Refrain, Refrain.

It's a Sunday morning again and I'm sitting here because I don't feel like doing anything else. I think I'll make this a long rambly post for the heck of it. It's a long time since I wrote one of those. I attended a short fiction-writing workshop by Melissa Pritchard yesterday at the Seagull Arts and Media Resource Centre, where I was made to understand all the difficulties of being a writer. Mainly because as a writer you're self-employed, therefore you're playing boss and employee together, so inculcating self-discipline tops the list of hurdles you need to overcome. Judging by my levels of self-discipline, my past record of time management and my successful completion of tasks, I think I'm going to end up plastering propaganda posters onto crumbling walls. Maintaining this blog in itself is proving to be a painful lesson in consistency, so I'm wondering why I wanted to be a writer (in addition to other things) when I was a kid. Let's not talk about this, any mention of my future gets me damp and fungus-prone nowadays.

The past one year has been what I call a post-school vacation. Fourteen years of exams and worn-out erasers must amount to some form of regression, and since I managed to get into college and convince people I was doing all right in it, I figured I might as well bring out the sun-hat. If I haven't spoken about college it's because I've been in the process of coming to terms with how incredibly lucky I am to have landed here. I never wanted to go to JUDE but now that I'm here I practically live on campus. There are parts of the city I haven't seen in a year, and I feel out of sorts if I don't walk around on campus for two days running. I play pretend-basketball there in the morning. I attend classes after that. I mooch about till evening. More than anything, I walk. I walk past the football field and fences, past old crumbly buildings aligned with swanky new ones, I walk from gate to gate and I feel happy, because school was small and handkerchief-sized. School was hectic, and claustrophobic, and confusing without being overwhelming. College is so much more, and getting to know college has taken over much of the past six months, with the result that I haven't done other things. I've read next to nothing, and watched next to nothing, and I've forgotten where my favourite channels are on the television. I've done a bit of photography, but that's because I'm still in love with my camera. And with the world.

I was in South City the other day, and I saw something very interesting. A man was cleaning the set of escalators at the back of the mall, and this is how he did it. He placed a piece of cloth on the handrail, got on to the escalator, and slid all the way to the top, looking immensely bored. Then he got onto the escalator going down, placed the cloth on the handrail, and slid all the way to the bottom again, yawning. He repeated this twice with the opposite sides of either escalator. I was very tempted to ask him to let me do it, only I didn't. I don't know why. I think I'd like to have a job like that, it is a verrry verry khooool. As a kid I thought the best way to make money was to be a window-cleaner in New York because you got to work in mid-air, got paid in dollars, and saw interesting things. Now I think papering walls with posters is more feasible. The older you get, the smaller you get.

I was going through the old blog yesterday, it's much nicer. I tried to keep it funny and impersonal and it worked, only I don't want to try anymore. There was a very irate Sunday Morning Post I wrote there, and I've realised that the washing machine still makes my house sound like a minefield. It's good to know some things don't change. Maybe I'll write more here this year just so I can map out how it was the following year. I love finding little connections in the strangest of places. There's fish frying today too, and my mother just asked me if I'd like some. Only I've been typing this out really fast with a piece of paper in my mouth given to me by my father that I must not put down because it is very important and if I put it down I shall forget all about it. The strangest thing, however, is that it has an unknown phone number on it and I have no idea who I'm supposed to call.

Some things never change.