PETRICHOR

I’m exhausted. Even though the store I work at is closed for renovations, I worked four shifts this week at Ion, the busiest lululemon store in Singapore. Lululemon Singapore was having their friends and family sale this week, and because my store (the second busiest) was closed, Ion was even busier. On two of the shifts I worked, they earned record-breaking sales. Each of the days I worked on, we earned the entirety of my four-year university tuition, close to a hundred thou. In one day. That means I worked for two days and saw two times of my tuition fees being transacted in the store, while I as a meagre employee earned enough to pay for one fifth of a month’s rent. I juggled this with my classes. Vancouver’s timezone is sixteen hours later than Singapore’s. A regular person’s day lasts for sixteen hours, before they go to sleep for eight hours. That means I pretty much start class at about the time I’m supposed to sleep in Singapore. I’ve been trying to break up my sleep into naps, all the time. My body doesn’t understand it because my classes are at different times on different days, so the day after I have stayed up till 4 in the morning, when I’m able to sleep early, my body doesn’t feel like it, and then the next day it’s back to staying up again. My back and spirit are breaking, and I’m so, so, goddamn tired of it. I’m tired of consumerism and capitalism. I’m not just complaining on my own behalf. I live in Singapore, I have a roof over my head, I had a good enough secondary education, I have the brains and somehow the personality and congeniality to scrape my way through every damn time. There are hundreds of thousands of other people who will never have my good fortune, and it sucks that the world is this way. If it’s not me in this position, it will be someone else. Even now that I am in this position, there are still countless others, working three odd jobs, hustling all day every day to make bank, to keep their apartments, to keep their families afloat. The system is broken, and it doesn’t have to be this way. We have to stop exploiting the least fortunate of us, for the most fortunate to live extravagant, lavish lives. It’s the worst form of ableism and worst, it pretends not to be. There are people who were born with privileges they will never acknowledge, who assume that everyone who does not make it never tried. There are too many people born with physical handicaps, with invisible mental illnesses, with neurodivergent conditions, and we exploit them further. When people from low-income backgrounds who are prone to addiction get hooked on drugs like marijuana and petty pills, we put them in jail instead of getting them help to cope with their livelihoods. When bankers and celebrities take coke, it’s cool and no one brings in the law. What kind of world is this when we don’t have compassion for the people who need it most? I’m sick of it, and you can bet your bottom dollar I’m gonna do something about it.