Declaration

I want to be a writer. Sometimes, I want it so bad that it scares me. What if I turn out to be really mediocre in something I love? It may kill me. I don't imagine I'm going to be great. No, I don't actually aim for greatness - to write The Novel of the Century or any time period (however small). I just want to write something simple and true, and hopefully have people enjoy reading it too. It scares me so much. But, it's worth trying right?

Then again, there are so many other barriers to cross. Those barriers are neither about time nor money. It's about being able to really go deep into your soul and write. Sometimes, when I think about this, the fear makes it such that I can barely breath. God, give me courage, for it truly is a long day's journey into night.

Insomnia

I have been having trouble sleeping. As if I was afraid of what tomorrow might bring.

So, I've been reading my old blog. Funnily enough to have my twenty-one and twenty-two year old selves giving me comfort.

And then, I reached this old entry written when I was twenty:

And so my seventeen year old self gives me a little hug, and tells me to carry on.

It's time to sleep, my dear.

Prayer

I sat down and prayed for all kinds of people and all kinds of love and we lit two long white candles. There's something about lighting the candles that feels especially warm, more than the physical warmth of the flames. Perhaps it's that feeling of leaving a part of ourselves, here, to burn for someone else.

- Written on 21 December 2008

Why Regret?, Galway Kinnell

Didn't you like the way the ants help
the peony globes open by eating the glue off?
Weren't you cheered to see the ironworkers
sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable,
in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe
baloney on white with fluorescent mustard?
Wasn't it a revelation to waggle
from the estuary all the way up the river,
the kill, the pirle, the run, the rent, the beck,
the sike barely trickling, to the shock of a spring?
Didn't you almost shiver, hearing book lice
clicking their sexual dissonance inside an old
Webster's New International, perhaps having just
eaten out of it izle, xyster, and thalassacon?
What did you imagine lies in wait anyway
at the end of a world whose sub-substance
is glaim, gleet, birdlime, slime, mucus, muck?
Forget about becoming emaciated. Think of the wren
and how little flesh is needed to make a song.
Didn't it seem somehow familiar when the nymph
split open and the mayfly struggled free
and flew and perched and then its own back
broke open and the imago, the true adult,
somersaulted out and took flight, seeking
the swarm, mouth-parts vestigial,
alimentary canal come to a stop,
a day or hour left to find the desired one?
Or when Casanova took up the platter
of linguine in squid's ink and slid the stuff
out the window, telling his startled companion,
"The perfected lover does not eat."
As a child, didn't you find it calming to imagine
pinworms as some kind of tiny batons
giving cadence to the squeezes and releases
around the downward march of debris?
Didn't you glimpse in the monarchs
what seemed your own inner blazonry
flapping and gliding, in desire, in the middle air?
Weren't you reassured to think these flimsy
hinged beings, and then their offspring,
and then their offspring's offspring, could
navigate, working in shifts, all the way to Mexico,
to the exact plot, perhaps the very tree,
by tracing the flair of the bodies of ancestors
who fell in this same migration a year ago?
Doesn't it outdo the pleasures of the brilliant concert
to wake in the night and find ourselves
holding hands in our sleep?

Andrea Gibson, How it Ends (an excerpt)

You kiss me deep as my roots will reach and I want nothing more
Than to be an eyelash fallen on your cheek
A thing collected by your fingers
And held like a wish
I promise whatever I do
I will always try my best
To come true

Echoing Light, W. S. Mervin

When I was beginning to read I imagined
that bridges had something to do with birds
and with what seemed to be cages but I knew
that they were not cages it must have been autumn
with the dusty light flashing from the streetcar wires
and those orange places on fire in the pictures
and now indeed it is autumn the clear
days not far from the sea with a small wind nosing
over dry grass that yesterday was green
the empty corn standing trembling and a down
of ghost flowers veiling the ignored fields
and everywhere the colors I cannot take
my eyes from all of them red even the wide streams
red it is the season of migrants
flying at night feeling the turning earth
beneath them and I woke in the city hearing
the call notes of the plover then again and
again before I slept and here far downriver
flocking together echoing close to the shore
the longest bridges have opened their slender wings

Thank you, young self

I'm re-reading my old blogs now and I just want to reach out to my young self, hug her and say "thank you". I feel real again - even a little beautiful.

But today was an incredibly good day, the kind of day that just builds up as the day goes by as if God was sending me morse code, tap tap tap , on your shoulder, you can do it , tap tap tap , I was almost waiting for a dove with an olive branch to fly towards me. I can almost hear him whisper, Why carry all these hurt around?

- Me, 22 years old, 21 Oct 2009

A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway

A girl came in the cafe and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair was black as a crow's wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.

I looked at her and she disturbed me and made me very excited. I wished I could put her in the story, or anywhere, but she had placed herself so she could watch the street and the entry and I knew she was waiting for someone. So I went on writing.

The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it. I ordered another rum St. James and I watched the girl whenever I looked up, or when I sharpened the pencil with a pencil sharpener with the shavings curling into the saucer under my drink.

I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

Carrot's Book Launch

This morning, I went to Carrot's book launch. I haven't read her book yet, but D and I excitedly bought it before the writers started speaking about their works - this slim tome that seemed far heavier than its actual weight.

What hit me this morning, besides more inspiration in my head than I've felt in a while, was the existence of so many different tones in this world. Each speaker spoke in what was undeniably, their intrinsic voice, and with the way they emphasized words and even the words they chose, it brought out so much character.

The first speaker (not the actual author) was male, incredibly earnest and boisterous and delivered a rich text. The second speaker read out his own work and it felt incredibly personal and private, as if you had uninvitingly found yourself in the middle of a lover's quarrel. The third speaker was a woman whose written words took on a completely different character from how she was in real life - yet it wasn't disconcerting, and actually kind of gelled after a while, you could see, I think, how her natural bluntness in real life eased into an honest, yet forgiving, poetic voice.

