Chapter Thirty-Six: Monotony Versus Cake (~jinghan)
I wake up. It is a Wednesday. I know it is a Wednesday because I was doing my physics pre-lab yesterday and I have physics labs on Wednesdays.
It is a Wednesday, and usually I haven’t used up all my energy until at least Thursday afternoon, but this morning there’s this heavy feeling in my stomach and an added inertia to everything. There’s nothing unpredictable about my morning routine, I get out of bed, toilet, clothing, wash, breakfast, teeth… I even eat exactly the same thing that I’ve had for breakfast all week. A head of me is another day. “Arg, another day,” that’s what that heavy feeling is: monotony.
At this point in first semester, I hazily recall, I was sure I didn’t feel like this. Perhaps it had been the dual nervousness and excitement of a new lifestyle that had fuelled my energy. Or the unpredictability of not knowing which of the people who talk to are passing acquaintances or will be enduring friends. Or the new style of learning that is sometimes very fast and hard but always interesting to talk about. But now, in week nine of the second semester the novelty of all these things has long faded, and I’m left with just a dull and heavy monotony with no apparent end.
I don’t know when the decision formed in my head. (Perhaps as early as the previous morning.) But it was as I drank the last of my morning tea that I decided that I would not go to my physics lecture that morning*. I imagined myself sitting in the lecture hall sitting next to the people I saw every day and drawling out notes that only half made sense and I could not bare the thought. Don’t get me wrong, they’re really nice people, and its an interesting subject. But hard and fast without the novelty and pseudo-passion of first semester has become, well… just hard and fast. And stuck in the middle of week nine, the beginning of term too long ago, the end of term to far away, I just needed a break from hard and fast.
I sit down and quietly work though a chapter of the text book, it takes more than an hour that the lecture would have been to cover the same material, but the semi-personal tone of the text book author coupled with colourful pictures and worked examples is much more reticent of the comfortable high-school pace of study. And I’m feeling pretty happy with myself by the time I finish the work, only to remember that I still need to drag myself into uni for my physics labs.
Driven by the need to do something physically productive, anything other than study really, I have fallen into the habit of walking from Melbourne Central Train Station up to the University, rather than the usual 10 minute tram ride. The weather had been a bright hot over-enthusiastic spring when I had left the house, but as I walk up Swanston Street dark clouds have rolled across the sky and ominous grumbles of far of thunder seem to be in crescendo. A few drops of rain fall on the hot sidewalk. I ignore them. And then, without warning, the sky collapses into a downpour of warm sweet spring rain.
The people on the streets of Melbourne all around me make mad dashes for cover, and umbrellas sprout in their hands. I’m umbrella-less having not planned for rain, and the inertia of the monotony has me trapped in the same even-paced walk, but I can’t help smiling as I watch the people rush about around me, and the warm water gush over shop fronts. The rain drops are cools against my forehead, and in that moment nothing else matters.
The rain oscillates between a thick drizzle and a heavy downpour. Umbrella-less pedestrians are left just as indecisive about what action to take. By the time I’m half way to uni I’ve stowed my jumper, hoping to save it as something dry to put on when I get to uni, and I’m laughing and running along in the warm rain with all the other people. (They’re not all laughing, but definitely running.) I’m ducking into doorways, and skitting across the road, hopping on a tram, hopping off a tram only to find the rain heavy again. I’m still laughing as I duck into another tram just as the doors are closing, rain dripping from the tips of my hair. The windows are misted over and miserably wet people stare at me out of the corners of their eyes. But they can’t drown my smile.
It was a small respite, but a good one, from the monotony that uni seems to have sunken into at this late stage in the year. I’m clinging onto all the little things to keep it all afloat above the slurry and muck of assignments, worksheets and lectopia recordings. All the big things to look forward to are still to far away (end of exams, Christmas, Summer, beaches, friends and three months of sweet lazy mornings) so what I can I do but build myself small artificial things to look after, and rejoice at little unexpected things like spring rain.
I’ve decided that in these last few weeks of uni I’m going to bake a cake every week. There’s something physically productive about picking out a recipe, hunting down the ingredients, and getting all the buttery-sweet mess everywhere. And of course having something that smells and tastes beautiful at the end of it all. And there’s nothing quite like taking the weight of half a cake in a box to uni on a Monday to share with friends. It’s a pleasant and rewarding weight that counterbalances the heaviness of all that study.
This week’s cake: Sugar and Spice Cake (with ginger and cinnamon)
