In another context, 20 years down the road, Ailing would be my 20-year-old wife from China, whom I paid a four-figure sum to come to Singapore to marry me, with several failed attempts at getting a proud, obnoxious Singaporean female to engage in wedlock with yours truly.
Right now, however, I refer to the English meaning of ailing, which is to say I’m sick. My cough’s doing great. I’m not so hot, but the cough is asserting itself better that Sean Connery at a bachelorette’s party. Not that it doesn’t have its perks – people give you your own radius of free space in trains when you start coughing like a madman, and if you’re an even better actor than I am at being sick, or a really hot girl, people start offering to do things for you.
(Also note that this entry is somewhat outdated. I no longer have the apetite to churn out essays, obviously. This does not bode well for my studying life.)
Illness doesn’t seem to be confined to just the self, however ; Frequently reading the news(things you do when you’re bored) will tell you that all people have to report are tales of violence and depression, and somewhere in there, you know that the world is ailing, and the breaking point isn’t far from now. Soon enough, the world will run out of space for landfills faster that scientists can invent alternate ways of disposing waste, the world won’t have enough trees to sustain oxygen output for the human race and there’ll be so much barren land from scorched-earth policies and bombing that there won’t be enough crops for the people of the world not to have constipation become a norm.
And this will all happen because we’re too busy worrying about each other. We’re too busy worrying that people will take our money excessively – be it by legal or illegal means. Everyone is worried that Israel will go berserk and declare war on the rest of the world, or that their jobs are being outsourced to countries with too many people willing to work for too little pay. In short, everyone only sees the problems ahead of them, and not the problems ahead of everyone.
If we keep this up, we won’t even have a world to argue on – Those that haven’t died of dehydration will have frozen t death, or are living on hawaii.
