In Continuum.

But at six in the morning, I wasn't too sure about any clinics near my place opening at all. The thought of going to a hospital came to my mind, but the dreadful thought of long confusing corridors and the smell of death turned me off and steered me away from that idea. I woke my mother up, and she started telling me about that other time when my sister had a similar allergic reaction, and how she had red rashes all over her body, like the ones that I am having right now. My sister is allergic to prawns, and those little prawns made her look like a giant human shaped tomato. It was so bad that the swelling reached out to her eyelids and caused them to be swollen too. They looked like they had ping pong balls stuffed underneath those eyelids, not a pretty sight for a girl as narcissistic as herself. So we visited the neighborhood doctor, that indian man who could speak Hokkien for some very strange reasons. He had small talks with my sister and injected her in the waist as she was explaining the subjects she studied in school. A very experienced way to distract your patients while you inject that long needle into their bodies, long and thick enough to kill a raging bull.

Searching through my wallet, I was thankful to find my old Silvercross card with the words "24 Hours" printed on the back. I gave them a call, and the woman on the other side of the phone sounded tired and worn out, maybe it was because of the time of the day perhaps. Anyway, my mother and I made a trip down to that clinic, and it was good to know that at six in the morning, nobody is going to be before you in line and taking up all the time in the world. We strolled in, I gave her my card, and that was as long as the wait lasted. The light on top of Room One lighted up, and I met the doctor who prescribed to me the following: Prednisolone Tabs, Piriton Tabs, and Calamine lotion. Altogether, those pills and lotion cost me nearly eighty dollars, and as I paid the cashier at the counter, the phrase "It's cheaper to die than to get sick in Singapore" drifted slowly into my mind. Even in the crisp morning air at six in the morning, I was sober enough to know that what I was paying was an obvious robbery, a rip-off as plain as day. My mother pays a little more than SGD$10 in Taiwan for a full body X-Ray, coupled with a check up annually. Of course, she also has to pay about SGD$ 30 every year as the national healthcare coverage, but that is still way cheaper than these two packets of pills and a red bottle that looks so shabby that it could have been a bottle used for soy sauce.

On the way home, the crowd around the MRT station was already building up. At six in the morning on a Saturday, you wonder where were all those people headed off to. Whatever happened to the idea of having our Saturdays and Sundays free from work, and just have those times to yourself and your family. That is perhaps something I admire about the Western culture, and how a Friday is a Friday, and a five in the evening is a five in the evening. They don't work overtime, and they do not see the need to bring their work home. They give more respect to their time alone at home than their time at work to earn even more money. It's kind of sad to realize that I am living in a society that lives to work, while other people around the world are working to live. There is a difference, and the latter just makes a little more sense than the former. We are like robots now, like ants working mindlessly in a great hive. As I contemplated and entertained these thoughts, I realized one thing: Valerie's right.

Her family is moving out of Singapore, but not anytime soon. She has to clock a minimal of two and a half days in America every year to make herself eligible to be an American citizen, or something like that. Technically speaking, whenever she is not studying in Singapore, she needs to be back in the States, she is technically speaking an American already. I used to think that staying in Singapore should be a great thing for her, even if her seismologist dreams are going to be shattered here. But in retrospect, I probably said those words because of how much I didn't want my friends to leave this country, instead of how I genuinely thought that things would work out here if you want to be a seismologist. Seriously, it'd be pretty cool if you can be a seismologist without ever stepping out of the borders of the country, but what are the odds? Moving to the States just seems like an obvious choice, and I am beginning to agree with her. Just look at the rate at which the inflation is crushing us like ants here, it's stifling as it is suffocating here, and you can feel that even in the bills you pay at the counter of a clinic at six in the morning.

I can't help but wonder how it'd be like to be like the people we've met on our trip to Krabi, Thailand. I can't help but wonder how it'd be like to tuck away the life that you have grown so comfortable and familiar with, and to put yourself in a foreign country just because it seems like the right thing to do. In western countries, a long trip to a foreign country for an extended period of time is almost like a sort of ritual one must go through to adulthood. In Africa, some boys are still forced to have their hands bound in between two plastic baskets filled with fire ants, while the girls are still forced to have all their hair plucked out by hand as a form of growing into adulthood. Other tribes in Africa has the ritual for boys that requires them run across a row of cows over their backs to and fro, while the girls have the whip themselves silly by their side. Different countries have their different rituals to adulthood, and it doesn't matter if you agree or disagree with them or not. I wonder what is our ritual of adulthood, if the eastern culture has such a thing or not. Some Japanese do practice such a ritual, and one of them would be to hold on to a cannon filled with explosives, all the while with fireworks shooting out from the top of the cannon just centimeters above your head. Singapore doesn't have such a culture, simply because - like the man in the bar at the Banyan Tree - we work too hard, man.

We are ushered into the education system which doesn't allow the students to breathe, and it robs the kind of childhood that a normal child should have, and then dominate their lives with textbooks and examinations which are supposed to dictate their lives - though it really isn't the case. That happens for ten years, then you are forced to go to either a polytechnic or a junior college, because any other options in the society would promise you a dead end in life. Then you go to the universities, and then after that would be to find a job straight away. That job is supposed to last you for the rest of your life, and you are not supposed to have fun because fun is an absolute waste of time. We always hear about out caucasian counterparts, taking a year off after college and just enjoy life in a foreign country. Working and living, and working for living. I think our government knows about our shortcomings, which is why they have a very well established system to make our citizens think otherwise.

I was just reading an article this morning after the incident in the papers, an article about how great Singaporeans are at customer service, a sentence which I read with utter disgust and surprise. The writer of the article is actually a Singaporean student living in London, and he was stuck in the London Underground station one day when he realized that he missed the friendly faces in Singapore and their excellent customer service. Though, in truth, I don't see Singapore being synonymous with good customer services, not unless you have white skin and a wallet full of cash. Interestingly, this article appeared in the papers a few days just after somebody else wrote in to complain about the customer services of a certain shop in town, which just made me wonder how much the government paid that 'Singaporean student studying in London' to write a letter to the press like that. That is not to mention how the Taiwanese healthcare system was utterly thrashed in the Chinese papers a week or two ago, a few days after a Singaporean in Taiwan wrote in to say the exact opposite. That article mentioned how Singapore should learn from the national insurance policy in Taiwan, and the following article criticized it by saying how flawed it actually. Well, I have done a research paper on the subject, and the truth is every system is flawed one way or another, even if it is going to be free universal healthcare. At least we are not paying eighty dollars for medicine we use just once. 

So the rashes subsided along with my anger and complaints. The rest of the day was spent trying to stay awake and trying to stay in bed. The medicine I took in the morning knocked me out cold, like being shot by a jet of sleeping gas at point blank. It has been a while since I slept that long and that much, and it certainly felt good to be all lethargic all over again. At least for once today, I felt like I didn't need to be a robot of our society, an ant of our giant ant hive. I was able to tell myself to be myself if I wanted to, to take a vacation in my dreams as I floated back to the beautiful beaches of Krabi all over again. Seriously, if not for the school I am attending now and the friends that I have here, it wouldn't take more than a blink of the eye for me to pack my bags and get out of here. Anywhere outside of Singapore, a new frontier for me. And all these thoughts, because I had some bloody rashes in the middle of the night. Go me!