reduced and recycled

There is true drama in the everyday.

Take playing badminton for instance. The drama doesn’t start court-side. The drama begins at home. Tired, sticky and sweaty after 12 hours of breathing the same air with your colleagues, your brain rebels and shuts down. Your body, fit for supermen in the morning, slumps against your easy-chair. And then you groan.

All the world’s ills seem concentrated in your knees, or your shoulders, or your head. You flail about for the panacaea of a double on the rocks, and then you realize you never had any. And then you groan again.

Finding no relief, you become focused on how bad your day has been. You begin asking yourself questions about the future. Deep, disturbing questions. And just as the pessimism begins boiling over, you are told dinner is ready.

You shuffle over to the table, play with the food and eat little, saying nothing. You find yourself having less and less interest in yesterday’s cabbage and ikan bilis, so you get up and head for the shower - and then stop, realizing you have badminton today.

The questions, the reasons, the excuses, they tumble over themselves. I could be sick, so I can’t play today; heck, I am sick, dammit! Or I could say I’m up doing something urgent, I’d think to myself. But you can’t fool a bunch of guys hell bent on sweating two hours like a bunch of animals, prancing about in shorts and rackets; you can’t just tell them you aren’t “making it’.

Bailing out is a sign of weakness. Weakness! You begin, then, to consider the larger questions. Suddenly, as if spurred on by some survival instinct, your brain wakes up. Week-in, week-out, the same routine; work work badminton, rinse and repeat. You can choose to break out of this cycle, friend. You can choose! You can even choose to choose!

By this time, the excessive brain-activity brings on a huge headache, a sharp, eyeball-piercing sort of pain. You start having delusions of grandeur, too. You fancy yourself as some sort of hapless greek trapped in the pits of hades. You console yourself, telling yourself how there is glory in routine, if only you find it in yourself to choose to partake in the routine you can find no way out of.

You start feeling better about yourself, confirmed in your noble sacrifice, and then sit back, and watch an episode (?) of your favourite anime.