Tonight is bound to be a sleepless night. A rowdy group of college students have gathered en masse at a house just half block away, showcasing their youthfulness and their aptitude in partying. The incessant blaring of rap, hip-pop, punk rock, heavy metal clashes with the tranquil look of a moonless and cool semi-starry night.

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I sat contently in a small cafe surrounded by healthy, bright foliage in the hustle and bustle of West Los Angeles, slowly devouring two cups of coffee, laden with heavy cream, and the last 50 pages of Rohinton Mistry's Family Matter. As the plot thickens to its climax, resulting in professor Nariman's slow death from Parkinson's, out of the blue I felt an helpless sense that death will eventually befall anyone at any time. How will anyone move on when his or her loved ones gasp for their last breath? Apparently, they do, but at what cost?

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The night continues to stretch long into the evening. The loud music only made it seem eternity. Isolation and misery, the dominant elements of my adult life thus far, are made all the more pronounced by the ruckus.

Tags: Trifle, Rohinton Mistry, Family Matters

Minutes before the alarm went off I was fully awake in bed, waiting for the alarm to sound. At 8:40 a.m., on a wet and grey Thursday morning (I had skipped work), the alarm went off, broadcasting news from NPR at a moderate volume.

(I had not planned on recording on such a day spent in mundaneness. Yet, roughly 40 hours later, while reading Siri Hustvedt's The Enchantment of Lily Dahl and under the comfort of my heavy quilt, I felt compelled to not let the day before slip away from my conscience.)

The waitress took my usual order of two eggs, sunny-side up, wheat toast and coffee. The Thursday paper is spread wide on the near-empty counter and stained slightly by two wayward drops of coffee. I consumed what was on the plate and glanced nonchalantly over the newspaper. As I got up and paid, the cloud begun to disperse; soon the sky turned into a bright cerulean. I felt an unexplained happiness to be driving under a beautiful picture as that.

At the Central Library's literature room, while conducting my rudderless research on upcoming term papers, in the glass-steel-encased bridge that lead from the reference desk to the fiction section, I noticed a succession of men in variegated appearance and clothing, like a row of unmoving tableau, each sitting and concentrating on reading: A perfect picture of Equal Distribution of Wealth, where the homeless man sitting next to the man in expensive-looking Italian loafer to the young student knitting his brow on some difficult calculus equations. Perhaps the library will be the only place where every person will be equal in our inherently unequal world.

Piled under the pressure from term papers, group projects, critical notes, tons of reading and a full-time job that I hate, I gasped for fresh air, as the sense of urgency is slowly setting in on my procrastinated mind. Putting away the Enchantment of Lily Dahl, walking away from the comfortable and airy reading room, I forged on into the maze of APA Publication Manual and the rest of my researches.

Tags: Siri Hustvedt, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, LA Central Library

The foggy evening fell quickly as I let open the window wide so as to let in the cold and poetic feel of the night. Inside the bedroom closet there remained a Rubbermaid container that housed a sizable collection of scarves of every color and brand and dimension. The long hibernation inside the storage container had encrusted the collection with a layer of faint moth ball scent. After looking over the decision was made on the brown Polo checkered. Carefully extending the fine, delicate fabric vertically, making sure the bottom end does not reach the floor, I glanced over the checkered squares as if they each contained plaintive meaning. Next I wrapped one time the scarf around the neck; the familiar motion, or what it used to be, was repeated twice to make sure the length on both ends matched perpendicularly. Funny, on a night as such, the best warmth is provided by a long stretch of wool.

Tags: Trifle, Gloom, Depression, Night

The familiar, reassuring sight of cold water droplets that rime on car windows during the early morning hour has not been seeing for quite few days, an ominous indication that the transient wintry season is coming to an end. While the suspended morning air still retained a touch of coolness, the biting chill is no longer present. Already, with the twinkly sun rising from the east, a mawkish warmth is sifting through, a prelude to months of scorching weather that is to plague the land for months onward.

In the semi-privacy of my cubicle, with the pattering sound of numerous fingers striking computer keyboards in the background, I fixated on the new dark brown wool cardigan that hung precariously on a hanger by the wall, a new purchase of mine that has been rendered useless by the commence of balmy sky. Both of my hands unconsciously went into a chafing motion, imitating that of an action in cold, to appease my stirred annoyance at the early sign of warmer days.

The balminess still clenched the city tightly at 5 P.M., showing no sign of retreating. But I was no longer seething, for today I did not have to study. Over an expensive cup of macchiato I opened the long neglected Family Matters, dog-eared at page 103 from two weeks ago, and for a good hour and a half I was in India, humid, hot, more specifically, in Bombay, observing the clattering of kitchen wares and the tumult of street hawkers. The moldy smell of a small apartment packed with furniture after a long monsoon rain. Everything suddenly came back to me, of my former life in that subtropical, over-polluted island.

The phone rang, pulling me back to reality. It was N., asking if I wanted to dine at the Elephant Bar with her friends. With my brain still boiled with last night's lecture, the bed seemed like a more inviting place than bars serving cold beer, but recalling the disarray that is of my residence, I would rather have illusion take a few hours of my untidiness away.

Tags: Los Angeles, Rohinton Mistry, Family Matters, N.

The over-sized laundry basket is brimming with dirty laundry that dates back to early last week. Pens and papers and water bottles are strewn all over the wooden desk. The carpet is also littered profusely with books and clothes, leaving a snakelike trail in which navigation is barely possible without stepping over something. This is life in the midst of graduate school and working full-time. Everything is encrusted in a thin layer of dust and I have no time to get rid of; everything is an eyesore.

My mind can no longer focus: it skittered here and there and distressed constantly about the next paper due date and when will the researches start. No longer can I afford time to linger over Henry James's eloquence or George Eliot's fine subtlety. Topsy-turvy my life has become, and I have no idea as to what adjustments should be made in order to accommodate the whole stir.

Perhaps somewhere down the road the course will straighten itself; perhaps a gleaming dolphin will carry me off across the Pacific or the Atlantic; perhaps I will pass out in the middle, be revived by the arriving medic, and declared I had lost roughly half of my brain power, however scant it was in the first place.

I miss my cat.

Tags: Graduate school, Henry James, George Eliot, Research paper, Mimi