Cabin fever
I am getting cabin fever. It's the weather. We are now holed up in here, hostages to some of the worst torrential downpours i can recall. They go on for hours and hours, rain that resounds on the rooftops, run down gutters like rivers and fills drains to bursting. We sit in the house, disbelieving its strength and duration. The skies are grey and its cold and clammy. It feels as if the island has left its moorings and drifted twenty degrees north or south. It never rained thus when i was a kid. Once, perhaps. I recall that once. It rained for two days in December, continuously. I thought, perhaps the world will now end. If it rains for 40 days and nights we'll drown. Mom, do you think it'll rain 40 days and nights? I was quite relieved when it all ceased after day two. But this...this is something else. Maybe we will drown.
The rain is so heavy that it bounces off the surfaces of shelters to create a layer of white spray over everything. It feels like we're in a Japanese cartoon. Ghost in the Shell has a rain shower in the middle of it, where the school children are running in the rain with their pink umbrellas. I have entered a lobotomous phase. I have ceased to think about much or anything at all. today i called Susan who's in town and she asked me what i was doing. What am i doing, i wonder to myself, existentially. Or non-exisentially, as it were. She began to complain about how fast the pace of life was in Singapore. Is it fast, i wonder? I know it's very busy, but fast...i suppose it is.
For dinner today we ate at Crystal Jade Kitchen in Toa Payoh. As usual when the food arrived Ghin began to slap the table with great urgency and vigour, making loud protesting noises. Instead of ignoring him or taking him out, i relented and gave him some of the beancurd from the mushroom dish. That did the trick. He loved it and kept quiet through the rest of the meal, pleased to be included in the proceedings. He also had some tau huay chwee, which he loved, and some chicken soup. It is all my fault. I fed him food off my plate when he was younger and now he will ostensiably NOT eat any baby food, especially if it comes from the USA. I have also decided not to buy any more baby food from the US, even if it is organic. It tastes dreadful. In fact it tastes so dreadful that the teething biscuits which we have left out are also snubbed by the ants.
It will be a good month before we leave for Singapore and i am wondering how in the wide world i'm going to cope with work and children - and school. So for now, if i am to be treated like an invalid by my mom, i don't care. Drive me around, buy me my dinner, do my laundry. It's fine. In a month's time, it'll all be over and i'll be back in the big bad world.
