Friday, August 26, 2011

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.

Thursday, August 25, 2011

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

Thursday, August 11, 2011

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.

Monday, August 8, 2011

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.