Credit Impulse

I’m typing this from in Patience, one of the last places I expected to be at this juncture in time. How sudden changes can occur, eh? And it’s only, perhaps, typical of my life that such things should occur just as I’m expecting life to go back to usual.

So I’m here, and… well, let’s see where to start. Without the benefit of the Internet to quickly check where I left off, and yet certain that I certainly posted within the last few days, I suppose I might as well recap the events of everything since the eighth of July, and then we can slowly slice off the redundancies if there are any. But I doubt there will be any, since I don’t think I’ve posted anything since leaving Singapore. So that’s where we’ll start.

On the night of the seventh of July, I received an SMS from my father saying that my paternal grandfather (I have only the one; my maternal grandfather is long dead, and from all accounts nobody but the worst of drill sergeants would have gotten along with that man) was very badly ill, and I was wanted back at the house the next day as soon as I could make it. I asked how ill he was, and my father replied saying that he was ill enough to disrupt my father’s plans; I then asked what illness it was and got no reply. Nevertheless I left early the next day, telling the landlady I was going away and didn’t know when I’d be back (but promising to eventually show up), and arrived in the grandparents’ home roughly after lunchtime envisioning either my grandfather in his usual lounge chair or in a hearse—yes, my imagination tends to the morbid, and my common sense tends to the commonplace, and the reality is usually neither.

(At this point I have déjà vu. I’ve almost certainly typed up these events before. But I might as well tell the rest of them, since I don’t think I’ve told all of them yet.)

I found the wife of my paternal eldest uncle in the house, as well as one cousin, and that’s how I found out that my grandfather was in the hospital (as well as having been very disobedient to his doctor’s instructions post-knee surgery), the ex-wife of my (now-deceased) paternal youngest uncle had had a hysterectomy in secret and now was in hysterics about whether or not to tell people, my paternal fifth aunt was in the hospital with my grandfather (as well as my grandmother and my paternal fourth aunt) and a phone call established that my father was there too. I had a rather larger lunch than usual—my usual one-meal-a-day diet in Singapore had led to exclamations of how thin I suddenly was—and then went to sleep, because the hospital’s visiting hours were 4.30pm to 7pm daily. At 4pm I was awoken and taken to the hospital along with the wife of First Uncle, by First Uncle, and then I found out the reality of the situation for myself.

First off, my grandfather was neither perfectly fine nor nearly dead; he was quite hale and hearty, but unable to get off the bed without help, and wore sunglasses all the time because of a recent cataracts surgery that had left him extremely sensitive to light. He was surrounded by family, though, and didn’t look too unhappy about it. I greeted him and the rest of the family there, and spent the rest of my time there hovering around the bed the way everybody else was. At some point I went to the vending machine to get drinks, and established that the drinks it dispensed tended more to create thirst than quench it, due to them being terribly sweetened to the point of muting whatever they were purported to taste like. We hung around way past 7, though, because we had put in a request for him to be moved to a nicer ward earlier and the request had been approved on condition of somebody getting out of the nicer ward, and rumour had said somebody would be getting out that day.

A quick run-through of the patients in his first ward: his neighbour was an aged, aged man with no apparent brain functions; he spent his time wailing soundlessly at the ceiling, while a young maid (possibly Indonesian, possibly Philippine) sat beside him staring at him, and fed him when the nurses delivered food, at which time his inaudible wailing turned into audible coughing and hacking while the maid looked helpless and tried to coax the food down his throat. In the opposite corner was another aged man, possibly with dementia, whose bed was more like a cot with string-fastened walls; he spent his time picking at the strings, but futilely because the knots were on the outside of the cot and he never quite managed to reach over the bars. When fed, he would insist on feeding himself, but often wound up flinging bits and pieces of the meal at the nurses, and only quietened down when the male nurses came by to admonish him. One of the other patients was a young Malay man who seemed quite healthy; my father went to talk to him for a bit and I went along, and the conversation turned up that he’d managed to have eight kids in ten years, the youngest of which was (if I remember) about four months old. Two of the patients were ambulatory, and did so, wandering around and sitting down on any unoccupied bed they happened across; I remember that the hospital-issued one-size-fits-all pants were too loose for them, and they kept on having to hitch their pants up or risk accidentally flashing the whole ward. I think my Fourth Aunt talked to one of them, once.

At any rate we agreed that the ward was not conducive to resting, partly because the only ventilation was by wall-mounted electric fans and the only actual outlet through which air from the inside could go out (and vice-versa) was the door, which fortunately my grandfather was near. So we hung around and eventually the rumours were proven correct, and my grandfather was indeed moved to the new ward, which had windows as well as a door, was only occupied by one other Malay man (who snored in his sleep), and was air-conditioned all the time. We stayed long enough to say it was a nice ward and to thank the nurses and say how much better the new ward was than the old one, and then we went to Fifth Aunt’s house for dinner and showers and sleep. I slept in the same bedroom, but not the same bed, as my grandmother, and it was a fitful sleep because she had got a cough and periodically woke up hacking during the night.

The next day my grandfather was released from the ward, so we took him back to the house, and life returned to a semblance of normalcy; the cousins and the chitchat and the uncles and aunts coming and going and fussing over my grandfather (who was pretty much confined to his lounge chair unless he wanted to hobble around with his walker) and so on, and I finally turned on my laptop and got back online. The rest of the time was pretty much normal, while my grandfather rested and I sat around reading Luminosity and Radiance (which, despite being based on the Twilight ‘verse, turned out to be quite good) and sometimes talking to people—but the wireless was horribly undependable and so I wasn’t on MSN very much at all. My father took to trying to get me to go jogging or running with him, or to start reading useful things, or to start somehow being useful and all that kind of thing which proved that he’d stopped worrying about my grandfather enough to start on me.

