Entry 9: Googled Earth

At four weeks into college life, you grow this feeling called sian-ness. It's like boredom, except with a blank mind. With boredom you know you're bored; with sian-ness you don't even feel bored. You just.. are. It's is like a philosophical term, a phrase, a mantra: I think, therefore I'm sian.

Cogito, ergo sian. Something like that.

It's the kind of feeling where you don't know why you're doing what you're doing, but you just know you're on the right path to somewhere. Even those of you who are all rah-rah I-am-so-self-fucking-motivated-I-bleed-from-my-ears, I know at some point of time in your life you felt the same thing. You just trudge on with life, knowing that perhaps you're on autopilot.

You wake up. You take a shower, or perhaps you don't but you still brush your teeth all the same. You change. The bag has been packed the night before so you can sleep five minutes more. You open the fridge and grab a bottle of fruit smoothie, a strawberry one, or perhaps a mango tango for a change. You close the door behind you quietly so your roommate doesn't wake up.

You walk to class via the route you always walk, like Will Ferrell in Stranger Than Fiction. Across Fifth Street, then University Street, past Elliott Hall, across the Beering fountain, into Wetherill. You hold the door for a Jewish-looking girl with the familiar hot pink Purdue shirt. It's your English classmate. Her name's Caitlin Rinowski, or something along those lines. Something -ski. She says thank you, but you don't say welcome. You just lug your backpack up the stairs and into the classroom.

You find a seat where no pompous asshole can disturb you in class, or maybe just a seat if you're late, and if you're lucky. The day repeats itself for every lesson, every hour, every minute, you sit there and try to absorb, because you know you have to. Then all of a sudden it's 1630, and the day has ended.

Like what Chuck Palahniuk would say, Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

At the exact minute at 1630 a Banghra ringtone Mundian To Bach Ke cackles in the middle of the corridor. It's your girlfriend. You pick up. She called to tell you she's picking you up for dinner. You wait at the Math building for the familiar ah-beng blue Kia to appear, a model so old and obsolete it probably runs on coal. You stand up, backpack slung across one shoulder, your body slanting the other side so it doesn't slip off. You take your time to walk to the car, because you know daylight ends only at 2030hrs.

She gets out of the car. She pushes her giant shades up, like she would a hairband. She walks over to you and kisses you on the lips. You don't even stick your tongue in; you just give a quick peck. You ruffle her hair. She's 10 cm shorter than you, whatever the conversion to inches is you just don't care. She asks you how your day was in her Japanese-accented English, like Ken Watanabe in Letters From Iwo Jima. You just barely manage to gasp, Not bad.

I think, therefore I'm sian.

You flop into the passenger seat, winding down the window to feel the wind in your face, like the movies always do. She tells you about her day, her Chemistry lecture, her Engineering homework, her breakfast, her hall, the callouts she attended. But you, your eyes dart from the wing mirror to the sky, to the windshield, to the road below, to the wing mirror again, your head rested on the headrest. She glances at you; you don't see her glance, you just feel that she did. She holds your four fingers: that's all her hand can manage. She says, Cheer up.

But you don't. You don't not because you want to be a badass, to show her who's boss. You don't because you're not in a bad mood. You don't because you're in no mood. Moodless is what you are. Just sian.

Like what Chuck Palahniuk would say, Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

If only life was like that.