The fourth speaker was M, Carrot's representative, and she was, in my objective and completely unbiased opinion, the most brilliant. M has such a lovely voice that seems to spring out to your ears. I felt she gave a different texture of Carrot's words, there's that sharp consciousness in M's tone, that world wry humour, that inner knowledge, that gives Carrot's words a surprising edge. I imagined how it would sound in Carrot's own voice, and I think Carrot's tone is more wistful, more hopeful and more indulgent. I loved both interpretations (M's one and Carrot's imaginary one in my head, or at least how it sounds in my head when I read her works).

The last speaker was a playwright, and there's something about the way she enunciated her words, that while entertaining never completely felt fully genuine, as if she was always performing.

So, it was extremely interesting to see how people spoke orally as compared to how they spoke with their written words. Someone once told me that I speak exactly like how i write, I was surprised at this for I don't think it's often for the two sides of myself to come together at once.

I am not a dog/ But you are the moon

Robert Frost once said that all metaphors
break down somewhere.
I call you a lion,
But you are not a lion,
You will not eat me up and
Spit out my bones.
I call you many things,
But clumsily
So you do not hear the truth in them.
Many like to use the metaphors
Of a key, a room, a door,
But you won’t even give me the pleasure
Of a door-knob.
If our relationship can be called love,
I am the dog barking at the moon,
I am not a dog,
But you are the moon -
and there will never be enough metaphors
to cross the distance between us.

Robert Frost - Education by Poetry

Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections—whether from diffidence or some other instinct.

- from Robert Frost's speech "Education by Poetry"

The Beauty We Find When We Aren't Looking

There is a reason why I write rarely. I can find lots of pretty justifications - (1) Work is such a big part of my life and I can't write about Work as Work is Confidential, (2) I write so much as part of my Work that I can't write anymore in my free time - kind of like a comedian who doesn't tell jokes in his personal life or a Cook that does not cook family meals and (3) the ever trusty, classic Writer's Block.

The truth is less pretty. The truth is that I'm afraid I can no longer write anything beautiful. I am scared of producing personal words and realising how plain they are, hence how plain I am. I am afraid, I guess, of facing myself. I paused here for a while and contemplated if I should delete that line - "I am afraid, I guess, of facing myself". There is always the desire, however hard one tries to suppress it, to paint one's self in a good light. In this novel in which we write, who of us are writing as if we are the bad guys? Or more precisely, does any of us imagine ourselves as one of the minor characters in the novel - maybe that secondary character who was at the dining table and told one joke - and that's it - that's all the role he'll ever play.

But I do force myself to write. To make it an activity, a habit even. Everyone has a different mode of self-reflection - but we all need that mode. If one does not live consciously, one perhaps does not live. One is just an apple, waiting to ripen and to fall off a tree. And, so, let's abruptly transition now, to a reflection of my Penang trip in August!



When I recollect it now, the first sentence that pops into my head is: Penang is such a dusty town. I remember the first cab ride from the airport to town, it's always full of anticipation. You watch the windows with such intensity, it is as if you imagine a dinosaur is going to come down the road at any moment - yes, at any moment, don't blink! And then, we arrived at our hotel, and immediately the heat hits me and than the DUST. Penang makes me feel like it's an old dusty cowboy-like town, except instead of cowboys and sheriffs, we have incredibly talented hawkers and taxis waiting to rip you off.



And then, the next thing that hits you is that you feel anachronistic - you feel out of sync, you feel out of time. It is as if you were a modern person walking around in 1960s, or however I imagine 1960s to be - which is slightly peaceful and off-coloured. So, we dropped off our bags, and we started wandering around Georgetown as if we were time-travellers, wandering into our childhood. Oh, it really felt like my childhood - when everything around me felt so old and established, and I felt eternally small and young. Oh, the buzzing cars and motorcycles and the streets that felt like puzzles to cross. And all the different mosaic floors. It was, in all sincerity, beautiful. Beautiful in the way you spend an afternoon in your Grandma's house - it is everything you have grown up with, it is not exciting but it is so real that you feel that if you paused, completely pause for an instant, it is as if you are capturing a moment that would stay with you for as long as you believe in simple things.



We had a reason for going to Penang. Besides the cheap flights and the fact that we could double our spending power, we came to Penang because we wanted to see fireflies. I've never seen fireflies in my whole life. Although sometimes, I wonder, if I did when I was young, or I was merely imagining beautiful little lightbulbs now in my memory, kind of like imaginary childhood friends, but in this case, imaginary childhood fireflies.

So, we waited eagerly for the driver to come pick us up for our long journey to some secluded part of a forest, around some secluded mangrove swamp/river. This was a real journey of faith - because not only must one trust the driver will not abandon you at some remote corner, one must believe in fireflies in this world in which we constantly erode. There were constant warnings of not getting your expectations up too high - fireflies won't come up when it rains, their habitats have been destroyed over the years, there are hardly any left. On the first night, it rained. It not only rained terribly, the windows of the car that came to picked us up got jammed. Hence, we were stuck in this car that was getting rained in. Literally. We aborted the first journey.

The second time, the weather appeared well. I prayed to see the fireflies so badly, I must have sat cross-legged and cross-fingered all the way. We did get to see it in the end. No words can describe that feeling when you first realised THOSE are fireflies. And, you realise, there's so many things left in this world that can make you feel like a child again - to make you stand in awe of the world and want to cry. And I thank God for all the magic in this world. At the start of the boat journey into the darkness, the kids in front of us cried: Are we there yet? Mid-way through the journey, the kid cried: Why are we still here? The kids didn't really appreciate the fireflies. In fact, the people who appreciated them most were the three precocious teenage boys that directed our boat. I found the expression of their faces really beautiful - it was pure joy. No matter what they grow up to be, I hope they always remember that for a few nights (however many), they drove a boat in the darkness, and loved finding fireflies.




At the end of our trip, I asked him what was the best part of the trip for him He said, "Old Trafford Burgers". It was this special stall that only opened late at night, two streets down from our hotel. The Old Trafford Burger was a gigantic burger with four slices of meat. Even today, he speaks of it in a tone of awe.

