The Time Since Then

...has it really been only half a month since Australia? It seems so much... longer. My sense of time has gotten warped, what with not having anything occupying my time...

Let's see if I can piece together any sort of coherent memory of the last two weeks. I'm sure I'll be able to. Not in as much detail as the Australian account, of course, but that's to be expected. Let's see what I can remember. We might have to throw coherency out along the way, though...

I suppose I might as well lay out a baseline, so you don't imagine me living the footloose and fancy free life, all bobance and bounce and fricasseed Freakazoid and come away with entirely the wrong impression and start thinking that the events I tell you about are just the tip of the iceberg and really I'm doing all sorts of really amazing things I'm just not telling you about. So here's my new "average day"...

On an average day I wake up anywhere between 10am and 12pm; the first thing I do when I wake up is groan, and then I sit up and get out of bed feet first. I always place my glasses and watch in the same place relative to the bed, so I get them and put them on. Then I go to my computer. I don't usually get lunch or breakfast--I've been eating irregularly ever since classes ended, really, it helps reduce food expenditure--and the next few hours are spent chatting on MSN, Facebooking, YouTubing, and looking at job alerts on various online job-search services; I usually apply to four or five a day--on good days I apply to as many as eight possible-looking positions, on bad days it's maybe none to two--and then I play browser-based flash games and read news for the rest of the day. This continues until about five, when I get up and do whatever tasks I have set myself for the day--usually things like "pack" or "shower" or something--and then I get back to the computer and stay there until about eight, when I go out for dinner. Dinner is nearly invariably a bowl of yong tofu--SGD2 for five items, and always the same egg-carrot-beansprouts-cabbage-tofu (sometimes the tofu is replaced with some greens) in kuayteow, with soup, and then with fried shallots and spring onions and light soy sauce and sesame oil. Dinner never takes more than half an hour. And then it's back to the room and the computer, interspersed occasionally with other tasks, and I usually fall asleep anywhere between 1am and 4am.

And that's my usual day.

What's happened since we returned? Not much, really. Or perhaps a lot? Most of it's been in my own mind, though--a quite okay place to be, since I don't exactly get out much these days. But let's recap, with the aid of Google Calendar...

We arrived back on Tuesday the 31st of May, and my first order of business was to go through my things to find my spare glasses, which I found and am now wearing; it was a great relief to have my eyesight, even if I was reminded sharply of why I had opted to buy new glasses before--not just cosmetic purposes, assuredly. And after that it was a bit of unpacking and then some laundry-doing, and then I went on Facebook and Twitter and MSN and so on, had a bit of chatter with people and then the next three days are a bit of a blur in my mind--they were probably average days, full of not doing much except sitting around staring at the room and occasionally typing up a bit of the record from the notebook... ah, yes, and looking for a place too. I had met a guy over the Internet who was also looking for accommodation, and we had agreed to live together so as to make the search go faster.

On, I believe it was Tuesday itself, he messaged me (I had messaged him first to announce my return) and told me there was a place open for viewing on Thursday night; Friday and Saturday were fully taken up by a Campus Crusade event for graduating students, and I'd been offered a place to crash for that night and Friday night, as the event was being held some distance from the campus. At any rate on Thursday evening I went out to meet the prospective roommate to see the prospective room; we agreed that it seemed nice and the landlady seemed a decent human being, if a bit garrulous and tending to ramble on about the high costs of living, and so we agreed to the place and that took awhile... it was around 8pm when I left that place, slightly unsure if I'd gotten a good deal, and went to meet the friends at the place-to-crash. It turned out to be a quite nice house, fitted with its own movie projection and surround sound system, and we watched District 9 before going to sleep.

The next day we woke and had breakfast--his father brewed up kopi luwak (!!!!) and I think we slightly disappointed him when he asked us to guess the value of each cup of coffee--I've never been good at guessing games and so guessed way too low--but it was nice coffee nonetheless. (If I had had more of a sense of drama and less of a sense of propriety I'd have gone splut at once.) It was a nice house--full of collections and random little useless-but-cool things... we didn't hang around long after breakfast, though, because we had to rush off to the event and were very nearly late. The event lasted until Saturday night, and was quite good, I think; I made a few new friends, learned quite a bit (in fact I probably should go through the notes again, I've got the time after all) and ate a fair amount too... that Sunday was the last "normal" Sunday of the House of Bread before summer schedules kicked in, too, and I quite enjoyed the time of getting back together with the rest of them and just hanging out.

