26/08/08
Frustration - I can't wait to change my spectrum of reality again. Having a modern house and no job is, to me, like having a cosy jail cell in a cave in a fantastical, Scandinavian forest. The janitor isn't telling me how ridiculous the wild dances in the outside cold are, but CNN tells me... so much...
Again, procrastination patterns and shortening attention span... Body under-stimulated, eyes overstimulated (by spurts of reading and TV), and brain over-irradiated.
Steffen just finished his plastic coconut that I bought him the other day while I was drinking an authentic one, and pulled out of the fridge. It had been briefly neglected but it included all of the tasty parts: water and hastily scraped slivers of flesh... He is laughing at home videos from when he was five years old onwards and becoming more and more demonstrably and hysterically amused; I don't want to be mean saying so, but it's hard not to react as such displays of amusement are only naturally expressed in the presence of others. A couple of times, I have carefully responded - or not - neutrally to his attempts at sharing his amusement. It's interesting that although we may now share relatively similar attitudes, his family situation can seem too unalike for me to relate too. Such is the respective context for humour. My family has always represented a sort of cynical satire to me; a conditionally wearing and predictably unpredictable roller-coaster of over-extending, petty tragedy implied by paradoxical complexities - a black comedy - that could overshadow Shakespeare in the oddly exclusive arena of English literature; If only it would be communicated. I miss it, now that I'm experiencing a different family of green grass. A sufficiently-more-innocently carved person would likely be disgusted by a second-hand account of my growth in detail; not because of any particularly recognisable significant human tragedy, but the effects on the intellect - not emotion - that a clear perspective of the futilities my family members could persistently contribute would conjure. So I speculate in boredom and wordy naivety.
I chatted with the Malay boy (that could have been older than me) at the roadside stall where I bought coconuts yesterday. Nicely contesting local prejudices, he told me that he had learned Chinese from his ethnic Chinese girlfriend, after he inquired to my usage of limited Bahasa Maleyu; A common perception is a lazy and uneducated Malay who depends on the support of the government. Chinese-Malaysians often share the opinion that they are pressured to study many languages at school, whereas Malays only learn "BM" (Bahasa Maleyu). My acquaintance was apparently a superior character. He briefly confirmed my claim in BM to a broken bicycle before I left by briefly trying to thread my pedal back in to the crank. I had just been riding for exploration's sake, mug-shot a live exhibit over the wall of an ostrich farm, discovered a random town and managed to break my pedal off by standing on it in front of a full-house in a restaurant, in the middle of the road. I had left the apartment bare-foot but, even I was self-conscious pedalling back with one foot while the other awkwardly rotated the crank the rest of the way.
Written by choben at 11:00 PM.
sign here ;-D