For everyone else, just keep your eyes open as you wander in Georgetown. Don't miss Love Lane. There's nothing on this lane. Absolutely nothing. It doesn't even seem to lead anywhere. And that's why I love it.

To have lived like Steve Jobs

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. - Steve Jobs

The speech Steve Jobs gave to a graduating batch of students at Stanford University still rings so true, inspirationally and beautifully. Indeed, the mark of a Great Man.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma-- which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. - Steve Jobs

The truth is can we be brave enough to lead the live we want to seek? There is also a fear of finally having the courage to do what you really love and realising that you aren't good at it. An arrow straight to the heart. But, if one never takes that first step out of that door, one will be eternally shut in. Coasting through life, living at the shallow edges - kind of like the safe part of the sea our parents always made us stay at. Don't go too close to the waves. Don't let yourself get carried away.

But how I miss it! That wild abandonment and the fresh salty taste of the sea. How the salt gets in your eyes and it hurts. But it's alright, you just shed a few tears and you are all ready to jump back in again. And, you come up, in your clothes, terribly unsuited for the ocean, and you just lie on the sand, with sand in all kinds of uncomfortable places (haha!) and let the sun and the wind do its magic and hug you dry.

We did it so often, jumping into the sea in our school uniforms, that the ends of my long hair got so dry. But again it was alright, I just cut it short and felt as free as ever.

Life is not about reaching an end point. In a way, it's not about achieving something. Life, sometimes, is about breathing. And when you forget to breath, or when you fail to realise you've been holding your breath, holding it all in, for such a long time... oh my dear, you have been forgetting to live. But it's alright, you just shed a few tears and you are all ready to jump back in again. Yes, you shed a few tears and you are all ready to jump back in again.

Mood Board: F1 Race

from net-a-porter

Recovery

The worst part about an illness is losing your appetite. Losing your appetite for the physical things - the food, the taste, the smell is inextricably linked to the loss of appetite in all important aspects - Life. I was so sick that I didn't even wash my face. The only thing I looked forward to and longed for was peaceful sleep. Even that was limited. I prayed for less discomfort. Every day, a new body part ached and I took deeper breaths. More than the pain, it was just plain exhausting. One looked at life through a very narrow scope - please hurt less. Then, as if a different coloured paintbrush had dropped into a well of greyish muted colours, everything started changing. Nothing drastic of course. No deus ex machina. The fever went away. I could laugh again. The television shows on the same few channels became mildly amusing, some moments even touched me. I was grateful they touched me. I longed to be home again. The appetite has not quite returned, but at least, in the ways that are important - I'm home - and I see the colours from the view of my window.

A Waste

Years ago, a friend told me about how a really bright girl graduated and never worked. She married a man and spent her days making cupcakes. She said it was such a waste, and at that time I agreed - although we both agreed that a life of making cupcakes sounds very delicious indeed.

Years later, I've realised that I was wrong. It would have been a waste if anyone lived their life not doing the things they truly want - productivity levels of Society be damned!

So, if years later, someone tells me I've lived my life in waste. I'll smile and say, "Better considered a waste than good riddance!"

Groundwork for Penang

I've been wanting to write about my travels but I suppose there is always a bit of emotional disconnect from being so busy with work and writing about one's holidays. While walking home yesterday, I thought of my Penang trip, which happened just a month ago, and there was a sweet feeling in my mouth. It's quite apt that it was the mouth since I ate so much food in Penang.

Well, this will be my "practical" entry. I heartily recommend Yeng Keng Hotel at Penang. It's a really lovely boutique hotel and I say this with as much objectivity I can muster - by far, the prettiest of all the hotels I walked by in Georgetown. The rooms aren't very big but perfectly sized for a weekend of relaxation. Without further ado, I present the pictures:













It costs S$450 for three nights for the room, inclusive of a really generous breakfast buffet every morning. I have to confess that I only ate the breakfast once because waking up early on a holiday? Sacrilegious!

I recommend getting the rooms on the second floor. The rooms on the first floor are very near the restaurant and reception desk and I imagine it won't be very peaceful. There's also a mosque across the road, so if you are a light sleeper, you may be affected by the 5 am prayer calls. However, being a deep sleeper, I wasn't affected at all.

Yeng Keng is right in the middle of Georgetown and very near the best eating places. It's my favourite part of Penang... I really enjoyed walking around the streets and getting lost.

Dress Crush

When I was a teenager, I loved wearing prints and patterns. Unfortunately, due to work, I hardly wear prints anymore. I can only make do with little blocks of colour. Still, my dress crush on Diane Von Furstenberg has lived beyond my teens and one day I'll definitely buy a DvF dress :)

in tiny measured doses

When I saw your strand of hair, I knew that grief is love turned into an eternal missing. It can't be contained in hours or days or minutes. Remember those 1930s coffee spoons, each one like a melted sweet? That's how I'd be living my life, in tiny measured doses. But your death was a vast sea, and I was sinking. Did you know that an ocean can be seven miles deep? No sun can penetrate that far down. In the total darkness, only misshapen, unrecognizable creatures survive, mutant emotions that I never knew existed until you died.

- Sister by Rosamund Lupton

Returning to School

I went back to my faculty’s library on Thursday. I had to get a few books for a case. It felt so familiar even though there was construction going on (there is always construction going on in Singapore). It was very quiet, which was what I always loved and disliked about libraries. The quiet gives one the extra intimacy – you can almost feel the books breathing. But when it’s too quiet, it seems like all of life has fallen still and nothing feels real… and only when I exit the library again do I feel that something is returned to me.

It’s been a year and a few months since I graduated. Oh, lots of thoughts flew in and out of my head. I looked at the students around me. I wasn’t out of place. There weren’t many students around. It was early evening and the semester has after all just begun. Sometimes you get caught in your own life, you forget that you are only one wave of a big ocean… and the ocean will repeatedly repeatedly return to the shore, carrying with it greater and greater waves. I wanted to tell them so many things. Ask lots of Questions. Have Long Lunches. Take Conflicts of Law. Enjoy yourself. It’s true, the grass always appear greener on the other side… so sleep in your grass while dreaming of everything (oh! The things the things!) that lies ahead.

