The dwelling

"You know what might be fun?", I heard myself ask.
"YEAH!!! A night blog-a-thon!!", came the instant reply.

So here I am dosed up on a cup of coffee past midnight, determined to make it to the finish line and hoping I wont hit anyone at work tomorrow, being obviously sleep deprived. Why? Because my imaginary therapist was right. I am going to explode with overwhelming thoughts any day now.

In the past few weeks at work, when I really should be working, I have often found myself living inside my head (more than usual). But it happens that I seem to deliver the best speeches when I'm drifting off to sleep and draft good blog posts in my head when I am at work (somewhat like how I perform in rock concerts and play violin solos when I'm commuting in the train and how I travel the world and swim with the whales when I am in the bus).

Not having the luxury of sitting and blogging on a regular basis has taken its toll on me. It's not that I turn out world class posts or have pressing issues to blog on, but the simple process of downloading thoughts to an editable screen in front, that allows undo-ing, rephrasing, reviewing, etc, seems to have a magical effect on me. Like the new burner I got recently.

Back in university, we had to take several cross-discipline modules as part of the requirements to graduate. A lot of students saw it as a burden and a distraction from focusing on the core modules of their major. But not me! I had too much fun picking an array of modules on Astronomy, French, Computing, Quantum Physics, Psychology, Food Science, Communication, Tamil and Complementary Medicine. Doing those modules on external topics I was highly interested kept me sane enough to survive the competitive atmosphere of a South East Asian tertiary education system.

I recall bits of a lecture from the Complementary Medicine module on the effect of essential oils on the human senses and general well being. To put it to test, I bought a burner and tried a "mandarin and tangelo" infusion in my new room. It smells divine. And look at me, the oils have already made my brain think it's okay to stay up late and rattle about useless things.

Shu's new essential oil burner, which the sales lady assured won't set off any smoke alarms

I love the new room! It's clean, spacious and it's got Shu written all over it. There's more redecoration work to be done!