I left off writing on this blog for a while because things had gone complicated and work's death grip of powerless tedium tightened several hundredfold. Since I last wrote the department I slave in has been reorganised, moving us up one notch from inefficiency to sheer chaos. The newspaper has been redesigned, thus adding to said chaos and transforming it into directionless mayhem, to say nothing of the rather depressing colour scheme and several dozen technical tweaks that have been as useful to my job as ear plugs to a blind man. I promptly fell ill with some sort of nerve-induced ailment, which was a stroke of luck because I got to stay at home for two days; you know you truly hate your job when you'd glady take on half a week of acid in your gullet just to avoid having to turn up in the office. Worse still, I was informed that I could be transferred to the departmental equivalent of Iraq by next year. It's all been taking place over my head, of course, but as a serf I have to be content with my lot and my monthly influx of groats.

Then there were the usual skirmishes on the personal front. My father has been testy of late for reasons better known to himself, destabilising the delicate parental entente and driving my mother to unusual bouts of verbal shelling. The Smilodon and I had a very rough patch, as the last post would have made obvious; this was exacerbated by my growing unhappiness in the office as the building vitriol had to go somewhere and, like all fallible human beings, I chose the one human being I shouldn't have spewed my bile on to do just that. Add to that the fact that I feel like I'm becoming stupider and more shallow after leaving university: whatever mental adeptness - far inferior to others' in the first place - I once made a pretense to is fading as I spend my days correcting copy and trying to make long captions fit in small spaces. Wit gives way to platitudes as the closest thing I get to self-expression is forcing headlines into increasingly tight columns. Theory transforms into dogma as I find my ideas and feelings unchallenged by academic rigour. The scariest part is: I have no more time or energy to think, to read, to reflect. All I do is flit from annoyance to anger to ennui.

There have been small pockets of respite, however. Rejoicing for the moment at the weakness of the US economy, I seized on favourable exchange-rate winds to loot a couple of online shops which, for some reason, had timed their sales to tempt me to part with my groats: I suppose I can blame capitalism. Cheaper alternatives to riding at the Saddle Club, which has been the Spain to my Napoleonic campaign to save money, have emerged and I look forward to plunging into Russia in the near future. In a way that's a uniquely Singaporean capitulation, of course: Unhappy with your life? Well, shop! Buy things! Paper over the cracks of your boring lack of self-realisation by induling in the thrill of acquisition and material one-upmanship! If you can't exercise your brain, spend good to look good! So yes, I do feel an element of shame for that. I've been sliding down the slippery slope of shallow appearance-conscious vanity.

The Smilodon and I have patched things up enough to play World of Warcraft together. My family is more or less back on its old tack, which means the unending Long Day's Journey Into Night plot of recrimination, guilt and frustration chugs along in Act One all over again. Some of my friends have come home from greener pastures abroad and I look forward to complaining further about this wasteland of a country with them when the opportunity arises. And a small window of escape has swung open in the form of Degree Day, when I shall return to England for a week or so and drink deep of the life I've been missing here. Small pockets of respite such as these have fluttered down from above like leaf litter concealing a graveyard and kept me marginally sane and still hopeful. Or perhaps not exactly hopeful, but numbed and distracted from the full putrefaction of my life. I may be stupid, but I have horses! Oh yes. Horses are good.

Is this what working life is like? Perhaps, but I'm beginning to wonder if that's only true for the stupid, naive and terminally unlucky: namely, myself. The truly intelligent would be able to make themselves wanted, to infuse themselves with a mental infallibility that would send debaters, pundits and, more importantly, employers flocking. The shrewd network, hustle and ooze their way to the top, or at least to some comfortable and lucrative cubby hole; they make friends, influence people and wind up sitting pretty, doing what they want. The lucky, well, are lucky. So what about the rest of us talentless, graceless and ill-favoured cannon fodder? Mental stagnation? Emotional anaesthesia? A retreat into material excess, competing on bragging rights for who has the nicest house, prettiest wife, most botoxed face, largest number of exotic travel destinations or cushiest job?

It all comes back to the same thing, doesn't it? Wittering on about disillusionment and work and misplaced idealism. Struggling with an inability to acknowledge that I am indeed stupid and naive and unlucky and for God's sake, get over that already and just become one of those "I have a pretty life" zombies. Oh wait, but I have horses. Horses. Oooo. And aren't horses fun!