I found myself sitting in the balcony of my apartment after the usual
routine this morning. Not much of a physical routine, though, except if
pulling yourself out of the blanket which magically gained weight
overnight and a few clicks on the touchpad counted as ‘physical’. Laptop
lid up, Firefox on. The first site I visit will be Facebook, to see
that there is no new notifications save for game invitations. Sometimes
friend requests too, mostly from people I don’t know. Two or three
people usually have a birthday on any given day, whom I rarely wish a
happy birthday. Twitter is next. I scroll down to briefly skim some
tweets. Then I go to national news website, and next to BBC. Again, I
simply skim through the headlines. Except when the news is about North
Korea. Or China. I would read them. I somehow feel excited to read the
sensational lines they write about those countries. It feels like
watching movies; it’s just that the consequence for me may be real, like
war and the like. The consequence, I suppose, are what people avoid
when watching movies. They want the sensations, developments of events,
without really living the consequences. Oh, the villain destroys the
city? The apocalypse is happening? Aliens are invading the world, I
mean, the US? Woe is the citizens! how are we gonna rebuild
civilization? but, hey, that’s just in the movie, no need to feel sad
about it. But, imagine, Russia, China, and North Korea ally themselves
and go on a campaign to conquer the world. Oh yes, there are a lot to be
concerned with. The last will be my email. But today I skipped it. It’s
Saturday morning. Firefox off, laptop lid still up.
On working days, it would be around 8.30 after all this routine,
after which I would continue the translation from the day before. But on
holidays like this, it’s usually around 7.30. Since elementary school, I
realized that I have this habit of waking up earlier on holidays, which
I attribute to my assumptions that I got to sleep more soundly knowing
there would be no pressure to wake up early the morning after. Back when
I was still training for badminton, I had for every Sunday a long jog
either at a sports center a bit far from my house or an even longer jog
around the housing complex. Guess what, I would wake up earlier on the
Saturday before, which also became free after my fifth grade, only to be
a school day again when I entered junior high.
Speaking of the fifth grade, the Saturday mornings have
something in common with it. My apartment is on floor 12A. 13th floor
essentially, but the developer perhaps believed in some Western number
superstition, which I have always thought is strange, because they also
named the 4th floor 3A. They believe the Western and Eastern
superstitions. It’s like having multiple religions, which, however
absurd, is not that uncommon actually, as in some students, previously
non-religious, who are facing exams. But in its advertisements, the
developer said only one thing: The price per unit would rise on Monday.
That means I will get richer out of nowhere in 48 hours.
Anyway, located at quite some height, I can hear the
traffic far less busy than on weekdays, and only rather faint noises
reach me. Relatively speaking, the subdued magnitude compares to the
subdued class conversations fifth graders have in the last hour before
lunch break. That long, boring, drowsy hour they spend thinking of what
to have for lunch and talk to their classmates about anything at all to
vent off their near rebelling hunger. The normal traffic will be like
the noises those students make during the break itself, revolting their
ways to the cafeteria as if there is no tomorrow. 'YOLO!' Well, they
don't scream it out, but you can see it from their ferociousness.
Around this time, another means of communication one step
more sophisticated will have been in use at least from the year before:
Writing messages on pieces of paper, rolling them into balls, and throw
them to the other interlocutor. It saves you the privacy, because if you
pass them from one desk to another, chances are nosy mates in between
will read and find some way to make fun of the message. That can be a
rumor you don’t want, like that you like the person sitting by the
window and such. In high school and college, that kind of rumor can get
you into real relationship with said person.
Somehow, having conversations on paper, which now may have
been obsolete thanks to smartphones in everyone’s hands, lasted for me
until high school years. I remember keeping one piece of paper with a
close girl friend’s drawing on it. I passed it back to her, who then
happened to sit just behind me, with certain translated Japanese song
lyrics I claimed to be my own poetry. I received it back with a smiley
face at the end of the lyrics. After the last hour bell rang, I said to
her she could keep it. No, she said, I should keep it, implying such
romantic and memorable future memento should be kept by someone special.
I caught that impression, but this tug of war went on for a period of
time longer than it should. The reason was that I wasn’t impressed by
the drawing she thought was pretty, so I felt no real urge to keep it.
Perhaps she also thought the lyrics were ugly though.
