ears and went quickly away whisper-screaming "GAAAAAAAH" until I was out of earshot. I'm afraid I rather startled an elderly couple in the next aisle.

I suppose it's a weird sort of Berserk Button. After all I suppose it's natural to want somebody to demonstrate great interest in the book one is about to buy for them at their choice, especially if the book is a devotional which will require some long-term discipline. But it's not the fact that the mother was quizzing her son's level of motivation that irritates me, much as I also greatly dislike people going at me and wanting me to prove I want something enough that they'll want to give it to me. (Which to me is a ridiculous question, because if I didn't want it I wouldn't be asking for it. Unless they want an answer worthy of Captain Obvious in which case my opinion of them falls even lower.) In fact my irritation is in... I suppose, at the very end of it, it was the fact that they were, in the bookshop, discussing matters of a personal nature.

I dislike personal questions when asked to answer them in the presence of more than maybe three people. Four, even, if I am on very good terms with them all. Another thing I dislike is to be interrupted when reading, especially if I like the book I am reading and if I have few foreseeable opportunities to read that book--say, if I am visiting a person and they happen to have a certain book I want to read but never have before, or in a bookshop. Yet another thing I dislike is self-help books; I never have trusted the kind of book that claims to have the secret to wealth, success, efficiency, etc. for me without a huge amount of corroborating evidence. You can probably see where all of this is going... last year when I was with the family in Patience, we visited a bookstore during one of the trips to the mall. So far, so good.

I picked up a book (Gaiman's Neverwhere) and began reading; I had always wanted to buy it, but had never had the money to do so, especially not in Patience. The parents keep a tight rein on spending, so tight that to buy anything I would have to ask for the money and go through a series of questions that begin with "How much?" and go on to "Is it educational?" and then end with "No". I had been reading that book in bookstores, "browsing" maybe fifty pages at a time when I could; and at that point I had reached nearly the end. And then my father hove into view, asked what book I was reading, and immediately dismissed it as useless tripe without any educational value, and demanded that I go to the self-help section or the textbook section to try and find motivation to become the workaholic, straight-A student that my parents have apparently always dreamed I'd be.

Suffice to say that what came next was me slowly getting more and more irritated as my father continued, for the next half-hour, to list off all my faults, real or not, and finished off with (paraphrased): "...the only thing in which you have set a good example for your younger brothers and sisters is in your habit of reading. But you read THIS! Why won't you read something more useful?!"

This incident has always rankled with me, and this morning when I heard the woman and her son in the bookstore, he wanting to buy a book but needing her money and she demanding that he prove his worth (so to speak) to buy it... well, it shot the memory straight back into my mind, and bitterness welled up all fresh and shiny-black-hot-bitter-angry; together with all the other times that my choice in reading material has been criticised and belittled, I'm not sure that it's too harsh to say that my parents would have very little hesitation in flinging about 80% of the books I currently have in my room into the fire.

It's part of the reason I don't want to live with them, at least not for periods exceeding maybe three or four days.

...work is going on; deadlines are coming; there are things to be done, standards to meet and people to talk to and ask questions of; a report be written and submitted. Today is my mother's birthday; I have SMSed her. Next week promises to be busy, and full of more departures, at least one of which may not come back as he is going to transfer to a college in the USA, and I don't know whether to wish him well as he goes or to wish he wouldn't go. And I am still ill, and there is much to be done tomorrow, and I am gaining weight and must begin some sort of exercise regime sometime soon. Life is so busy and so full--there are so many things to do and so many people to spend time with and talk to--I don't think I've had many unoccupied hours in the past... oh, three, four, make it nine or ten, weeks. I'm so tired now, but I still have a newsletter to edit and send out. And I shall do it; and then shower; and then sleep.

And tomorrow I shall wake and go out, and attempt to smile without having had breakfast.