Christmas Wrapping

The Malls are usally sad. Large and empty with products staring bleakly from racks and shelves. Come Christmas the mood takes a new plunge. Now the hopeless products are flanked by plastic cheer. Fake elves and a fat old man take the seat of consumer culture. You almost feel bad for whatever is being sold. That coat grimly hanging from a rack. Or that gwady ornamental thing with no real use. It is bad to think of products as having feelings. But you almost want to believe that those last few items in the bargain bin so desprately want to be bought. Or how holiday trinkets look at the near future with abject fatalism. 

Every year we go to the Malls hoping to feel special. And yet it is amongst those rows of merchandise where I can smell the mudane. Of afternoons trying to make a decrepit room look cheerful. Of evenings after the party when the fleeting magic has gone away. Of taking out the trash, of copious use of make up, of puking on the side walk while all dressed up, of presents from relatives you never touch, of christmas bonuses that are never enough, of bad wrapping and worse presents – peel past the red and green wrapping, and it seems like just another day.

Perils of Sleeping Late

According to most popular writing out there, you would probably associate sleeping at odd hours with the usual suspects like chronic fatigue, dark rings and errant pimple outbreaks. But of course, if you’re endowed with enough foresight and common sense to appreciate the perils of these seemingly minor health risks, then you wouldn’t be the type sleeping late in the first place. The real danger, fellow late night deizens, is crashing at 5am after a gaming spree only to be forcibly awoken a few hours later by something so stupendously trivial that you wonder if you’re still dreaming about waking up in a house full of sentient dustbins.

This morning, I finished up a book at about 5, and realizing that the sun was probably going to come out soon, I crashed. Just 4 hours later it seems that the whole world suddenly needs me to advert some cataclysmic disaster. The phone was ringing, some one was yelling outside my door, and worst of all another person was knocking in that annoying way that reverberates right into your head. And so I had to zombie my way down stairs, only to find out that some Starhub man wanted to know where the modem was, and for any handphone to test out a new system he was to righ up. My dad, being already at work wasn’t there to show him, and my mom… well. There are some women who after a certain age are well on their way to becoming senile housewives. My mom on the other hand wasn’t just on the way to becoming senile, but making leaps and bounds towards full fledged doddering idiocy. And EVEN so, her having to wake me up to point to the modem failed even my supremely low expectations of her.

It’s fine that you have the barest grasping of what the Internet is. It’s even somewhat tolerable that your say the word modem like it is a kind of alien toaster. But, when there is only one computer in the house, where all the internet connections are set up, it takes a special kind of senility (terrible situations demand terrible new words) to not add things together. And waking me up on 4 hours of sleep to do something a 7 year old could do, seemed like Murphy’s special way of saying he cares. Even though the world is increasingly devoid of personality these days, you can always count on bad luck to personally render some unforunate service. With Relish.

Peddaling into the rain slick darkness

Thinking about light drizzles usually conjure up images of a lazy afternoon sprawled on the bed whilst the sky gently weeps outside, covering everything in an almost mystical fog. Time draws slowly to a standstill, each drop of rain falling so fatalistically that you could almost assume that another one will follow. Blow up these tiny steam of rain to an infinite extent and you have a dreamy drizzle that just goes on and on.

Last night, with the clock just reaching for midnight, I decided to finally bank in a cheque I had received in the mail. Not wanting to drive, I settled on the next best thing – cycling a couple of klicks to the nearest bank with a 24hr cheque deposit box. But ofcourse, luck decides halfway to the bank that this would be an excellent time for a nice slow drizzle. Depositing the cheque, I was pretty much resigned to simply having a wet and miserable ride home.

Then something magical happened. The last stretch of the return trip is a beautifully long steep strech of Sembawang Road. I say beautiful because it is a breeze to cycle down normally. But now in the rain slick  darkness that the street lamps only briefly pierced, racing down madly seemed the best way to crash and then get rolled over by a passing vehicle – the net result being in a ludicrously bad story about your death in The New Paper. In retrospect, the very real danger of all that happening should probably have been cause for alarm. But the mintue the road gradient changed, I switched gears and peddaled right into a screen of rain water.

It was like warp speed for the millenium falcon, hyper drive for the enterprise. Streaming down, I rode into the oncoming drizzle, almost as if I were bursting throught an extremely fine waterfall. Water spalshed everywhere, churned up by the wheels from the group, smashed into as the bicycle raced downhill. If this were a movie, everything would be in slow motion, time dialating as individual water droplets flew and crashed into each other in midair duets. Later on, I would realise that most of the water was from puddles on the road which the wheels spalshed up, meaning that I was probably soaked with dirty road sludge. But for now, all that water was glorious, almost baptismal.

For at the point where the bicycle could go no faster, seeing the rain drops rush towards me was almost like seeing life, in all its opportunities swarm you. After all, what are we, individuals, but tiny pin pricks in a vast expense of infinity? We hurtle through life, buffeted by chance and misfortune, and only maybe make the right choices. And this bicycle ride, in the cold, dirty dark of a night time drizzle, made me realize that even though life might at times seem utterly uncontrollable, one can either ride bravely (or madly) towards it, or get off the bicycle and walk down miserably cold and wet. In the end, we’d still reach home, but only one person would have enjoyed it.