I just realised that I couldn’t live without my mp3 player.
The golden sunny afternoon suddenly changed into a rainscape. A funeral pall seems to hang over the sky. That’s what you get when you live near thee equatorial - sunny one moment, then suddenly rain.
The rain wasn’t that bad. The bad thing was that my mp3 player ran out of battery. And I was already in the train station, passed the ticket barriers, and there’s nowhere I could get a fresh battery so that I could blast music into my ears.
I shrugged. It shalln’t matter. My home was just a couple of stops away, about 15 minutes. I was so wrong.
So bereft of music, I did what I usually done when alone. I started to think. I ponder all the shit that has happened and the deep hole bottomless hole that I am in. The bank has started charging interest for a study loan I took 3 years ago, which they shalln’t be, but have, thanks to a miscommunication. I had ranted on how Calculus was making life difficult for me – and now there are two mathematical modules which my brain cells somehow wouldn’t accept.
Then there are stories, very horrifying stories, about how hard it is for university undergraduates to find work in Singapore nowadays. Then there’s the usual, “No one will employ you unless you are a upper-second honours”.
I took yet another loan for my university education. I will have to pay back 2 loans once I graduate. On top of this, I am expected to support my mother – she burnt out her pension, struggling as a single parent to bring up my sister and me. Asian values or not, I have to support her for that.
Soon thinking turns to pondering, and pondering to brooding. And there’s so much to brood about.
I love group assignments. I love to co-ordinate people, brainstorm ideas, generating the creativity jazz and get people excited. Now, it’s rare for a strait-jacketed, traditional and boring university here ever to have group projects, but there’s one, and I was really happy about it. So excited. Preening and ready to go.
The best thing is I get to work with my friends. They are reliable, responsible and I know them well. They won’t be the coworkers which have graced this board and both horrified and entertained us at the same time.
But this time round, 2 more of their friends joined the team, and everything changed. One of the guys is a go-getter, someone who oozes self-confidence with every word he said. They decided on a project. I hated the project. I loathed it. I spoke out against it, and they just brushed aside my concerns.
I fumed. When I was the lead, I entertained all their doubts. I strive to make everyone happy. After all, it’s what friends shall do for each other, right? But for some reasons, this time round they decide that I am expendable. I felt frustrated. Betrayed. Everytime I tried to raise my issue, they brushed it aside, ignore it or even worse, interrupt me in the middle of my sentence. Not interrupting me. Interrupting me to say something else completely irrelevantly, as if they never heard me speaking in the first place.
When I reach home, I took a look at my desk and realised the mountains of tutorials which I have to do, but have no idea. I have attended the lectures, took down copious notes, read up on the textbooks, but I have no idea what to do. I feel stiff, tired, frustrated, sickly, sweatly and smelly.
And so I took a shower. And water falls upon me, I started thinking. I thought about the horrible mathematics tutorials I have to do. I thought aboutI thought about the programming lab that is due next week. I tried to visualise what I have done, and what are the potential problems. Then suddenly, for no apparent reasons, I cried.
It was unnerving to cry in the bathroom. The tiles reflected the echoes, amplified the sobs and gave a strange, eerie undertone to my weeping. And even more nerve-wracking was that I wasn’t only crying, but laughing at the same time. I sound demented and insane. Maybe this is what I’ll end up as in the near future?
But as sudden as I cried, a wave of calm settles over me. I dried myself, dressed, and got started on my tutorials.
And I am packing spare batteries for my MP3 players next time. Either that, or anti-depressants.