…for everything else, but great for whining. it’s whine-fest monday!

i am tired, and sad that i don’t even feel like i have the right to be saying that. i’m entering week 2 of the lull, and starting to feel absolutely uncomfortable. i need work soon. money is one thing, of course, but there is a far stronger cry – i simply need to feel gainfully employed, and of some use to the world. i hate feeling forgotten and somehow, left behind in the whole scheme of things. it is such a lonely feeling. and furthermore… hell, i’m bored.

i am also tired from hounding Agency From Hell for the fees due to me. being a debt collector is exhausting, to say the least. i am beginning to understand why s always seemed so jaded and tired. it can’t be good for you – asking people for money over and over again, then listening to their sorry excuses over and over again. besides, it’s christmas season. they should really have a little more sense than that. how am i going to fuel the economy with outrageous christmas shopping if i don’t get paid?

and then there is the health. always the health. my gastric pains have returned again after a year long sabbathical. i know not why. perhaps my body is as bored as my mind. but why should it be when it has been wheezing for close to a year now? surely wheezing is as interesting an ailment as gastritis. in any case, the combined effect of the two has effectively stopped me from doing anything more exhausting than running for the bus (believe me, even that can make me wheeze for half an hour). the rain makes me wheeze, the air-conditioning makes me wheeze, dust makes me wheeze, late nights make me wheeze… frustration has given way to amusement; i refuse to go to any more doctors or imbibe any more antibiotics, so i have opted for resignation.

and resigned i am, too, about scholarship results that are slow in coming, stupid agents, motorcyclists bent on scaring the very cells out of me when i drive, jeans that are too tight, dad saying “parrot importer” when he really means “parallel importer”, and whiny government-hating singaporeans. i should probably elaborate on the last lest i come across as an extremely hypocritical, i-studied-abroad, singaporean-bashing singaporean. i have many thoughts on the singaporean need to complain, but have neither the physical nor mental strength to go into that today. suffice it to say, for now, that i am rather well aware that that particular gene is alive and well in me (hello… whine-fest monday, remember?), so at least some of those thoughts do not involve mentally maiming my fellow countrymen.

i leave you, my dear non-existent reader, with something from a german movie i watched last night (with the enticing title rabbit without ears). there is a scene where ludo, the typical skirt-chasing handsome lead who falls for the not-so-beautiful nice-girl, laments about how he does not enter into relationships because he has yet to find the woman who has it all together and does not look to him to make her happy. the gospel, according to ludo, is that one has to find happiness on one’s own, and that it is selfish to expect someone to make one happy. i… don’t… know… but… i (rather grudgingly) think he’s right. oh, hang the men with all the answers.

what a day.

first, the wheezing (always the wheezing). wheezing is a really terrible thing to have happen to you. the sound itself is enough to send anyone scuttling to the other end of the room. air may be a free commodity, but the pain you experience when you have to tear out your lungs to get at it…! you are so exhausted you need to lie down, but yet cannot do so because that makes breathing an even more excruciating activity. so you spend half your time sitting around dully with a heaving chest, wondering if your next breath could be (touch wood) your last.

then, i wonder if i am sickening for yet another flu attack. my nose is aching and tender from contact with too many tissues and towels, and… all ah wad to do ith lie dowd ad thleepth.

then, then… oh, the big then! i met my first stalker today. or, if i were feeling a little less mean, i could call him the overzealous suitor. (but i cannot stand using the word suitor on him! it is an insult to the word!) he came sidling up at lunch today and asked to share the table when there were a dozen empty ones all around us. alarm bells went off. then he started a conversation, and the details are too painful(ly embarrassing) to relate here. to add insult to injury, he had to be some fortyish, balding, medicine man (yes, he called himself a ‘drug-pusher’and seemed mighty proud of his little joke). wherefore my expat husband?? part of me wanted to weep, another part wanted to howl with laughter, and the rest of me was simply struggling with mortification, panic, and some fear. he did say he had seen me around a few times. does that not qualify him for stalker-albeit-mild-version? so, lunch-from-hell and fake smiles and vague answers to ‘let’s lunch together another day’.

oh, and there was also the chain of miscommunication with agency-from-hell, who told me instead of just saying ‘no’ to a job when i couldn’t make it, i should try to make it seem like i was really trying to help. what? i don’t see that as my job – that is the agency’s duty to its clients and has nothing whatsoever to do with me. i am Translator/Diva, and i do not see why i should not say ‘no’ (nicely) when i really.do.mean.no. i have noisy lungs, a painful nose, and trauma from being picked up by someone i thought looked like my uncle. i do not see a need to bend over backwards to accomodate an agency who doesn’t even treat me all that well to begin with.

what a teeth-gnashing, foot-stomping, fist-pounding day. it’s not over yet. more work awaits, but tomorrow i will have a night of martinis and free steak sandwiches. scant comfort for she whose pride has been brutally trampled on in one short day, but comfort nonetheless.

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afterthoughts.

i have been pondering the reason behind my popularity with old-ish men (yes, today’s was not an isolated incident).

i am clearly not so young and pretty that they would take one look at me and know that i am way out of their league, yet attractive enough to make them want to take a chance with me. another way of putting it is to say that i am also unattractive enough to make them think that they would actually have a chance with me.

dang. i am not making myself any happier.

i try to keep my mind off that, but the suspense is killing me (and it has only been one weekend!) so i have to say it out loud – i really want to get that scholarship. there. i feel somewhat better, as if i have finally made it to the toilet after holding in my pee till my bladder hurts. i am actually highly superstitious, and i do believe that the more people i tell, the less likely it is that i will get it. so i have been trying to keep it all zipped up.

i have just found out that the current ambassador is an alumni of the same university i graduated from. i see that as a good omen. but when you want something real bad, it is easy to find an omen in the smallest thing; i swear, the ants are trying to tell me something. or… there must be a reason why thunderbird is now refusing to work just three weeks after i gave it life as a member of my computer.

i am going to go back to my work and give it all the attention it deserves… and then… to bed, to bed, to dream of fat pigs…