spark

Today the electricity was cut for 8 hours, because some contractors were doing electrical wiring for the whole block. Which meant using the laptop sparingly, no music, no microwave, no aircon, no hot water. It felt like a regression to a caveman existence. (That is, if you believe in cave people in the first place.) Then again, you don't know what you need until you don't have it, and when you don't have it, you realise that what you think you need are not really 'needs' at all.

Staying in a HDB flat is great. Apart from the occassional inconveniences like having no electricity, you hear people practicing the electric guitar and singing horribly from the next block, you get a guy screaming strings of Hokkien expletives that echo within a 3 block radius, at 3 am and 3 pm and other odd hours; sometimes you hear him rattling the gates and shouting some more and you know he's locked out again.

You get groups of ITE Malay boys sitting at the void deck playing poker and smoking. Sometimes you come back and find many motorbikes parked neatly around the blocks perimeter, motorbikes with the most neon colours with painted flames, which look like moving pieces of graffiti. (It's a compliment.)

Other times you see an area cordoned off with blue police tape, and white powder sprayed hastily over a dark brown patch.

You walk along the corridor, and get greeted by the combined chorus off three dogs barking in an emasculated fashion, either because they're too small to produce anything more than a peep, or because anything noisier will get the neighbours complaining.

Not everyday is this exciting though. Normally, you just get barked at, and hear someone in the next block practicing a piano piece to death. (death of the piece, sometimes also the death of you.)