words are dope, he said.

merry had a plate of lamb

2008-12-14T01:02:00.008+08:00

IT IS DECEMBER! I realize with an exclamation as if winter shook me awake.

... ...

but i digress

2008-10-18T16:28:00.007+08:00

If I had the time and leisure to take out canvas and brush again, I thought I would have a picture consisting of a tall tower, with little white faced human figures in various stages of a tower-jumping process.

These are students, depicted as being expelled from the ivory tower of academia. Some parachute, some bungee jump, some take flight and parasail, for better or worse, to distant places, some, most, I think, crash to the bottom in a straightforward tragedy.

Because I don't know which type I am, it is hint suggesting that I belong to the majority: already dead, still unknowing, and will remain rather unrecognisably unknown.

room

2008-10-01T15:17:00.005+08:00

my bed is beginning to rust. little specks, areas, where metal is overcoming its coat of paint to meet the room's air.

So is the wood (even if it is plywood) that is starting to show if i opened the pastel colored door of the cabinet and looked at it.

I used to be proud of my cabinet. It was cool then, to own a color-coordinated bedroom set, comprising a writing desk, display cabinet, book shelves, bedframe, wardrobe--all that a school student in this country's system needs. Then even as we outgrew it, we left it there, using it, occasionally cleaning it, and except for a memory of how great it was back then, there was not about it to feel for anymore.

I thought. I've never felt happier about my furniture. How they clash and mix

Oh, to be young and living in Paris

2008-09-16T22:20:00.002+08:00

is not wanderlust. nor is it looking at green grass. It is this, written en rose because it must have been lived comme ca.

before we ourselves must die

2008-09-14T01:54:00.007+08:00

The campus has an immense, undefinable influence on me. A recent visit stirred up, not indulgent memories of wonderful schooling days past, but a remembrance of what I had set out to do outside of school.

I recently was reminded of the idea I learnt somewhere I have already forgotten, that once you take note of something by writing it down, you are actually committing (and i use the word committing with purpose) an act of forgetting. Putting things on paper, or in fact putting them wherever, is to put them aside, casting the responsibility of remembering them onto that which they are put, and not holding on to them "at the forefront of your head"--as some funny crazy person used this phrase to great humorous effect recently (i just had to quote it because I would want this wonderfully coined phrase to attack my forefront should i chance to re-read this post in the future).

What are the remembrances the campus holds for me? Reading Proust (which I opened in the hwachong library in 2002 but haven't since read much of)--amongst many others-- all tattooed during school days on the inside of my forehead already, and all perhaps starting to appear to me now.

I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and so effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised their voice the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life.

And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die.

Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, which i find very difficult to read, but which should be read in french, perhaps?

what I subscribe to

2008-08-28T22:42:00.006+08:00

Checking my emails, and checking myself reacting to my emails made me realize how news feeds have become the new psychological (also illogical) dependence. The little net droppings from net heaven, as I shall call these "digest" things that are dropped into my mailboxes, remind me of past desperate/frivolous days when I used to flip to the last page of the magazine for a little enlightening horoscope snippet.

The other day,I wrote this of a net dropping:

I can't believe the evilness of the world. Just when I was being dragged into the thick of a very weighty issue (self being over-sized), gourmet.com had to plop a BJ plum on me.

plum plum plum plum plum plump?

Today, with rainy weather further dampening spirit and making the now almost tangible weight issue weightier, things just burst out at the seams. I then resolved to pick up the pieces: Will power, control, discipline, I thought. Then, in a very deft stroke of bad luck, net heavens pooped in my inbox again. This time, it is a September message from Jeanette Winterson:

Don’t let your need for control get out of control...

Of course it complicated and thwarted everything, just like how the weather, the pedestrian lights, the smell on the train, the lunches, the friends, the electricity etc etc thwart everything. To control or not to control is an additional question, on top of to eat or not to eat, to run or not to run, to go or not to go, to buy or not buy, to drink or not to drink, to have another brulee or another mooncake, or the mini tarts that are fantastic, or perhaps the savories , the drunken chicken and harmless mushrooms fried in batter this hotel is famed the world over for.

Life is never more burdened than now.

But like Winterson says in her September message,

As a writer, either you grow or you get stuck. That’s all there is to it.

Grow? No! Stuck? No! I am therefore stuck--if I thought like Helen Fielding.

But of course I cannot, and instead should take advice from real literary writers, such as Winterson, who comfortingly wrote a little more:

By that I mean that creativity is by its nature a growing and developing thing, and when we hold it back, it ruins us with its ferocious energy. And because we are human, everything has to happen through the body. So the body gets tired, needs looking after, needs respecting. That’s why I live as I do – the food, the exercise, the sleep. I want to go on working, and for that I need my whole self, not just my head, and for that I have to look after my whole self.

Protect Our Food

2008-08-15T10:48:00.008+08:00

As a way of cultivating a cheerier life, and to make up for the No Surprises, Bad News Only in this same life, I have arranged for the Gourmet newsletter to pop itself by my mailbox once every time, well, the newsletter is ready to come out to make its rounds.

Today I woke up to a "voluptuous raspberry crumble tart" which is so good, I am told I should "buy an extra pint of berries;[because]you won't be able to resist eating them by the handful while you're rolling out the dough."

Raspberry crumble tart's featured neighbor tho', isn't too appetizing. Someone is trying to put chocolates into the bandwagon of current politics:

Each box of L.A. Burdick's Campaign Chocolates harks back to the nominee's biographical roots. For McCain, that means flavors like "Arizona Citrus" (orange-lemon ganache) and "Kentucky Rye" (whiskey, lemon, and pepper). For Obama, it's "Kenyan Coffee" (coffee ganache sprinkled with crushed Kenyan coffee beans) and "Hawaiian-Pineapple" (pineapple pâté de fruit). Track who's ahead in the chocolate race on the confectioner's website.*

As if the rest of our modern, civilised, democratic life isn't saturated with politics enough already. Now politics is also a snack? So now, if I picked dark chocolate over white ones, am I making a political choice?

*For sure I have made a self-note to provide only links that direct to sites with desirable content. No links for politically-contaminated food.

what was at the end

2008-08-13T21:32:00.004+08:00

When I am recovered and freed and found back my leisure time and rid of the professional habit of reading and composing and emailing art and design and architecture related stuff i will go and find out if woolf's last ink mark was a fullstop behind her name closing the letter she wrote for her Dearest

I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of these terrible times and I ... shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices and can't concentrate. So i am doing what seems to be the best thing to do.

You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I know that I am spoiling your life, and without me you can work and you will. I know.

You see I can't even write this properly.

What I want to say is that I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me. And incredibly good. Everything is gone for me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer.

I don't think two people could be happier than we have been.

Virginia.

beyond skin, dance redeems

2008-08-09T17:03:00.007+08:00

I was going to write about poetry, specifically, the most very wonderful reading session i just enjoyed some evenings ago, but thinking about poems, literature, married people, lovers' bodies, such intense things of life, i feel like publicizing instead some impromptu thoughts about dance.

So off this tangent, I say I love dance very much, altho' most times I do not understand it,and may I say it because I am naturally limited by my two left feet. In this world saturated with spectacles of the body, majority of which are reduced to the narrows of the body's sex, dance stretches skin flesh and jointed bones to their rightful capacities. It shows what the body can do, how it can be used, moved, and in moving freed to express all it wants to say beyond "look at me, desire me". It is only on the stage of dance that the minority of the body, as it were, gets to display its fully extended and perfectly nonfunctional wings, and this in its very own skin.

twenty six

2008-08-03T00:29:00.005+08:00

I use and reuse twenty six letters so much these days, that should I one day in some accident lose a typing finger-or more unfortunately, five that hold a pen-I'm afraid I shall bleed words.

And in some ways, I wish that what comes out would be 一些横竖撇捺s. For I really wish I retained the O-level command of the Chinese language. Or maybe, some $$ and %%-because those with numerical blood get paid better.

get well and get back to work soon, the head begs the body. in the most childish of retaliation, body shuts head down by striking a headache

2008-07-28T21:14:00.008+08:00

Considering I spent 4 days in bed and in the toilet, I am amazed by the amount of things I get done. Things like getting my head around how to catch up with work as soon as I am released from the clutches of sickness. Planning, strategizing, calculating, sending myself reminders, little mental post-its, these are things I found done and settled in my own head without having the need to rely on Excel, or GCal, or Gmail, or the battery-operated-recently-suicidal phone. Yes, your head is more capable of doing things than your computers. Perhaps it is because my body has more capacity, now that it's almost purged all of 23 years of accumulated overeating, wrongeating, sineating. Oh god, my punishing body. Sante!

3 for $1

2008-07-14T00:45:00.002+08:00

I love the taste amylase makes of colored steamed cakes. A kind of pure sweetness. Basically, fundamentally, essentially wonderful.

perfectly bad

2008-06-25T23:46:00.005+08:00

Going through a pile of reports written by university students I came to learn something: That with people, bad English is not the worst; laziness of thought is.

People who write grammatically perfect English but who write nonsensically irritate me more than words can say. I cannot tolerate the thought of language being used unthinkingly, as if it was merely an exercise in the application of grammar + vocabulary, and had nothing to do with the expression or the communication of human thought or feeling.

So stupid! As my GP tutor used to scold us. I'm starting to understand that it wasn't that we had bad English, but that we were stupidly using big ideas and big words we simply didn't even understand.

And now, post JC, post NS, there is still an entire plantation of unthinking undergraduates ... Let them eat sunlight.

2008-06-22T18:22:00.004+08:00

Imagine all the girls,
Ah ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.
And the boys,
Ah ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.
And the strings,
Eee, eee, eee, eee, eee, eee, eee, eee.
And the drums, the drums, the drums, the drums, the drums, the drums, the drums, the drums, the drums, the drums, the drums, the drums.

