In Continuum.

You must be an idiot, you have to be. You have to be that mentally incapable to not notice something as obvious as the weather these days. Any conspiracy theorists who think that global warming does not exist, they really don't need to go as far as visiting the Aral Sea to know that our planet is in serious peril, and we all contributed to it one way or another. Just pay a visit to Singapore, a metropolitan country with the finest in almost every aspect of life. Even in a country like that, you'd be able to feel the punch of global warming right in your guts, because it is something that the locals - such as myself - have to go through on a daily basis. The idea of going out of the house sends a chill down all our spines whenever we contemplate it. Oh, actually a chill sent down our spine would be rather refreshing, considering how everything feels like it has been to Hell and back. The idea turns us off, and the people who can actually drive are not spared either. Just try parking your car out in the sun for three hours, and jump right back in after a long day's work. Leaving the windows down doesn't help, because the leather of the seat is burning into your butt as you are driving, killing massive amounts of skin cells and sperm.

It has been crazy hot - not, stupid hot. It is so hot that it has turned many of us stupid somehow, and it is all somehow lead to global warming, I reckon. I remember rainstorms in the past lasting for a full week continuously. If you tell somebody about such a phenomenon, he or she is going to think that you just came back from a rainforest or something. Hell, even rainforest don't receive that much rain anymore, and they really should be renamed to "usedtorainforest", or something. It is so hot that you feel like breaking something, or go skinny dipping in a frozen lake or something. It is also so hot that you feel like injecting coolants into your skin just to keep cool for about five seconds. Soft drinks are not working either, and ice cream melts the moment they hit sun. Nothing works under the might of the sun, and I wonder if somebody has accidentally touched a button that sent the Earth's course of orbit ten miles closer to the sun or something. It is stupid hot these days, and that is the best reason to want to stay indoors and not go on out. If you are sitting at home and sweating your brains out, you know you want to stay at home because going out is suicide.

I've been warming up to the idea of staying at home because of the prospect of going out scares me. Just imagine yourself all dressed up for an occasion, and it doesn't even have to be something major either. Just a big of styling in the hair, make-up for the ladies, and everything is refreshing after a good long bath in the morning. But just think about the five minute walk you are going to take to the nearest MRT station, and the amount of perspiration that is going to be involved. By the time you meet your date, half of your efforts would have melted away in the sun, and I do wonder how those people who have underwent plastic surgery are supposed to be coping in a weather as screwed up as this. They are probably traveling around in portable fridges now or something, wheels fixed onto the bottom of fridges and pushed around by their maids or something. This weather calls for a movement on a national scale, and that is for everybody to stay at home. There aren't a lot of negative points about doing that, if you think about it. Staying at home allows you to save money, because you won't have to spend anything outside. Food is a great expenditure, not to mention the traveling involved. You get to spend some time with your family members, and your home is really all you need with the availability of computers in most households in Singapore. If nothing else, you can do what I did for a full hour today in bed - idle.

Yes. I spent an hour of this afternoon lying in bed and idling. It began with a strange stomachache this morning at nine that didn't fully go away until nature called a few hours later. I wasn't able to fall back to sleep, so I stayed awake and minded my own business around the house for the most part. By lunchtime, I was already drifting off because I slept late last night, not to mention the somewhat creepy dream of being trapped in a room I desperately wanted to get out of. So I took a short nap, and even that dream involved an annoying chef at a restaurant asking me to go look for lotus roots in a set of shelves behind me. Anyway, I woke up at about three in the afternoon, and I pretty much spent the next hour just laying there in bed and replying to Neptina's message on the phone. While she's out with her family at the PC Show, I remained in bed and pretty much spent the hour doing absolutely nothing. The reason being is really because of the weather outside, and how the radiation must have found its way to the interiors. Even walking around the house is enough to induce an annoying amount of perspiration on your back and in my armpits. That was why I resorted to just laying still for a while, and I pretended to be a dead body or a kidnapping victim for a while. I am weird like that.

Within this hour, I did a great many things by doing not much. I did a lot of things that I used to do when I was a child, waking up on a Sunday morning and refusing to get off the bed. At one point, I stuffed my head underneath the pillow and pressed my left ear to the bed and tried to listen out for distant vibrations. You know, like the closing of doors by the neighbors downstairs or the shuffling of feet around my house. You know how sound travels, and that is what I did for a while. I didn't really hear much, but it was still fun to do something I haven't done in a long time anyway. Then I went on to play with my eyes by opening and closing each eye one at a time. You know how it is, when you close one eye and open the other, the view is different from when you close the other eye and open this one. The surface of the pillow rose and sank with every wink, and I thought it was really cool how our brain has the ability to put two separate images registered by two separate eyeballs into one single image. I played with that for a while, and then I went on to rubbing my eyes just to see those bright spots in the darkness of my eyelids. They'd sparkle for a while, float upwards and then down, and then disappear completely into the darkness - what the hell are those?

Anyway, I think it's fun to idle for a while sometimes. You know, let your mind rest for a while. I'm not sure if it is possible for our brain to be not thinking about something at any moment in time. Like, when you are trying to think about nothing, aren't you also thinking about something at the very same time? What we can control, however, is how much we think about, and I think idling is the least amount of information you can process during your waking hours. Your brain rests, and you aren't thinking very much for the most part. There is art even in zoning out, and I like engaging myself that way at times. I love lying around in bed and doing absolutely nothing every once in a while, because it reminds me of childhood, those days with as much responsibilities as a hamster in a cage. Especially on days like that when it is either blistering hot or ridiculously wet (a storm is gathering outside right now), this is the perfect time to pick a bed and do nothing on it for a while. It is not something out of laziness, but it's just that there isn't a rule to tell us that we have to be doing something productive every minute of the day. Sometimes, you can rot away and waste time, because it is ultimately our time and not anybody else's.