Medium Delirium

Finally, a moment to sit and write for abit.

I’ve been thinking over the past few days about how I spend an inordinate amount of time on heat management. The weather has been perilously, oppressively hot, the air thick and fiery like a furnace; how are people supposed to be nice to each other in weather like that? It’s all I can do to keep from stripping bare in public and kicking a plant out of frustration. It’s worse with a baby, of course, because now I have to think about how to keep two people cool, instead of just me. Most days, this results in us popping out twice or even thrice a day to malls for air-conditioning – the colder the better, polar conditions are ideal – for however long she deigns to stay confined in the stroller. Whatever heat we are able to expel on our expeditions is quickly regained during the short walk from the MRT station back home, which inevitably results in us both being covered with an uncomfortable film of sweat by the time we get to our doorstep.

My absence from this space is largely due to trying to juggle two creative projects at the moment: drawing a comic for a charity organisation, and designing a book cover for a local poet’s upcoming self-published collection. On top of that, the baby is extremely active and requires constant supervision. Whatever pockets of time I’m able to wrangle from the day, I spend being the rapt audience of a series of marginally different ASMR vlogs on Youtube.

I’ve started doing reformer pilates, albeit at an unhelpfully slow rate (about one class every 2-3 weeks). It’s so expensive that I can’t tell which makes my heart race more: the intensity of the exercises, or the process of paying for a class. For what it’s worth, each 50 minute class sees my body worked to its limit, and the other day my legs were so shaken I had to limp out of class, pretending I was taking a slow stroll for no particular reason. I spent the next day in deep, deep pain; my hamstrings and glutes were positively pulverised. In some twisted, masochistic way, the pain made me feel better about the money I’d paid for the class, since it was a tangible reminder that results had been reaped. Ah, the saccharine hell of a life spent groping through the garden maze in this capitalist wonderland.