Love the sounds they play with words.

le francais me manque ...

2008-06-20T21:55:00.000+08:00

c'est tout.

Today , negotiating being

2008-06-07T04:42:00.009+08:00

The act and passivity of being

Today, for the first time, I feel like I have moved on. It does not mean that I have reached a new phase in life, as it were, the next milestone/stage/chapter/whatever (i hate these kinds of badly contextualized words)nor does it mean that I have made progress; merely that there has been a departure from, a leaving of--something. Moved on, in a way, willy-nillyly. And this moving on, or perhaps, this being moved on, is the trouble.

The thing was, she called me an "English Graduate". Now this is an interesting identity; for being a graduate means that I had been someone (an English undergraduate), but have not really become the next person that I am going to be.

I miss my studentship. I miss learning in class. I am going to be a writer, maybe a journalist, most likely a mere typist serving time. Anyway, the student has to go. Rather, sadly, has gone.

jolie in passive positive

2008-05-22T00:46:00.008+08:00

photograph by Marc Hom

I like the way her legs are elongated, her face masculated, and the way her poised arched hand is a repeat pose of her body. Arches are everywhere: under her cheeks, her feet, formed by her fingers, the four legs of the chair. Because the arch is support and shelter both, seemingly, she and the chair is a solid cave under an invisible arch. A great kind of architecture seems to be going on here; there is harmony.

So I love how her legs are elongated, her face masculated, and how in a man-made way man-made things(both she and the chair) can be perfected.

Guys have more fun aiming

2008-05-14T17:05:00.003+08:00

If only it was as easy for girls to get into their jeans.

If I died now,

2008-05-08T09:47:00.004+08:00

I would only be 3.6963% literate, going by the standards of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, a literary reference book compiled by over one hundred literary critics worldwide.

Yes, I checked my memory against the list. The things one does when unemployed, and unrested. But here is my list, no prizes for guessing who my favorite author is.

1. The Light of Day – Graham Swift
2. Under the Skin – Michel Faber
3. The Hours – Michael Cunningham
4. The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje
5. Possession – A.S. Byatt
6. The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
7. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
8. Solaris – Stanislaw Lem
9. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
10. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
11. The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
12. The Outsider – Albert Camus
13. Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
14. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
15. The Years – Virginia Woolf
16. The Waves – Virginia Woolf
17. Orlando – Virginia Woolf
18. The Well of Loneliness – Radclyffe Hall
19. To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
20. Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
21. Night and Day – Virginia Woolf
22. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
23. The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
24. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
25. The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins
26. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
27. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
28. The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot
29. Villette – Charlotte Brontë
30. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
31. Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
32. Persuasion – Jane Austen
33. Emma – Jane Austen
34. Castle Rackrent – Maria Edgeworth
35. Vathek – William Beckford
36. Evelina – Fanny Burney
37. The Castle of Otranto – Horace Walpole

Being the Jean Brodie that I am, I have observed the strictest standard of honesty when I did my literacy check. Of course many times I went ACK! I read so and so, but why isn't this book of his here? There were books I started but didn't finish, like Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Jansson's The Summer Book, and Stoker's Dracula, these I don't include, out of shame. There are also books I am currently reading with pride (Calvino!) that I don't include.

It is certainly a very curious list that reflects contemporary literary tastes--if a little academic (since compliers are cool literary folks reading in their ivory towers all over the world).

But if I were one of the compilers and given the chance to include one book of choice , it would be ... very difficult to decide. There are so many great books left out of 1001BYMRBYD-- like Fair Play by Tove Jansson, Age of Iron by JM Coetzee, Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson, The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman, and Neil Gaiman? Where is Gaiman?? I suppose I would include him, one super prolific writing machine he is.

Go through the list. Remember that you had meant to read something? Print this, and off to the bookstore you ought to go.

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, Words Are Not The Only Language

2008-04-23T17:55:00.008+08:00

Came upon this story again while I was looking for Jeanette Winterson on YouTube (which has an atlas-y ice blue tint I realised)

It reminds me of a class on Semiology, and how words are not the only language. Language is so much bigger, universal, a whole system that can be encoded in so many thinkable forms--in music, in signs, in symbols, in colors, in nudges and hints, and in this case in shapes and lines that make up human expressions (itself re-presented as fruit expressions, if there can be such an expression).

It is an ever expanding gamut of signs and symbols we create and share everyday, yet we misunderstand one another more and more disastrously. Human conditions unwritten spells of the chaotic, the unspecified, the disagreeables. Memorandums of Understanding, pre-nups, manuals, table etiquette, email etiquette, Mona Lisa, the promise she made, the sound of his voice indicating ... what? If only the world could be scientifically coded, and peeled fruits remained only peeled fruits--We wouldn't be so upset with one another would we?

anywhere the wind blows

2008-04-11T02:03:00.003+08:00

you see this is a "live" show, but the stage performs death. the cups on the piano--very mesmerizing. but what do they mean, just what do they mean being there? Do you think you can love me and leave me to die?

what are you?

2008-04-07T01:50:00.015+08:00

When I think of people saying to me "is writing is the best thing that ever happened to you", I dont even think of it as something that is happening to me, I think of it as something that is me. You know, birds fly fish swim I write.

--Winterson, in an interview with More4

Chancing upon this interview must be one of the best things that can ever happen to someone like me . A life-saving reminder that I should not always rely on letting things happen to me, (and faulting, or crediting them) but to, as it were, recover my rights in being. I shall therefore (in manner of Bridget Jones, yes i started to read again) resist as much as i can the circumstances that so irresponsibly shape my life. And perhaps, if the birds and fishes of world would guard my being, I shall be able to submit myself to my own nature.

---

what are you? i must be plant because just today, a professor who teaches visual art (therefore has special seeing abilities) looked me in the eye and very seriously said, "Yvonne, don't droop yet."

Birds fly, fish swim, plants droop, right?

---

so the unemployed was back in school again today. i have to say that the moment the turnstiles at the library gates relented and swiveled me past the threshold, i felt like i entered paradise. Readmitted into the school library! of course it was also nice to bump into familiar faces among shelves and stairways and the quiet reading places whose floors are, at this time of the term, criss-crossed with power-adapter-cords stretching from oases of power points to the workers' tables, like lifelines that are as endless as term essays.

what king or freedom?

2008-03-31T16:47:00.014+08:00

Sometimes i wonder if the Speak Good English Movement, initiated in the year 2000 by then Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, would be more fun if were to be turned around and aimed at correcting the gahment's Standard of English.

There is a project called Kings of Freedom organized by The Aljunied GRC and this is found on its website:

The Berlin Wall was a poignant symbol of a once mighty and oppressive regime that preyed on fear and intolerance. Many Germans endured the pain of separation when the wall was put up.

This project attempts to pay homage to the wall and its legacy.

-Lien We King
And The Kings of Freedom Project Team @ The Aljunied GRC

*Legacy: a condition that is left or created by an organization, individual or group of community leadership

Is he saying that the project is paying homage to the might, oppression, fear, intolerance, pain and separation endured by many Germans?

Perhaps they meant legacy to be, "a bequest or gift left in the Will that can be in the form of money, property, stocks and shares or possessions"? Even then, who is Singapore, whose idea of a "movement" is practising "Standard English" in peace and in technology, to inherit a piece of Germanic history?

If the main aim of the initiative is to remind Singaporeans to "speak in Standard English so as to be understood by all English speakers in this globalised and highly-interconnected world," perhaps then, the movement leaders (or their first class scholars)--nonetheless (or all the more?) Singaporeans--would care to polish their Standard English, instead of importing other countries' cultures and planting them in our also imported soil as if cultures and histories were but trees.

a meeting between 2 of my favorite english women

2008-03-26T04:28:00.003+08:00

Winterson read VB's autobiography, and she wrote about it the way i, self-sworn sister to the Spice Girls, never could. I say she wrote about "it", and not "her" because i think it was written about the manufactured MRS VB, post marriage, who since becoming wife, mother, super celeb, designer and autobiographer, has been transformed into something quite phenomenal, a curious subject of study that obviously interested Winterson.

I wonder what VB would say of Winterson's books, or lifestyle. Both are smart, quick witted, well-known English women, but operating in such different, yet meeting, worlds.

human contact

2008-03-24T15:54:00.007+08:00

having recently entered a new phase of life known as JobSearch, i made a few encounters with people and discoveries about their natures. there is the psychotic angsty boss who hurls insults because, i maintain, he couldnt afford to pay a new hire, and there is the smarty pants one working under said boss who gets kicks out of labeling himself a "strategist", and giving anecdotes about orgasms, marriages, relationships--all in the context of warring states. Gmail must have sensed the extreme ridicule of my encounters and it consoled me today with its own philosophy on humans and humanity:

It reminds me of Philip k Dick, Orson Scott Card, and Dr Ang who teaches science fiction and fantasy in NUS.

the fugly bubbly word

2008-03-16T23:22:00.009+08:00

I thought i loved all words, until today i realised that there is one word in the English Language that is absolutely intolerable. The word BUBBLY, bubbling in all its bubbly bubbliness. i dont think i can come across anything that is more disgusting, as in these 2 instances:

1) Would you care for some bubbly?

2) Candidates must possess a bubbly disposition.

what bubbly ideas. a word that even ear wax cannot tolerate.

however, in certain context, and as used by certain people, the word can work out fine. For example, Nigella Lawson saying, the bubbling broth of my hot broccoli soup. How positively appetizing!

But then again, she is Nigella, Nigella who can put the word SLIME in the title of a recipe and still have her book on the bestsellers list.

owning none

2008-03-11T03:25:00.006+08:00

We like something, we want it. I like your shoes. Where did you get them? (Damn she has them i cant anymore). We like someone, we want him. I love her. She's mine. A song on radio becomes one on ipod, a movie in the theaters becomes a DVD sitting in the favorite collection.

possessive animals. didnt they say we go as we come, nothing to be had, nothing to hold, no comfort, no trophies of achievement, no proof of having lived at all?

