Panthera Sapiens Ellipsis: The Blog

It’s definitely been awhile since I last posted; considering I haven’t got any Internet up yet in the rented place, and I haven’t been online using the laptop in some weeks, it’s been at least—oh, let’s call it at least three weeks. But life goes on. I should bring you up to speed on what normalcy has newly begun to mean to me in my life here, so I will. My weekdays begin at 7am, every day; I set two alarms, one at 7 to wake me and one at 7.30 to bid me leave. After I wake up I turn the electric kettle on and then dress myself while the water is being brought to boil; I usually finish dressing before boiling occurs, and so I check the car’s engine oil and radiator water and pat it and tell it what a good lad it is. I often talk to inanimate things—the air, the car, my laptop, books—I have an urge to name the car, but haven’t any idea what to call it yet, and anyway it’s not my car to name. But by the time the engine oil is checked and the radiator refilled with water, the kettle ...

I’m typing this from inside the room I’ve rented to live in for the weekdays; there is no Internet, so my only available entertainment is playing games or listening to music or watching videos; I almost think I’ll revive my NaNoWriMo project one month early. Still, working is more enervating than I’d expected and so I’m taking my time acclimatising to the different living schedule. After all, I’ve got another twenty to thirty years, maybe even forty if I’m amazingly long-lived, of this sort of thing to go through. I suppose it’s safe to say life now is decidedly different from how it was in Singapore; oddly enough, I find myself even more dependent on other people now than I was. There I had very little preventing me from, say, going off to lunch at one end of Singapore and having dinner at the other end, having wandered my way through the intervening distance through the evening; now I find that if I want to go to lunch at all I need to ask for help. In fact I find myself less free ...

I see that I've neglected to post for nearly two weeks! I shall rectify this at once. My last post was the Sunday night immediately after my last return to Spore; the Saturday before that I had attended a farewell hike for one of the House of Bread people, and that Sunday itself was all farewells and goodbye speeches. As it turned out, though, my packing went a little slower than expected (mostly due to the time it took to scrounge for boxes and finish off administrative things like closing down accounts and informing the house-owner of my impending departure) and arranging for transport, in between meeting up with friends for farewells: I expect the house-owner was happier with me (as a tenant) in that week than ever before, since I was often out of the house for upwards of five hours a day every day to meet people for lunch or tea or dinner, and all that human contact tired me out (enjoyable though it was) and so I always fell asleep relatively early. (Though I should mention tha...