Men On The Outside
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Men On The Outside
Something is making a lot of people sick these days, something is putting those itsy-bitsy viruses into our bodies. This is probably the second time I've detected a symptom of cold in the past three weeks or so, and an army of pills downed with tap water must have did the job this afternoon, not to mention the quick nap that gave birth to the dream that involved my grandmother's old house in Taiwan and my friends making me small paper boats. I don't suppose I am alone in this, because a lot of people around me has been succumbing to various ailments, some more serious than the others. April just recently crawled out from a serious cold of sorts that took away her voice completely, not to mention the flu bug that caught on to Liz over the weekend. Kania has been down with a terrible stomach upset which caused the rest of us to have a pregnancy scare, and the fact that both Jonno and Azhar were hospitalized for inflammatory gastritis just further proves that something is going wrong. I bet this is a governmental conspiracy of some kind, someone is trying to control our minds. They have hired people to spy on us too, to see if their little nano-scale microchips are working, and they are pretending to be painters outside my bedroom window.
Something is making a lot of people sick these days, something is putting those itsy-bitsy viruses into our bodies. This is probably the second time I've detected a symptom of cold in the past three weeks or so, and an army of pills downed with tap water must have did the job this afternoon, not to mention the quick nap that gave birth to the dream that involved my grandmother's old house in Taiwan and my friends making me small paper boats. I don't suppose I am alone in this, because a lot of people around me has been succumbing to various ailments, some more serious than the others. April just recently crawled out from a serious cold of sorts that took away her voice completely, not to mention the flu bug that caught on to Liz over the weekend. Kania has been down with a terrible stomach upset which caused the rest of us to have a pregnancy scare, and the fact that both Jonno and Azhar were hospitalized for inflammatory gastritis just further proves that something is going wrong. I bet this is a governmental conspiracy of some kind, someone is trying to control our minds. They have hired people to spy on us too, to see if their little nano-scale microchips are working, and they are pretending to be painters outside my bedroom window.
A letter typed and printed out a month ago and made its way into my mailbox about the repainting of the entire estate. It has been quite some time since the last layer of fresh paint, and let's just say that it is about damn time that it is happening. If you have seen those old Hong Kong action movies with Jackie Chan running and jumping over buses and street signs, you would have noticed the state of the buildings there - old, cluttered, and rundown. My condominium is somewhat close to that description after years of disrepair, since the administration has been reluctant to do a complete makeover of the estate due to the MRT construction just an arm's reach away on the other side of the road. In fact, calling this a "condominium" hardly fits the bill, since it is more like a higher class HDB flat with security guards and a swimming pool, not to mention the third-rate gym and the nice little Thai restaurant downstairs. But it is big here, big and cozy, two words that don't usually come together in the same sentence while describing a certain place, but that's what I feel about my home in Singapore, my happy place.
Anyway, so, foreign workers have been running in and out of my estate due to the paint job happening on the perimeter of every block, some of them can be found sleeping at the lobby on lazy weekday afternoons while it is raining and they can't be paid to do anything. So the surrounding areas have been blocked up with warning signs, steel cages brought in and buckets of paint piled up to look like and outdoor mega mall selling home refurnishing equipments. The residences in the neighborhood have been given slips of paper to pick the colors that we'd like to see our blocks painted, and for some reason they all look rather horrendous to me. One suggestion was to keep the current color, which has already faded over the years into a pale shade of green. The second color is a awful shade of purple that looks like the guts of a jellyfish, made especially more so by the fancy designs by whosoever. The last option is a dull shade of brown, which makes the apartments look rather depressing but, at least it looks a little more normal than all the other options. So the colors have been chosen, the orders given, and the workers went to work.
A few afternoons ago, I was taking a nap in my room when the neighbors upstairs started drilling - again. Seriously, they are going to get themselves killed one day by my own hands, and I wonder if they are making a homemade bee hives for their secret underground honey mustard business. I woke me up abruptly, and I rolled about in bed and desperately wished for the old pair of ear plugs I had from my army days, which I so kindly gave to Lynette two years ago because she was having a hard time keeping the noise from the neighborhood renovations out. I started picturing myself murdering my neighbors again, and somehow such violent thoughts brought me some levels of peace as I slowly drifted back into sleep again. That was when I heard another sound on top of the drilling, and it sounded like water being sprayed on the walls outside my bedroom, or something along the lines of that. So I clicked my blankets off, walked to the window, and was just about to find out what the sound was when I saw a man staring back at me through my bedroom window. Now, keep in mind that I just woke up, and the sight of a man standing outside a nineteenth floor bedroom window can be quite a shock in times like this.
So I jumped about ten steps back, cursed at the man and then gathered my nerves. It was one of those workers with the painting company, standing in one of those cages outside my bedroom spraying gibberish on my wall. I think they were marking out the dimensions, or the color, or something. My whole block looks like it has been vandalized by someone with very bad vandalizing skills. Anyway, that man on the outside stared at me for a while, and then closed my bedroom window for me so that it wouldn't be too noisy for me, I think. Nerves were collected, heart was calmed, and just as I was about to crawl back into bed for the second half of my nap, the man outside started singing in a language I couldn't understand. So, let's get the picture right: I had the neighbor drilling, the men outside spraying paint on my walls, and another singing on the top of his voice in a language I couldn't understand. It drove me crazy, and I had no choice but to wake up and blast even louder music through my speakers.
I pictured these men to be spies from the government for some reason, marking out the units with blue colored spray paint so that pilots from above would be able to drop a bomb on us conveniently. Perhaps we are the invalid bunch, the group of population that proved to be resistant to the virus, and they are eradicating us from the face of the earth. Yes, I have strange and warped thoughts like that from time to time, which is also why my father gives me that look once in a while, as if to ask "What have I done?" So yes, the weather has been crazy and everybody is falling sick. It seems to be a global conspiracy thing, kind of like how TIME magazine is calling the promotion of bio-fuels to be some kind of money making scheme. Whatever it is, the weather is breaking me apart, and it's not like those creepy men outside my windows are making my life any easier for me. They have to stop staring at people's lives from the outside, it is strange and it is uncomfortable. It must be very tempting to look, and I suppose they get a kick out of it. Talk about a job bonus.
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on Sunday, March 30, 2008 at 8:27 PM.
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