Away From Him

2008-03-08T04:14:00.014+08:00

in the cinema today, i thought about films that i have seen and loved and those that I will see and will come to love. These great films, i thought, are the best encounters. Like meeting of two lovers, first at first sight, then perhaps no more, but perhaps too, for life.

Great Expectations was my love at first sight, Pip and Estella. A long time ago, someone mistook me for Estella. I told him Cruella fits me better and he thought i was wise-cracking. He wised up a few years later though, messaging me one day, saying I was Sophie who sad(istical)ly took the bus and married a footballer. Sophie de Jeux D'enfants bien sur. Jeux D'enfants, love that dared not be. We outgrow certain movies dont we, like children have to outgrow their games.

Now which film, to love for life? I was trying to find something before my movie started. Looking at the empty theatre and its rows and rows of yellow leather seats in front, I thought about The Dreamers, in which Matthew, Isabelle, and Theo sat right in the front row because they were the insatiables:

I was one of the insatiables. The ones you'd always find sitting closest to the screen. Why do we sit so close? Maybe it was because we wanted to receive the images first. When they were still new, still fresh. Before they cleared the hurdles of the rows behind us. Before they'd been relayed back from row to row, spectator to spectator; until worn out, secondhand, the size of a postage stamp, it returned to the projectionist's cabin. Maybe, too, the screen was really a screen. It screened us... from the world.

No, not The Dreamers, too innocent. to have their kind of love was to die young, in a big bang, a revolution. Not enough of a struggle. We must not die young. Too tragic, to have to end Before Sunset. Eternal Sunshine? Honeymoon on ice? Away from Her, a spotless mind?

I hadnt managed to summon any before the movie today started. Throughout, my companion fell asleep many times. Usually, i get irritated at nodders. I would like to slap their heads to inform them that they are in a civilization. But i was quite undisturbed today, staring at all the winter in the film, i thought, it has always been just between the film and I. My love has always been right there--between the film and I.

we always commence at the end

2008-03-07T02:04:00.005+08:00

Because the university sent me a congratulatory note, i thought... the greatest accomplishment that i ever achieved was getting myself into the arts faculty; and the worst that i did was to graduate from it.

Please attend my commencement in July darlings!

these bodies

2008-03-02T02:10:00.012+08:00

I was in a dance class the other day and watching the class i felt like i was transported to the tip of life and offered a new view of of it--one that is not commonly seen or experienced by an audience in a dance theater.

i told myself that this blog will only be made up of words. but exceptions had to be made because admittedly, words are deficient. they say music is the greatest of all arts. dance must be second. words then, maybe third. it can never be music, never dance; but all three are friends.

i wanted to write about dance.

the dance class i was in (certainly not part of) offered a better insight to the art than what can be viewed from a presentation of it on stage. it wasnt anything high brow royal ballet. in fact, the instructor was very funny with his choice of words. saying things like "one te two te, one two three turn, one two three melt! tatata, tatata ", i thought he made dance defeat literature very gloriously.

you see, to dance is to release the body from the corporeal. it lets the body be subjected to music, to rhythm, to an idea that is very remote and very safe from the body that is seen, that is touched, that is idealised, sexualised, or even, the body that is naturally aging with life. in other words, the dancer's body is not the common body. it is not owned.

to not own it...i wish i could dance one day. to do something meaningful with my body.(insert thought: why do people end at sex?) the body must have a life of its own. undictated. not owned. given to art. like music or a dance teacher's instructions. but first, everybody should learn to reach for their toes.

what he really said

2008-02-25T19:00:00.003+08:00

Will you marry me, Spring asked Winter.

2008-02-12T04:46:00.000+08:00

"But they've had time," Mari objected. "We don't always have time to think, we just live!"

--Fair Play, Tove Jansson

Started reading a new book. A very very exciting book about two people living together--living as in talking together, planning dinner for two, informing the other that it is raining outside, minding own's work, and giving that little license of space that is so essential between two intimate people sharing their lives together.

at least this is what the novel is about in the first one and half chapters that i've read tonight.

In the story world that seems a little idealized, Jansson gives Jonna, one of her two main characters, the luxury of her own time--time to do whatever, to read at lengths, for days, for example. How enviable, this sort of intensive reading--reading not as a bedtime habit, not as a pastime while on public transport, not as a hobby, but a legit activity du jour. to read and read only.

If only. But time will come. Time will be up.

---

Suddenly life bears exciting promises. it feels like the harmonious marriage of winter and spring--a season accepting another, or more specifically, a dying season accepting the life of the next. In giving spring its lease of life, winter dies and therein, gives up its solitude of cold bitterness for what i imagine to be naturally sweet tidings.

---

i think i shall write a little story, as little as a capsule that can be easily swallowed without water, a little story about the love of spring and winter. it will be called To Run Out of Time.

and it shall end with

so winter said yes, yielded--but it didnt really die; for it only became sweet spring.

honor the fate you are

2008-01-23T02:36:00.000+08:00

weeks without writing
writhing withering wilting
waiting waiting worst
only seemingly
the end

the only things keeping me from slipping away are my friends, my lover, and poetry. everything else, everyone else, my estranged self included, are killing me like a tumor of worry and frustration.

poetry, not necessarily poems, but poetry like a good chair design, time magazine's review of the top 100 most important persons of the C2oth, and winterson. winterson who has picked WH Auden's poem Atlantis as the poem of January to share with her readers.

"I wanted it here this month for all our voyages…Honour the fate you are" --Winterson

is like a living literary figure. well she is. a living literary figure. the idea is overwhelming.

ATLANTIS

Being set on the idea
Of getting to Atlantis
You have discovered of course
Only the Ship of Fools
Is making the voyage this year,
As gales of abnormal force
Are predicted, and that you
Must therefore be ready to
Behave absurdly enough
To pass for one of The Boys,
At least appearing to love
Hard liquor, horseplay and noise.

Should storms, as may well happen,
Drive you to anchor a week
In some old harbour-city
Of Ionia, then speak
With her witty scholars, men
Who have proved there cannot be
Such a place as Atlantis:
Learn their logic, but notice how its subtlety betrays
Their enormous simple grief;
Thus they shall teach you the ways
To doubt that you may believe.

If later, you run aground
Among the headlands of Thrace,
Where with torches all night long
A naked barbaric race
Leaps frenziedly to the sound
Of conch and dissonant gong;
On that stony savage shore
Strip off your clothes and dance, for
Unless you are capable
Of forgetting completely
About Atlantis, you will
Never finish your journey.

Again, should you come to gay
Carthage or Corinth, take part
In their endless gaiety;
And if in some bar a tart,
As she strokes your hair, should say
‘This is Atlantis, dearie,’
Listen with attentiveness
To her life-story: unless
You become acquainted now
With each refuge that tries to
Counterfeit Atlantis, how
Will you recognise the true?

Assuming you beach at last
Near Atlantis, and begin
That terrible trek inland
Through squalid woods and frozen
Tundras where all are soon lost;
If, forsaken then, you stand,
Dismissal everywhere,
Stone and snow, silence and air,
O remember the great dead
And honour the fate you are,
Travelling and tormented,
Dialectic and bizarre.

Stagger onwards rejoicing;
And even then if, perhaps
Having actually got
To the last col, you collapse
With all Atlantis shining
Below you yet you cannot
Descend, you should still be proud
Just to peep at Atlantis,
In a poetic vision:
Give thanks and lie down in peace,
Having seen your salvation.

All the little household gods
Have started crying, but say
Goodbye now, and put out to sea.
Farewell, my dear, farewell: may
Hermes, master of the roads
And the four dwarf Kabiri,
Protect and serve you always;
And may the Ancient of Days
Provide for all you must do
His invisible guidance,
Lifting up, dear, upon you
The light of His countenance.

--
it reminds me of Yeats' 'pilgrim soul'--from the poem 'when you are old'. love the pilgrim soul in you, honor the fate you are. to say the least, both are arduous enterprises--especially when you are constantly thinking about how something as ridiculous as a job market might value you if you did this this and that, and took this path, and were with that company, with all these, you simply lose sight of what matters. you lose sight of yourself basically. and you know that your soul is dead, if you started blaming yourself for taking, say, a literature degree, instead when you should have raved and stomped and cursed the world for not hiring you who have a literature degree.

so start by stopping. stop self judgment, self evaluation, stop asking what you can do. but what you want to do. honor the fate you are, search not for a job but the soul. because "one life live it" (the M1 slogan probably thought up by an underpaid arts degree holder) is quite ... indisputable.

remember

2007-12-30T01:32:00.001+08:00

Love is not to admire the beauty of, not to hold in your arms, not even, to grow old with. But to dig, to burrow, deeper and deeper and deeper until the furthest and the closest, where you rest snugly and from inside out, understand your responsibility to love this tamed one.

This might be idealism. People forget who they love, where they are. I mustn’t forget. In fact, I must remember, especially now that im leaving school (the place where people remember more easily), i must remember the most important line from my very first literature text,

"But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed."

The fox said it. Why the fox? Because it is cunning of course. If you wish to remember, here’s the chapter: The Little Prince and the Fox

There is a borders giftcard I got as a writing award a while ago. It is the picture of a pink creature in a hot air balloon flying away, and it says “Oh! The places you’ll go!” And I decided then that I should use it to buy a graduation gift for myself. A book of course. Of course – literature – course –of course, the end of course. So, it turns out that I am going to buy my first literature book The Little Prince (because some distant unknown idiot borrowed it and never returned; a bed of rose thorns under him). But of course this isn’t the end of reading.

