Impatience, a subset of 浮躁

My niece is getting increasingly impatient about my prolonged absence from home. Initially, we had told her I would be back after Christmas. Then that became after Chinese New Year. Most recently, we have been telling her after her Disneyland trip. Of course, all these dates and events have passed us by. We're rapidly running out of "after"s.

Her impatience is causing mine to grow as well.

On a different note, but leading to the same conclusion, there has been a stabbing of an old man in his own home late in the night recently in my suburb. Despite his shouts for help, his neighbours did not venture out to help. In a way, I can understand why. The old man is now in hospital, fighting for his life.

Some time ago, there was this other piece of news about Sydney bus drivers' protests. They did not want to drive through certain areas (one of them being a neighbouring suburb) at night because many of them had suffered beatings. Then there was the other one about two fourteen year olds robbing and killing a cab driver, also at night. The list goes on...

I've heard so many such stories over here, I'm getting genuinely sick of it. But this most recent one about the old man's stabbing struck really close to heart. Because it is in the very suburb I am staying in. It might have even taken place a few streets away from my own apartment.

And my suburb is supposedly one of the safer suburbs.

Yeah, right.

I've never ever felt safe in Sydney. Back home, I can be walking around in the death of the night without ever having to check over my shoulders, without having to squint to make out if that was a shadow moving ahead of me or just my imagination and without giving up altogether and just staying put in the apartment once it gets dark.

Such events just forces my own impatience, at time and at getting home, to resurface. Actually, impatience does not quite describe how I really feel. Perhaps I can borrow a term from Faye Wong:

浮躁.

36 days to go.