It was getting increasingly hard to sleep recently, especially in the past few weeks. I could never understand why.
Perhaps I've been thinking too much, perhaps there had been nothing much that could shake me off from my perpetual melancholy. It's this crippling feeling I always endure when I'm not making films. Perhaps it had to do with the girl problems, or the lack of them. Perhaps...
I couldn't really come up with a reason, it was just becoming insanely difficult to sleep. I slept at crazy hours, many times only after I finish BREAKFAST. I wondered why was it that it was so easy for me to get a good night's sleep during my France trip, yet a different story here.
I'm in the midst of summer, arguably the season I like least. I never like the heat, my solution had always been to close the curtains, snuff out all traces of sunlight in my room. Even so, my room was stuffy, oppressively hot, and difficult to breathe.
It had happened a few weeks already, I wondered whether I was suffering from a metaphorical problem often suffered by artists with tormented souls, or whether my room was indeed stuffy... despite blasting the air-con at the lowest temperature, and having a fan nearby as well.
Of course I thought it was the former, it has to be the former, a guy like me has a romanticized worldview, and an inflated ego known for dramatics. I am like Florentino Ariza, I suffer literally (as in, there IS physical discomfort) for love, clinging on to this archaic, intense view of romantic love. I am like Don Quixote, a chivalrous figure of contradictions, living in his own world, falling deep into the world of his own imaginings. I am like Mr. Darcy, I suffer stoically with seer manliness. And so on and so forth.
But then, after suffering this metaphorical pain for so long in my room, I started suspecting that my bloody room was ridiculously stuffy. The air conditioner didn't seem to work at all!
So this afternoon, I went to the dormitory's office to complain, I wasn't expecting my problems to be solved, yet since I wasn't making films, there is no canvas for me to paint upon with the colours of my sorrow, no medium to channel my built up agony and depression.
Nonetheless, the guy came to my room to check the air conditioner.
"See? It's ain't working, right?" I insisted.
I wondered whether being such a tormented artistic soul, I have started to hallucinate imaginary pains for myself.
Then the guy reached for the bottom of the air-con and pulled out its filter. Or rather, what vaguely resembled an air conditioner filter, if it weren't caked by a magnificently gross layer of dust, crap and other things that I do not dare to imagine.
"Wow... that's more than an inch of... dust." The guy said. "You haven't clean it?"
"... not since March 2008, when I first moved in." I said.
It never occurred to me that one needs to constantly take care of his own air conditioner filter.
I took it to the bathroom and scrape off the crap, the sink ended up looking horrendous.
Once I was done, my air conditioner was working perfectly again. The cold air emanating from it left me dizzy with ecstasy, I wanted to compose a 1000 stanza poem of the sudden liberation from my physical discomfort in my room. The gloomy, oppressive air that had plagued me for nearly two months... could they be caused by... a dirty air conditioner filter??
It's odd, to feel this sort of lovely coziness in my life again.
