A World So Alien

Today there were no colors, only strong winds. The usual morning sky, blue and often diffused with golden shades, became gray. The houses looked ill, while the trees acquired a hunchback with their liveless boughs. The trees shivers and trembles, while the leaves hollered at the violent aggression. A few crestfallen leaves swirled past my lone figure, as if to ward off a cosmic scale apocalyptic day ahead. Somewhere near the horizon, I saw subtle glimmer of golden light wrapped around the pale moutain range. Which was where, I suspect, normalcy lived in exile.

It was a world so alien.

Change of Mind

I had a staggering change of mind today. While I rummaging through the torrents of information on web pages of various universities, I realized my previous ambition of waltzing past a Gothic stone arch of a Ivy-League standard institution, suddenly became so alienating. 

I have set aside five esteemed insitutions to which I will painstakingly populate empty spaces on the application forms and diligently write application essays, having thought that these “untouchable” super five are well-endowed with academic features and opportunities that would without any doubt appeal to me.

A stroll in a city

I happened to walk along a pedestrian street in the city when a blind man burst in from the margins of my field of vision and became the latest addition to the moving crowd. Aimlessly, he hit his walking stick on the worn out pavement ground, while – unbeknownst to him – slowly drifting away from the pedestrian pavement. The two ladies in front of me, upon whom I have placed great expections to – due to their close promiximity to him – lend a helping hand, had walked away in wanton disregard for his safety.

“Here”, I said as I reached out to the edge of his sleeve, applying a mild pulling force enough to inform and effect a change in his bearings towards the yellow tactile pads, just before he was about to run straight into a steel pole bordering the pedestrian pavement.

Time

Four years ago, a few classmates had their hands on my scrapbook which I carried around school. Therein lies snippets of ideas in the form of bullet points, mind maps, and doodles; to-do-list which largely remained unchecked due to my unrealistic ambitions vis-a-vis the time I had; and most importantly, a timetable which contained the most minute detail of what I ought to do at a certain time on a certain day of the week, from lunch and sleeping time to jogging and studying time.

I could not bother much as to what they were doing with my scrapbook. But soon, they began to chuckle among themselves, opening a wide knowledge gap that prompted me to satiate my curiosity. It turns out that my timetable was tampered with, with the original item assigned to 10.30pm mercilessly slashed with a strike through. Next to it was the mocking letters, in capital – SEX, as if something as leisurely, comparatively trivial, and – if you watch enough pre-coital scenes on TV- spontaneous as the experimentation of my libido needed to be corralled neatly into a timetable.

Time is my commodity to my future, I have long decided. I recently read a book about the hidden benefits of being messy, unorganized, and unplanned, but the fact that I have a lot to do in my one and only life (no, I am not entitled to an after life due to my intransigence to abandon reason for faith), had invoked my deep-seated skepticism for the application of such messiness in my life. The urge to ensure that every second is well-spent in contributing towards my long term potential, having had a mostly stagnated younger days, is ever present.

Today, I penned every time management problems on my scrapbook, in order to rectify my time management technique, in hope that I can perfect my timetable one day. Alas, in a rare instance of a low emotional ebb, I came to a disconcerting realization that I am in fact wasting a huge chunk of my time, thinking about my time.