Current mood:

contemplative

counting the stars
Walking home from the MRT station tonight was almost a spiritual experience. For some reason I had a bottle of Starbucks Caramel Frappe in my hand (I was at 7-11 looking for a drink. I decided against the coffee at first, but then I decided I'd probably need a kick tonight and if I thought coffee was too stiff, well, I needed to HTFU). A bit into the stroll home, I realised just how much the teaching stint hit me - it taught me how to drink coffee. I've never liked the taste of coffee - as far as I'm concerned, it's self-inflicted torture. I remember the day I slept three hours because I'm habitually nocturnal, and I had to do FOH for The History of Singapore that night, and I was practically sleepwalking around town waiting for FOH to start. When you're in that kind of situation the horror of drinking coffee pales in comparison to the kick it promises to give you, so I ordered myself a mocha frappe and then sat around wondering what I'd just done. It didn't work, by the way. I didn't feel any kick. Clearly by that time I needed something far stronger than a mocha frappe.

So the frappe proceeded to leak out of the bottle all over my hand like all frappes do, and I was irritated enough I ended up not drinking much on the way home. But anyway, no wonder almost the entire VJ arts department is alcoholic.

So as I walked home, I suddenly looked up at the sky and saw a star. I stopped. I haven't seen stars for a very long time - I recall Hengjie asking during the night cycling trip if anyone else had the impression that they saw more stars when they were younger, and I realised that yes, I don't seem to see stars these days. Then I noticed another star, and another, and what was probably a constellation of them.

Then I did something inexplicable - I tried to count them.

Of course when I did, I inadvertently thought of The Guide - "He started counting the stars. He said to himself, 'People will say, there is the man who knows the exact number of stars in the sky...'"

Yeah, I'm not sure why I did that. I think I wanted to know how this sudden explosion of stars in the night sky would compare to days in the future - that if I were to walk home tomorrow, would the stars still be there, or am I just lightheaded tonight? (Clearly I'm lightheaded - they probably won't be the same stars.) But there is nothing like seeing stars - not one, but many - in the sky to put you in your place. I am reminded now of Troy and its terrible screenplay, "Greece was Greece long before I was born, and Greece will remain Greece long after I am gone."

I think I need coffee.