At my convocation, I shall have pictures taken, as tradition or parents would have it. I think I can gladly stand before the camera, and in that shutter of an instant, look into the camera’s questioning eye and tell it that I have had the university education I with idealism 4 years ago set out stupidly to get. Maybe in that instant all will be re-membered and captured in a photograph. (more about photograph somewhere else) Now, 9 years and tiring number books and essays later, digging and burrowing, I still am reading the fox’s line and am still wanting to find the deepest point, where it is furthest and the closest.

That’s love you literate goondu! Neverending love!

And remember, the fox said that you must not forget it.

where will you be in

2007-12-21T03:06:00.000+08:00

a new direction of sorts landed on me. that there will be less "feelings" and uncool sentimentalities, and more activities such as sitting half-slumped in bed thinking thoughts. ideally with a plate of food by my side, and perhaps looked after by someone like a parent, a sister, a lover, or ...a non-animal pet. not much of a "direction" i know, but that's where im going.

this has been very difficult

2007-12-21T02:21:00.000+08:00

It is a feeling that prompted me to blog.
One that is opposite from that which prompted me, days ago, to reorganize my room--school things, nonsense things, dusty things, unseen things. But mostly for my books. Books are remarkable things. They are not like souvenirs of clutching desperation, they are not gifts from very very good friends, they are not items of "S44 whoosh" or "XXOO" collected over years of Valentines days. Books are all these things, and more. They cultivate, they morph, some yellow, some brown, some develop a distinct odor, some grow dog ears, most just get spotty. Idiosyncratic, individual, unique. Each book (not each title) is different. Each is like a repository of mixed souls--authors' and readers'. Like bodies entwined. Minds that meet. An understanding, or a quarrel(depending on how you pick your books). A complexity arising out of 2 people or more. When closed, they have become the only things that are at once both past and future. When opened, they are simply an orgasmic confusion. Many books need to be read more than once in a lifetime. And most can only be read, encountered, but never ever understood, conquered, or finished in entirety. From cover to cover, a book is a neverending story.

my bookshelf is my altar. as i am making it to be. following this reorganizing will be daily rituals of reading, so that i dont lose mind in the insane world. i think ive found my anchor, my religion if you will.

to go back to the feeling that prompted me to blog--it is a feeling linked to my new found faith, and paradoxically, it is also a profound feeling of loss; of separation from literature, from school, from teachers, from classmates i hate to be in the same class with. as if after all this labor of arranging a-z, a disorientation, a profound sense of loss, profound only because i cannot understand what or why.

music

2007-12-11T04:54:00.001+08:00

The build up
Lasted for days
Lasted for weeks
Lasted too long

Our hero
Withdrew
When there was two
He could not choose one
So there was none

Worn into the vaguely announced
Worn into the vaguely announced

The spinning top
Made a sound
Like a train
Across the valley
Fading
Oh so quiet
But constant 'til it passed
Over the ridge
Into the distances
Written on your ticket
To remind you where to stop
And when to get off

The spinning top
Made a sound
Like a train
Across the valley
Fading
Oh so quiet
But constant 'til it passed
Over the ridge
Into the distances
Written on your ticket
To remind you where to stop
And when to get off

The spinning top
Made a sound
Like a train
Across the valley
Fading
Oh so quiet
But constant 'til it passed
Over the ridge
Into the distances
Written on your ticket
To remind you where to stop
And when to get off
When to get off
When to get off
When to get off

an interesting edit-tion--when many become one

2007-12-08T00:47:00.001+08:00

men (may) turn cold when girls grow old but this song never loses its charm i suppose.

and (god she's turned bimbotic hasnt she*) after the death of feminism and dignity and the whole world, nothing is as fun as VS and the spice girls. what does it mean that i can remember every single word of the song? that the brain retains everything from childhood learning.

*the return of the ~~repressed~~ spice girls!

she said it

2007-12-07T23:15:00.001+08:00

While the men were doing Playboy, we were doing Feminism. --Winterson. (read here and learn more about the magazine)

I knew it i knew it! Feminism is a rut! it is betterment, but betterment that isn't fulfilling. in some ways, like cosmetic surgery--dissatisfaction, hope, a means to a godot end. Oh when ever can we play like boys? with boys?

i had to edit this post to include this:

finally! a jolt

2007-12-07T00:44:00.000+08:00

"k luv im gng to go shower n read harry potter part 7 finally," the admirable and laughable (because she has such a humor) said. so then suddenly i remembered,

k i am going to go shower and read kundera, finally!

champagne from a paper cup

2007-12-06T23:29:00.001+08:00

i have a friend who does not care about what he is going to wear underneath his academic gown. he doesnt even plan on attending his own convocation. very unceremonious. while i take painstaking care to publish a post on this wow wow web today, just so a blog post of mine can lay some claim on today's date. of course, the last day! (not counting the day i must return to school to pay my library fines, return 2 books, and ...watch another movie)

and what an impotent day. what an impotent semester. all the build up and blah, it flags and it fails at what is supposedly the grandest climax of my entire education!

nonetheless, it is an event. and if there were to be song to commemorate this unspeakable event on this day that is today, it would be called champagne from a paper cup.

On November 29th 2007

2007-11-30T00:19:00.000+08:00

my life changed. For the first time ever, i felt hatred--towards myself. If i could, i would spit in my own face. i dislike and despise myself like i dislike and despise all of them.

after the paper, i thought that woolf would turn in her grave. but my friend said , "woolf would probably hand you a cig and dismiss the very idea of final examinations!" most adorable and admirable person this friend. (but i am not you, virginia woolf. for one-- i cannot smoke.)

heard the first christmas carol this year on lush, felt a delight, which deflated like a fart because realised there isnt going to be mushaboom this year.

laughed out loud in the school library on an examination day reading a book of interviews, interviews by truffaut of hitchcock. they are lovable lovable lovable.

Following a lead in from "the longest kiss in screen history",

AH: As a matter of fact, the actors hated it ...

FT: The problem for them was how to walk across, glued to each other in that way, while the only thing that concerned you was to show their two faces together on the screen.

AH: Exactly, i conceived that scene in terms of the participants' desire not to interrupt the romantic moment. it was essential not to break up the mood, the dramatic atmosphere. had they broken apart, all of the emotion would have been dissipated. And, of course, they had to be in action; they had to go over to the phone that was ringing and keep on embracing throughout the whole call and then they had to get over to the door. i felt that it was indispensable that they should not separate, and i also felt that the public, represented by the camera, was the third party to this embrace, the public was being given the great privilege of embracing Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman together. It was kind of temporary menage a trois.
The idea not to break up that romantic moment was inspired by the memory of something i witnessed in France several years earlier.
I was on the train going from Boulogne to Paris and we were moving slowly through the small town of Etaples. It was on a Sunday afternoon. As we were passing a large, red, brick factory, i saw a young couple against the wall. The boy was urinating against the wall and the girl never let go of his arm. She'd looked down at what he was doing, then look at the scenery around them, then back again at the boy. I felt this was true love at work.

FT: Ideally, two lovers should never be separate.

AH: Quite.

And thus the two go on talking about rotating kissing actors against walls and other things on sets. It is not that these two grandies are romantic, but that idea of romance coming with the third party is very convincing and laughable (almost like a Hitchcockian effect) The third romantic party can be anyone; in this case, it was Hitchcock; in his movies, it is the spectator; in ordinary life, it could be one of lovers, one or two of them looking back at what they were, looking back as a third party and understanding that it was true love at work, this holding on to the arm of a boy who was peeing, and this peeing with a girl never letting go of his arm.

Photography: Me. Art Direction: My mum, the bed maker. Styling and makeup: 22 years of sleeping with me. Models: My snoops

rights to marraige

2007-11-27T15:08:00.001+08:00

I am not getting married but i came to this site that offers what is called a "pre-marital screening".

Pre-marital screening enables an individual to :

1. To assess the general health status.
2. To detect presence of infectious diseases e.g. HIV and Hepatitis B infections.
3. To screen for common hereditary conditions that may affect future offspring e.g. Thalassaemia.
4. To screen for any fertility problems.

It must be a marriage issue, hereditary and reproductive functions of a lover. The thing is, only one person of the couple gets HIV test.

The screening package consists of the following tests:

* Clinical Measurements, History & Physical Examination
* Body Fat Measurements
* Body Mass Index Measurements
* Urinalysis
* 12 Leads Resting Electrocardiogram (men)
* Blood Group
* Blood Glucose
* Lipid Profile
* Complete Haematological Profile with ESR
* Haemoglobin Electrophoresis
* Serological Review - Venereal disease, Hepatitis B, HIV Screening, Rubella Screening (ladies)
* Hormonal Profile
o E2, FSH, LH, Progesterone (ladies)
o Testosterone (men)
* Seminal Analysis (men)
* Ultrasound Pelvis (ladies)
* Medical Report & Clinical Review

Why?

on how not to alliterate snakes and lambs

2007-11-27T02:28:00.000+08:00

People shun pessimism like the plague. In the activity of writing it is quite the same; if the subject is touchy, is controversial, especially if it is going to be what haha-shall-i-call-him-my-lover calls "something close to the heart", readers are usually reading through their lenses with criticism poised at the tip of the tongues. in effect, that is inviting slithery snakes into all the wrong blackleather bound books.

now that's too much of a "do not" paragraph up there, laced with too many mixed up metaphors. and mixed up metaphors are also the killers of readership, and consequently of authorship or authority to authorship.

so i shear off all of these woolen warm verbosity and state very nakedly, very directly, and in very neutral terms: that i have discovered a way of writing--that is simply to show, to re-present, to offer and not to give. it might be something like this:

today, i took the morning peak hour train and it occurred to me that all around me were pedicured feet shod in heels. it smells like morning, shampoo, and fragrances. so i realised, there are more women than men taking this train everyday. does it mean that more women than men work? but it cannot be.

then i must end (without a word more).

