It is now 11.50 a.m. on Tuesday, and I am sitting in the office. I am currently fixing up some samples for later use, so here I am while they incubate. I am so completely and utterly exhausted and I feel like the entirety of my life force has been leeched from my very being. I have not slept more than 4-5 hours a night for the past…8 days? I feel like there is something in my chest that is barely holding on to life and it is near snapping. I would not like to find out what would happen if it does.
Looks like it is time for some intervention, huh? I have made up my mind—once the samples are all good and ready, I am heading straight home for a bloody nap. Call it medically necessary, if you will. It seems stupid to come into office for a net total duration of 2 hours, but the samples sure don’t wait for no one, and neither would my body be willing to tolerate a couple more hours in this place just to complete a workday. One of the perks of being a graduate student is that you are technically allowed to come and go at strange hours. Funnily enough, this very same perk is also a drawback. If you decide your own progress, then you are really responsible for your own progress (or demise). Honestly, at this point I am just rambling. The nap is starting to seem less like a nap and more of a life-preservation measure.
5.02 p.m
That was a great nap. Perhaps a little too short. I woke up groggy, but at least I am confident that I won’t be dozing off randomly for the rest of the day. Anyway.
A couple days ago, I had lunch with some longtime friends. These are friends I have known since I was a silly teenager, so we obviously had a great time. I almost felt like a teen again! There was a funny moment when one of them laughed and said that we used to sit and talk about teen girl topics (eg. cute boys), but instead, we were now sitting together and talking about health. Thinking back, that was embarrassingly funny. We were talking about health problems that we are now facing, but for heaven’s sake, we are in our twenties! As far as the outside world is concerned, we are bright-eyed young women in the upward climb of our career ladders and living our lives in the best way possible—of the 5 of us, 2 of us are happily married, another two are well on their way to matrimony while the fifth is quite contentedly enjoying single-hood. We appeared to be—as expected of us—the very picture of young adulthood, with our lives ahead of us in a sunlit path, complete with sunflowers and roses growing on either side of the path.
And yet.
There we were, sitting around a table discussing adult ailments that we were definitely too young to be having and recommending all sorts of supplements to each other. How embarrassing. Did we age too fast, or was this just something that happened to all generations that everyone collectively chose to keep mum on? I would like to believe it is the latter, but I am quite certain that the generations before us kept themselves in relatively good shape until they are well into their thirties. Maybe even forties. Now isn’t this just a cheerful thought.
11.05 a.m, Monday
Well. Another week has just passed us by. It seems to me that for the past week I have been so busy with surviving experiments and meal-prep that my mind was just too (un)pleasantly occupied to muse about everything under the sun.
Anyway.
There is an abstract sense of…well, not grief, exactly. I would describe the feeling to be similar to that of being sold what you thought was a high-end product with a bunch of freebies thrown in for, say, a hundred dollars, but then it turned out to be a mediocre product and the freebies were included from the start anyway. Yeah, you may have wasted some money, but the product was still usable. It was just not entirely worth it. To put it simply, you have just been oversold. Not cheated. We still became adults. We do have adult money, in a way. We definitely do look the part of sparkling young adults, we just don’t feel all that great.
12.36 p.m, Tuesday
Another day has passed, and I am now sitting in my office after just starting a PCR run that is estimated to finish in 3.5 hours. Obviously, there are other things that I could do (and am supposed to do) in the meantime, but unfortunately, I am a frail human who is prone to fits of procrastination and laziness. Ah well. Back to my musings while I sit here, I suppose.
Of course, there is also something disconcerting about spending a big portion of your childhood seeing the entry into adulthood as some sort of threshold that you step over, only to never encounter that metaphorical doorway until you realise too late that you have long since entered the room without noticing it. Sure, I know people host 21st birthday parties to celebrate becoming a legal adult, but really, that does not mean anything, does it? You don’t just suddenly feel like an adult at the stroke of midnight—if anything, from my experience in the circles that I grew up in, most 21 year olds are still being given pocket money from their parents. I am not sure if this is a uniquely Singapore thing, but it makes a great deal of sense here, seeing that many 21 year olds are likely still in university and without the means to support themselves. If I were to hazard a guess, I would say most Singaporeans likely only started feeling like an adult when they start their first Grown Up Job, long after the age of 21.
For myself, well, I feel as though I exist in some sort of strange limbo. Sure, I am legally an adult (a married one at that!), but at the same time, I am a student. Well, a graduate student, but you get my point. One may point out that graduate studies is a kind of occupation by itself, but it remains a fact that I am a graduate student who is not bound by strict policies to commit to office hours of 9am to 5pm daily. It remains a fact that I am, unfortunately, responsible for my own progress. It remains a fortunate fact that my student card is still very much valid and eligible for the various student discounts out there. Sure, a student can be an adult and an adult can also be a student, but realistically? In a place like Singapore, the state of being a student carries connotations of non-adulthood, despite what the laws of this land might decide. Anyway, back to the limbo contemplation. I believe my friends who have been working in their full-time jobs for the past few years might feel less conflicted on the question of their adulthood. I am not sure who is luckier—the Adult Graduate Student, or the Working Adult?
6.02p.m.
Oh bloody hell, the PCR failed and I am peeved beyond words. That is the easiest step that has no business failing. Ugh. Oh well, I guess I will just have to redo the bloody thing tomorrow. What an inconvenient time it is right now, too. I am hungry, but I really am not in the mood for my packed food for dinner, seeing as I already had them for lunch and I can, well, technically, go home. Oh, well. I will just have them for lunch tomorrow, and leave the office in a while so that I can pick up some fast food for dinner on the way home. Times like this call for some comfort food, and I do badly need some comfort. As things stand, I am heavily leaning towards the conclusion that the Working Adult is luckier Than the Adult Graduate Student.
Of course, I am extremely biased given my state as an Adult Graduate Student and given the failed experiment, perhaps much more so than usual. It seems that I should really be continuing this line of thought another day—I do not want to put myself in a fouler mood than the one I am currently in.
Bealie
Series of Ordinary Days 
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