it's been very, very long since i came in here. to expunge memories and things that i tread in, on and about... mundane things that anchor me to the reality of life.

i've already faded where i was in bangkok, so anand ivan and guys, do forgive me for a less than complete trilogy of my very very transient, very very passionate expenditure of life there.

i promise, i will complete it. one of these days, before school reopens and i'm tossed back into the numbing routine of schoolwork, i will.

because, as the past few weeks have shown me, life is, really, quite underrated.

there're people who wish to relinquish their hold on life at this very moment. it's almost as if a tendril of their dark, maroon-tainted-black thoughts travels across continents and time to reach me, because i've feel feeling so acutely the loss of life over the past few days. no, i'm not being morbid... it's rather indescribable. nothing faintly creepy about it at all, either, just a heightened sense of how tangible, physical and visceral life can be. as opposed to what we so-oft take it for - granted. besides the cliche about the beating of the heart and all that, i can also feel my brain and its cohabiting vessels pounding, thudding, being alive. i can spend an hour watching the little polygonal shapes making up my skin and the little hairs poking their heads up like a toddler learning to stand between the polygons. i examine my eye in the mirror, looking at (and past) the little lines on the brown iris. i lie on my bed and feel the various systems housed neatly inside the mesenchymal derivatives (bones and flesh, my dears) operating, pulsating perhaps, along with arterial spurts. it's almost like i've taken to reading myself, savoring every word, like an anatomy textbook. which is really queer, considering that i've never truly liked anatomy for its tedium and onerous memorizations.

and of course, with life comes death. and funnily enough, the concept of death seems to exert itself in a different form in the past few days as well. just last night i had a protracted dream where i was part of a team. i couldn't tell you, in all honesty, if it was a clean, sanitized version of the reception room at the FOC campsite (which had a fridge just like the one in the dream) or an impression from Fast Food Nation's sterile workrooms. anyway it was mostly white, with many fridges. it was a place that was at once familiar and yet a stranger, something like deja vu but not as explicit. i found myself in the midst of many people, whom i know, and yet didn't. i couldn't tell their names, for example. i knew i knew them, but who were they? we were all being held in a very small room. and now i really am rather convinced that it was the SU campsite, because what happened after that was that even though the air conditioning was kept on, people began to suffocate from the placement of airtight sheets over the airvents on the door. and the story zoomed forward after that (i assume) because then suddenly i was again surrounded by a flurry of animated people, many of whom were in pairs, lugging bodies between them. the bodies were, strangely enough, all wrapped in sheets, not exposed. it was a massive case of unidentified bodies, bodies without identities, and mass graves spring to mind. i was roped in to help as a medic, which i insinuated from the next task that i was given: to triage a young caucasian male whose body was horribly curled upon itself and twisted grotesquely from the cold. someone had opened a fridge and gasped, finding him inside. in fact, there was a very certain knowledge that most, if not all, the dead were found in fridges. this one was wedged in the sidedoor, and i recall clearly how i wondered a person of his size could fit into the sidedoor where the bottles are usually kept vertically, leaving a dented and swinging holder. his limbs were not pure white or cyanosed, as would be expected of hypothermia, but retained a beige-ish tinge. he was hairy. but apparently, he was considered to be alive, and i went about measuring his blood pressure with a funny little digital contraption that i have never perceived before in my life. totally not your usual heavy, bombastic, old fashioned sphyggie. i didn't get a chance to see the reading, cos he began to twitch and that evolved rapidly into a full blown fit or generalised spasms; i couldn't tell which. (they're overlapping concepts; spasms account for the characterisitc presentation of fits) and the dream ended there, i think, and my brain began to recount the events that happened yesterday, starting with desmond's meeting.

what a strange... lot of concepts and thoughts to grapple with. i've never thought myself any more sophisticated a dream-interpreter or a philosopher than the average man on the street, but this certainly calls for a lot more ruminating. not voluntary; a compulsion.

i've taken to reading the classics. austen, bronte, dostoyevsky (or dostoevsky, as some may know him by)... in a frantic attempt to reacquaint myself with the english language. i do feel rather ashamed of the deplorable-ness of my grasp of vocabulary, ah, but what can i do but try to read more? many small things that clutter my life must be taken out of perspective for me to regain any semblence of control over myself.

school, alas, draws near.