You know life has gone wrong when

1. You go to work with the most disgrutled look on your face for two consecutive days
2. You are so upset with working OT for the pittance of SGD350 that nothing in the world seems to be able to comfort you
3. You show outright disrespect and impatience for your boss who is almost indubitably one of the most inept, distracted and ill-disciplined women you've met in your life
4. You gripe at how everyone else leaves before you even when you're not on duty and are therefore supposed never to go home last and lock up the miserable office
5. You grouse over how the buses never come to take you home and the weather is dismally wet and grey and you feel like you're worse than a slug pulverised by an avalanche of table salt
6. You are bitter over how your elder brother gets the parental attention, when your dad who is almost always at home takes the trouble to fly out to chauffeur him home in the rain, when you have to worm your way home with 10,000 other people on the bus
7. And as if the world hasn't yet come crashing on you, your dad makes you cut up a whole honey dew when you just get home, simply because you happen to be in the kitchen in the most inopportune of moments, but your brother who is nice and dry and comfortably seated in the living room reading the papers and munching on some pastry, is inoculated against such humdrum rubbish.
8. You - after all the abuse both in the office and at home - storm up to your room and collapse on the table but are either too tired, too vexed or too fed up to cry.

I'm completely wasted and have been so since my day ended after the last meeting. Yesterday ended with me quivering for no apparent reason again. CG came online twice to chat with me, but I was just too tired and upset to talk properly with him, so I practically left him alone and let him leave me alone.

Hell, I've never felt more abandoned. Not met up with Wilson and gang for the week, not talked to anyone properly for the week, and all the while I've just been shuttling from office to home and back to the office. I know that something in me is crumbling away and I'm desperately looking for some prop to keep me up. All the time I've been thinking how much better those guys who get to do research are. Just because I'm physically too healthy, I'm left in this hellhole and abused by all those fools who are so pathetically irresponsible I end up doing all the nonsense and the work keeps piling up because no one wants to do his own work. And all the MCs that my colleagues are taking don't help. Some day soon, I'm going to stamp my foot down firmly.

I need some meaning, some impetus in all this monotony. My brain is dying, I'm dying, my heart is dying, and honestly, I don't know what is left in me that isn't yet dying in this stultifying and suffocating madness.

I've taken to reading poetry on the bus now. I'm re-reading the anthology I bought when I was in Narita airport, an anthology by Zagajewski, a Czech poet. It's almost like the precious moments I have on the buses to and from work are now my personal moments, moments I have to myself and only to myself. So Zagajewski's 'Canvas' becomes my soulmate, and I let her speak to me, as I speak to her myself. It's just like how I used to preserve time and the venue that my close friends and I used to meet in JC; I never liked it when any other party came to use it, even if legally speaking, those were public spaces. But this time, well I'm glad I own the book; sometimes maybe then, friends can be bought. Ok but I don't want to know that Canvas is a mercenary friend. No I don't want to have to lug on board all the baggage of Canvas being something as cheap as that. Pecuniary vocabulary begone!

I'm tired. I need the wine downstairs.