In Continuum.

My favorite time of the night is probably three in the morning, when everything has settled and it is just you versus the rest of the world. Though, the word "versus" is hardly appropriate, considering the fact that there is hardly a battle involved most of the time, but a peaceful tranquility that pierces the night and its entirety. Then we have the mornings, right after we wake up, and those few minutes when we just lay there for a while, debating with ourselves when is the right time for us to swing our legs off the edge of the bed. It usually takes a while before you come up with that perfect moment, only to miss it altogether for the next one to come along. Morning debates are difficult, but it happens all the time, and we just allow ourselves to lie there motionless for the most part, unwilling to allow the day to happen. That is how it is, the minutes before you fall asleep and the minutes right after you wake. You are in the same position, or slightly varied after a night's tosses and turns, but you are most probably still in bed anyway. In these moments, while your mind is mostly free of the day's thoughts and the night's dreams, your ears perk up to listen to the sounds around you. At least that is what I do before I go to bed and right after I wake up, and here is an entry dedicated to those few short moments.

In the dead of the night, the sounds wake up and become quite alive. When you allow the inner voices quieten down for a while, you actually hear a lot more than the immediate sounds that are around you. You know, the soft humming of the air-conditioning that occasionally snaps due to a change in temperature, and then the vibrations that cause a certain calming sound throughout the room. On nights that are not too warm and humid, I turn on the fan that is next to my bed, and that gives off an unique brand of sounds as well. The wind in my ears create one sound, while the wind blowing on a magazine next to my bed creates new sounds. The vibrating motor inside the fan rumbles away into the night, always a trusty machinery that never seems to fail on me. On nights like that, there are times when the wind comes through the windows, and the curtains get blown off the walls and above the tables. The books get flipped, and you hear the flapping sound of the pages going by at high speed. The thick curtains would flutter like flags on a flagpole, and it'd create a strange suction sound when it lands on the back of the fan. You see, as the fan is trying to suck air into itself and through the front, a curtain blocking the back of the fan would cause no wind to exit from the front, thus causing that strange sucking sound wakes me up from time to time.

On calmer nights, though, I'd try to listen in deeper into the sounds of the house and beyond. The lizard in my room croaks every once in a while from behind the cupboards or air-conditioning, and it almost sounds like a little laughter from my clandestine roommate. Then there is the sound coming from the outside, the gentle sounds of water rushing over the edge of something. It is the sound of the fish tank, with the tank water falling over the back of the tank and into the filters below. It happens twenty-four hours a day, and seven days a week, a sound that the family has grown very used to over the past decade or so. The wind chime swings about from time to time, kissing each other gently when the breeze comes through the corridor, giving off soft gentle notes that sound like accidental melodies. Something drops in the kitchen all the time, only to be discovered by morning. One of the hangers would snap, or one of the buckets would fall from the hooks. It used to sound scary to me as a kid, and I'd imagine someone breaking in through the back of the house and crawling through the kitchen. Until one day I realized that it'd be foolish to rob someone's house at nineteen floors up by crawling through a window.

Night sounds are repetitive, which makes it easier on the mind to get use to and, eventually, fall asleep to. Morning sounds, though, they aren't nearly as kind to the ears and mind at all. Morning sounds attack your senses, because a lot of things tend to be happening at any one time. There are multiple layers to morning sounds, one on top of the other, and they usually are more fascinating and yet more conflicted with your morning goals - to fall back asleep. Morning sounds are generally more unforgiving, and they are like the nature - and city's - natural alarms for you to wake up to. They are not exactly the most pleasant of sounds, but they are usually interesting things to write about, especially for somebody like me. A lot could happen in the morning, because the majority of us have different times to wake up to on different days. Sometimes, our activities come in major conflicts, and these conflicts translate into sounds that travel from one point to another. When they clash, the people deep in slumber are usually the victims, and I hate to wake up in unexpected ways. Here are some of the things that I have noticed in the past couple of days in regards to morning sounds. While some are pretty to wake up to, others are just downright annoying for the most part.