(It’s a long-running thing, and very irritating to me, that my parents seem to constantly see me as a work in progress, and they always have input on where the progress should go. At the moment I’ve only just managed to convince them that no, I don’t want to be a professor even if I spent four years with that nickname, and so now my father is apparently convinced that I need to start reading about how to be a manager and lead people and be a great people person and stuff and then maybe I’ll be attractive enough that companies will want to hire me. It’s almost certainly the reason I broke up with the Coconut—not that my parents were bothering me at the time, but she was definitely showing signs of turning parental on me, and not in a good way.)

At one point my father asked if I wanted to go to Patience for a week, and I was noncommittal about it, which he took as assent, and so booked the tickets. And then returned to the topic of how I should be bettering myself since I had so much time, and shouldn’t be reading things like The Book Thief (which I had brought along as a book I had been meaning to read but hadn’t yet had the time to) because apparently it would make me start stealing things. I managed to distract him by going online and reading lots of local news, which at the time revolved around the government’s rather misguided way of dealing with a peaceful protest about electoral reform (it reminded me mostly of the Subnormality strip where there’s a girl on a stripper pole wearing an oversized T-shirt reading “hot for electoral reform”). If nothing else, though, the look at the ward told me what kind of old person I do not want to end up like. (My landlady is already one example of an old person I do not want to end up like.)

(The parents have a long-running thing about being useful and arranging all one’s activities towards being useful for whatever, which I partly agree with and partly want to know what I’m going to be used for and whether I quite agree with that before I start chipping away at myself. Which, with me being in my current state of not knowing anything about the immediate future, means I sort of hang around all day reading fanfics and talking to the cousins when my parents would rather I was reading stuff about how to ace interviews and outsmart office gossips and things like that, which I agree are important but not urgent.)

So here I am now, in Patience; I’ve already contacted a bunch of old classmates who are either already here or soon will be here, so I’ll definitely not be lacking for things to do or people to meet up (I hope). And there’s some Internet—one of the computers has a little dongle on it, but both parents also want to go online and so my access to that computer is limited, so there’s that at least. Job-hunting seems, like Singapore, a rather distant concept at the moment.

A quick run-through of the things I was thinking mid-flight: clouds cast shadows, which is very cool. It’s also quite difficult to describe clouds without sounding like a poet-wannabe, because all the usual adjectives have been taken already, but I settled on thinking of the ones I saw first—giant fluffy things they were—as cotton candy spun from ice crystals. Would it be possible to, with sufficient meteorological knowledge, plan a walking or hiking route so that it would be entirely under the cover of one cloud, always moving so as to be under it? It would take a bit of work, of course. And clouds would make quite interesting sculptures—what material would one use to make a cloud-sculpture, especially as unbalanced as most of them were? Most clouds look top-heavy, if they’re not ridiculously filmy or look like cauliflowers with random protrusions and all that; perhaps lots of strings holding them up. But Styrofoam might do it, if accompanied with, say, plaster for the smooth bits, and some bubbling for the apparent randomness. Helium balloons, shaped like clouds, though, would be cool, if carried on strings too thin to be seen (but not so thin that they’d cut flesh). There was a screaming baby, and I wanted to go and ask its mother if I could beat it around its head with its own limbs. The window was rattling, and I wondered if it was really airtight and then I wondered how I would test that without potentially destroying it, and without barometers or any apparatus I gave up the idea. But why do all airplane windows seem to have a little hole in the bottom of them? Maybe all airplane windows are made by the same company and they figure that if nobody complains then there’s no reason to change (and after all, all airplane windows do look alike). (It was a very long flight.) I wondered why the sea had so many tints from the air and only apparently a few from sea-level; and I wondered how big a splash would be made if the plane hit the water. And later I noticed that the sea was the same colour as forests and trees, at least to my colour-blind eyes, and for some reason people’s houses always seemed to be clustered at roads, which made me think of Geography lessons, which made me think of Loch Yuck teachers, which made me think of Accounts and Chinese and dropping them before the Slimy Purple Muck, which made me think of the Chinese teacher and then the Chemistry teacher, specifically her threatening to knock out my teeth, which made me think of the homunculi from Fullmetal Alchemist… and eventually I fell asleep, and woke up to find the plane entirely blanketed in white, which it eventually emerged from, upon which I thought it was cool that different clouds existed at different heights, though it was a pity I didn’t know which was which (and wished for Wikipedia to be implanted in my brain, though that would be slightly dangerous); I wondered where we were at that moment, too, and was wondering when I’d see land (I had a window seat).

It’s not at all a quick run-through, is it? But I suppose that’s about as much as you can take (and certainly it is as much as I can remember) of the processes of my thoughts; and these are mostly scattered thoughts that I thought would be good to remember and put down later.

I’ve already exhausted my phone’s credit in SMSing and phone calls—fine, just the one phone call, to the Pig, whom I plan to meet up and hang out with tomorrow; I hope the parents haven’t got conflicting plans—I’ll need to top it up in the morning, though the parents already have plans involving washing cars and repainting walls and things like that, which is a bother. Still, I suppose if I do those they’ll be okay with me gallivanting off every night or so. Tit-for-tat and so on.