I'm at the IK Barber library discreetly (at least, I think so) side-eyeing the activity in the immediate perimeter. I don't like studying at Barber. It's not bad... the building's very pretty; there's just always this feeling of... superficiality I get when I sit down and try to concentrate. Weird, right? It's not the people, I'm sure they're sincerely hacking away at their academic duties like the good, scholarly individuals they seem to be. Maybe I'm just not used to people seeing me study (haha).

Meanwhile, I look out the spanning windows and the angle from the 3rd floor tricks me into thinking there's a ginormous tree growing on the lawn outside. There's probably four of them, if I look down and count the trunks. Green leaves everywhere, thronged and swarming among branches bobbing in the wind. It looks like they're doing little jazz hands up in the very tops. Sheeny, like snake scales.

Better look for something else to gawk at; the girl by the window is starting to fidget something fierce.

The trees remind me of the times I used to climb one in our old backyard during summers to pick mangoes. And of a recent visit to the park when I went out for a jog on a whim. Went a few rounds around the track oval but strayed off to hunt down a water fountain, and stumbling back decided I just had to lie down the fantastically wide, manicured field for a few minutes. Yes, it was probably bad for the heart and circulation. Yes, there could've been geese poop between blades of grass for all I knew. Yes, I was begging to be knocked out by a cricket ball from the game a hundred meters off. It felt nice to risk them all for a few minutes.

I missed open fields, and the shameless lack of inhibition of the sun in the old country (HAHA). The sweat on my face and neck was baking. I had my iPod on. Bill Doggett's Honky Tonk came up and never did I expect gritty blues riffs and soil and grass and sky to all together make as much sense as they did.

It's really unfortunate I haven't had the time to see nature in its true... well, nature. I never have, and really, I probably never will. And that's fine with me. If there were ever a strip of forest or a square meter of bogland or even a little bit of iceberg on this planet that has never been touched by human hands, I'd like to keep it that way.

Urban nature is nature, still. I'm immensely happy I get to appreciate the very life that courses through dandelions growing through cracks in the pavement. Can you grow through a crack in the pavement? Didn't think so.

I'm studying outside the next opportunity I get. Even I wouldn't sit on wet grass in my jeans.