She was personally close to me then, maybe even closer than was she
to her boyfriend. She often told me her relationships problem. Of
course, like many other single high schoolers, I was a relationship
expert, and she seemed to grow closer to me day after day. Once in a
while I would ask her out to have some bites near her house. She would
be indisposed. Her boyfriend might find out. Of course, what else could
it be? But then once I said if only she hadn’t been in a relationship,
to which she replied if only she had known she would meet someone like
me.
Maybe it’s because of the field I was an expert in that I
could respond to the problems she told me. Maybe it’s because back then I
was a smartass who spared little thought on what to say, but these
days, I often find it difficult to properly respond when people confide
to me. A lot has been going on, I guess, in college and books I read
that somehow I became too careful perhaps in these things. These days,
my responses to situations my friends are in mainly consist of things
that sound like hands-off, like just shrug it off and just stay there
and it will go away on its own. The latest case happened last night. A
friend, it seemed to me, was having existential crisis, asking herself
what life was actually for. After some lame, clichéd suggestions, my
final advice came to be ‘maybe after a while it will go on its own, just
hang in there’. It’s super effective. Fast forward to the casual
chit-chats as if the heavier topic had never been brought up at all, she
thanked me, saying I would find a sympathetic ear on her too when I am
in situations. I thanked her and said I was fine at the moment. Smiley
emoticon. Blue double ticks. End of conversation, beginning of a new
thought. I was wondering if she had told her boyfriend about it too? I
was wondering if I attract only girls with boyfriends, even though in
these cases I was more of being friendzoned?
Like any normal single person my age not desperate to get
into a relationship, I couldn’t help but think of her throughout the
night, imagining scenarios where we would ride on my car throughout the
city talking about random stuff. As the night grew mellow, the
conversation would as well get more intimate, and I got to be
increasingly tempted to confide to her what really bothers me all this
time: That I didn’t make the most of my exchange program in Bangkok few
years back when we were still in college. I spent my time surfing the
internet, not meeting people, locking myself in the small dorm room
within the big campus at the center of the huge city, neglecting my
exams, going to the red light district with the scholarship money which
came from the Thai taxpayers’ money only to back off when I noticed some
random women had well-built shoulders. Heck, maybe I would be too
embarrassed to tell the last thing but she would, as in cheesy soap
operas, notice it and persuade me to let it all out. I couldn’t. The
only woman I would even cry in front of was my first girlfriend, who up
until now also happens to be my only girlfriend. Ex-girlfriend, to be
exact.
But, if that scenario really did take place at all, I
don’t think I would tell her all that anyway. I have recently been
telling myself to be a stronger person. To tell anyone at all about past
problems like that sounds exactly like whining. ‘Yes, but sometimes
people need to let out their emotions too,’ my thought would contradict
itself. ‘Maybe, maybe not, maybe fuck yourself,’ it would recite a scene
in an American comedy movie, ‘Other people have their problems too, ok?
So quit giving others hard time!’ The sequence of thoughts in my mind
would go something like this, so I would be happy if friends I consider
close to me would voluntarily ask me what’s wrong, which is also why I
do not tell off people when they confide to me. Except for that one time
when I was facing exam, suddenly living like a church-goer again, and a
friend I made when in Bangkok (male, 100%) was complaining about how he
had to cook for his sister. Later on I felt rather bad about it, but as
one of my favorite columnist advised on regrets, if you make a great
mistake, there’s no need for regret, you will make bigger mistakes
anyway. Oh, well.
I press my Capri-Sun packaging to extract from it its last
drop. It’s only recently that I rediscovered the delicious drink,
although it has been some time that I became aware that foods and drinks
that sweet could give me diabetes. Cool morning breeze sweeps
pleasantly over my face, while the sun has climbed higher out of the
city skylines to fill my room with a warmer hue of yellow. A nice
weather for a Saturday morning, indeed, although my favorite will always
be the cozy cloudy sky with thinly visible drizzle. I am thinking of
having instant noodles as breakfast, despite the fact that once I bought
a whole box of it and ate it continuously for several days that even
the scent of it made me want to throw up. But the fact that there is
another box next to several Capri-Sun must say something about my
fondness of it. Is that how true love should be? Maybe I’ll muse over it
later.
