In Continuum.

Let's begin from point one, from where I sit. I can hear the fan spinning behind me, and the sound never fails to confuse me between the swirling wind and that of rain falling outside the window. Especially those brief moments of awakening just before dawn, and you are lying in your bed with the dreams still lingering in your head, your blurry mind begins to debate with yourself if it is really raining outside, or if it is just the fan being turned to a notch too strong. It usually is the fan though, rain in the morning doesn't come very often these days any more. It's the wrong season I suppose, which is why I'd have to get used to the fan for now. Blue boxes are appearing in the bottom right of my computer screen, slowly fading into the background image which I picked out from a site on the internet I visit. The  dark clouds like blankets over a purple sea of trees, like overhanging mountains bearing down upon the canopy. I like wallpapers of nature somehow, it gives me a little something that my own bedroom window does not provide. All I see is the building opposite my own, the roads and the cars down below, the neighbors minding their own businesses in their homes, and then the occasional sight of the moon peeping at this half of the world. 

It is so crowded these days, which is why I feel immensely thankful of my school's timetable. With a three day week and Thursday being the new Friday, going to town doesn't seem as much a chore as it used to be any longer. The narrowed walkways and the stifling malls, not to mention the humid air and the bustling crowds. Every inch of Orchard Road is a reason to stay away from nowadays, and the same thing repeats itself on every vein that runs through the country at peak hours. If the island is a living and breaking human being, then he should really worry about his blood congestion problem. The expressways are like blood vessels that runs through our bodies, and these expressways literally turn into parking lots when there are too many cars lining up in front of traffic lines, desperate to go home. Cars after cars after cars, like giant electric shavers all vibrating softly to their engines. I was trapped in a similar jam this evening on my way home, after an impatient wait at the bus stop around the Raffles Town Club. A man blew smoke into the back of my head today, and the cold dead stare into his narrow eyes did little to hurt his pride. A random thought. 

I feel bad for the taxi driver today, despite collecting a handsome amount of money from me due to the surcharges. Damn the surcharges, and it would have been worse if he actually took CTE. The ERP gantries are like the neon signs that lead to hell, a hell that robs money from you if you make a wrong turn at the wrong time of the day. Peak hours in Singapore might as well be the heart of a dying man, with blood clods and what not choking up his system. Nothing moves properly at peak hours, nothing moves as they should any longer. The driver's fingers drummed on the top of the wheel like Russian ballerinas, and the giant plunger appeared in my head to clear the road before the front of the cab. I became restless and my knees were hurting again, and the bag on top of my thighs weren't helping too much to ease the pain either. All the drivers around me were leaning forward, with their chins shot beyond the edge of the wheel, as if it'd help with the clearing of the road at all. Nothing worked, not even the horning and the rude cutting of cars into different lanes. But my cab driver just watched from over the brink of his glasses, a man who has seen too many of such congested roads. The lines around his eyes and lips were like deep roads carved into his skin over the years, and I wondered how long he has been at the job. 

Probably  not very long, as I later discovered. He made a wrong turn into the bus lane, and a traffic police was waiting behind the bushes like a fox, armed with a digital camera. The only way for the cab to evade a ticket would be to run over the traffic police and then drive all the way up into Malaysia and to never been seen again. That'd be stupid, which is probably why the driver just brushed it off with a curse and then an awkward smile. I looked at him with my matching awkward look as well, because I felt really bad for being the passenger in his car while he received his, well, probably a hefty sum of fine. His finger trembled as he reached for the "K4"button on the meter, as if he was shaking with frustration over the mistake that he made. He miscalculated the price of the trip for about eight times, every time adding a few cents to the total amount. He was probably subconsciously trying to get more money from me just to cover the fine, and I felt very bad for correcting him every time he made a mistake with the calculation. Still, I got out of the cab and trotted across the road despite the zebra crossing just a few meters down the road. I escaped this time, though I can't say the same for the driver. 

I am beginning to be accustomed to the permanently dark room of mine, with the lamp by the side of the computer and the sombre atmosphere that screams of inspiration. For some reason, any music seems to fit this beautiful ambience, and I suppose this is what anyone's safe haven should look and feel like. Janice from Australia just sent me a bunch of pictures of a baby giraffe that was just given birth to a few days ago, and she didn't warn me about the pictures of the umbilical chord that followed swiftly after. The chocolate muffin in my head got stuck somewhere between my throat and the back of my tongue at that moment, and then this moment of limbo was ensued by a silent scream from the comfort of my bedroom with Natalie Walker's music coming through the speakers - the irony of the image. But baby-anything is pretty much a good thing for me, I suppose you can say that I am a sucker for those. Like I was telling somebody, babies are adorable as long as they are not my responsibility. It sounds really cold, but I know you are thinking the same. You'd rather play with your neighbor's baby than your own, right? Right? I rest my case. Oh, now she is showing me baby flying squirrels, and a close up picture of a squirrel nipples. So much for the muffin. 

I cannot wait for the holiday to come, by the way. Two weeks of bliss, absolute nothingness. I'm probably going to fly to Taiwan for no good reasons at all, just to get away from this place for some time. It has been delayed for way too long, and I miss Taiwan in late summer and early autumn, when the air would smell like a handful of damp sand at the beach outside the airport. I'd like to take the bullet train down south this time, maybe visit a friend or two whom I have promised to meet, and maybe eat myself silly during the trip. Speaking of which, I still have a bunch of movies I have yet to watch (Dr. Strangelove and The Lives of Others) and re-watch (The Hours and Waking Life). This week has to end, and it has to end soon. In fact, everything has to end soon, like this random, impulsive, unplanned, non-systematic, erratic, unmethodical, rubbish of a blog entry. And so, it shall end on that note, and I shall finish the half-eaten muffin that I left over just now after seeing the umbilical chord.