Corner of the Eye

"And this is why I hate people."

Yesterday saw me in the rare mood of nearly flinging a textbook at someone's face. It was already in my hand, I was weighing my options, so to speak. In the end, I decided that being suspended from school or charged with assault might not be worth the temporary pleasure of tracking the trajectory of a paperback missle en route to the source of my annoyance.

It's not rare that I feel annoyed. I was annoyed alot yesterday. I woke up annoyed, fighting back a tide of phlegm while trying to to aggravate my bad leg, fumbling for my Nokia as the theme from Sin City (Cells, by The Servant) plucked me from my slumber.

But I should rephrase my earlier statement.

Not the "source of my annoyance", but more along the lines of "the reason murder exists" or simply anal bitch.

The story so far...

Group project. Three guys and a girl. Girl doesn't show up for scheduled meeting to discuss presentation.

Fair enough.

Guys make do with assignment, come up with an outline for an essay.

At this point, think about what an outline for your own essay might entail.

I don't usually handle criticism very well. It's a fault of mine, I admit. Really. But what really irks me is when someone is critical of something that really isn't wrong at all.

If I had asked you what your favourite colour was and proceeded to ridicule you for answering "Blue" just because my favourite colour is silver, would you think I was in any way, shape or form justified? Or sane?

There we were, showing the "teacher" what we had come up with for an outline. And we were told we were wrong.

Firstly, she said, we had the numbering off.

Forgive me for being stoopid, but I didn't know that personal outlines required numbers with decimal places, following an apparently globalised system and code.

Taking a break from the strenuous task sitting on a table at the back of the class, she reached for the breakfast that was graciously provided by the school administration. Not two feet from my face.

"Can I have one?"

"Sure Ma'am, just don't eat in front of Naz."

Smirk.

"Oh, I'm sure it's fine, it will test his self-discipline."

And she tore open the plastic wrapping and ravaged the bun.

Wait a minute. Last time I checked, we here in clean green Singapore understood racial and religious issues and concerns. I don't spike food with beef when Hindus are going to dig in, and I don't expect that anyone goes around ripping the turbans off the heads of our Sikh friends.

So why in the blue hell is there a fucking teacher who claims to be a former lawyer fucking eating and smiling at the only Muslim in her class when she God Damn knows he is fucking fasting?

Self-discipline, yes. It takes alot of control and willpower not to grab her by her scrawy shoulders and deposit her out the window.

After glancing through the rest of the document while at the same time keeping an eye on the ceiling, she told us we needed to indicate every single point and sub-topic that we might want to touch upon in our essay.

Intro: History & Definition - Recent changes, etc

Later became

1. Intro
1.1 History
1.1.1 Recent changes
1.2 Definition
1.2.1 What
1.2.2 Who
1.2.3 Why

Out single page outline was starting to resemble the actual essay when one of us prudently pointed out that outlines shouldn't be more than a page in length.

"Oh, yes. Yours is too long. It has too many details."

Fuck you, you anal cross-eyed bitch.

"But Ma'am our outline before was only one page. You told us to expand it and include all these details."

"Yes, but it's too long now, too detailed."

"But what we did at first was a single page outline with everything we needed."

"I didn't see it."

And the unspoken retort of "Of course you didn't see it, you cross eyed mutant. You couldn't see an elephant if it farted in your face."

At this point I found the book in my hand, and the other two were already exasperated beyond compare.

If you've watched 300, you'd have remembered when Leonidas dropped his shield and helmet near the end, but gripped his spear and looked down at it, thinking of hurling the weapon to cause grievious bodily harm to Xerxes.

She is definitely not Xerxes, and I don't have the abs to be Leonidas, but it was slow-mo nonetheless.

But the moment passed, and I am still enrolled in school, though my urge to murder, maim and mutilate has never felt so right.