pessimism shall be

2007-11-19T18:31:00.001+08:00

it is irritating (to be using this word again) that one is expected to find absolute balance in everything. as if one must have a long term goal, foresight, planning. one way of looking at it--it is self-centeredness, self limitation, a kind of cunning. yet another way of looking at it, it is being socially responsible, finding direction, taking care of self (so that one would not be a burden, or worse, a threat to his society?). a gp teacher has once said that no one in society is free. i have been thinking about it all these years and as much as i try to hold on to the idealism of freedom, I can only agree with my teacher's statement.

so? then?

to find elbowroom is such a confining state, i hate to conclude, becomes the main struggle of life. it may be likened to a ride on the mrt: there are only so many seats, and so much space in the cabins, everyone jostles, some get stepped on, some suffer violations, all of us start out with clashing fragrances and then stink by evening. the ones who have the privilege of seats might see with a clearer eye--what dirt in those toenails, the embarrassing frays of a bag, the overwashed, unmistakably pasar malam "bebe" top, glued shoes--the abject of mrt society. nothing glamorous at all. even this "privilege" eye of the seated passenger, might in his or her turn be seen as a sight (site?) of clumpy eye makeup. then one might want to get a seat, and take a nap, turn a blind eye to these things. but society does not let you go. you smell the tiredness of the workman beside you, you feel the nearness of sweat molecules, or in your minds eye you see someone tripping over your paper bag of newly bought merchandise. this is just a daily scene, of working and spending lives away.

why care about smells and vulgar sights? the economics of life? the economy class of life? it is interesting how the pessimism of Keyes--in the long run, we are all dead--offers a kind of optimism. life seen through death becomes more livable, in a way.

Saudi's Gross Domestic Product

2007-11-18T15:40:00.000+08:00

is this.

swoops of skywriting

2007-11-18T03:25:00.000+08:00

sometimes, when i say "go and die" i do not mean for the recipient to go away and die. like skywriting, it is for effect. it has a message, but one which is secondary to the grandness of it--that is, the spectacle of seeing a plane make words that soon dissolve in the sky. so when i say i wish for lee to die, its not me being evil. (but i do hate him--but what does it mean to "hate him"?) and realize that i was making sweeping statements (like skywritings) about things. whatever i have said about his works, will only be meaningful and sincere when i start to write an essay on it, backed by a good supply of illustrative examples. in that case, i would become a film critic; but i was just a blogger pseudo reviewer who was writing for my own eyes at my own pleasure. call it bitchings but they are really just momentary flurries of words-to be ignored. (cf. see blog title)

dogs and sex do not go down well

2007-11-17T15:58:00.000+08:00

i think i need retract what i said about lust. after a sobering sleep, before and after which i spent hours lying in bed thinking about the all the sex scenes i have ever seen, i think ang lee isnt at all remarkable. there are uncountable movie scenes which achieve what i thought lee greatly achieved. Ozon (Swimming Pool, 5X2) did it, Kaye (American History X)did it, Cronenberg (A History of Violence) did it--of course one realizes that sex and violence are just partners of run-of-the-studio-s. As for the French ... its altogether another business when it comes to sex.

i think lee's film is like what Yee, Leung's character, says of the Japanese songstress, 丧家之犬. The plot, distinguished from the story, is such a wail! It is not a failure movie; but it is only so because ang follows all established cinematic rules and naturally never will go wrong. In fact, i think his films are so agreeable they prompt audience to nod their heads; i fell asleep in crouching, pushing hands, and almost almost in lust. so now i conclude, not with much finality, that the plot (=everything visibly and audibly present in the film) is so-so, blah-blah. the story, or the fabula, which is constituted by all the events in the narrative, both the explicitly presented and the inferred, is the film's saving grace. i would not hesitate to say that it is eileen chang the storyteller (who wrote the short story upon which the film is based) who has more genius than ang the filmmaker. (after all, what Wong, Tang's character, says of her experience, is more compelling than what is actually seen on screen)

i hope lee can stop exploiting his (pseudo) award winning asian-american status to pander to the male gaze of the white, middle class, spectator. yet, of course these films are so commercially successful it must take him to die before he would stop these productions. then i wish him death.

but i do thank him for the orgasmic presentation of leung's performance. because orgasms in cinema have always been the stuff of women's facial contortions accompanied by the same kind of soundtrack. but too little, 2 scenes i think, was all he gave us of leung's. the rest is just the run-of-the-studio/sack techniques.

as for the "lashes of cold humanity"--credit to the actors and to the writers. it still grips me, this something about people working and pushing together to achieve ultimately, what is only a brief and illusory sense of fulfillment. the rest they say is just emptiness.

faithless caution

2007-11-17T06:02:00.000+08:00

lust, caution is "depressing" (as my friends say) i think because it has no love. patriotic, romantic, materialistic--no love exists. they do not even try to be love, or twisted love, or love gone wrong. it is upfrontly about patriotism as a cheap mass sentimentality--a loyalty. a theme that is very nicely conveyed through the motif of dogs. one inescapably think of faith, lapdogs, watch dogs and of course the zou gou. (and perhaps mahjong bitches, if it may be so crude.)

i never thought i would watch another ang lee film, especially one that makes tiring cheap use of the over-exploited political-sexual angle. after 4 semesters of colonialist, feminist, and asian american literature, i feel sickened even at the least association of war and sex. (mostly because of the teacher in question really; he goes on declaring "this is sexy" all the time. every class is war and sex, invasion and rape , colonialism and bdsm, firearms and the phallus. and always, of course, the spectacle of the violated erotic exotic asian female body.) but i must say, the sex in lust was such a lashing of cold humanity i do not think it could stir in the audience, even in those who paid for the sex, anything but an utter desperation that is--im sorry too--deflatedly non sexual. this, i think is lee's accomplishment in cinema of this visual-pleasure age. ho art has finally made a pile of your lusty dollars you lecherous voyeurs. ( tied in with the theme of loyalty, a betrayal of spectator's expectations then perhaps?)

but then again, maybe i am all wrong. because the camera loves tang's body too much. a little too much. and too little leung's (whose character should be the dominating one, isn't it?)--thats my only complaint.

on a relevant note, am very excited about all-you-need-is-love Across the Universe that is opening soon. which will not be sex and war, but love and war. or in better terms, beauty, love, and truth. and it will be swell.

faithless

2007-11-11T06:11:00.000+08:00

Packing your bags like people in the movies do,
All severe, and not saying a word,
And I'm sitting down here just watching you,
And I'm thinking:
Where has all the love gone?
Where's the love gone to?
Don't leave,
You got me hurting,
Don't leave
You know it's never been easy to love someone like me,
Oh, don't leave.
Hanging with friends like we used to do,
I didn't know anything was wrong,
And last night while I was thinking it through,
Trying to find who am I and what do you need me to do?
Don't leave.
There's a record you used to play,
there's Joni singing
'best to be without you',
And I know just what she's saying: Help me, I'm falling,
Where did all the love go?
Where's the love gone to?
Don't leave.
You got me hurting,
Don't leave.
You know it's never been easy to love someone like me,
Oh, don't leave.
Where did all the love go?
Where's the love gone to?
Don't leave.
I would fly around the world, give you what you're giving me,
I should have dressed you up in pearls,
Find that silk to touch your skin,
Don't know how to write a love song,
But Don't leave.
You got me hurting,
Don't leave.
You know it's never been easy to love someone like me,
Don't leave.
Don't leave.
Don't leave.
Don't leave.

i heard something singing this, in my head. it was the strangest experience. and for the first time, i weep for an abstract thing best described by a friend as "an empty".

That in the popular, there is merit

2007-11-06T23:25:00.000+08:00

is something that crept up to me today.

yes, i do mean popular cultures, mass cultures, popular bookshops, mass rapid transit. but one still needs to retain that discriminating eye, framed by the highbrow, because most of the popular is just--well mass that is floating about re-cycling around and around and around. The displaced misplaced discarded disregarded lost lot of humankind.

with that, this is one of my favorite piece of popular culture churned and served up by popular media. love its set up!

what the

2007-11-03T22:00:00.000+08:00

Business writers perplex me. Why in an article such as this, are marriage, wrestler husband, and courtship mentioned? It is irritating, that a woman needs to be talked in terms of these things.

a great feeling

2007-11-03T03:36:00.000+08:00

I understand now, the feelings of the person on the death row. It is of happiness, of greatness, of pride. In the face of death, one lives.

I say this because i do my final essays with such feelings of greatness.

Professions for Women

2007-11-02T17:59:00.000+08:00

"My dear, you are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written by a man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure." And she made as if to guide my pen. I now record the one act for which I take some credit to myself, though the credit rightly belongs to some excellent ancestors of mine who left me a certain sum of money--shall we say five hundred pounds a year?--so that it was not necessary for me to depend solely on charm for my living. I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defence. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all these questions, according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must--to put it bluntly--tell lies if they are to succeed. Thus, whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. She died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. She was always creeping back when I thought I had despatched her. Though I flatter myself that I killed her in the end, the struggle was severe; it took much time that had better have been spent upon learning Greek grammar; or in roaming the world in search of adventures. But it was a real experience; it was an experience that was bound to befall all women writers at that time. Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.

--V

Times have changed, but people are the same, and so their struggles. They say--history doesn't repeat itself; it rhymes.

not the shape of my heart

2007-11-01T02:16:00.000+08:00

the past weeks have been an expense of spirit. it is wilder than the idea of being a penniless and talentless artist. but sure i would do it, weather it all, and somehow perhaps, the future might blossom out of the past. i cannot imagine how. i cannot gauge my asking pay. but its the prerogative of Youth to spend and that of the Spirit to gamble:

There is no money in poetry,
and no poetry in money.

Which line would it be?

lets call it ...

