mid-week complaint
the guestroom's bathroom drain is blocked again, thanks to the piece of shit renovators who left me such long-lasting and recurring problems due to their lousy work ethics. had to contact the id's boss again who promised he'd get the plumbers to come down again, but until now haven't heard back. worse, i actually have a guest staying for a while for now... so basically now i have to leave my bedroom door open and unlocked including at night so that the sole useable bathroom remains accessible at any time. imagine if i had rented that spare room out to, say, some random guy stranger. then have to allow him access to my bedroom where i'm sleeping cos of the toilet choke, wtf.
in other news, yesterday i watched a docu/film on netflix called found, in which three adopted teenage girls across america discover they are blood-related cousins from china, and engage a genealogy researcher in beijing to help them track down their birth families and reconnect with their roots. a really poignant (non-fiction) film. i ended up crying a lot throughout, super fml. have many thoughts from my experience of watching the film as well as about its actual content, but shall address just some of my thoughts here.
namely, introverted and anti-social as i am, i do find it valuable to hang out with different types of people every once in a while. living with someone else for this past week in a way that mimicked how we lived when we were in hk, i've had to do/watch/read some things that i wouldn't have done/watched/read on my own. it's like, people can recommend you to watch this watch that, but nothing is more effective than actually having someone using the tv watching it right now, so that you also sit down and watch for a while and end up being captivated by it, if you get what i mean. people that you normally already live or hang out with already have their own set genres of topics that you've already been well exposed to, so i feel like having new input of new genres/topics is quite valuable to me.
sometimes i think that there has been no other time in my life that i was more exposed to such broad and wide range of content/information/activities than when i was in hk, precisely because i had to meet, get to know and spend extended amounts of time with such a broad and wide range of people across walks of life, industries, job levels and all. and i think i kinda miss that sometimes. like, waking up in the morning to smelling brewed coffee (which i never drink) and global business news on tv (which i would never watch) and being forced to wait until the morning's news programme has concluded before we can even proceed with the day... or whizzing down some steep taiwanese slope at breakneck speed on a self-guided round-island bike tour (which i'd never dare do on my own)... or learning about the latest goss or hottest products in the singapore influencer circle (which i'd never have had the time to read up about myself)... all these give you a glimpse into the so many other aspects of life that i wouldn't otherwise have tried or found out on my own or within my own usual circles. just fascinating.
secondly, i have become such a crybaby. i wasn't always like that, but some time along the journey of life, in more recent years, i started being very much more prone to tearing easily just by seeing other people cry. in the first place, i think i have always been somewhat quick to tears on matters close to my heart. in 2017/2018, i chalked increased occurrences of such events up to 后遗症 from some privately traumatic experience. but it's 2021 now and i have become only more sensitive to what you might call "other people's tears", not less. like i can know that it's just fiction, it's just a show, or that the person is from some unrelated land far away from me; it can be not just watching something on tv, or listening to something on the radio, but even just reading news articles about some random thing, or worse, editing a touching story, and then i would be "moved" to tears. it's not very convenient at all, tbh.
frankly, i feel like it's a terrible weakness and a rather unwelcome trait to possess. so far there has been only one person in my life who bothered to google this issue and point out to me that they actually appreciate it because it apparently indicates "a well of deep emotional empathy" that most others do not have, and that it is what makes me different/special/good in both my line of work and as a person. it made me feel like i am happier to be myself, and that i did not have to try to disguise this part of me from at least one person. even after everything, sometimes i think back on these words (among many others) and the person's clear efforts spent on psychoanalysing me and my various quirks and traits, and i just feel... understood. like the time, too, when person compared me to a mad woman obsessed with the beauty of fantasies in a lit text. (like, surely you have to really like somebody a lot in order to want to spend this much energy on observing her so closely over the years to gain such a critical analysis of her various behaviours? i mean, person clearly was not as aware or accurate in understanding and analysing others around them.) how many times in one's life can one feel so (for the lack of a better word) connected in spirit and understanding to another? i hope it is not my last.
there is one other seemingly contradictory trait of mine, however. some part of me quite enjoys violence and gore. and while i would cry whenever movie characters cry, i wouldn't bat an eye when they get slashed in the throat or stabbed in the chest or speared in the head and blood splatters all over. the only thing i would cringe at is if they put a sharp object to someone's eye or nose or wrist or some other immensely sensitive part of the body. that's why i enjoy game of thrones and all its equivalents, and zombie shows and all. weird, right.
Click to viewin other news, the difficulties of my project have now set in. i really need to remind myself not to put myself through this again next year. people actually expressed surprise that i dared do it again this year even after my first experience, fml. they also mentioned other projects are nowhere "as ambitious as" mine. now is the time where i wonder if the project can actually be produced, and entertain seriously thoughts of scaling everything down majorly. it wouldn't really be ideal, but i don't know if i can really make it work otherwise. (why does this sound so familiar?) we shall see.