Running the cogs.

Maybe it’s only me but I find it exceptionately easy to fall into routine. It’s only day 6 at work and I’m already going on it like I’ve done it for the past 2 years (excluding the hard and new parts, like going on a meeting with a very lethargic looking person from the insurance brokers or calling a designer who sounded like I’m willing him to commit suicide).

It doesn’t mean I’m doing a good job, though. It also didn’t mean that I enjoy routine and monotony. I don’t. I like things fresh and constantly new, yet it is undeniable that we live on routine and that routine does, at most, bring comfort and peace and consistency.

Work day will begin by waking, packing, taking the 7.30/7.45 train to KL Sentral, grabbing the Klang train at 8.15/8.30, breakfast, work, lunch, work and then the train home, which I use to catch up on my anime on the phone. Then dinner, then chill, then sleep until the next day and rinse and repeat.

I’ve been getting along the days feeling like I’m part Gene Kelly under the rain and part Forrest Gump on a road trip, in the sense that I’m feeling cheerful over things I don’t really know or don’t really understand or just cheerful anyway because it’s the way to be. Not in the manner like I’m having a spring in my step or seeing fraying bougainvilleas as majestic roses; but I’m walking with the sun behind a gentle cloud and humming to whatever song that’s stuck in the head.

I take it as a way to cope with the strain, but well, if it is, then I’m coping pretty well.
I realised today that I didn’t like my job. I don’t hate it, but it’s just this; it’s not something I’ve signed up and bargained for. It’s something I would’ve done in a desperate state of unemployment, but at the whole - especially when reading up or listening on fellow course mates’ exciting and unpredictable ventures - I feel like I’ve registered for the Dead Poets Society and instead got the Campus’ Program for the Future Janitor.

To think that I spent months wondering how it would be to cope with journalism, when now I’m doing anything but journalism. And where I’m sitting now, things are starting to get stale and uninspiring if not for the rather positive outlook I seem to have on it (learn what’s shoved to you, because in the real world where dog eat dogs and corporate leaders are masked alien tyrants, whatever you can get, keep it).

And so I did.

A few people asked why I didn’t apply for a change when I discovered I won’t be doing journalism, the big punch-line is that; I didn’t know I won’t be doing journalism until the end of the exams and I’m starting to get calls from the office. And it’s not like I can completely help it. Ms Sharon said I’ll be going to an ‘online publication company’ (to which I immediately deduced is a HoMag, due to the secrecy of it). Ms Sharon also said ‘online magazine’, I believe, and even at the amended list of where we’ll be sent to, mine was marked ‘online JR co’.

Gee whiz, I sure was expecting some sort of obscure online magazine where the people will work in leather-tight pants and worshipping Hardo-Gay. At least that’s a journalism co, even if it will hurt my heterosexual believes and standpoint. What I got is an IT company that has, at this moment, nothing to do with whatever online publication aside from the fact that it publishes websites. Does that count?

No, I don’t enjoy typing letters. I don’t like calling designers to goddamn send the brochure drafts. I don’t like the sound of grant proposals and hamper fax advertisements and I sure dislike making minutes of meetings. The only thing I enjoy is the little bit of advertising copywriting I‘m tasked to do, but at the end of the day, I wonder why I’m there doing the things I’m not supposed to.

I don’t hate it. I’m learning from it. But damn, I want to write about something that has happened and then let others read it, because even if it’s the most basic, stoic and downright boring piece of writing, it’s still a story.

I want to write stories.

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Apparently, the kitten I let in from the gutter seem to be treating the place as some sort of hide-out. Or at least, that’s what its mother would prefer to think, and now when I go behind I hear mewing and if I pop the gutter-hole open, a kitten head appears and would seem to want to come inside and tear at the curtains.

Dad’s idea is to flush it away with boiling water.

My idea is to leave the gutter hole open and when the kitten’s in it’ll meet the Rastafarian pup and maybe they can be friends.

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How does this sound for the opening text to a website Client Support page?

“In giving life, God gave the means to live.”

If you see it online somewhere, you’ll know that it was written by a guy half-awake and wallowing in the last bit of his daily-depleting sanity, and know to feel some sort of pity, perhaps, or even feel happy for him, because it’s sadly the only thing creative that he felt he had done over the past week.