Organs for sale

Five days of office life has officially reduced me into a twitchy, incoherent narcoleptic with an insane resentment for diamonds. By the next week I shall be quite unfit for human conversation. Even as I speak I vaguely remember dizzily irritating Pong on the bus journeys home with half-baked responses to her brainy theses. ‘My brain is half gone,’ I said on Wednesday morning. ‘Don’t expect too much.’ ‘Hmph,’ she said. ‘That explains it.’ Then: ‘I wonder what will have happened by the end of next week.’

By the end of next week, yes, Zhenteng shall have no brain left, but will be quite rich. $500 is a lot when you haven’t calculated your expenses yet – or at least, are hoping for divine (read: parental) intervention.

Or have lost half your brain.

In a last-ditch effort to salvage some last bits of my thinking consciousness I have taken to rooting up old piano scores and attempting to memorise the hiragana portion of the japanese alphabet. I imagine spending the next five days mindlessly chanting ‘か’‘き’‘く’‘け’‘こ’ under my breath while I tie little paper tags onto ugly pearl earrings. Everyone will think I have finally cracked and perhaps allow me a few more toilet breaks.

All this will be on top of a nasty cold, which started on a chunk of ill-advised Cadbury’s darkstuff last Sunday and a raging sore throat on my first day of work. The cold is now in its fourth stage, where there is no more sore throat but far too much phlegm blocking up the cavities at the base of my throat, so I can’t breathe at all when I try to sleep. It is most annoying to think that I might just expire if I roll over and suffocate with my face in the pillow. I’d frankly rather be killed by a spanking new automobile. Which, given my recently carefree attitude towards speeding vehicles, might just occur tomorrow when I toddle back to Ubi Avenue 5, unless Pong decides to lug me over by the traffic-light route in a borrowed straitjacket.