The Recent Turbulent Past (Meet My Friend Payn Killah)

The past month and a half has been an intriguing chapter in 2006 for many reasons. For starters, there was an upheaval of sorts at work with many comings and goings, hints and allegations, Als and Simons, meetings and huddles, even paper theft. Then i went to my first reservist in-camp training, ever! The army forgot about me, left me to become the blob I have snugly fit into, and sent me a invitation 11 years late, to join my peers to hang out in olive green, uncomfortable uniform. I managed however to sneak away from my military duties with an official permit of excuse (in layman's terms, an off pass, haha!) to hang out with my colleagues in Bintan. And I do mean literally hang. The adventure taught us all one lesson - that together we can achieve anything, and that one can be 32 years old and still be scared shitless. Then I went back to the army to join my peers in the jungles of north-western Singapore to build tentages, prone on soggy soil, lay out concertina entrapments (to keep the dogs out), perform sentry duties at 6am, heat and eat food from plastic packaging (lo and behold my lovelies, there's peanut paste dessert now), count store items, clean rifles (I couldn't even remember how to strip the weapon!), and be fed well.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I hurt my back. The compressed nerve decided to turn on the pinch of death and cause me endless shudders of pain and agony. This is a long standing problem. The last time the damn thing decided to make its presence felt was early one morning when i was ironing for work. I sneezed and i was instant and effectively paralysed from the hip down. My sister brought to the neighbourhood clinic on my father's wheelchair. The doctor didn't have the right medicine as I am allergic to most NSAIDs (aspirin type painkillers) gave me 'the other' painkillers to ease the suffering, probably an adverse reaction to my unbrushed set of teeth and unwashed body to punish me further. Today, eighteenth day of December 2006, my back gloriously hurts. I did an Xray this afternoon (damn the frigidly cold metal table). My fate with the MRI machine will be revealed in the next few days.


In addition to all this madness, my sister got ROMed, my company did the annual Xmas bash where I won the 13th prize and the best dressed award for my impersonation of Clark Kent the school teacher with stripper tendencies (the MC returned my belt loop), my sister had her wedding dinner, and to top it all off, I aggravated my back condition by helping my father in and out of his wheelchair.

And I have become lazy. The laziness is an overall aura of apathy, ennui and mental murk accentuated by the fact it’s the festive season, am not too sure where my job is going and I have been to Mat's Xmas party.

Thus ends this episode of the pain up north and around the last vertebrae.