Well. It is now 5.56p.m on Tuesday, and I am on my way home. It is one of those days where your experiment failed halfway due to machine malfunction and you were forced to choose between staying for a couple more hours and redoing the whole thing or to throw your hands up, go “oh screw this!” and make your way home. Obviously, I chose the latter and am currently making my way home while feeling terribly sorry for myself.
…well that was unexpected. The train was packed like sardines and it seems that somebody tried to make a dash for it and force themselves into the cabin, got stuck in the closing train doors, and then ended up running away. I had someone shoved into my back and when I turned my head, all I saw the stunned expressions of the other passengers and that particular passenger dashing away. Huh. Well, nothing like a good shock to jolt you out of your foul, foul mood! No, really, I do feel better. I am not sure why, but I am not about to look a gift horse in the mouth.
3.04p.m, Wednesday
So. Q and I overslept today, and I ended up getting a theoretically sufficient amount of sleep. I won’t be getting much work done today, but I can’t bring myself to regret the loss in productivity. I once heard somewhere that people who are always unhappy usually suffers partly from some physical discomfort—someone whose body is healthy and strong typically would not feel too bad about themselves. I suppose there is an element of truth in that, then?
Huh. I wonder part of the reason my girlfriends and I are starting to have health issues in our twenties is simply that none of us are actually getting enough rest. It kind of lines up, actually. Two of them are in high-stress occupations where they spend part of the year in an intense overtime haze and they seem to be suffering from more health issues than the rest of us. Myself, well. You get the idea. Of course, I am not so whimsical that I believe that simply getting enough rest would be enough to keep one completely healthy, but it seems perfectly reasonable that insufficient rest could, at the very least, be one reason for our less than perfect health. Well, it might be one of hundreds of potential reasons, but it could still be a reason.
I am not sure if it is the stress that most of our health issues could potentially be derived from, or if it is the lack of sufficient sleep. Frankly, I am not too interested in finding out either—I am likely dealing with similar levels of stress as the Average Graduate student, that is, a great deal, and I am definitely not getting enough sleep. Yes, I neither have my cake nor can I eat it. Oh, this idiom is hilarious in this context. Most people understand it as one being unable to eat their cake and still have it (obviously, if you eat the cake, you no longer have it), and that one could either have their cake in their hand and be unable to eat it, or eat it and no longer have a cake in their hand. Well. I do not even have a cake in the first place! My hands are empty and so is my stomach! Why would I care about my cake when I do not even have one? At this rate, I am quite sure that just having one of these two variables solved would be enough to do me a great deal of good.
Wednesday, 1.19 p.m.
Well look at that, another week has passed us by. I am currently sitting in office waiting for yet another PCR to finish. I was listening to Mayday while pipetting away at my bench earlier…ah, what a quietly devastating jab in the eyes.
Mayday has a specific group of songs that mainly centre around the various aspects of adulthood: growing up, learning to play by the rulebook while trying not to lose the parts of yourself that you once swore you would always wear on your sleeve but have since been forced to tuck into your breast pocket because keeping it out of sight is at least better than losing it. That’s one jab in the left eye. Another theme they seem to circle around is the idea of friendship—friends who witnessed you growing up, who look at you and see the version of you way before you had to package it all into a brown paper parcel with a bow tied neatly on top, friends whom you once thought would be there every step of the way in life but have now been reduced to seeing once or twice a year. Thrice, if you are lucky. There, that’s the jab in the right eye.
What a strange feeling it is to think about that rebellious friend of mine who used to get into trouble over her attire in school, that she is now a perfectly polished corporate lady mentoring interns. What a strange feeling to see that perpetually sleepy girl who could never stay awake during afternoon class now working till midnight almost everyday. How strange. It is funny to think about the contrast between who they were, and who they are now—the kind of funny that you would probably laugh about during meetups while admitting to yourself in the quiet of the night that it is, in reality, sad.
But that is the reality of life, isn’t it? You have to laugh at the absurdity of it all, otherwise you might just find yourself—well, not exactly crying since it really isn’t all that sad—I would say “melancholic” would be the correct word here.