2007-10-30T02:51:00.000+08:00

i tend to want to start this with "cruelty (is this steady tearing of myself from the arts)" . I start with:

Literature is stagnant now, a tray of unhealthy black water denied flow, filthy, the mind is detached from the eyes that asleep roam the lines on the page: the mind strung awake on its own--defiant, rebellious, races on its own brisk legs unstoppable through resumes, applications, positions, ads, money, money, money, and strangers that i need to meet. betrayer!

now,just how does one tell his lit teacher that he needs a testimonial for such an application? [after these years in this classroom where they read and talked,shared an unsaid sense of something, something esoteric kept from the lawyers doctors engineers, someone stands up, and stepping over a floor of words that founded these years and these feelings of relationship he walks right out of the door,which, with a heave of a breadth falls close behind.] just how can he ask for such a thing?

but i cannot think this way. it is clutter, an excess too much for any good.

what a lark! what a plunge! would not describe this.

i think it should be:
chasing after what is chasing you.

fab-ulous

2007-10-25T00:21:00.001+08:00

In the early twentieth century, Woolf imagines “a fabulous age when women will have what has so long been denied for them—leisure, and money, and a room to themselves”. Reading what she wrote then now, I cannot help but wonder if this is the fabulous age. If Carrie Bradshaw were the spokesperson of our age, her fingers might have tapped on the idea of “fab”, but perhaps only “looking fab”, at most “feeling fab”— she never really owned the pen for dipping into the real idea of “fab”. In other words, this isn’t (yet?) the fabulous age. Leisure (not cake eating), money (not man’s money), or a room (certainly not the HDB), these are unreachable today, unavailable in fact, in reality. But fantasy is quite another thing. I think, therefore, the conclusion: The idealistic woman is the realistic woman.

a sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

2007-10-16T03:26:00.000+08:00

When i work today, earlier in the cafe in arts with classmates and now before my computer that has served me since year one, i feel my mind become very physical. It has become physical--not that my mind takes the form of the brain limited by cranium space--it has become physical, bordering on a coporeality, because it can feel a desperate clinging

by work:

how can you forsake us? we cling on to you like money plants to the wall. we eat into your pomp, your paint, your superficiality. we will leave our black marks creeping on, soiling you facade, clutching on forever ...you peel us out together with the shell of you that thus will become only debris. MURderer!

then i realized it was i who was desperately clinging on to school and school work. however am i going to find another place that is space for thoughts, for discussion, for indulgence, and for inspiration? The faculty was suddenly transformed into Xanadu...

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round :
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh ! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover !
A savage place ! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover !
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced :
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail :
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean :
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war !
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves ;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice !
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw :
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome ! those caves of ice !
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware ! Beware !
His flashing eyes, his floating hair !
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Being in the arts in Singapore is being in that sunny dome with caves of ice. It is a difficult sustenance, a paradox. And certainly anyone who wants to gain entry into this place should hear warning cries of Beware! Beware! Nonetheless, the line "i would build that dome in air" is never more Romantic, or for that matter, more meaningful. I want to say too, to declare: I would build that dome in air. However instead i find myself asking the woman, "is it time for me to leave?"

I thought i heard her reply, "Go, only you leave me alone wailing for my demon lover." perhaps with scorn, perhaps without a care.

bliss, this moment i stand on

2007-10-10T22:29:00.001+08:00

if i were a housewife today, i would be one who stayed in bed a little longer to read in the morning and having felt pleased enough, and giving to the enticement of the new day, i would then sweep my duvet aside, swing out of the bed to meet the day. i would go about the things in the house, very familiar things which still, every now and then after this many years, had the ability to throw back little surprises at their owner. the back of the tea spoon! it can only reflect one face--that of the onlooker, nothing more. that was the discovery yesterday. after everything that had to be seen to have been seen to, i finally sat down now, in the chair i bought myself when i was 23 with my first paycheck, biscuit in hand (my favorite--the husband bought), and turning to dog-earred page from this morning, i was just about to start when i saw in the wall beside my face

cracks

cracks in the wall of this house. oh, the roof is going to fall!

THE END

What about China? Have you seen the Great Wall?
All walls are great, if the roof doesn't fall!

And the man you will marry?
The home you will share? --Bjork and Thom Yorke

from My point ...and i do have one to Camera Lucida

2007-10-06T22:56:00.000+08:00

Internal tension
"I realize that when I write a story I instinctively try to distance myself by means of a demiurge who will live independently, so the reader will have the impression that what he is reading arises somehow out of himself. . . For me the thing that signals a great story is what we might call its autonomy, the fact that it detaches itself from its author like a soap bubble blown from a clay pipe." (it started with this soap bubble, which corresponds to an astonishing degree to the bubble i wrote in my "3 cities", which ... is still classified)

"This necessarily brings the question of narrative technique, the special relationship between narrator and narration. . . While there is the obvious bridge of language that goes from the desire for expression to the expression itself, this bridge also separates me as a writer of the story from what i have written, which, at its conclusion, remains forever on the other bank." (wow)

“In a world which is indeed our world ..." (--in a world which is ... indeed our world cracked me up, and it did a second time when it reminded me of degeneres' "my point...and i do have one")

these lines in safe quotation marks are by julio cortazar--whom i found today like i found at the bazaar the stone that fits its encasement ...or the gem of a ring that fits my naked finger ... no no, it cannot be limited. i found him like i found the right that pair the left of my shoes, which i put on with happiness, and walk to explore the rest of worlds. such happiness at finding gems or shoes that fit is what makes me go on and on, even if it is into the sea or the heart of the desert, i gladly walk. yes i will die for literature.

having said all that (not much actually) about cortazar, my heart, if there is a heart for these things, still finds itself beating quietly within the pages of camera lucida. see, there it sits with the rest of my books ...

2007-10-01T04:23:00.001+08:00

the hours leading to the time to die

2007-09-18T22:07:00.000+08:00

it can never get more realistic, the truth about time, when one is trying to meet a deadline, and spends the entire day, hour after hour, trying to produce an essay on the subject of Time and Death, but time just moves on and on uncaringly, relentlessly, towards the deadline.

freed

2007-09-04T02:59:00.001+08:00

This is Margaret Cho. (someone give me makeup, take off my clothes, and put me on grass too please) i call her macho because she does not fall into any of the trappings of the F word. Now, i cannot decide whether it is macho or ellen who is going to be my favorite showbiz personality.

i also like anthony bourdain, although i used to switch channels on him. ( he inspired me to write something, something about him but i think id like to keep all these celeb biographies to myself for now, for good reason.)

school is giving me too much free rein on time. which is very very good for some things, and very very bad for others.

dead again

2007-08-28T22:54:00.000+08:00

i too would seduce --or even perhaps fall in love with this man.

that's all i can say now of the film--until my mind revives itself--shall say more then.

i heard shania twain on the radio on my way home today, and almost burst out laughing beside my father (but didn't)

I give my hand to you with all my heart ...

See, there is an outstretched hand, on which is the thud thud, no longer thud-thudding of course. a woman must die if she gives her hand with all her heart!

2007 la fin!

2007-08-26T16:51:00.000+08:00

today i had a dream and in this dream, there was a vampirish monster with wild short hair on the plane who, after destroying all the SIA girls brutally, came towards me and devoured my face, leaving my head mangled--all the time i felt my heart beating to a sense of the ominous, then as blackness dawned, a numbness spread from my head down through the arms to my hands. and my mind (probably chewed and swallowed--or expelled--already) thought 1985-2007.

there is a sneak feeling that the best part of life is over.

oh dear no good

2007-08-23T23:52:00.000+08:00

i fear--the emptiness of life. success is a one way rubber tube, airless. first the employment, then the renumeration, some fulfillment, or--some emptiness. work, a friend said, rarely is happy. but people work, for organizations, they feel nothing. a network of unfeeling. for money. employees. can i be one? employment renumeration fulfillment emptiness. work is. work has. work will be. work structures. work defines. work pays. work keeps busy. work keeps piling, clearing, piling, clearing. work day in day out, work 8am 12pm 1pm 6pm 9pm, work empowers, work answers, work without question. work late, work justifies, work like a dog, work on a project, work with. work hard young man!work towards! work OT! work till, work till you die! work for, why, work for life!

does it feel good? does it feel like success, that by age X or year X or X point in life, you are this or that, you work for this or that, you have this and that, you have been here and there, met so and so, experienced this and that, is this, is that, here or there, so contributive to anything you care about at all? do you care?

really?

you must stop looking at the ads.

Is this the real life-
Is this just fantasy-
Caught in a landslide-
No escape from reality-
Open your eyes
Look up to the skies and see-
Im just a poor boy,i need no sympathy-
Because Im easy come,easy go,
A little high,little low,
Anyway the wind blows,doesnt really matter to me,
To me

Mama,just killed a man,
Put a gun against his head,
Pulled my trigger,now hes dead,
Mama,life had just begun,
But now Ive gone and thrown it all away-
Mama ooo,
Didnt mean to make you cry-
If Im not back again this time tomorrow-
Carry on,carry on,as if nothing really matters-

Too late,my time has come,
Sends shivers down my spine-
Bodys aching all the time,
Goodbye everybody-Ive got to go-
Gotta leave you all behind and face the truth-
Mama ooo- (any way the wind blows)
I dont want to die,
I sometimes wish Id never been born at all-

I see a little silhouetto of a man,
Scaramouche,scaramouche will you do the fandango-
Thunderbolt and lightning-very very frightening me-
Galileo,galileo,
Galileo galileo
Galileo figaro-magnifico-
But Im just a poor boy and nobody loves me-
Hes just a poor boy from a poor family-
Spare him his life from this monstrosity-
Easy come easy go-,will you let me go-
Bismillah! no-,we will not let you go-let him go-
Bismillah! we will not let you go-let him go
Bismillah! we will not let you go-let me go
Will not let you go-let me go
Will not let you go let me go
No,no,no,no,no,no,no-
Mama mia,mama mia,mama mia let me go-
Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me,for me,for me-

So you think you can stone me and spit in my eye-
So you think you can love me and leave me to die-
Oh baby-cant do this to me baby-
Just gotta get out-just gotta get right outta here-

Nothing really matters,
Anyone can see,
Nothing really matters-,nothing really matters to me,

Any way the wind blows....
--Freddie Mercury

Cashback is cheap

2007-08-22T03:43:00.000+08:00

At the outset, it promised. Supermarket, beautiful women, appreciative men, art student, abusive girlfriend, dumped boyfriend, insomnia, nudity, clocks, voice-over, charcoal, perspective, pay per hour, 7.5 on IMDB. It had all the elements. It promised, it enticed, it was going to be swell. After the whole show and a pent up anticipation, it remains nothing.

