Private Peace

Location: On her way to somewhere and trying not to steer too far from the main roads
Mood-of-the-day: Cloudy, with a hint of sudden and quick drizzles.

I did very little writing this week and I fear the same under-the-weather phase is going to continue for a while. Not just blog writing or assignments (which two are overdue btw) but any writing; s’matter of fact, I hardly feel like picking up a pen yesterday (I prefer traditional methods over digital in fiction digest). Unlike when I feel very sad, I don’t let all the moodiness run overdrive for an hour just to get it over with and then go downstairs to set the dinner plates. Rather, I feel tired of feeling tired.

I suppose these are something like a sad moment, not a sudden downpour of depression like I had at secondary school but more like a weeklong overcast that gave only cold drizzle or humidity to the point of head aches. Here I sit before a PC that’s not mine yet I wholly depends on and just watching letters of the alphabet appear in structures on a white sheet of softcopy paper, wondering if words such as these are truly my own, instead of a collection I’ve complied from others’ lethargy.

But would I be offended to the emotions of others who felt similar weariness? That there are others of such introvert nature as to compare with mine? I don’t know. An age such as now scarcely needs more others like me. As the world sped along to the rhythm of production, I was the person who sits in idle, narrowly in between the highways of Time that has no speed limit, lost in her own inner traffic. Surely the barrier is too small to accommodate so many dreamy recluses. Eventually one of us will fall to be crushed road kill, or worse, become the bane of innocents. Would I be the one to fall?

It is not a crime, in my heart, to sit and listen only to your own breathing. Not snatches of available time scattered in a day or one to spend with your workload on your head or an instructed meditation from a self-help video. Only pure, idle, selfish peace. Selfish indeed, more so for one such as I who would have spent such time drugging herself in the addiction of playing games or reading legends. But I did it, for myself to add, a bit of time only to breathe and not even counting the breaths.

And that’s when these moments gave me a sense of new air. An illusion I’ve made for myself to make the dread less dreadful? A time wasted in an hour where time is limited? A simplified form of prayer? An excuse for sluggishness? A private soul healing method? A forced silence after cycles enduring drudgery in the mind? An unexpected thundershower of all these questions at once? There is little reason for me to use metaphors or descriptive language to the something what outsiders would term as ‘being lazy’.

Inhale. Exhale. I was not trapped in on the barrier in between the highways of Time. I was one who had stopped on the side of the road to turn away from the suffocating busyness. I had stopped to see the simple sunlight beyond that wearisome overcast and not judge it for anything. There is a feeling, only good. Yet my place is not here, and while there is still gas in my car, I must follow the rhythm or else splutter and fail to be stuck into the highway barrier. But I do dream sometimes, after those private peaces. I dream of a life after my destination, where I could see the whole world on a bright sunny ending.

Signed: *Ophie, having little to say or do and yet still not feel guilty about it.

Return of the Blogger

Location: Back to school (AAARRRGGGHHH!!!)
Mood-of-the-day: AAARRRGGGHHH!!!

Wow it’s been the longest ever since I’ve last blogged. A lot of things had passed through while I was away and so I’m just going to run them along. For starters, I think I did okay in my mid-terms. The pity is that I dare not to confide as much as I really wanted since one reader of Suvon Reality hadn’t the sense that an open journal maybe open, it’s still a journal.

Well, I’m back at school. I’ve finished reading Robin Hobb’s Assassin’s Quest. The story’s cool, something I half-felt like passing it on to my dad, but he had a stereotype against fantasy stories like everyone else in my family (save bro-in-law). There’s a mysterious dark plot into it alright, one that generated from the moment of Fitz’s bastard birth and continues on as he reluctantly attempt to do his fatal servitude against a foreign prince.

Another thing that readers’ might have missed is the grand opening of Dad’s koi pond. Well, the opening isn’t really that grand (more or less, a bit greenish IMHO), but they’re fishes swimming alright. I’ll get a before and after pic ready. It’s not as glamorous as other custom-made landscaping hired geniuses though, but it’s my dad’s small effort at a DIY.

On an unrelated note, my grandfather’s got admitted to the hospital. The old due with a proud Johorian history got a tuberculosis problem (aka batuk kering). This 80-year-old hardly had a sick day in his life (still drives his Kancil like Schumacher, I last remember his good days) so it’s no surprise that the extended family dotted on him to the point were his hospital table looked like a Ramadan buffet. Oh, and he still hadn’t remembered my name :P.

Speaking of Ramadan, I was happy to discover that I had a visible waist as I wore my new kebaya (it’s the one were I got the cloth from my Redang trip). Kak Liza de Tailor showed me only one other kebaya she had sewn that resembles mine (a green one, looked uncannily like the one I’ve first wanted) but I hoped this style would make it okay. Though since the style was uncommon, it took my mom and me a good Nuzul Quran shopping to hunt for a matching headscarf.

Still, I see in the near future that I’ll be making a solo trip back to KL soon. I planned to go back to Low Yat Plaza for a warranty claim on my poor old thumb drive. I suppose the 5-minute panic experience had greatly shorted it’s life-span as now it can’t be formatted. I remember plugging it into Dad’s Compaq to do some blog tinkering (and gaming, I would hide that) before exiting the hardware. But at the same hour I tried to redo the tinkering, a lil’ window popped with a format-your-disk request. I’ll extend that story later.

So I had to redo some 5 blog entries, replay Laxius Power 1 and do that project proposal all over again. A real cautious geek should have made back-ups of those files, but then a real cautious geek shouldn’t have screwed her own PC in the first place. Sis already fixed that problem though, but now the Windows got back to freezing every alternate time I tried to run an MS-DOS based program. It sucks damn bad.

Overall, this is a less than enthusiastic re-entry, I apologize as I was trying to fit in everything that I’ve loss (as you can see that I’m still in thumb drive mourning, almost to the point of pathetic :P). But do look out for more up-lifting ones tomorrow maybe, once I got some snapshots working. But for the record, it looks like I won’t be putting up printed Scenes in my bedroom in time for Hari Raya, but I can still try.

Signed: *Ophie, Getting back into the blogging stream