Sunday, April 22, 2007
I'm staring at a small little plastic bag right now - one of those ordinary-looking ones you get from buying chips or a small canned drink. Inside is this dried up little fruit. An okra, to be exact, given to me by a rather famous actor's wife.
I was supposed to have planted these seeds by now, and she promised that they would grow up to be okra of garguantian proportions. A stark reminder of the end of the end, what have been accomplished, and what had not. Seems like I always end my holidays with such similar summaries, eh?
Honestly though, the one biggest thing that I had not managed to do during the last 4 weeks was to enjoy myself. I did, in a rather demure way, but not thoroughly and intensely. Which you'd think would be the case, after so many years of slogging it out. My idea of a thorough and intense holiday? I suppose a really exciting getaway perhaps, with endless nights of partying, boxes of imported plants, late night rendezvous at coral wholesale farms, daily skating and throwing a huge dance party and Lindy'ing till 4am. Wait a minute - I actually did the dancing. But heck - limitations would be $, and most importantly, the fact that the REAL holiday started after 9 April, which left little time to pick up the wreckage even. To tell the truth, my books are still piled up in a corner - I simply couldn't bring myself to touch another one of those ever again. Not after they've been read cover-to-cover and recited and revised in every possible way, ad nauseum.
Had a talk about this with Yx actually, a couple of weeks back. I suppose I've been too telescopic about everything. In fact, loads had been done, and I've been enjoying myself, albeit in different ways. Every long holiday, for example, I
will embark on a major (and usually domestic) project. Some years it was re-doing the interior of much of the house - which ended us up with new toilet lights, shower curtains in the auxilliary toilet that was 1 foot too short, and a lovely re-grouting of the tiles; remember that one? And sometimes it was the tank - building a new hood, getting everything back in line, re-scaping the rocks. Or, writing new arrangements of major scores for the electone, including "Meditation from Thais" by Masssenet and "The Point of No Return" - none of which ever got completed, alas! This year, it was the installation of the garden irrigation, and a few related things like repotting. And, of course, fixing up the aquarium chiller. And holiday-wise, I managed to scrape out quite an exciting trip to Cameron Highlands, and completed a full VCD of the trip including some video editing. Not too shabby, in retrospect!
It all unofficially starts tomorrow. Orientation week, a crash course in politics, enduring torture, wayang'ing, and not freaking out in the face of collapsed patients. And a week later, thrown into the deep end of the pool. The responsibilities are galling, seriously. I still don't quite know what to think of the entire thing. The whole affair, starting from the end of surgical SIP to the start of the long, arduous period of revision, to the very traumatic and long-drawn examinations, to right now, all seem too surreal. It still feels like the start of the final year for me, like the last 6 months have been but a long, long, long, horrid, horrid, horrid dream. The true dream lies in front of me, right now, but something deep down inside is rejecting the entire thing. Yet another maladaptive behavior of the brain, I'm dead sure of it. Time to dig out giant psychiatric volumes again.
Time to wake up from the slumber, accept the facts as they are, and get on with it. New phases in life come all too quickly, but as again, once you're in the thick of it, much of these thoughts become once again suppressed. Goodness knows when they'll surface once more, although I have a shrewd idea when.
Perhaps, it's time to mark out an area to sow those okra seeds, and get things going once more.
Labels: rants, work
Wenky
11:06 PM
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