Musings Abroad

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 has usually already shut down because the water has boiled; so I make instant hot chocolate and eat whatever falls to hand. Usually it is biscuits; sometimes it is cookies, or bread; a friend in the House of Bread recently gave me four boxes (each containing six bars) of granola bars, and so that is what I’ve been having with the instant hot chocolate these days. I drink, and eat, in that order; in the morning my throat is always parched and I am very susceptible to sore throats.

When the drinking and eating are over, and I have washed my mug and stirring-spoon, it is rarely past 7.20am, so I do my hair—it is the suggestion of the boss, and I have a small thing (container? jar?) of something called Moving Rubber that keeps hair in place—and I never am quite satisfied with how the hair lies, but have to eventually stop tweaking with it because my arms are sore from being held up for so long. The alarm generally rings around then, and I unlock the gate and reverse the car out and lock everything up and head out, and usually arrive at the office somewhere between 7.40am and 7.50am if traffic is as usual for that road at that time.

Work begins at around 8am, interspersed by lunch from 1pm to 2pm or so; then it ends at around 6pm or later, depending on the urgency and interest of the task that I am working at; if it is either urgent or interesting, I stay to finish it; otherwise I leave quite punctually at 6pm, and arrive at the house between ten to fifteen minutes after I leave, if I have planned to cook that night. So far I have only gone on two night jaunts, once to the market and once for dinner; both of those trips added easily half an hour or so to the journeying-time, not including the time actually spent at those destinations; but cooking takes at least half an hour, and is more inconvenient as it involves preparation and washing-up and the risk of having it come out too salty or too peppery. At any rate I am always back in the house and somewhat at leisure by 9pm or so, and then I have about an hour before I plan to do my devotions and go to bed.

I call it leisure, but it is not. It is more appropriately called housekeeping-time, because that is when I do the mopping and washing of clothes (by hand and washing-board and small stiff brush) and ironing and sundry other things that need doing when you are the only person who lives in a house. Usually I end this time by showering and brushing my teeth, because housekeeping is sweaty work.

I do my devotions, often later than 10pm but not before 11pm, and sleep anywhere between 11pm to 12am; and then the schedule repeats itself the next weekday, and the next. I’m starting to find my sense of time wavering and often disappearing altogether as each day blends into the next with nothing but a long to-do list to tell me how each day has been spent.

My weekends are, these days, scarcely more remarkable; I have been spending them at the ancestral home, where great amounts of emotional duress have been brought into play (on both sides) to decide whether I should be allowed to drive—as you probably know, I have managed to convince the family that I am a careful enough driver to have the car here with me—though if they ever found out how I’ve been driving sometimes, when it’s dark and I’m inattentive, that permission would be revoked in a moment. It’s only the most recent weekend that I spent in Singapore, practicing piano pieces for an upcoming wedding and going to the House of Bread (hence the aforementioned granola); that was a very nice weekend. I lived in the house of the person about to be married, but for now (while he is still a bachelor) he lives with three other men in a two-bedroom flat, and you can tell from the comfortable messiness that they are all bachelors (for now); the kitchen is chaos and the living room is a whirlwind of books and paper and half-eaten food, carefully/carelessly placed in Tupperware and then left around. I spent the weekend there, returned to Malaysia on Sunday night, and spent all of Monday in a haze of loneliness and missing them.

Sometimes the house feels too big for one person to live in; and I don’t think I will ever be able to live the way they do; mine is not, I think, to live with friends and sit around playing games and impulsively fry whatever falls to hand and call it Saturday lunch. Not when my foreseeable future involves me living alone, in this too-big space, for the next six months, and then to live with family—with all the conveniences and inconveniences that will imply—for years and years hence. Maybe that’s for the best, and maybe things will change. Half a year is a long time and many things can be unsettled in that time; but for now I look at the lives of people around me and I want their lives because they seem so comfortable being who they are.

Tonight I’m sleeping late; tomorrow is a public holiday, which means I’ll sleep late and wake late and then maybe drive around a bit to find out where all the nearest banks and petrol stations are and get an early lunch and then come back and get to work cleaning house: the floor is getting dusty and the car needs washing, and I want to wash the bathroom and wipe down the kitchen and maybe re-shine my shoes, and then in the evening go out for dinner (or I could finish off all the ingredients in the fridge and make soup) and come back and be in a too-big house all by myself.

Maybe I’m just being maudlin and emotional, but one does feel the loneliness of the silence pressing in; and the daily waves and smiles exchanged with the neighbours and the chitchat with the colleagues just doesn’t do the job… I think what I really want is to come back and for somebody else to come back, or be already in the house, and then we would talk about the day and the small ridiculous things that happen or the frustrations of being alive, and then eat and do chores and jokingly try to pawn off the most troublesome chores on each other, and generally hang out and mess around and chitchat and say the kind of things to each other that would make other people turn pale and suspect domestic abuse, but only make each other giggle a bit and retort with something even worse, and then eventually fall asleep—I think I’ve said this somewhere before—if it were entirely up to me I’d skip the courting entirely and go directly to being an old married couple.

But such is my life, as it now is; full of things to do, plans to make, and not very many people.