pause.

once again it's been far too long since i last wrote, as busyness is my muse's worst enemy. i sit in peet's trying to drown out the noise with music and earphones to little avail. it's unusually busy this friday afternoon, and i am surrounded by middle-aged pairs and single young adults, likely students. gone are the grad students who filled this place earlier in the week, with stacks of papers or bluebooks, grading feverishly to make their grade submission deadlines. i was one of them, and well-acquainted myself with the anxiety of finishing my eighty hand-written three-part essay exams. it is not an experience i would like to repeat anytime soon. over my music i can still hear the murmurs of customers ordering drinks, the piercing hiss of a milk steamer, the all-too-loud christmas music, and my neighbors conversing about either relationships or data sets - possibly both, and i don't seek clarification. either way, the dialogue seems heated.

my latte's gone cold, and my name, scrawled across the foam in caramel by the barista, becomes little more than smudged tan loops - big loops, serial-killer style. another quarter of schooling is over, and my astonishment by how fast it went doesn't make me any more or less excited for the next. it seems like only last week that i complained about a lack of guidance in my studies. it seems like only yesterday that i revisited taiwan with my parents to see them re-view a landscape that has changed so drastically over the two decades of their absence.

a shaft of sunlight streams through the window beside me, warming my legs. the storm has ceased for the moment, leaving behind frosted mountain peaks in the distance, which hover above the brown layer of haze that has returned. tomorrow, i head home for respite from suburbia-land.

the world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.
: wilde.