Bohemia Bunny

Off-day offloads

July 19th, 2008 by lynnylchan under Comments and My Life

Here I am, on my day off. Don’t get me wrong - I’m not overworked by slave-driver employers. Quite the contrary, I go in to work when I’m not expected, just because I like the company of others. But this is my first proper day off in two weeks.

Last week I used my two off-days to be with my family and attend commencement, so I didn’t really have any time to just chill out and do “me” stuff. “Me” stuff means the mundane, such as backing up my hard drive and ironing my clothes, and more abstract pleasures such as eating lunch at whatever time I like, and reading online comics non-stop, because I have 10 years of backlog to get through. I’ve been reading this comic, “Little Dee”, and its creator used to do a daily strip entitled “Bruno”. It was a surprise for me to read “Bruno”, because it’s very much for mature audiences, and “Little Dee” is quite child-friendly.

So far today I’ve picked up my mail, sent out my mail, done my laundry (yay!), and had a delicious lunch of porridge from the downstairs stall. The proprietor didn’t skimp on the ikan bilis, but maybe it’s because he’s a young man and I’m a pretty girl. Yes, I admit to the sexistness of that statement.

While we’re on the subject of food stall proprietors: The chicken rice seller downstairs from my office calls me “mei-mei”. Heh. When your job consists of being with people who consider you a relic, having someone treat you as a younger person isn’t all that bad.

There’s a temporary stage erected on the empty field, visible from my balcony. I can hear the dong-dong-chiang of drums and cymbals as they rehearse for tonight’s performance. Perhaps I’ll head out later and watch. I haven’t seen Chinese opera since I was a very young child.

I think raising kids is always so damn hard because they usually turn out the opposite of what you wanted them to be, and if they don’t, you’ve failed somehow to raise an independent human being. Either way you’re damned. Tell me again why we don’t have parenting licenses?

And now to be controversial: I’m calling out the hypocrisy I see in some sectors, that they oppose abortion and stem-cell research, and not assisted fertility. If children are indeed given by God, and if you have none in spite of your efforts, then isn’t that a pretty clear sign that God doesn’t want you to have any? Why are you messing with the divine plan to keep you child-free? Answer me that, and then maybe I’ll give you leeway to advance your pro-life rhetoric. If you ask little cynical me, though, I’d just say that anything that advances their numbers is a good thing, and anything that reduces it is bad. Never mind the fact that a pro-life policy also affects people who don’t necessarily share their religious views. How unselfish they are, to want to save us all from the hellfire of Damnation!

Part II:

One of my students woke me from my nap with a nudge on MSN. Serves me right for not turning down the volume. Seeing how it was already 7pm, I readied to go out grocery shopping at the bargain supermarket before it closed. I managed to lug back nearly 50 dollars’ worth of groceries, as the rain drizzled down gently. So gently that I could just barely feel it alighting on my skin as I waited for the red man to turn green. The Chinese opera had already started, but I think it was in Hokkien because I had no idea what they were saying. Still sounded like fun, though.

On the uphill walk to my apartment, I glanced back at the makeshift stage and saw the moon, just rising above the buildings. She was hidden behind the diffuse rainclouds, aglow but not bright. As though she, like the opera performers, was waiting in the wings for her moment to shine.

I did my ironing, which is always strangely calming. Bringing flat, smooth order out of wrinkled chaos. There’s an analogy in there somewhere.

Now it’s time for some bedtime Sudoku, and that’s not anything dirty or kinky a la “bedroom Twister”, okay? Although Sudoku makes for a poor nightcap, it revs up my brain instead of calming it down for sleep.