Yearning

On days when I’m feeling down, not just the average low, but the equivalent of a minus two hundred and eight, I think of a pond with ducks. Perhaps pond is the wrong word because it evokes images of something round, circular, manageable. Bigger than a stream, but smaller than what I imagine most rivers to be – wide enough for a proper-sized bridge. Actually, now I’ve started to imagine it again, its a wide river, wide enough that the houses on the other side are about the size of my palm.

We were going to have our first picnic. It was late September. The Autumn that year was unpredictable, sunny one moment, frosty the next – so instead of guessing how good she would be feeling, we just planned it. I don’t remember the logistics now. We went to the supermarket. We made sandwiches. We bought chips and juice. We laid out a mat. G was late. We were hungry and ate first. I don’t remember the conversations now.

G left. We remained. I remember the large bag of bread we had left. We started throwing crumbs to feed the ducks that surrounded us. We started to name them. Oh, you gave such bad names. Two-face to a frowning duck. On hindsight, it was the only name I remember… not so bad after all I guess. We remained until it was too cold not too. I didn’t even bring a jacket that day.

There were so many happy days before and so many happy days after. Why do I always return to this day? The pond that is not a pond, the river that is not a river? Why every time I close my eyes and ask you if you miss this place, I think back of this moment? I think this was my last few moments of freedom.

I didn’t know how you felt then. But I was falling in love. Only starting to be aware of it. I had the choice. To continue falling or stop then. So, whenever I feel the equivalent of minus two hundred and eight, I go back to this moment. I would choose to remain even after G left. We would decide to feed the ducks with all the bread we had left. And, I would choose to fall for you.

House

I find out that House finally confesses his love for Cuddy:

Dr. Gregory House: I've made a decision... Being happy and being in love with you... makes me a crappy doctor.
Dr. Lisa Cuddy: Shut up! You're too drunk to end this relationship.
Dr. Gregory House: I am drunk, and I am also right. You have made me a worse doctor, and people are going to die because of that... and you... are *totally* worth it. If I had to choose between... between saving everyone or loving you, being happy. I choose you. I choose being happy with you. I will always choose you.

AND! That the actress acting as Cuddy is leaving House!

ON THE SAME DAY.

The pain of it all.

Heart Ache

Every time someone I love gets hurt or falls sick, my heart aches. It is a lie that love means sadness divided, for love multiplies everything. On some level, I believe we were born to get hurt. To learn about finiteness, that the physical state only lives so far. And only when one understands one's limits can one really face infinity - which lives as a seed of possibility in all of us. Knowing this, even an inkling of this, does not make it easier. We'll love, we'll fear and we'll hold hands in the dark.

The Appearance of Destiny

every tale in The Thousand and One Nights begins with an 'appearance of destiny' which manifests itself through an anomaly, and one anomaly always generates another. So a chain of anomalies is set up. And the more logical, tightly knit, essential this chain is, the more beautiful the tale. By 'beautiful' I mean vital, absorbing and exhilarating. The chain of anomalies always tends to lead back to normality. The end of every tale in The One Thousand and One Nights consists of a 'disappearance' of destiny, which sinks back to the somnolence of daily life ... The protagonist of the stories is in fact destiny itself

- Pier Paolo Pasolini

Westward Adventurer Satchel

I have a huge crush on Kate Spade's Westward Adventurer Satchel. I don't know if the crush stems from the bag itself or the idea of all the adventures I can go on it. It's such a good size for a weekend trip. A passport, a book, a wallet, some toiletries and a change of clothes. Sometimes I don't know if we love things for the things themselves or what they represent. At the end of the day, we may be only buying intangibles. One thinks if only I had a bag like this, I would be going on more adventures. And, I close my eyes and play a little pretend.

EDIT (16th August): I saw the bag in real life. Sadly, dreams are never what they seem.

said King Lear

so we'll live
and pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh at gilded butterflies

Yesterday, a bunch of us gathered at C's house to celebrate her birthday. I couldn't recognise S. But when he started speaking, I practically screamed, "S!" Some people we recognise not by how they look like, but how they speak. I like that. I wonder if people recognise me by my hand actions or as another S once described, "mini forcefields". Later, in the night, after the security guard reminded us to keep our voices low, we were all very quiet as S told us his love story. Full of the freshness that only relationships that just started can have - the uncertainty of it all, the reinterpretation of all the past events to figure out when the thread of love started or even how it will unravel at all - will we last? Oh, please do. That sense of shared urgency and hope. His story went straight through my heart.

Another moment that made me smile was when He looked with amazement at Carrot (too many friends to initial as C) after she explained her thesis for her postgraduate studies. He said, "None of my friends are as cool. Some engineers, some bankers...." I laughed.

Oh, the un-coolness of how I have turned out. There was enough of the old, enough of the familiar, to see and remember our much younger selves running and laughing along C's house. As we started to pack up (because some of us had work the next day), our feet became completely wet. A group of very young teenagers started diving rapidly into the pool. Loud splash after loud splash. Someone said you had to be very young to do that.

And so we left, tupperwares and half-finished cakes, our feet soaked, our stories still unravelling.

the weight of it all

These days, my gmail inbox always gets filled with newsletters from blogshops - all kind of blogshops. I have no idea how these shops get your email addresses but it's intriguing to watch how commonplace setting up a blogshop is becoming. I think buying from a blogshop is one of those phases every young girl will go through - fashionable peers setting up pretty things at such cheap prices. I'm quite happy, that I think I've finally reached that stage in life, where I don't feel the need to buy clothes anymore. In order to understand the weight of something that seems so trivial, one must understand that we all have our vices. And for me, my vice were clothes. Like all vices, despite knowing that it really doesn't do us any good, we can't see why we should stop when it makes us feel happy (even for a while) and it doesn't do us any harm . So, yes, buying clothes within your budget isn't harmful, it's just wasteful. It's not that I'm no longer going to buy clothes (i can hear disbelieving laughter already) but I'm simply going to just enjoy my wardrobe and leave it as it is. I'm going to re-wear things so often that people will stop telling me that they have never seen me in the same outfit twice (which really is more due to their poor memory than any inference as to the size of my wardrobe).

