“When you take apart a lego house and mix the pieces into the bin, where does the house go to?”

“It’s in the bin.”

“No, those are just pieces. They could become spaceships or trains. The house was an arrangement. The arrangement doesn’t stay with the pieces and it doesn’t go anywhere else. It’s just gone.”

- xkcd.com

I’m at the cyclical low of self-esteem, brought upon by the discovery of having messed up at work.

When it comes to stupidity and inadequacy, I’m an all-rounder. I’m ignorant, careless, useless, fussy, critical, hypocritical, mean, paranoid, lazy and dorky. I’m so lousy I have to resort to a clumsy string of words that can barely express how lousy I am. I used the same word twice in a sentence, and the argument was possibly circular. Ugh.

I’m amused and slightly disturbed by how much the phrase “high and dry” is misunderstood, especially since it’s been popularized in the Radiohead song where its meaning is evident.

In fact, it is so commonly misunderstood in my office, that people understood each other perfectly, leaving me bewildered.

“Hey! I realized if we do this we’ll be high and dry!” I frowned and thought, Oh no… but why does he sound so excited? That was when the person who was directed the phrase responded with an enthusiastic, “WOW! Really, that’s great!”

Huh?

A while later I realized they both happened to misunderstand the phrase in exactly the same manner. The good news was then related to a third person, “Actually, if we do this, we’ll be high and dry!”. And the response?

“Really, that’s great!”

What are the chances?

Thank you for the music, the songs I’m singing

Thanks for all the joy they’re bringing

Who can live without it, I ask in all honesty

What would life be?

Without a song or a dance what are we?

So I say thank you for the music

For giving it to me

- “Thank you for the music”, by ABBA

Today, a really sweet girl offered to lend me her umbrella, as though she read my mind as I was planning a dash to the bus stop, fretting about not having an umbrella and not being able to go swimming because of the downpour. 

Incidentally, my friend and I were just discussing about how Singaporeans can behave more like citizens of a first world country if we could learn to be more gracious and helpful towards strangers. We agreed too, that this would also require us to drop our over zealous self-reliance to humbly accept help and show appreciation and encouragement to the person who offered help.

But today, I rejected her help, opting instead for a long detour to avoid the rain. So much for graciousness.

Moreover, I could neither, for the life of me, remember her name nor how I knew her. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I realized I actually did pack my umbrella this morning when I looked into my bag after I got onto the bus.

I’m atrocious, and possibly senile too.

The mind is kind of jumbled up now, which is evident from the 3 completely unrelated and very random facebook status updates today.

It has been like that since after the exams – a serious inability to focus. There are many things on my mind now. There’s that great anticipation of the long holiday in Australia, a great many half-read books lying around that I am dying to complete and my silly interest in classical music which has suddenly resurfaced twice as hard. All these while being in the deepest, boring-est accounting hole.

What’s worse, every time I do something I feel like I’m depriving the other. In this way I have effectively not done much of all the things I need to do. I’m in desperate need of a systematic way to organize my life right now. What do you do when you want to do 2 million things at once?

An (almost) empty pool on a sunny weekday afternoon. The only way to survive the current heat and enjoy the sun in Singapore is to soak yourself in a pool the whole day. Swimming felt so good – the water was soothing, and the sun was so energising. Actually, today was supposed to be catching-up-on-advanced-financial-accounting day, but knowing the day’s plans made it all the more impossible to get out of the pool. 

What made my day after swimming was to come to school and receive a package from the Embassy of Angola. The good people who made attending a party worthwhile sent me a beautiful picture book on their country. I see sea, sand, palm trees, elephants, zebras, sunsets, diamonds and happy, friendly people. I am so going to Angola!

Plus, I coincidentally met D whom I haven’t seen in a long while. =)

Guess it’s not that bad a thing that I have to come to school to retrieve the AFA book.

I discovered that common knowledge is not very common. Common sense is probably not very common as well, but I can accept that because sensibility requires some thinking to understand and make use of information. But considering the amount of trivia we’re bombarded with everyday, there just isn’t any excuse to be more ignorant than a 8-year-old if you are older than 8.

Therefore, I always thought shows like “Are you smarter than a fifth grader” are completely rigged – they made the contestants act dumb so that idiots will watch it to feel better about themselves and boost viewership and producers can rake in the moolah from advertisers. But now I think I have to reconsider that hypothesis, especially after I overheard a mother teach her daughter (probably around 8 years old) how to do her homework.

1. She raised doubts when her daughter told her wool comes from sheep.

2. She couldn’t correct her daughter when her daughter told her silk comes from wool.

3. She agreed with her daughter that sunflower translates to 太阳花, and told her daughter to write “太阳花的样子很像太阳” in her exercise book.

Sitting beside them, I was itching to help her with it, but that would have been the equivalent of giving the mother one tight slap and telling her in front of her kid how ignorant she is (even though she is).

Ignorance is scary, I should read more.

I’m having days of immense tiredness, which I can’t explain.

There’s a lot of work to do and a lot of fun planned for. But even though I don’t seem to be working as much as I used to, there are some days when I’m overcome by exhaustion. The fun doesn’t excite me either.

And late nights, many late nights, very very late nights. Mostly I while away the nights watching TV half-heartedly while listening to music or reading. Sleeping time is abnormal (by my own terms), I could sleep for 6 good hours and still feel exhausted.

Maybe it’s because it’s the last school term, and my life after 3 months is a vast unknown. Or maybe drive does run out, and takes time to be regenerated. Hell, maybe it’s just because I’m at the low of what Taoists call energy cycles. Or maybe a little bunny in Ecuador hopped and created a change in air pressure which resulted in some air current that knocked the life out of me.

Whatever it is, I don’t like it. Please go away.

The most terrible thing is not that life is tragic.

What’s worse is when life is really good, but you can’t enjoy it.

This happens when you have an air ticket booked for Australia, but on it, it says “depart on 4 Jun” instead of “depart on 4 Mar”.

And on 5 Mar you have a killer paper.