Hiatus

Let me explain my hiatus.

To do that, let me guide you through a journey somewhere around the vicinity of my last post.

If you've read my previous posts, you'd notice my knack for spotting bad days in the horizon. Sometimes the colours seem off. Sometimes, things smell weird. Sometimes, I just wake up on the wrong side of the bed. Today, however, I'm staring at a beautiful sunrise, coffee in hand, the relaxing quiet of a world still in slumber, and I say to myself, "It's going to be a bad day."

So I get to work and check my e-mail. I had to translate a 500 word article and double its length. Nevermind the fact that I had to expand an inefficient language into a language famous for brevity. I open the client's feedback and it reads:

First sentence dah salah. Anjuran does not mean sponsored. Sultan punya title pun salah. Ini pakai google translate ke? And snag a medal? What kind of English is that? The dean is going to be very disappointed with this article.

I take a deep breath as I feel a slight pinch in my solar plexus. The following e-mail is from my boss:

What is this? It's very humiliating. Fix it.

I'm pretty sure my boss didn't read the article. I turn over to my colleague three desks down. "Hey Iqa!"

"Ya?"

"Anjuran tu apa dalam Basa Ingris?"

"Uh... organised kot."

"Oh."

I turn the other way. "Greg."

"What's up?"

"We don't quote 'Yang Bahagia' in titles, right?"

"Nope. House style."

Don't even get me started on 'snag a medal'. I'll just credit that to the receiver's lack of lingual expression.

So I've only struck out once. I start composing an e-mail to my editor, hoping to find salvation somewhere. As if on cue, her e-mail reaches the servers in reply to my boss:

Language-wise, the article is well written. The only mistakes could be in the facts. Stu, double-check.

At least someone's got my back.

I call the client's PR department, explain what's going on, and tell them that the vetting process entails mutual corrections, not blatant mockery.

Half a day later and the vetted article is sent back. The only correction? They took out 'sponsored' and changed it to 'organised'. Yeah, a thousand words, and they only changed one.

To say I'm livid would be an understatement at this point. All that fuss when she could've just changed that one single word herself. Still, I give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she woke up with less colours in her day. Maybe her day smelt different. Maybe she woke up on the wrong side of the bed, but it doesn't change the fact that she's a colossal bitch.

Problem solved, right? No. Another e-mail comes in as soon as this fiasco ends:

Your article wasn't very well-written. I asked you to spice it up. It's not interesting enough.

What is this, complain week? 'Spice it up' is the designer equivalent of 'make it pop', and I'll never live up to your expectations if you don't tell me what to fix specifically. Do you need more mention about your courses? Do you need to highlight certain events? Do you need more sex scenes?

When I was a hairdresser, criticism just slid off me. Couldn't produce a proper financial statement when I was an auditor? Too bad, boss. But when someone criticises my literary work, the gloves come off. I start to understand the people crying over their results slip after getting eight A's instead of nine.

The discouragement hits me, and it isn't long before I'm taking a self-proclaimed day off from work, and by 'day off' I mean sulking at the office corner with a cup of coffee over the surreptitious stares of my colleagues.

"Chase your dreams," I say to myself. "Money doesn't matter if you're doing what you love. What a load of bull." I contemplate going for a money-based career instead of a passion-based one. My train of thought was that you're going to get screwed at your job regardless, might as well make it worth it. An SMS from my editor snaps me back to reality.

Do better next time. Chin up.

It's a sweet gesture, but it's too late to stop me from distancing myself from writing. Over the coming months, the only writing I'll do is job-related, and my journals and blogs get put on the back burner.

But like a can of beer beckoning the recovering alcoholic, the desire calls forever. It whispers silently whenever I pass a bookstore, whenever I find myself struggling through a Hemingway or a Nabokov. Like a siren's call, seeing a pen always spurs my heart into writing something, even if it's gibberish. I can abandon literature as much as I want, but it will never loosen its grip on me.

And I know that I'll never escape it. Writing is a part of me that I can never let go. No matter where I am in life, I know that this is my one true form of self-expression. And on this day, as fate would have it, I find a pen beside a box of tissues. I pull a two-ply out of the box and scribble:

Let me explain my hiatus.