And so, it's not like I can now happily announce I've conquered all my vices - because as you'll often find, the demise of one vice is the acceleration of another. Happily, I'm returning to books (surprisingly finished 5 in the last 2 months). And cakes, yummy, scrumptious cakes.

City lights

from: http://www.printedmatter.org/


Living in the city, it's hard to see the stars. So, we need to find our own lights.

Quotes from Grey's Anatomy (Season 7): Teddy & Henry

Teddy: I have great medical insurance.
Henry: Way to kick a guy when he's down.
Teddy: I'm... I'm saying... I'm saying that I'll marry you.
Henry: Uh, that's a really generous offer, but I can't.
Teddy: I'm a doctor. I took an oath, and I can't leave you now anymore than I could leave you bleeding out in the street.

Henry: I've been thinking lately, and I think...um...I think I've figured it out...why all of your dates go so bad, so, so bad, laughably bad, and it's not your fault—it's mine because I'm not the guy on them with you.

Henry: I really tried to be a gentleman about all this, but now you need to get the hell out. Letting you go was the worst thing I’ve ever done. It’s the most painful thing I’ve ever done, and I’m a guy who’s had 82 surgeries. My threshold for pain is pretty high. You need to get out. I’m not your best bud. I’m not your security blanket. I’m a man who’s been in love with you and you, you who waltzed you into the arms of a damn knight on a horse. So, go to Germany and have little spaetzle-eating children. And please, for God’s sake, leave me alone.

I love how marriages of convenience slowly become true marriages. Always a romantic at heart.

Cristina: Why would you want to put yourself through this again?
Her patient: Because I love what I do more than anything. You don't find something you love that much and let it go. You hold onto it and throw yourself in deeper.

The Origin of Stories

I used to find it difficult to write fictional stories. Poems were easier, spun out of dream images (which explains why I write bad poetry). Stories... I always felt had to center on some kind of truth... and when you are young, you don't know many emotional truths except your own. As you grow older, it's not that you necessarily become more mature, but you've observed truths not of your own but bestowed from others.

Most likely, the type of stories we will write have probably been written before. For example, the ever classical and reliable bildungsroman - youth experiences life and learns lessons while growing up. Sometimes I feel like shakespeare had written everything (and even he recycled from old tropes): the tragic romeo and juliets, the philosophical (anti-hero?) hamlet, the switched identities (twelfth night), I use this term very loosely "romantic comedies"/battle of the sexes (taming of the shrew).... so it's not that we need new ideas or even that we need to use these classical story types in fresh ways (although you should if you don't want to sound trite)... but People will always have Stories.

Most of the things we write are not growing to break any moulds. But every time I read a book, especially a book I really like, it feels immensely personal. And, when I see someone reading a book I've read before, I feel like we are kindred spirits - regardless if he or she would have felt completely different from my own subjective feelings. It just felt like, in one moment or another, we all took part in someone's story-telling. So, it's not like I've been writing fictional stories of my own, but I finally have had that realisation and courage to take a step forward from just being a reader. To emulate Isaac Newton so to speak and try to stand on the shoulders of (literary) giants... and hopefully not fall off too badly.

I don't think I have a voice yet, but at least I feel the stories forming beneath my feet.

Morse Code

Is anything more difficult than liking someone
and hiding your feelings?
A game of morse code, in which
you invent the symbols
every minute,
every second, kind of like
a magician, hoping to achieve
the greatest sleight of hand.
To create an illusion of nonchalance
to shield a beating heart.
I confess to like having my feelings
kept a secret.
When something is out in the open,
it feels like it is waiting to be broken.
Can you break an egg that has
not been hatched?
Sometimes it feels like I've placed
my love for you in a bottle,
and thrown it out at sea.
A robinson crusoe-like survivor
will find it on some deserted island
and he will read it.
Can feelings be known that way?
Does our feelings become true
if read by a stranger?
He'll used the bottle now,
for some means of survival.
While my words, these words,
will fall away in the faraway island.

Traveling

June is always a period of "peak" traveling. Students graduate, the younger students get released for holidays, workers decide to celebrate the end of the first half of the year... it's a marker of sorts for time (even if we cannot truly fathom if time is truly chronological). However, regardless of the true nature of time, our bodies are aging, our minds are changing and the memories in our head have changed in intensity.

I always feel a great sense of happiness looking at other people's travel albums. We are always traveling, a-wandering in this place called earth, but it's only when we leave our homes, take a bus, train or plane of sorts, do people consciously realise they are embarking on a journey. It is that consciousness, that desire for discovery, that I revel in.

Good Day!

Today was a good day with mascarpone cheesecake.

Palpable

Regardless of how every relationship turns out, I really enjoy the beauty of the pictures of the stage of the relationship where the seed of love has just started budding. That sense of hope, that sense of the possibility of forever ...... for me, love is most palpable in those moments.


Cinque Terre, June 2009

Heroism

I once fantasised about writing a fantasy novel. I use the word "fantasy" because I don't want to constrain it - i would love for it to have the widest realm of magic and illusion as possible. I finished two science (?) fiction/ fantasy books of the best kind lately. The hero reminds me a lot of Hamlet, and often highlights that the hardest battles are often within yourself.

I love fantasy novels, especially their sweeping epic arcs and seemingly endless trilogies, preludes, epilogues set in a universe that is constantly expanding. I love how people set their own rules in each worlds, and the best kind of fantasy novels break away from conventional tropes or even better, use conventional tropes (heroes, quest, etc) in the greatest of heartfelt ways.

Maybe, just like my love for fairytales, I am in love with Heroism. I am in love with the idea of our better selves. I don't deny that novels can be pretty heavy-handed - some people, types, seem to be eternally relegated to sideline roles while the heroes are often "reluctant" and yet unable to resist their "destinies". I do want to kick the hero or heroines at times, but in the end, we laugh and cry and enjoy this journey of self knowledge. For we understand that we are our own worst monsters.