The next few days I simply lived normally, experimenting with eating once every two days (it didn't turn out so well) and occasionally popping out of the room to interact with the world beyond my four walls. There was also a fair bit of packing, mostly consisting of moving stuff from place A to place B and then staring at it and then throwing most of it out after agonising about it; I'm fairly convinced by now that in my zeal to throw things out I've also jettisoned some of the only copies in existence of many of my hand-written lecture notes summaries, which means (especially given my tendency the last year or so to not download the .ppts when I could just print them out) that a fair amount of hand-written information is lost to me forever. Not that I can't Wikipedia it up--it's just the sentimental value of it, and of course my handwriting is the kind that's actually nice to look at. At any rate I managed to pack up things by fits and starts--first were the books, and then the clothes, and then some of the random debris (really, I've amassed a quite amazing amount of desktop accessories over the years--and I'm soon to be deskless) and so on...

On Thursday night there was the annual Campus Crusade thanksgiving, which I went to; it was good, with plenty of food and people and most being quite jolly about the holidays... I suppose I was jolly enough, but all the same it was one of the last parts of my student life. Still, all things end, don't they? I spent that night and the next day as usual, except for a short jaunt out on Friday night for pre-House of Bread discussion; and then on Saturday I met a man from AIA (he'd called on, I think, Wednesday or Tuesday to arrange the appointment--he'd got my information from a survey I'd done to get a goodie bag way back in April) and for whatever reason I had madly agreed to meet up and discuss my financial future--keeping in mind that at that time I had about SGD50 between my bank and wallet, too.

So we met up and it was a terribly depressing conversation overall, since it started off with him asking how much I knew about insurance and me admitting that I knew next to nothing. And then the rest of it went along the lines of "what if you're paralysed tomorrow and need a nurse to take care of you daily until you die at 80?" upon which my preferred answer would be "euthanasia" but the obviously-wanted answer was "have insurance"... and when the meeting ended because the topic finally swung 'round to my finances and he realised I had absolutely no means of paying for any plans, I went back to the room and everything seemed horribly bleak to me; it still does, to be honest. If I had a choice we'd all be One Hit Point Wonders and the moment we were put in a position where the only possible future was a Bad Ending we'd expire. As it is life is too... too bit-by-bit. We have far too much HP and a seemingly endless list of possible negative status effects, and the world is a crapsack one at worst and a crapsaccharine one at best...

...and then later I decided to heck with it, I'll never get insurance and then nobody ever will have a reason to kill me or injure me or anything like that and I'll make sure to carry a card around that says IF FOUND REQUIRING EXPENSIVE MEDICAL PROCEDURES PLEASE TOSS IN GUTTER AND LEAVE FOR DEAD. Yes, my will to live is horribly low. I'm one of those people who would never be cause for "Miraculous Recovery! Doctors Attribute it to Clinging Desperately to Life"-type headlines. I'm much more likely to be the kind of patient who, despite the surgery going perfectly and in fact better than expected because the staff team managed to overcome all their personal differences and cooperate to make it the performance of their entire careers, dies with an anticlimactic giggle and then turns out to not actually have the money to pay for the operation in the first place. Or I could just rent a car and go to some of the rural parts of Malaysia, run over a chicken, and get out of the car and wait. I hear that villagers will cheerfully beat you to death for that sort of thing and never report it to the police, which means I'll need somebody to come along and escape with the car and conveniently be a witness to my death. They'd have to be the kind who'd run away rather than perform Car Fu in an attempt to rescue me, though...

So that was Saturday. It's Wednesday today, and four days have passed more or less normally, without any distinguishing characteristics such as callbacks from companies about job applications--I don't know if I've been applying to all the wrong places or if it's just my resume or something else (a niggling voice at the back of my head says "God closing doors?") but no company ever replies my emails or calls me up for interviews or anything and my money's still running out. And I've found that in the absence of positive stimuli my default emotional state is rather... blank, with a side of irritability. I think the last time I smiled was Sunday, or maybe Monday. I don't remember... It could've been more recent than that, of course. And for some reason I've been rather prickly these past two days... I'm not sure if it's all the buildup of the worry and bother and joblessness--the parents are starting to get clamourous about it, which is more bother still--and of course there's still the matter of getting money to pay the rent with and live on until the pay starts coming in... at this point I'm starting to wonder whether it ever will. I mean, worst comes to worst, I'm off to find those hyperaggressive rural folks and kick over a chicken.