Yet another night
27th April 2001, 0735 hrs
Location: Arts Canteen
Weather: looking good
remember May Ee writing once about how lovely and peaceful it is to sit here in the morning, so I
thought I'd find out for myself. It is nice and quiet; the sun's rising over the trees of Kent Ridge, screened just a
little by the roof of this place. The university staff - canteen vendors, janitors, librarians and the like - are just
coming in. No students yet; no surprise, given that the exams have ended for a good many people. Which suits me fine: I
like this easy, breezy quiet, broken only by the sounds of morning - the squeal of a rubber hose, the gruff throat-clearing
of a truck engine, the faint skrrsh of a broom sweeping, a radio on the edge of hearing - and birds, always birds chirping
squawking chittering. And crapping. I just saw a mynah go on a chair not far from me. Yep, it's the Arts Canteen all right.
I've just come from breakfast with Vernie at The Cheese Prata Shop (yep, that's what it's called now). We've spent the night in school, working and talking and laughing with Val and Sandra. Laughing especially. There's no better way to ward off the terrors of the night than to have a good hearty laugh. I daresay we annoyed a few people - I didn't see any, not really, but it's late at night, and sound carries, echoing down the voids and corridors. Especially Sandra, who's tremendously demonstrative and whose voice ranges from a whisper to like, well, REALLY LOUD. Imagine "FUCK YOU, BITCH!!" reverberating down the corridors at three in the morning. And then there was Val's scream when she saw this really fat lizard. (Val's got a thing about lizards, apparently. One fell on her last week, at four a.m. or so, and I heard her shriek from the other side of the library rooftop. Like I said: sound carries.) A wonder security didn't show up.
It was a good night, if not very productive. We talked. A lot. As you've no doubt guessed by now. Conversation topics were the time-honoured traditional ones of late-night group-chatter everywhere. We talked about sex. And relationships. And love. And how all men are scum (sigh). And email. By four a.m. people had started singing. And then we talked about death. All the usual twentysomething things.
(We also talked about Sartre, and Freud, and Heidegger, and Durkheim, and Orwell, but hey, that was work.)
I've a group discussion meeting later on, at ten, so that's why I'm not going home just yet. I had an hour's nap earlier on, so that should cover it. With any luck I won't sleep again till about midnight tonight. That should normalise my sleep patterns. I did take eleven hours of sleep the night before last, after all.
I need to work.