Mood Board: Peace

Freedom & Anonymity

Today's my last day of leave. I came back to Singapore yesterday, all tired up, but loved by my parents. It was rather amusing unpacking my luggage and compartmentalising them - a little like separating the groceries or dissecting a body. This is the lungs, the stomach... my heart.

I understood a little more of the nature of the anonymity I sought and enjoyed in Seoul. Does one loses one's identity when he or she goes to a foreign land? I can't answer the question of whether we have an instrinsic essential nature within us, but I think what gave me that freedom of anonymity is that we lose the usual external factors constraining or even elevating us. There are no ties that bind. It leaves us both vulnerable and yet completely free to be as hedonistic or altruistic as we would like to be. Pleasure seeking beings, so to speak.

There is no place calling out to me in a foreign land. I've no home, no workplace, no destination that I need to be. I do not belong. I am only a tourist. There are places tailored for tourists but they do not necessarily call out my name. For I have no name. There is no struggle between all the places (home, friends, work, pleasure) that call out for us.

The anonymity was wonderful. But, I have to admit, I missed the struggle. Even typing this now, I can already hear the beckon of all the places I "belong" to - all the places I need to go. All the people I love and missed.

I'm back. The person and the identity.

A Holiday

Finally, my holiday is arriving. Dreadfully, I fell sick mid-week. Still, I can sense already that things are falling into place. The books I ordered to read on my trip, arrived today (!), despite worries that they will never reach in time. I just have to finish another assignment and I'll be off, at least, guilt-free.

I honestly don't know what I envision for this trip. Of course, every time someone asks me about it, I smile all gleeful (and in all sincerity too) that I'm going to do that and that and that, yes that too! I think, most of all, I just want to be anonymous. Anonymous in the way you can only be in a city that does not know you.

It's as if I could give myself a new first name. Or maybe three names! Or be nameless. Have you ever had the feeling - sitting somewhere, a cafe, a bridge, a garden, anywhere really, and you feel really content, and you close your eyes and secretly wish the world would pass you by -- leaving you behind? Not forever of course. Just a little while. Enough time to savour a cup of tea.

I'm glad I'm going with my sister. We have the kind of relationship where we don't keep secrets, but it's not like we know all of each other's secrets - we simply don't bother to pry. Maybe it's the kind of feeling where you know someone too well, that all these secrets, whatever things she has put on along the years, makes no difference at all. Everyone always thinks she is the older one, and I'm all the younger for it.

The World's Future

When we think of the world's future, we always mean the destination it will reach if it keeps going in the direction we can see it going in now; it does not occur to us that its path is not a straight line but a curve, constantly changing direction.

- Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

"Liking is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts" by Jonathan Frazen

This is the kind of article I would love to send to a few people who I like to goad out of their self-disgruntled hermit circle, but decide not to, eventually, because who is to say I am not a coward as well?

For full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/opinion/29franzen.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2

Finally, in the mid-1990s, I made a conscious decision to stop worrying about the environment. There was nothing meaningful that I personally could do to save the planet, and I wanted to get on with devoting myself to the things I loved. I still tried to keep my carbon footprint small, but that was as far as I could go without falling back into rage and despair.

BUT then a funny thing happened to me. It’s a long story, but basically I fell in love with birds. I did this not without significant resistance, because it’s very uncool to be a birdwatcher, because anything that betrays real passion is by definition uncool. But little by little, in spite of myself, I developed this passion, and although one-half of a passion is obsession, the other half is love.

And so, yes, I kept a meticulous list of the birds I’d seen, and, yes, I went to inordinate lengths to see new species. But, no less important, whenever I looked at a bird, any bird, even a pigeon or a robin, I could feel my heart overflow with love. And love, as I’ve been trying to say today, is where our troubles begin.

Because now, not merely liking nature but loving a specific and vital part of it, I had no choice but to start worrying about the environment again. The news on that front was no better than when I’d decided to quit worrying about it — was considerably worse, in fact — but now those threatened forests and wetlands and oceans weren’t just pretty scenes for me to enjoy. They were the home of animals I loved.

And here’s where a curious paradox emerged. My anger and pain and despair about the planet were only increased by my concern for wild birds, and yet, as I began to get involved in bird conservation and learned more about the many threats that birds face, it became easier, not harder, to live with my anger and despair and pain.

How does this happen? I think, for one thing, that my love of birds became a portal to an important, less self-centered part of myself that I’d never even known existed. Instead of continuing to drift forward through my life as a global citizen, liking and disliking and withholding my commitment for some later date, I was forced to confront a self that I had to either straight-up accept or flat-out reject.

Which is what love will do to a person. Because the fundamental fact about all of us is that we’re alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it.

When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might love some of them.

And who knows what might happen to you then?

Almost Left Behind

Today, I watched the fruits of 9 months of my friends' labour - Almost Left Behind. There were many individual pieces and they were sited at different parts of the Substation. It was like a traveling circus and the audience were the nomads.

It was painfully ironic that the person who I set out to see perform, was the one person I didn't get to see perform. I was stuck at another piece, which I didn't know I couldn't leave halfway, and was only able to reach her piece when it ended. When I heard the others all raving at the performance, it hit me, how yet again, I've missed being personally part of something important for her. Still, I was really happy that her performance went so well.

These group of friends, from my theatre study years, were the friends who, at one point, physically embodied my heart and soul. One of you could be my head, the other could be my toes, or my right hand, or any limb you would like. It just felt that natural. I don't know when, but at some point, I felt that the umbilical cord had been cut off. Now, whenever I see them, I feel this great wave of affection, a great deal of respect and admiration, but never that sense of intimacy again. I was really glad to see all of them on stage, performing, being in their element. Everyone it seems, is most beautiful, when they are living out the truth of their lives.

