I arrived home an hour before midnight tonight after a hard 2pm-10pm shift at the office. I left my desk, as usual, an hour after the end of my shift because I just need to clear one last copy before I hit the road.
I wouldn’t mind working the extra hours or minutes, especially during the times when stories just keep on coming like a hail of bullets in a chaotic war. In fact, I like the challenge of tackling a copy, especially if the writer himself or herself had tried to write it in a coherent manner.
Nine hours of digesting words
So, off I went after the final copy. All in all, it was not a busy day in office although I was still glued to the computer screen for nine hours, trying to make sense of the hundreds of sentences and thousands of words on the flat screen monitor, and reproduce them in another language which I myself is still struggling to learn.
After a light supper at home and a late shower, lying in bed and drifting into faraway land seems to be a tempting idea.
Wide awake in dreamland
Yet here I am, wide awake at 2.40am, still banging on the keyboard and trying to write something; still trying to squeeze the words out of my sleepy and verging-on-fatigue mind as though the nine hours of word processing in the office was not enough already.
But there is a reason for this burning of midnight oil, chief of which is that I like writing.
Writing is therapy
I like the process of writing, of seeing words taking life of their own, of expressing things in letters, of telling stories in strings of sentence — preferably well-crafted ones if only I could — and of relating how I feel about certain things the way they should be related.
Obviously I cannot achieve that by sitting still. On the contrary, I should force myself to write even under extreme circumstances, like after tiring myself editing copies at the office.
In doing so, I should not only try to write, but also to write in the way I think things should be written — with the meanings clearly understood by the readers, with all doubts and confusions eliminated from the sentence and paragraph.
But still, I got to go now
I can still go on but I guess fatigue is getting the better of me now; so I had better stop here. I hope I hadn’t made a fool of myself by writing incoherently in this entry at this ungodly hour.