Let's begin with the pleasant sounds, shall we. There are mornings when I wake up to the beautiful sound of my mother in the kitchen, with the pots banging gently against one another and the sound of cabinets being opened. I like to imagine what she is cooking in the morning, or sometimes what she is doing behind that apron of hers. Outside of the window, you hear the sound of the morning birds chirping away, always to the same song, and the echos traveling far and wide. You can literally hear the sound of the cars being heavier than usual though, and it is probably the sound of those commuters trying to get to work as soon as possible, not wanting to be late. The sound of tires scratching over the road almost sounds like the rain coming at times if you listen properly, and that can be a wonderful thing to fall back asleep on. That is the list of pleasant morning sounds that I have observed, and it is a pity how the unpleasant ones outrank the pleasant ones by a mile. Truthfully, I have no love for everything morning, because it hasn't really done anything for me that is worth remembering. I feel like staying up at night to experience the night in its entirety, but not mornings. The only thing I want to do is to skip mornings and go straight to the day - yeah, I feel that way at times.

First of all, you get the hysterical laughter of my sister from time to time. She'd be commenting loudly about something, and that comment would probably wake me up very efficiently. To add horror to the mix, sometimes my father joins in the fun. My father has a naturally loud voice, and it is worse when he uses an ounce of his strength to raise his voice. When he is negotiating on the phone, telling a joke to my mother, or making fun of my sister's weight, he raises his voice despite the fact that it is seven in the morning on a day when I don't have to wake at all. Then there's the habit of turning the volume of the television all the way up at seven in the morning, and don't think the voices of commentators during a golf game are quite tamed even with the volume up. Try that next time, and you'd want to swing a golf club at someone's face. Speaking of voices, I was woken up a few days ago by my sister's hysterical laughing, and that was due to the sound of my neighbor from the opposite block, a Korean neighbor apparently, yelling at each other on top of their voices. Everybody could hear them, though we didn't necessarily knew what they were arguing about. Nonetheless, their argument did keep me up for a while before I could go back to bed.

Then there's the neighbor upstairs who happen to have zero appreciate of timing at all. Every once in a while, you wear furniture being pushed or pulled around, and marbles throw all around by the children upstairs. On top of that, you hear them talking about their everyday lives every once in a while, and the frequent scolding of the children can be heard from my bedroom. All of this is possible because, for some reason, the neighbor upstairs refuse to install curtains to their windows. I am not sure how they withstand the Singaporean sun, but apparently they are coping. Anyway, the scolding of the children can be annoying, but sometimes hilarious as well. You hear the parents scolding their children for the dumbest things, and the most often one I know would be how the youngest child would wet the bed all the time. The mother would be pissed off and give the girl a scolding, which is usually followed by the bed sheet hanging from the edge of their balcony and draping down into ours. There was this other time when the mother called the father to be crazy because he was, apparently, on the verge of beating the kids into unconsciousness. Maybe she was exaggerating, but the father does have strange habits.

He seems to like to do things all by himself, and renovation seems to be his hobby. While they don't usually last very long, it is not impossible to wake up on a weekend morning to drilling. You know, those drilling that I lived through a few months ago before they moved in. He does upgrades here and there I guess, and does them all by himself. The man wields a heavy machinery and goes around drilling at nine o'clock in the morning. They don't last very long most of the time, but they certainly start my day off on a bad note - literally. I come up with murderous thoughts for those idiots upstairs, and most of them involve electric drills to their foreheads and then tubes of acid poured into those holes... OK this is becoming a creepy entry isn't it. Anyway, the neighbors upstairs are pretty vocal most of the time, and it is not difficult to hear everything that they are doing. We can hear their bathroom habits, their children crying, their children screaming hysterically, their children playing around violently in their bedrooms, and then a lot of yelling from the parents. It is fun when you are there to listen in for yourself. For the other times, especially when you are trying to sleep, it becomes a nuisance you want to stop.

Anyway, that is pretty much all the sounds that I can come up with, both in the day and in the night. Perhaps next time, it'd be rewarding even for you to listen in to what the environment around you has to offer. They could be the sound of nature, the sound of the city, or the sound of your father farting down the corridor. Whatever it may be, it is still something interesting to take note of every once in a while, a little gem of writing inspiration that we take for granted all the time. Little things, you know, always the little things that make life so much more memorable and exciting. As of now, I shall retire to bed and listen in to the sounds of the night, to see if there are anything worth noting down for the next similar entry. Until then, pay attention - listen in.