Variations on Irritation
I do enjoy a good people-watching session, though this habit has run into roadblocks in the past year. There’s the obvious issue of the pandemic, of course. For a good three months in Singapore, the streets were empty. When restrictions eased, it seemed everywhere was crowded. Too crowded. A lot of us couldn’t take it, we stayed home. After that, there was a long period where I lost track of time and space, sucked into an imaginary world of my own making. I was rushing towards the end of a manuscript draft, and the idea of interfacing with the outside world, let alone carving out time to gaze upon the machinations of strangers, was unthinkable.
I finished a draft — a bad one, a messy one, but at least, one that exists — a couple of weeks ago. And then I finally looked up. The situation now? I know that this probably isn’t what you want to hear, especially if you live across the world, but life in Singapore is pretty much back to normal. Everyone wears a mask, but other than that, theaters are open, restaurants, shops, even the theme parks. With nowhere to go and cases consistently low to nil, Singaporeans are hungry for things to do. Local hotels are booked out for staycations, Friday dinner bookings are near impossible to get, and giant cruise ships depart every two days, make a round in Singaporean waters, then return to land.
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I was strict about my time, the week after I completed my draft. I was disoriented and wanted a break. Being chronically type-A, I marked out a schedule of aggressive relaxation, timetabling my week off. One of the things on my list was a good, long, people-watching session. I could do that now, there were no urgent demands on my time. There were plenty of people out, doing people things. People-ing. What did people things entail? It felt as if everyone was too loud, too unnatural, as if the world had become too bright in the time we’d been away. It seemed pressing that I recalibrate to what life was, now. So I booked out a slot in my calendar, and went to the airport’s Starbucks. I was familiar with the baristas; that particular Starbucks outlet was where I wrote a majority of my novel. They waved me in early, and I settled into a seat directly across the entrance, ready to do absolutely nothing.
It was a good day to be at Starbucks. Somehow, I’d picked the exact day a new line of merchandise was dropping. Half an hour before the store opened, the line stretched all the way down the airport mall. Some of the people in line already had bags of limited edition merchandise from a different Starbucks, dragged along in tiny luggages, recently repurposed to keep them all. Each customer was only allowed to buy one item, but when the store opened, the baristas still had to gently, firmly remove additional items from the hands of some customers trying their luck. This always happens, the head barista whispered to me, later. The last time, two grown women got into a scuffle over the last item. He raised both hands to demonstrate, shadow boxing the air.
Surprise. I’d forgotten about scuffles, about minor altercations with strangers. The barista left my side to turn away another disappointed customer, a man who was repeatedly lifting and replacing the usual tumblers and cups on the shelves, as if one of them might magically transform into the limited edition tumbler he was looking for. After it became clear that the new items were sold out, the lines thinned. I went up to the counter and ordered my coffee. As I was waiting for my order, I noticed an old woman, in her mid fifties, staging a sort of impromptu photoshoot with her limited edition mug. The head barista followed my gaze and hissed. Scalpers, he said. Look, that mug is now going for $160 online.
I was stunned. That’s a 170% profit.
He shook his head. I know.
That’s better than gold.
He looked at me oddly. Thanks.
Scalpers. I had forgotten about them too.
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Early in the pandemic, there was a meme going around, one of those faux motivational posters shared and reshared across multiple platforms and whatsapp groups. It was well-meaning, I think, meant to make you feel better about how shit everything was. What if, the poster said, the scariest thing isn’t the pandemic, but the thought that when it’s over, things might be exactly the same? Ah, I won’t be so cocky as to say that it’s over here, though plenty of people behave as if it is. Still, watching the old woman hold the glittering turquoise mug up, tilting it right and left to catch the light, snapping over and over again — I couldn’t help but giggle. All the tiny, petty behaviors, the little irritations, they’d been smoothed over by the deadweight blanket of the pandemic’s horrors — presto, they were re-emerging.
Of course things can’t, haven’t stayed the same. Although I don’t doubt we’ve grown as a society, I’m not naive enough to have ever believed that the post-pandemic world might consist of a homogeneously wise, selfless community. But I had forgotten the textures in each day, the variations on irritation. For so long, things had been so monotonously, thickly bad, that to be able to lament minor grievances now seemed almost a luxury. The world was loud, it was returning. Behind me, the barista tsked.
