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18 March 2007:
Dozing in and out of sleep during journeys, awaken by a sudden laughter or the feel of a gaze. On the unfamiliar train journey, I fell into slurs of half-awaken states, the chatting quite audible, but bearing no sense. I know the meanings of individual words but they defy attachments and string together to form a sentence, whole-less.

Rushing in and out, round and about, from and to places which require my presence, of which I do not understand their presence. Rapidly from one to another, I must keep up with the pace and the train in just two more minutes. I might make it if I time my footsteps don’t block me now across you I stride I gasp and it was a miss of three and one eighth seconds.

On the television there is a charity show that moves me to tears, it did last year, two years ago, and many years ago. I watched it in Secondary Four, vowing to do something-ambitious, noble, and life-changing. I am in University now and indifference galled me more than I am concious of. I am annoyed with most of my generation. Of girls smearing their faces with foundation, mascara, eye-liners and colourful dresses they prance about in photographs rehearsed twenty nine times. Of boys drinking, driving, showing they have a car they drive in their shiny shoes. The desire to impress has a stench that is obscene, it stings and lingers; everyone is trying to have been there, and to have done that. The seedless Green grapes are cold within the linings of my mouth. It is a show that catches the tears, lets it flow and ends abruptly. All of a sudden, like a campfire group dispersed, these people on screen have died on you, and you chuck the phone because there seems no sense in calling now. It is a shadow that you seem to be communicating with, a bird flown high into the sky; you only smell the scent of the flap of the wings. They repeat that phone lines last till Sunday, the next.

I played with an extinguisher today. It is a red, cold metallic cylinder you hug, almost like a baby, and spray onto a mocked fire. It works on fires only, and I contemplated the idea of genocide.

There is a Volunteer Application form that I have downloaded and clicked ‘close’ without saving. Han messaged me to say it starts with a call. I told him there is a fear that accompanies that and a shame that you might have to live with because you left it-at that. But memory says the shame is short-lived: only for the night. Because the next year, around the same time period, when the guilt game plays out on the lawn green Casino table, the same numbers would be dialed.