At first, there was the gnawing annoyance of the one-sex nudity--what with the multitudinous display of the female body, hairless sex, male authority, straightforward fantasy? Ok. He was an art student, and he saw beauty in the female form, and well, his art, and the film as art, deserved all the idealized female bodies conceivable in the whole organ/entreprise of the male imagination. Fine, very frank artistic statement perhaps. Nope, no problem with the use of the female form.

Then, what? Nothing else is achieved. Cashback? Time? Beauty caught in time? Love? Art? Women? Men? What? Nothing!

Nothing but a very superficial imitation after the French Cinema. What a failure! What failure! What 7.5! 7.5 on the crest of the trajectory of spit i say.

Sean Ellis has spoilt the supermarket, unwound WKW's clock, disfigured beautiful women, incapacitated promising young art student, shamed bodies, abused art, and disgusted me. It must be my most unfavorite film.

smashed to atoms

2007-08-21T23:47:00.001+08:00

today was nice, from the point i was reading on the train, and was caught by a series of thoughts, which plopped me straight into the cushioned comfort of a carriage. the rest of the day was spent in this very nice train of thought ...

today i realize that i have, after all, done suitably well in life so far. (by own standards of course!)

i have no medicine degree to diagnose that i was to be a doctor--what specialization!--i have no law degree to bind me behind the bars, no business degree that have put me on the lowest rung of the social ladder, not even an architecture foundation to be housed in by education. it feels like freedom, freedom like the feeling of space, with no paved paths, or forks in the roads to fuss about. because there is simply no more choices to be made; no more science or arts, no more rgs or nygh or vj or hc, no more a,b, c, or d, hypothalamus or pituitary glands or both, it is none of the above, only the open-ended questions--what shall i do with my life? what shall i make of it? Un essai. An utter freedom in life.

the make and break up

2007-08-20T03:20:00.000+08:00

we were talking, well typing to each other, about terabytes. and i said that we are at the peak of a great civilization, after which will be our downfall. we are going to die, drop off the peak of this world, pushed over the edge. after the next war, i said, we are all going to die.

no, he said, there wont be any great wars. just little conflicts here and there, and terrorism.

five hours later, it occurred to me that the state of human relationships is no different from the state of the world. no, there wont be great dramatic wars, there wont be heroes and victims, there wont be conquests or legacies, wont be charisma to fuel passion, nor faith to lead, and there wont be sacrifice to recall a cold heart. This is the world in which people come together and then apart, and in between, little conflicts and acts of terrorism--far more cruel than being at war.

no bang

2007-08-19T19:57:00.000+08:00

first week of school was such a whirl. too much tiredness, then too much rest. it is like taking an unfamiliar train, the excitement, the stress, the need to watch one's own back, the sense of work done given by the miles one covers. then switching, after school days, to sitting idly at the back of your own father's car, just sitting with senses blunt, and doing nothing. north south east west, for various reasons i have been to everywhere on this island. such was how i was transported through this week.

my mind shifted, many times, about many things. but collectively, the weather, and the ghosts this season, dampen my spirits into a sheet of rotting wet paper with intelligible ink stains that previously was supposed to hold meaning. things must get started now. why, this is the final semester i can, with reason and approval, indulge in reading books (woolf mostly. ha!), writing essays, and ... enjoy going to school.

but there is no charge. there are no fun people in class, no lecturers' whose minds one can engage with. there are no new subjects (design and architecture) to refresh the mind. how can the final sem be so disappointing! how can it feel like working at the bank 15 hours a day doing senseless ops work, and earning ... not 4 or 5 k, but just a unremarkable piece of urgh despicable degree?

of ridiculous fruits and nuts

2007-08-05T03:21:00.000+08:00

taken from www.zodee.com
Men Buying For Ladies

The easiest way to determine the size for your ladyfriend is to have a look in her lingerie drawer at the sizes she is currently wearing. This may not always be possible and if the thought of being caught browsing through her lingerie drawer put you off there is another easier method which surprisingly works quite well. Think of her bust as a piece of fruit. The equivalent fruit size matches the cup size you should buy:

Fruit	Cup Size
Lemon	A Cup

Orange	B Cup

Grapefruit	C Cup

Melon	D Cup

i suppose the ladies would have to think in terms of peanuts, almonds, pistachios and walnuts?

To people living in winter

2007-07-29T21:36:00.000+08:00

If you could see the season like how Cyril Wong wrote of , presumably, his self:

If my self is a shadow, at least i made a dent in the light.

(line taken from the poem if ... else)

1 2 3

2007-07-23T01:32:00.000+08:00

many people see life as a test of self. the cliché phrases of "life's challenges", "life's ups and downs", "quarter/mid/late/end of life crisis".

wouldnt life be easier if we turned it around?

test life. sample it, test its limits. do not cry because it is difficult or because there is an uncontrollable emotion swelling up. challenge life, design your own ups and downs, and enjoy the difficulty that you have reached.

if you dare to see life in its face, admit that it is such a wet blanket: after everything, a lifetime of worries, toils, happiness, achievements, failures, pleasures, anticipations, every emotion everyone and everything, you die, and it just ends?

As Swift writes, "most of life, maybe, is only time served". and it just ends?

i dont think a lived life is good enough, we have to own it, test it, fight it.

images

2007-07-18T18:45:00.000+08:00

i hope that the saying "one is either a reader or a writer" is not true. strangely, it is after reading this line that i find myself less of a writer, and more of a reader. it is like the line is investing itself in its own idea, or i, investing myself in mine.

i woke up today with a hunger, literal, so i took my breakfast from the kitchen and scurried up back to bed. to read. bed time reading hours are extended to almost any time of the day, this being the holidays, and i being indulgent.

it is so fulfilling, to read and drift, and sometimes, i drift to sleep, like after a heavy meal. i had a dream-- that i was a kind of flower, white, speckled with flowery things, at the edge of something, a bunch of the same flowers perhaps. my focus was this flower. this flower, I, was in the midst of withering and blooming. "in the midst" hardly describes the situation. it wasn't in transition, it wasn't fighting nor submitting. it wasn't vagueness either, but just a matter of its being at this moment, the next not yet arrived . what next? it was as if no one was deciding its fate--whether it will wither now, before its time, or whether it will go on growing to live. and at this point, whether this flower with petals speckled with flowery things has reached its fullest bloom or not, no one knows. but it continues to exist in this half this half that yet purely imagist state.

the next thing that came to mind (because i dont know if i was already awake or still asleep) was the sound of the words "blunt knife". then it hit me on the head--that i write poorly! there is no precision in my writing, everything is blunted, when it is not meant to be. imagine a blunted knife chopping away at things in the mind, and everything coming out useless, spoilt.

the two images combined. chopping knife, blunt, trying to cut petals, which wont be cut--not because they are resistant, but because petals are more likely to be torn up by fingers, than be cut with a knife.

this is how i came to understand that my blunt fingers which hold the blunt pen, do not at all write well. i hate to think that i am not cut out to be a writer , because i have already decided that i am not cut out for other kinds of work, but i realize i need so much more time, to work at this.

the competition at the end of this month, perhaps, will be a round of lottery.

food

2007-07-13T17:24:00.001+08:00

Dear Ms. Xu,

Thank you for your feedback regarding your recent experience in our Northpoint Bistro. I am really sorry to hear what happened.

Please be assured that we take feedback like yours seriously. The information you have given us will help us to monitor our service quality so that our cafe will achieve the high standards we set ourselves.

We will definitely look into the matter and follow up all necessary action and our area manager, Ms Heng Hwee Huang, will be contacting you soon.

Regards

Colleen Low

Customer Service

Suddenly upset by the thought that food has become a matter of standard emails, a bunch follow up actions, a matter to be looked into. reiterations. corporate. service. and nothing to do with the basic pleasure of eating.

Letters to a Young Poet

2007-07-12T12:50:00.001+08:00

In the context of recent days ridden with uncertainties ( see previous blog posts and their number of question marks), and the fair amount of sleeplessness, this comes like a SOS relief:

You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke, in "Letters to a Young Poet"

i am beginning to see a very very long journey, and am in the midst of coming to terms with the reality that to decide, at this age, to write, is probably to be living in questions, till perhaps i am 50, when if luck visits, i might finally be able to find a voice, and fulfill the decision of becoming a writer.

Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must", then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse.

notes on a scandal, and others

2007-07-05T23:48:00.000+08:00

watched notes on a scandal at ike's, and understood, perhaps unfortunately, the thrill of guilt. more importantly, realized how one needs to have someone, and how hard it is to say everything that needs to be said to that someone. most importantly, heard Glass through the film--the texture of it all, the saving grace, since plot is rather bare structurally, in fact it felt like old bones--which should break unglamorously should there be no Glass. There is also a surprisingly amusing line the character of Cate Blanchett supplied: "Virginia freaking Woolf!"

after, clicked open the file titled Paris Je T'aime, and rewatched a length of it, starting from one of my favorite stories (the one about a husband falling in love with his wife a second time--perhaps the second time is the one that counts?/ the one about a husband realizing his love for his wife/ the one about a husband remembering his wife--its hard to decide other people's minds). Realized the richness of simplicity, and hope to write simply, and richly, and ... win something, as material as the simple desire for fame and $ it might be.

bonjour les vacances et les petit dejeuners

2007-07-04T05:50:00.001+08:00

This is the holidays. Time, and space.

