Skip to Late

So it’s the second-last day of my time in Patience today, and I’ve only actually seen the Pig once; it’s definitely his fault, since he keeps on oversleeping and being too tired and/or late to actually go hang out before he needs to sleep for his job the next day, and it’s not like I clutter up my time… yes, I’m slightly annoyed, why do you ask? But it’s still been a pretty good time here—I spend nearly every night out with people (and a different combination every time at that), which is a bit of a strain on the wallet but apparently everybody believes I’m going to get a job soon and have a salary double or triple theirs and so they have no worries on my behalf. Personally, whenever people ask me how I am, I start off with “alive” and then add “and jobless” to allay the odd look that pops up on their face, and then if I met them at church they say it’s all in God’s timing and if I met them elsewhere they say it’s not as if the economy in Malaysia is all that much better anyway, I’ll probably get a job before they do. But the main thing is that I’d been planning to see the Pig at least three nights out of six and so far I’ve only seen him once, and only for an hour or so at that, which is hardly enough to catch up on one year’s worth of news.

So I go out, and get caught up on snippets and pieces of people’s lives, and the same happens with family where I listen and get caught up on snippets and pieces of people’s lives. Nobody really asks me about my life history, apart from the obvious questions like “how are you” and “have you graduated” and “what did you study” and “so where do you plan to work” and occasionally “what’s bioengineering really mean”, but that’s probably because I’ve never been a terribly interesting conversationalist anyway. Not in person, at least; I think I’m a relatively okay correspondent over IM and email.

[Later]

So the parents decided to go out for breakfast with friends, and took me along for the experience; at least it was interesting, even if the parents think I ought to evince more interest in other people’s lives and the only thing I could think of was “how much interest am I supposed to evince in people not talking to me, and besides they don’t even know my name?” and so that didn’t go terribly well. But the breakfast was quite enjoyable, even if it started off with the apparently long-time friends of the parents asking what my name was and whether I had siblings (!); as it turned out some other friends of a friend turned up, and they were at least complete strangers to the whole family and so were interesting. That breakfast lasted until slightly after 12.30pm, at which point it was retroactively declared a brunch.

The rest of the day has been sitting in cars and going to a succession of banks while the parents took care of various bank-related things—I never inquire too much into others’ finances, partly because I know nothing about such things and partly because it’s never been much of a conversational topic—while I played games on the phone. Apparently we all share much the same opinion of my maternal second uncle, though we all express it differently.

My maternal second uncle made it a long time ago onto the rather long list of Adults I Never Want to be Anything Like, I admit. He lived with us for a short time when we first came to Patience, and my first impression of him was that he was a small, scrunched-up little thing with a two-door four-seat car who smoked. (I should probably put that list up somewhere sometime; my list of Adults I Want to Be Like is admittedly much shorter.) The impression was never really made better, because he never seemed to do anything but smoke, and was quite vociferous whenever I said he shouldn’t—I was an extremely tactless child, and some of that tactlessness remains with me; it’s apparently hereditary—and one day I took things into my own hands and hid his lighter, which made sense to me but probably wouldn’t work on anybody who had more than one lighter. Heck, I don’t smoke and even I have at any one time three lighters stashed in various boxes just in case. But as it turned out my maternal second uncle had only the one lighter, and he never thought to check in the drawers of the desk he always left the lighter on, and so it got me a whacking when it finally came out that I’d stowed it away… at any rate some time later he ceased being a presence in the house, for what reason I don’t know, and the next I heard of him was that he was in a mental institution for something, and eventually he got out and now apparently he’s being a perfect full-time nuisance.

I don’t think I really dislike him, though. I just don’t really think of him as being quite human. My mother told me his history, as far as the family knows it—apparently there will always be a five-year gap during his pubertal years when he got a scholarship and went away to study, before the days of cheap travel, during which nobody knows quite what was running through his head—and immediately I decided that when I die, the history of my life will not require less than an hour to properly tell. My life history must be the kind of thing that takes up a whole day, maybe more, and hopefully if more than one person is telling it they should at times end up contradicting each other while both are convinced that they are telling the truth, and then it’ll take a bit of effort to put things together and figure the state of things out. But as it turns out he was highly-educated for his generation, and then put together some savings from his first couple of jobs, and then twelve years ago he started smoking—that was also, now that I think of it, around the time we came to Patience—and stopped working. Since then, to hear the family tell it, his only expenditure has been beer and cigarettes and the occasional trifle for himself; other than that he’s essentially a non-contributing member of humankind. My father, being obsessed with usefulness, thinks of him as a waste; my mother sees him as both extremely embarrassing and too lazy to improve; I thought about it in the car, not having anything else to do, and decided that I think of him as a recalcitrant pet—the kind you keep around the house because your grandmother gave it to you a long time ago, even though it’s completely useless, even in terms of decorative value, and costs way too much to upkeep, and whose value to society probably only consists of the fact that it can be boiled down and made into a couple of cakes of pretty okay soap.

Of course, one can’t be too harsh on him. There but for the grace of God go I, for one thing. And God loved the world, so one can’t be picky—at least, one can’t very well be pickier than God, at least not knowingly and with a good conscience. But I can’t help the fact that when I see him (as well as assorted other people), I think “eyes: can be gouged; nose: can be hooked; throat: can be grasped; thorax: can be crushed” and so on. Or at least, I probably could, but it’s so unsatisfying... on the other hand, at least now I know that if I should fail to get a job, I can still live off of my family, as long as I do it with good grace, and they’re highly unlikely to leave me to moulder in unemployment anyway.

On second thought I probably shouldn’t put up lists of people I look up to and people I don’t. For one thing those lists will probably get revised as life goes on, and I’m far too lazy to keep revising and re-revising things like that (which is why the list of characters has vanished); but I think I should certainly put up a list of qualities I do not want to have in my old age, and a list of qualities I do want. Those will probably change, too, but even a periodic comparison of old and current priorities has its uses. So I shall do that, instead, when I’ve got the thoughts quite properly boiled down in my head.