12. Life is not a dream, shaboom

WW sat in the lounge and stared gloomily at each other. Nothing had been going as planned. Not the any new stories they had attempted to write. Nor their real lives.

Now that they had read the old story again, they had realised it was a bunch of crap. The fact that pig head hadn't published it in the beginning had been absolutely the right call. The fact that somehow the book had gone missing online was also a good thing.

Maybe.

It was extremely depressing to discover that the hard work and sweat of five years was unworthy of being consumed by even the most voracious readers. Some of their friends had taken a peek and immediately changed the topic.

Five years. More than five years.

Five years was a long time in the life of a pre-middle lifer. Five years could make up a fourth or fifth or sixth of an adult pre-midlifer's life span. That was a long time. Maybe it wasn't long for immortal cultivators but for these mere mortals that had once dreamed of being celebrity authors, it was enough for them to want to hug and cry.

Their dreams had been shelved and were gradually turning to dust under the constant onslaught of the neverending forwardness of time travel. There was no time to really stop and dream anymore. The introverts and bookworms of the yesteryears had been forced to conform by society under the pressure of that thing called money and changed by the high temperatures of those things called life experience. With the hammer and anvil of life battering away at their defences every drudging day, WW felt that they were gradually losing all sense of themselves.

What had made them feel like individuals back then now felt more like the immature expressions of teenagers trying to find themselves. Although they had not been teenagers back then, they had been close enough that they had still teenybopped about to those cringe worthy pop songs that they felt weren't worthy of the popular title now.

With the forced metamorphosis, some of them had become managers in an office or a store. One had already gotten married. The tigress was on the verge of it and spent so much time with her partner that they might as well hurry up and get married and then give birth to little tiger cubs or something, so that WW didn't have to watch their furtive PDA interactions where parent eyes could not see but they definitely could.

A person can only put up with so much cheese, corn and public displays of affection. Someone really ought to tell tigress that. She needed to just get married and move out already. They wouldn't be able to hide this from her parent's much longer.

Oh yeah. That's what they were doing right now while tigress was too busy kissing that sly smug face who reckoned he was a dragon of a man but in reality was more of a far distant cousin of a dragon who was likely to have the questionable bloodline of a mongrel reptile more closely resembling an amphibian that looked like a snake. The extra long sentences here were to act as a deterrent to prevent the smarmy, sly, four eyed lungfish from reading this paragraph, considering he thought WW were still immensely immature.

Honestly speaking, tigress needed to find a better man, but they couldn't say that to her face when she seemed so enamoured with the charm of the fox face who reckoned he was a dragon but was more likely to be an amphibious lung fish with a long enough neck to make him seem snakelike.

Blue Suede Shoes seemed depressed and defeated ever since his crushing defeats from other musicians and bands in consecutive competitions such that he had even lost his dancing shoes. Ah. Life was hard.

WW had thought that living together, even if they worked separately, they would at least have time to write and play together. It wasn't so.

Every morning, they had to line up for the toilet and bathroom, trying to snatch that little bit of extra sleep or breakfast from one another before they rushed to work. At work they would be swamped by other people's problems and stresses until they barely had the time to run to the toilet to relieve themselves, leading to them living under the constant threat of embarrassing themselves with wet pants.

At lunch, they would barely have the chance to snatch a bite, let alone sit and eat when:

One, eating at the computer was not allowed;

two, the reception desk was not allowed to be unmanned but was often abandoned by selfish workers who thought their managers didn't do anything all day but walk around, without realising that their managers had nearly three hundred 'urgent' emails and phone calls to return or address while they were trying to supervise these slackers so that the bosses wouldn't get any complaints.

Three, you weren't allowed to eat at reception.

Four, nobody could cover for you when you went to the toilet.

Five, there was sure to be an emergency every time you went to the toilet, stole a bite or took a break to drink a cup of water, resulting in being scolded for taking a break

Six, nervous breakdowns or expressions of frustration were not professional and considered a sign of immaturity. So was complaining. Negative emotions were not permitted to be expressed in any shape or form in this so called 'positive' work culture. Ensuring people were doing their jobs so that the manager didn't have to do it was already hard enough without this 'positive' work culture crap that made work life for slackers more like a party.

There was more. A lot more, but there being time constraints and other tired WWs wanting to take over the keybaord in order to let their rants loose, one had to retreat in order to advance. That is, while everyone was busy here, there was one place that would finally be free and allow a person to advance and make deposits - he really needed to use the toilet. Goodbye.

Anyway, long story short, the moment WW got home, they would squabble over who would cook dinner while someone almost always sneakily ordered a three dollar burger on special for themselves or a five dollar pizza that they would barely get a bite of before the others ate it for them. With their bellies filled, WW would then either drop into bed or into unseeing gazes filled with undead zombie light until the multitude of morning alarms brought them back to their senses.

Keeping a household running was hard. Even harder now that the tigress only had time to show off PDA with that scum who only knew how to scab off people and like a crab, live off them without paying. WW was itching to teach him a lesson but they had to distract the tigress first and get her away from the house for that. The tigress was still too fierce. Actually, the main problem was that the two seemed to be attached at the mouth most of the time and could seldom be separated. They looked like Siamese twins joined at the lips most of the time.

With no tigress to remind everyone of the schedule, all the schedules were getting messed up and chores were getting forgotten. The washing machine had been buried under a pile of dirty clothes and most of WW were running out of clothes to wear because they didn't know which section the laundry powder was meant to be poured in. Not to mention that when they had tried using a random one, it had resulted in soapy clothes and a weird smell. Without tigress, WW only now realised how much they relied on her to get anything done.

Tigress, please read this! We need you!

In short, WW had come to realise that real life was not like an RPG game where money and items could be picked up anywhere to be sold at nearly any random shop, nor was life like a dream where they could almost choose their own adventures.

WW wanted to return to their ages of relative innocence and lack of responsibility. Before they knew it, they'd have all moved out, be married and have little ankle biters crawling up them and on the furniture in order to help them drive up the walls. The drive to earn money to support the family would likely drive them underground.

They had always imagined life as adults to be vastly different from what it was now. Only now were they beginning to realise why their parents had almost never seemed to have time for anything, let alone them.

This concludes the latest meeting of the depressed and downtrodden WW who wished life could be like their dreams but was not.

Life is not a dream.

Shaboom.