See, one thing that people seem to know, in theory, about adulthood, is the loneliness of it all. But knowing it and feeling it are two very different things, aren’t they? Sure, we all know from childhood, in theory, that one day we would grow up and build lives of our own, and almost definitely go into different jobs in vastly different fields. Unfortunately, I also happen to be the type of idiot for whom knowing something in theory does absolutely nothing for what I feel in practice. I suppose some part of me always imagined that adulthood would mirror adolescence in the sense that I would somehow end up working alongside my friends, or that at least, we would end up living our everyday lives alongside each other. Ah, well. I would have liked to think that the past few years of adulthood had disabused me of these wishful notions, but these pesky Mayday songs have me feeling all wistful again. Ugh. Guess that is the mark of a brilliant band, huh?
I cannot help but feel a sort of tenderness towards this band—after all, it almost feels as though they have lived the life I wanted. No, I do not want to be in a band; I do not have a single musical bone in my body. What I mean is that I do envy the concept of building a career over a lifetime with your best friends. There, I said it.
I can almost hear the voices of the adults of my youth mocking me for being naive again, but did Mayday not accomplish just that? Yes, I know that they are that one group of friends who made it, and that for every group of friends who manage to build a career with friendship as one of the cornerstones, thousands more have failed. I am not trying to do it myself though, am I? I understand the temperaments, interests, and strengths of myself and of my friends—this is a complete impossibility for us. So? It only makes me feel fonder towards those who not only tried, but managed it. In fact, they did not merely manage it, they have succeeded, likely beyond their wildest dreams when they first started. To me, their very existence is proof that such a life can be possible at all, even if it is not possible for me. There is a whole life in that, in knowing this possibility became a reality for some people out there. I sure do sound noble right now, don’t I? Truly, this tenderness is not borne of some especially selfless and virtuous part of my heart. I suppose what I mean is that the knowledge that this could exist is sustaining in itself. Just knowing that some people out there managed to prove it to be possible is enough to make life feel larger. We all need something to live for, after all. Sometimes I feel that I am hungry for ideals more than ambition.
This isn’t a Mayday fangirl post—I would not call myself a hardcore fan by any means (am I considered a fan, even?). Let’s put it this way. The band has a way of looking at occurrences and events that are painfully ordinary in everyday life, and magnifying all the ways in which they are Definitely Not Ordinary. Yes, I get it. I get that everyone grows up. Everyone has to go through that phase where they learn to compromise, swallow all the unfairness of adulthood, go through the mundanity of working, paying the bills, and buying that ugly pair of shoes simply because they are practical and comfortable. Everyone learns to navigate the inefficient bureaucratic system of office life, learns to write “I hope this email finds you well” without batting an eyelid. Everyone learns to set some dreams aside. Everyone learns to settle to some extent. It is part and parcel of life, isn’t it? It is such an ordinary and expected occurrence that you forget what a devastating thing it really is.
I remember remarking to Q that these songs made me feel melancholic because Mayday has a way of making everything feel so big when in reality, whatever I am walking into daily is just so small, and him telling me that many of their songs also have an underlying message of trying one’s best even in the ordinary days and finding happiness in the small things all the while continuing to dream big. Well, I suppose that is true, too. But perhaps it is not that whatever I am walking into daily is small, just that it only feels small. Perhaps that is the point of what they have been going on and on about, huh? That the things that feel insignificant and ordinary are really what make up a life. The cliché “maybe the real treasure was the friends we made along the way” trope, if you will. But then again, clichés exist because they are, more often than not, consistently accurate, aren’t they? Perhaps I am the cliché one, to be pining for excitement and something big in life when, in reality, I am probably just the type to miss a good thing because I was too busy hoping for something good to actually notice it when it happens.
If I were to look at it from the point of view of a Scientist-In-The-Making, as I am, one data point by itself does not make a result significant—it is the accumulation of similar data points that eventually leads to significance. That magical p<0.05, that is. After all, a wedding is a day. Sure, it is The Beautiful Day in my life where I was the most radiant girl in the room marrying My Love. But a marriage is a life in itself. And it is the everyday nonsense that accumulates into a marriage. Maybe all the things that I considered small and ordinary only feel small because I am experiencing them one at a time, but perhaps there will be a point where I look back on this and see something memorable that I do not feel now. In this sense, then, the significance of life comes from the accumulation of ordinary days. What a tribute to this blog. And I wasn’t even trying! Huh. This sure feels poetic, doesn’t it?
Anyway.
It is somehow 8.40p.m now, I am home, and the PCR seemed to have worked. Things seem to be going…well the road is bumpy but the journey is still ongoing. Bumpin’ along, I guess.
Bealie
Series of Ordinary Days 
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