To give credit to some of the most heartfelt theatre I've watched in years, I'll write some thoughts on the pieces I had the fortune to watch:



The picture above is a shot I took from Esther Ng's video titled "I love to go a-wandering (the shanty town)". I didn't get to catch the whole piece. I found the opening very moving - swashes of primary colours started filling the screen, like waves of coloured oceans, and I loved how naturally the swashes of colour seemed to form mini amoebas - the building blocks of everything we see in this world. You could start to see all kinds of creatures in the sea-green,yellow,red ocean, and then there was a sun, and then there were stars. Everything was wiped clean. And then there was a tree. For me, I thought about the genesis and creation and I loved how the simple images/shadows in the video allowed the mind such a great space to play and exercise their imagination on. A-wandering indeed.

After Esther's piece, I went into Ng Yuhui's Storeyhouse. You were passed a torchlight, and in, you went into this deeply cramped space with nothing but a great sense of curiosity. I found this piece very well-curated, how such a small space could be so carefully segmented, with heartbreaking moments at each spot. I love the thoughts scribbled on the walls, some at different heights, which reminded me of how in our youth, we would mark our height on the walls with pencil scribbles - and those scribbles at different places and heights, made me imagine that was how one mark the growth of love in a budding relationship. This piece had such great humor and wistful sadness... she called herself a hoarder, but more than anything, in this careful sensitive compartmentalisation of memories, relationships and love, I left with the impression that she had already freed herself.

The third piece I watched was Lynn Yang's The Audition. I think this piece was the most honest of the pieces I watched tonight. We don't know the role she was auditioning for, but we didn't really need to know, because I think, in the end - that's all our life stories, figuring out what role we are playing at this particular stage of our lives. This audition was not for something, this audition was a very honest (maybe even painfully) self-examination into our deepest desires. As the "director" kept asking for her "life story", as if demanding for her to re-write her life story, there and then, to create something more tragic, more exciting, more fit for the stage - to be larger than life, but most poignantly, most of our lives are made of stuff like these - the fact that we come from happy, "normal", backgrounds and in a loving household, does not make these lives any lesser than a life with a "real" story. I found the most beautiful moment was when she was detailing her fears/mental blocks and little coloured pixels started falling down as if her life was a beautiful chaotic game of Tetris.

The fourth piece I watched was Pamela Tham's Sole Searching. This piece I felt was the best of all the pieces I watched. It was intriguing conceptually and the interplay of the actor and the lights was just plain impressive. Still, this piece was brilliant because of Pamela's immense natural charisma. She reminded me of my own batch mate, Jiehui, a natural performer as well. There's a sense of primal instinct in their acting, which is so raw and powerful, that evokes all kinds of subconscious fears and desires. She had excellent pacing, use of space, and was very true to her character throughout in her treatment of the different shoes that represented different stages of her life. The way she tenderly caressed her childhood ballet shoes, the animalistic cowboy boots, the heels she hid away, the practical and sensible teacher shoes. As an actor, she needs further vocal work, but I think she has perfect instincts.

The fifth and last piece I watched was Andrea Ang and Anitha Pagolu's In Flight. This piece was structured beautifully. The two actors have excellent vocals and control of their body - the physicality in their interactions really brought out the internal strife/struggle within. I really enjoyed how the actors could play off each other's natural physical sense - one naturally cool and sophisticated and the other with such nervous energy. I thought it was still rough around the edges, but there were moments of such poetic beauty - I felt that it was the piece that best brought out the title of this overall festival, "Almost Left Behind".

The "finale" so to speak was called "The Departure". I got to see Xijie in her mime outfit, and was deeply regretful I couldn't see her piece despite trying to queue for it thrice. She gave me a flower at the end, and my heart skipped a beat. She's really someone that reminds me of living, breathing "magic realism".

I'll be looking forward to what the future holds for all these immensely talented individuals. Certainly, the audience won't be left behind.

An Unposted Love Letter

I usually have a few books around my bed. They feel like guardians. I always feel protected by words. Even though, these days, I feel like I’m constantly tripping over them. Both the books and metaphorically, words.

If I’m reading a novel, I’ll usually read the novel faithfully. Trying to keep intact the world of the book. If the novel is one more of ideas than characters, with a very loose thread kind of narrative, then I usually intersperse it with short stories.

You would think that I read so much on the job, I would refrain from reading altogether. But I can’t help myself. It’s as if the tape rewinds in my head and the tight structure my brain has started coiling itself in starts to unroll – starts to transform into all kinds of brilliant dazzling colours.

I honestly recommend Doris Lessing’s Stories. It’s a collection of short stories that break my heart. I try not to be greedy. Only reading one story a day. Trying to let the flavours linger longer. There was no need for me to. The stories are so strong that they stay there, smiling at me, like old friends, whenever I return for another.

I’m only one-third into the collection. So far, the story that came closest to bringing me to tears was “An Unposted Love Letter”. It’s so wonderful that I don’t dare to even begin to analyse it –I’m just sitting here, being profoundly affected.

I’ll quote it a little, because I can’t help it, even though the words without all the other perfect words of the story does deal it a great injustice:

“I am a great space that enlarges, that grows, that spreads with the steady lightening of the human soul, and in the space, squatting in the corner, is a thing, an object, a dark, slow, coiled, amorphous heaviness, embodied sleep, a cold stupid sleep, a heaviness like the dark in a stale room – this thing stirs in its sleep where it squats in my soul, and I put all my muscles, all my force, into defeating it. For this was what I was born for, this is what I am, to fight embodied sleep, putting around it a confining girdle of light, of intelligence, so that it cannot spread its slow stain of ugliness over the trees, over the stars, over you.
…

I release you to go to your joys without me. I leave you to your love. I leave you to your life.”

a whisper of a sigh

I'm always most tired when I'm with him. I believe it's because I let myself be most vulnerable. I had the kind of tiredness, the long drawn kind of tiredness, that ends with a whisper of a sigh. My world felt like it was being held up by the thinnest of threads, so fragilely drawn tight, that I felt if I let myself slacken for a moment, even if just for a second, the world would fall down. Like london bridge. Like humpty dumpty. Like all the nursery rhymes in which we play-act pain so gleefully.

