A Complaint

I have noticed that my fellow countrymen enjoy complaining a lot. It is very annoying.

Don't get me wrong, complaints have a definite place in an organised society. They help to highlight inadequacies which need to be rectified. As they are a form of feedback, they aid in the optimisation of various processes. Complaints are useful things.

My complaint concerns empty complaints (what my father would refer to as "coffeeshop plotting"). This is when people sit around in groups and make mass complaints about various things which regulatory or legislative bodies are allegedly responsible for, and follow up with sweeping statements as to what needs to be rectified, without consideration as to how these rectifications may be viably carried out. The implication is that someone else should take care of the matter.

You know what? This is lazy. This is irresponsible. If you complain without taking any practical action, you are just being self-indulgent. And if it is a matter which is so minor that no practical action is needed, or that no further action is needed because practical actions are already in motion, maybe you shouldn't be complaining.

We have a nice thing going on in this country. How about stepping up ourselves to correct all the things that need correcting, and appreciating the things that don't?

Blue Airport

(This was originally written in the departure lounge of Tullamarine Airport.)

Airports. Are. Boring.

I’ve been down to the liquor stores, and the cafés, and the speciality shops with the strange chocolates and cosmetics. There’s only so much shopping you can do before you never want to see another duty-free store again.

Also, bookstores. Normally I love bookstores – I spent an hour at one the other day – but the airport ones seem to carry books I would never want to read, for one reason or another. (Twilight graphic novel? Really?)

I’m sitting in the departure lounge right now, my aeroplane sitting in the sun a bare twenty metres away, me in air-conditioned, soft-carpeted comfort, and I am bored.

Think of how the aeroplane must feel.

Endings

Somehow, the end of the year feels like the end of the year. It's probably just my sentimentality talking, since here in the Southern Hemisphere summer's just starting, and if anything, summer is a middle, not a beginning or end. But the year is winding down, and I find myself running through memories - both happy and sad - and feeling a little wistful.

Today our lab had our Christmas gathering, complete with a lot of food and the customary Stealing of Presents. I can't believe it's been a year since the last one. How many people have left? How much has changed? Our gathering was in the exact same room as the last time, but this time I sat on the opposite side of the table. It's the littlest things.

Every year, my co-supervisor tells the story of the one PhD student who went home for the holidays and never came back. There's a portrait of her in the lab, on one of the high shelves. Every year we are entreated to be careful, and please come back in the new year. Every year I shiver, afraid it might be my turn, and it's not so much the fear of dying as the fear of letting everyone down.

Endings, endings, endings. My last day in the lab today, tomorrow I head off with a bag in hand and another on my back. Adventure and homecoming all at once, and did you know that home can be more than one place?

We deal. We always deal. But now, with the afternoon light shining bright over the buildings (home) and through the leaves, there's an ache in my heart.

Canon Rock

I love this song more than should be legal.

It's Midnight, That's My Excuse

I have a Singapore flag on my desk. No one else I know has one on their desk, where they can see it every day and whenever their eyes shift off the computer screen for a second.

It occurs to me that I'm patriotic to a country I'm not even a citizen of.

Is that why my blood boils when I see someone with a pink IC complain, or downright smear mud on the name of their own country? They are recognised, officially, as a citizen. And yet they act as if they would carelessly throw that away. Maybe they would!

Throw it my way, won't you? I want it.

Can't Make Up Its Mind

Melbourne weather, what the heck.

(9:00 pm and the sun hasn't set yet, what kind of country am I in?)

Social Skills

You know those moments when there's another person nearby, and you figure you ought to say something, but simply can't think of something? And then the silence goes on while both of you try to find something to fill the space with, and it just gets worse and worse with every second.

Some people have the skills to deal with this. They just pull a conversation topic from... some other dimension, or something, and just like that, the tension eases. See, I can't do that. Every time I try, I end up babbling like a complete idiot.

Social skills. What are they?

Now, cashiers have the skills. At the shop where I get a bottle of apple-blackcurrant juice every now and then, there's a girl who always notices my nail-polish. I suspect she recognises me purely by my nails. Which is somewhat curious, because it's not as if the colours in my limited collection (light blue, metallic blue, apple-green, gold and lilac) are at all outré, but there you are.

Birds & Staircases

It hadn't been a long day, but I was rather tired and looking forward to a shower as I clambered up the steps to my apartment door. If I had been paying the slightest bit of attention I would have noticed the birds on the stairs before I was almost on top of them.

My apartment is on the second floor of a squat little three-storey building, surrounded by grassy lawns, low bushes and some trees. Off to one side is a small lake, populated by several water-birds.

The water-birds are both enchanting and something of a bane. In the spring the little ducklings and moorhens tumble along like balls of fluff while their parents stalk close by and hiss at anyone who walks past. This year has been a good year for chicks, so it is a common to see them scurrying across the pathways, and one has to be sharp in order to avoid stepping in something unpleasant. The birds themselves are not overly shy, encouraged by the few people who will persist in leaving bread for them. I met one of these individuals early one morning, covertly scattering his cargo over the grass. When he spotted me he scuttled away as if the police were already after him.

The birds are almost grown up now, and largely unafraid of humans, they wander everywhere. Really, it was almost inevitable that I would find two juvenile dusky moorhens on the staircase.

Each of the birds was somewhat smaller than a chicken, so the staircase must have seen immense - so immense that they could not figure the way out of the building. A tar-like fluid, dark green and pungent, dripped from the first stair, clear evidence of their distress. They called out periodically, looking this way and that, taking haltering steps up while eyeing me.

"No, you're going the wrong way," I said. I gestured firmly towards the flight of steps I had just ascended. "Down there."

One of the birds tilted its head in the direction I was pointing, then glanced back at me.

The other one stared for a moment, then purposefully led the way up.

"Suit yourself," I shrugged, and stepped into my own apartment, closing the door firmly before they could get any ideas.

About ten minutes later I glanced out again. The "fluid" had dried out by then, and the birds were nowhere to be seen.

I went back in to call maintenance.