Being the generous readers that you all are, indulge me in this little flight of fantasy and for a moment let our imagination travel with the physicists, with their theories that are infinite parallel universes running alongside ours.

In any other universe, I could be anything.

In the universe called Ulysess, I could be a king. In a universe called Conqueror, I could be called "the short french". In a universe called Hungry Lions, I could be called Nero. In a universe, called Passion, my name could be Christ. In the universe called Childhood, I could be the african american called Jackson....

Out there, I could be anything.

In here, I am me.

And the name of this universe is The Worst Case Scenario.

 
It is 2am and I am still in the office. The week being an extremely rough one, just refuses to end. It is tenaciously clinging on, absolutely intent on craving its initials into my personal history. And from the looks of things, it is likely to stretch itself over six, seven more days.

Or perhaps longer...

Issues happen, trouble has got to go somewhere, somehow and shit has to find a place to land. A friend asked me if this is happening because it is month end.

Shit is seldom seasonal...

 
Nobody really believes that I am a person who gets stressed up over my work, even though I clocked quite some unbelievable overtime last month. Some do not even think that I would get stressed up over anything... especially something as trivial as work, job, career and means of livelihood...

Reasons they might have, examples aplenty too, yet none normalizes anything...

Perhaps I do not have that constipated look that troubled faces share, perhaps I still feel hungry when the skies are about to fall, perhaps I should invest in acting classes so that my boss would think I actually care about this job...

But I do feel inadequate, stretched, tired and demoralized; not from work, but from the things I have chosen to load myself with. Having a job simplifies life enough, allowing one to surrender control of a part of life to a more predictable force, creating a semblance of order and regularity in life often mistaken for monotony. Having a job, perhaps even one that forces one to give up one's passion or life, is beneficial to us who lack the will to control our destiny. The price is there. And it is a price that is highly acceptable.

There is no reason for it to cause any uproar, after all life is about paying the price, the price for your existence.

But the thought of chalking up a debt, be it financial, emotional or physical, that life can never hope to repay is always daunting. Not many, even the most fatalistic, can say with total conviction that things are the way they are meant to be, when catastrophy or personal disaster strikes.

Perhaps then, a risk taker should be redefined as a gambler who borrows without shame and gambles without remorse; a gambler of time, life and future all of which are taken, stolen or advanced.

 
I do not think that there is a part of me that is not hurting right now. Swimming thirty laps on Friday night, gym session on Saturday evening and basketball on Sunday morning kind of killed me. Mental notes have been made to avoid such unpleasant experiences in the future.

I think I push myself too hard.