He changed the channel on the radio. It switched to the Kings of Convenience cd. The radio went, "Go easy on me..."

My shoulders loosened. The world didn't fall down.

Captain Sunshine

My rabbit, taking over the world, one butt at a time.

Larkin: Letters to Monica

'We cannot be
Elsewhere than here –
And yet, just so
May others stare
On our casual scene,
And cry for pleasure
At the out-of reach
Enchantment there
Where we have been.’

Girl Crush

From www.9to5chic.com

Macbeth: Rock Concert Style

I watched Macbeth at Fort Canning Hill yesterday. We arrived late and had to figure out how we were going to find a free patch of grass for the 7 of us. We did, we stretched out and waited for the action to begin.



Honestly, it's very difficult to put on a Shakespearean play - more than having a strong directorial vision/concept for how you would like to present the themes of the play, more than having costumes that would visually match the directorial vision - you have to respect the words. It's important to have a good sense of rhythm or the words will just die out in empty fury. Most of the actors left me with the impression that they did not understand the iambic pentameter. I think Macbeth and Macduff stood out with their words being able to echo through the hills and create some tremors in my heart. The rest, well, is best passed over in silence.


The Three Witches toiling and troubling

Still, much credit, goes to the stage designer. The gothic grey building was crisp and stark, so simple, yet it evoked associations of historical images of power - I could see the Parliament House, the ancient Greek pillars, a castle, a majestic tomb - how apt considering the deaths that would be played out on this somber stage. The simple palette allowed the colours to really shine through - the lovely shade of royal blue during King Duncan's reign, to be swiftly changed by the crimson red sea of flags for Macbeth's reign. The stand out scene by far was the Dining Party scene when Macbeth starts to show the public how the guilt and madness within is starting to cripple him. Oh, the sight of the blood soaked Banquo sitting silently in his seat, haunting indeed.

Other than that beautiful tableau, the play was extremely uneven. Still, I appreciated the message: when traitorous men are in power, it is the honest that are treated like traitors.

Singapore theatre, please rock on.

Sunset

Today, I left office just in time to see a sunset.

Tweet!

H gave me these knowing how much I love birds. They make me so happy. I'm so thankful for the people I've met in my life in all their wondrous capacities. It makes me feel that this world has infinite possibilities and as I lived more of my life I'm starting to realise how we all resist labels - we are just who we are. Strangers one moment and kindred spirits the next.

Historic Change in Status

On Thursday, my oldest friend became a mother. I became a god mother. On Saturday, I voted for the first time. On Sunday, History was officially made in Singapore.

A heart once stirred cannot be unstirred.

Mothers' Day in Pictures

Politics

It seems everywhere you go, everywhere you turn, there it is - politics. There are no politically correct answers, refreshingly, perhaps - because we are now re-defining the correct answers. I'm very tired of the bashing that is going on, the anti-insert Party rhetoric. Let's try and speak in positive formulations instead. Don't tell me how much insert Party sucks, tell me what you believe in, tell me what you want Singapore to be.

This makes me cry a little

I want you and you are not here. I pause
in this garden, breathing the colour thought is
before language into still air. Even your name
is a pale ghost and, though I exhale it again
and again, it will not stay with me. Tonight
I make you up, imagine you, your movements clearer
than the words I have you say you said before.

Whereever you are now, inside my head you fix me
with a look, standing here whilst cool late light
dissolves into the earth. I have got your mouth wrong,
but still it smiles. I hold you closer, miles away,
inventing love, until the calls of nightjars
interrupt and turn what was to come, was certain,
into memory. The stars are filming us for no one.

- Miles Away, Carol Ann Duffy

Still naive and innocent

"I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.” – Anais Nin

From G's blog

I love you

...All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase- 'I love you.'

-The Offshore Pirate, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Strength

I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.

- John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Sometimes All I See is Nothing But Stars

Human beings are good at understanding the world. We always have been. We were able to hunt game or build fires only because we had figured something out. There was a time before television, before motion pictures, before radio, before books. The greatest part of human existence was spent in such a time. Over the dying embers of the campfire, on a moonless night, we watched the stars.

- Carl Sandburg, Cosmo

I go cuckoo for you.

Source: bippityboppityboo's tumblr

"Do you want anything?"

After a while she says, "No. Not any thing."

— William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

Source: typewriterblues' tumblr

Thought-provoking.

Source: observando's tumblr

You and I, Ingrid Michaelson

Source: Observando's tumblr

For the longest time, this song got me through commute.

Rare Sunday

It's a rare sunday I'm not at work or working. So, i guess, being sick has its advantages. Antidote for today: endless lovely pictures. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do. *SNEEZE*

Joanne Woodward & Paul Newman

Image Source: Life.com


Whenever I fall sick, I like to read about Old Hollywood Legends. It may stem from my love of greek mythology (classic hollywood icons are our closest embodiments of immortality ) and my love for classic hollywood movies. I was struck again by Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman's long marriage and love story.

Can you see how Paul Newman only ever looks at her?

It reminded me of Louise Gluck's poem titled "Happiness":

A man and a woman lie on a white bed.
It is morning. I think
Soon they will waken.
On the bedside table is a vase
of lilies; sunlight
pools in their throats.
I watch him turn to her
as though to speak her name
but silently, deep in her mouth--
At the window ledge,
once, twice,
a bird calls.
And then she stirs; her body
fills with his breath.

I open my eyes; you are watching me.
Almost over this room
the sun is gliding.
Look at your face, you say,
holding your own close to me
to make a mirror.
How calm you are. And the burning wheel
passes gently over us.

Typewriter

When I was young, my mum gave us a typewriter and I loved it. You can't make errors when you use a typewriter. Or more wondrously, even an error is beautiful. As if every second of your existence can be embodied in the typewriter - and you can't hide your mistakes. You must be brave and say the truth.

I want to buy a typewriter. There are a lot of things I would like to type. And not have the ability to erase.