Hyperfunction Air And Sleep

I am at the School of Computing. Four macbooks including mine, one vaio, a lego-bot and the hushed sounds of people looking over each other's shoulders, at laptop screens. The soft tapping of keyboards. Half the people here have IDEs open and code on-screen. There are full ceiling-to-floor windows at this part of SoC. It's bright. The windows overlook Research Drive. I can see the Synchotron Light Source from where I'm sitting - it's this circular red-stone building that houses a compact superconducting storage ring. I do not know what that means. There is a soft buzzing in my ears. The light is bright and a little overwhelming and there's this tightness in my chest where my heart is, like a hand's holding it, and it's gripping ever so slightly. It's still buzzing. Or maybe it's the sound of the water pumps spraying the wooden deck outside? A woman walks past, her heels clacking on tile and I swallow. Too loud. I am hyperalert. Colours are bright, a little too saturated. I have finished my tutorial assignment, the code is good and it works. I know. I checked it at 4 this morning. I stood at my windows at 6 and stared at the sunrise. I slept at 7. Passed up assignment at 9. I am running on two hours of sleep. It's funny. I don't feel tired. I'm waiting for a friend to come out of a lecture so we can discuss our NM1101E assignment. It has to be done by Wednesday. But we're only free on the weekend. I may have to go to church later. Youth. Or maybe not. I promised. I don't know. I might be asleep by then. University is a very free place. I should be sleeping now. Maybe I will.

A Sunday In The Life

I wake up at 8.30am and swear at my alarm clock. I lie in bed. Church starts at 9. I briefly consider going back to sleep and skipping church but I kill that thought immediately, out of reflex. I go to the common bathroom to brush my teeth. It’s raining outside. I consider going back to sleep again – the skies are grey and the weather is cold and the thought of chasing down buses and huddling under bus-stops isn’t an appealing one. I kill that thought a second time. I don’t know why I do so. I’m probably going to be late anyway.

The walk to the bus stop is nasty. I make the mistake of wearing new sneakers (bought for running, and white) because right away I am presented with the basketball court: a no-man’s-land of little rivulets and sploshy yellow puddles. It’s still raining. I hop from one dry spot to another, clutching at my umbrella like a grandma, and then I reach the gravel path, which is dryer, but slippery. I slow down. The rain is doing that funny thing it does when there’s lots of wind and you’re walking exposed and your umbrella is too small: your head and shoulders remain dry but everything below your waist is obliterated. I feel water trickling down my feet and into my socks. I try not to think about my white shoes.

The bus arrives at the stop a few seconds after I do and I get in – possibly the only good thing to have happened so far – and I sit under the air-conditioning with the vain hopes of getting dry. There are no old people in the bus. Thank God. On normal Sundays there are so many old people entering and leaving I cannot sit for fear of offending them. But then I reconsider: nobody in their right mind would take my seat anyway - I’m wet, and my seat’s probably damp if and when I leave it.

I get off the bus at the Clementi MRT station and board a train. The wait is 2 minutes. I take out my earbuds and listen to Grizzly Bear. The train arrives and we hop in. I like the sound of the doors opening: it’s like the pneumatic hiss one’d imagine on space shuttles and the like, spoilt only by the annoying female voice telling us to ‘please mind the platform gap!’ in an equally annoying angmoh accent. There are four people reading bibles on the train: three Christian and one Stockmarket. The aunty nearest to me (Christian) has her bible up and directly in front of her face, and her lips are moving soundlessly as she reads. She looks funny, but not as funny as the uncle opposite and a little further away: he’s sleeping head bowed, body slouched, with the bible open on his chest. You’ve got to wonder what he’ll do at the sermon later.

I see nobody my age, and proceed to stare out the window.

I arrive at City Hall MRT station 10 stops later and enter St Andrew’s Cathedral via the underground exit. The praise and worship session is over. I am, however, in time for the sermon … which starts a few minutes after I sit down and turns out – 10 minutes in – to be about death.
I sigh and try not to think about the trip back.

After service (there is no communion) I eat a couple of miniscule burgers at the church Welcome Centre and I head for Suntec City Mall. There is an Epicentre store there and I need to buy an Apple keyboard. (I spent the whole of yesterday programming, and decided then and there that my aunt was right – 4 hours of being hunched over the laptop = not good for neck and back). I make my way via the City Link underpass (which is in reality yet another mall) and I spend the next 20 minutes or so navigating the mass of shops in Suntec. The bottom floor is uninteresting: Topshop and Rubi Shoes^[1] and New Urban Male^[2], and finally I find the store and I go in and I ask for the keyboard and I make my purchase.

I eat my lunch at Food Republic. They have Lui Cha, and I miss Lui Cha like I miss Kuching. Food Republic calls it Thunder Tea Rice, though, and I find this so funny that I have to stop to take a picture with my phone and I think of other funny and suspiciously lame jokes on the naming of food before I queue and order a bowl. S$4.00. The soup is very green and not very bitter. Kuching’s is infinitely better. Oh well.

I make my way back via City Link, because the sky is still grey and unhappy and the puddles don’t look very agreeable to me and my shoes. There are many skinny girls with DSLRs wrapped around their bony arms.^[3] Two Singaporean kids press their faces at a glass display, and two white kids stare back from the other side, their parents busy in conversation with the sales assistant. HMV is playing Zee Avi's Kantoi. One store, selling slippers and big furry plushies, have their SAs lined up and they're all hugging one plushie each, for God knows what reason. There are no customers in that store.

I finally arrive at the City Hall MRT station and I take a train back to HarbourFront and another bus back to campus and I hop through the basketball courts again and into my room and I study mathematics and now I am typing.

Hello. Hello. Goodbye.



^1. Slogan: ‘Shoes make me happy. I’m superficial. Whatever.’ ↩

^2. NUM’s logo is a swimming sperm, and their HIRING/SALES-ASSISTANT-WANTED ads ask potential employees: SHOULD COWS WEAR BRAS???? Their bags are printed with the NUM logo, sperm-head upwards, and are rather funny: if you are female and you hold the bag between your legs (which girls occasionally do, in trains) you look like you have a sperm swimming up your - nevermind. ↩

^3. Their not-so-skinny boyfriends are the ones carrying the bulky and rather unhip camera bag for them. Poor things. ↩