I am reading Virginia's diaries--for which i went all the way to the school library, because i am so intrigued by her. and holidays are meant for (if not work) such things.

it is morning now. people who do not sleep before morning have mouths that stink, and minds that are "semi-smart" (to borrow a descriptive from virginia), but very very rich--with all sorts of stuff.

semi-smart, who could have thought of such a word!

bridget jones. i think, really. yeps, bridget jones would to

i am heading down, to where i would rather be

2007-07-04T02:57:00.000+08:00

this time of the year, this age of life, my society is muddled by a group of clear minded, practical and i would say, very successful people.

i admire them, for their certainty, their no frills decision to steer by the fixed star of work and success. Also, for their willingness and reality in settling for mediocrity ( yes 9 to 5 is mediocre, spit at me for my elitism), and their confidence in that laid out path towards success, and perhaps, even, towards secured happiness? How do they do it?

i have no guiding star, except a crystal ball image of me at 35, asking "is this it? is this all?"

blackest of rooms

2007-06-17T00:13:00.000+08:00

10. when engaged/attached/(i cant seem to find a proper word) men band together, they become all single again

9. men thrive on women's refusals/rejections/denials/no, dont you touch me/dont you dare see her again/No, heehee, no

8. women on men's assurances/reassurances/yes i do love you silly/lies

7. on a good looking day, take the effort to go to a photobooth to have a passport photo taken. we always run out of presentable photos and/or presentable faces for photos.

6. experience solitude--when nothing, nothing but self, is comfort. no pillows, no partner, no tele, no internet, no books, no bridget jones, no woolf, not even my snoop, nothing can offer relief or company. only self in the middle of the night, eyes in turns opening and closing in pain, head in pain, shoulders in pain, lower back in pain, left ankle in pain, right shin and knee in pain, calves numb, sweating, shivering, with nothing to be done. rocking self to and fro, to sleep, and out, and in pain again.

5. ~~talk to Death. mine was a D-shaped capsule like thing by my bed.~~ To look life in the face, always to look life in the face--and to know it, for what it is. At last, to know it, to love it, for what it is, and then, to put it away.

4. kitaro offers the ultimate peace on a saturday night.

3. watch fort boyard.

2. miss (whatever country) must never participate in any game/reality shows--not because they are bimbotic and underachievers when it comes to bravery, physical endurance, or game tactics--but because the producers are bent on making a show out of them. Miss France's pert butt, cleavage, long manicured nails and other incapabilities were quite a sight and sigh on fort boyard. very entertaining nonetheless, the show.

1. i think my life is changing. for excitement's sake, for freedom, for holidays, in sickness or in health, i shall quit!

0. do not ever think that a married taitai's life is a long term luxurious holiday.

-1. hugh grant and colin firth are sexy because of bridget jones.

-2. oh learn to curse! and be vulgar to sex offenders

-3. love of mine, someday you will die, but i'll be close behind, i'll follow you into the dark

-4.

someone excavated a pair of lovers, 5000 years and hugging. jeux d'enfants!

fragile things

2007-05-05T21:47:00.000+08:00

i think eggs suffer the worst fate. they are either beaten, cracked, scrambled, half-boiled, hard-boiled(!!), or thrown left and right left and right to and fro repeatedly into cupped fingers, until finally dismembered into the white and the yoke.

i say this because i am copying some wonderful recipes, all the time thinking that copying recipes and buying the ingredients on the list are the furthest i can go without causing stress to people i said i would feed, or cooking myself into a foul mood. so exams are over, and i have 24 hrs each day to think about eggs and the eggs i would be (not make, because im not allowed to cook). in a wonderful podcast video of mr neil gaiman doing a reading, there is a story within a story within a story ad infinitum about, i think, an egg. it is a horror story, a parody, a comedy (dark to the right percentage), a fantasy, a reversed fantasy and it is in this part, the reversed fantasy part, where the egg appears. it goes like this:

"Scrambled or boiled?" She asked.

To be continued on monday--on which day i shall go to borders, and buy the book, called
Fragile Things.

lost

2007-05-04T23:09:00.001+08:00

"I lost my wedding ring."

"When did you last see it?"

"I..i don't know. i am so used to it."

i heard these lines from Lost as i went up the stairs at home, my eyes fixed on the familiarity of my way up the stairs, not seeing. if i had heard these lines as i sat in front of the tv, i probably would only have understood a part of what is happening--that she has lost her wedding ring, and that he is now trying to help.

Sight is such a distraction. if men had looked less, and hurt more, perhaps less used wedding rings would have been lost.

backlash

2007-05-01T02:34:00.001+08:00

we perceive the world in dualities; if i had a coin, i would hold it in one hand, so that one hand holds a coin, and the other holds no coin. this coin in itself has a head on one side, and a tail on the other. a certain design on the head side, that wont be repeated on the tail side. and the tail, having the other certain design, wont be mistaken for the head.

if you, reader of the above paragraph gets neither head nor tail, it is precisely my motive to confound through logic (or for the reader who has thus far diligently followed through to certainty, to soon be misled). Sometimes, dualities get a little conflated. A "certain" something is only pretense to certainty. Think, "a certain man i met that evening"--who? A conflation of certainty and uncertainty, of dualities--that is how a statement may have both logic and flaws, and how the fool may be wise, and the wise foolish.

i say this because i feel like every statement i make becomes a sentence--a judgment made by, for and against myself. I said, "it is precisely my motive to ..." Precisely--now this entry is getting a lil long winded and imprecise isnt it?

all i wanted to say when i hit "create new post" was that today i thought, "no woman shall be stupid until proven so, as all men are innocent until proven guilty."

wit or spit?

2007-04-19T00:15:00.000+08:00

it takes a million decisions to have a balanced life. a million zapping neurotic decisions inside the system weighing pros and cons, left and right. its very much like balancing on 5 toes in a yoga pose--a million muscular units shuddering and striving to make a human body appear to be a tree or a mountain.

so im heeding advice, to apply to be become an intern at brouhaha tick tock tick tock round the clock publisher. only after i downloaded the application form i see this:

"It might be that writing as a journalist has impeded my ability to write creatively." -- from the blog Wit and Spit, of someone who calls herself The Screwy Skeptic .

The Screwy Skeptic said this too: "I am not a writer".

now skepticism overtakes me. Is anything written on the blog of a screwy skeptic straight forward?That she was not a writer? I don't think so!

Ah, decisions! Shall i decide that i cannot write too?

And go to this.

recruitefinement: for a living, for life

2007-04-10T21:12:00.000+08:00

it seems like every time i get an almost logical idea on what i shall do for a living, some real life person comes along with her or his better life and takes my consolation away.

real people such as Boonstra,
and Nurul,
and even Nigella, who does more than use sugar and chocolate.

for a life or a living, would i have been better off not knowing these language nuances?

an air bubble

2007-04-10T00:41:00.000+08:00

It was suddenly ok when i stepped into the room full of breathing people.

left
and right
left
and right
left
and right

around me the sound of breathing

"I'm falling off the world for a bit," he announced.

2007-04-08T13:39:00.000+08:00

taking a day off. finally. to be alone, in my room, and do whatever--in between double-inch efforts at working thru the phallocentric poems of Donne and Marvell.

needing a lot of time off away, from monday to sunday. so i want to fall off the world for a bit.

i resist the coming of the weekend, as much as the turn of a sunday into a monday.

a little redisplaced disreplacement

2007-04-03T17:14:00.001+08:00

sitting at a faux class bench--shall i call it a faculty bench--with someone from school and am reminded of old school days. of course, that, from then, was a real wooden bench with good graffiti. this one im on now is lacquered so badly it is the color of the nescafe original can--whose contents is making me feel weird enough to put in an entry from deep within 4 deadlines 5 days behind. and there isnt any inspiring vandalism nor merrymaking scenery here at all.

there are some things that dont have their place. like an unused keylock. where do you store it?

because sometimes, in the past, i felt like a miscellaneous.

im used!

toutes

2007-03-31T02:55:00.000+08:00

perhaps the life of a 22 year old student is no different from that of a 40 year old housewife's, a 55 year old doctor's (who looks at the eyes of 22 year old female student through glass lenses), a 21 year old job seeker's, a Singapore Girl's, a Miss. Ng Math teacher figure's, a pornstar's (who begs forgiveness for weightgain), a dolly men-snatching waitress's, a single mother's (in Paris), the president's (of a woman's organisation--and who is married), a demoiselle's (in a painting), or a married literature professor's (who wears dresses and nice heels).

yes i think so. so, whats the great deal about your pushed up boobies or hooting pelvis that are losing calcium by the trimester, hour, and second?

impressions

2007-03-29T00:13:00.001+08:00

today as i stood on the platform waiting for the train, i saw the construction site before me (its like a greek stage--2 yellow helmeted men came out blowing a whistle--i expected a spectacle)and i thought that i shall believe that one day i will die because the construction site i was walking past just happened to explode.

when i write run on sentences it means that i am typing with a mind that is going off on its own.

then at my home station number 13, i saw the station officer in her purple uniform, standing on the platform, looking down at the mill of people going down on the escalator,through the gates, and out of the station--home.

i thought, oh my, the daily construction, the daily travelling, the daily milling down the escalator to go home now life like this, like this sentence, should end.

but it doesnt. perhaps one should always keep in mind (keep one's mind) the reason behind going through the gate. pause for a moment before tapping the card, and think "for what", as Mrs. Ang would say. (mrs. ang was a GP teacher) but no one would answer.

words not untrue and not unkind

2007-03-14T19:31:00.000+08:00

Talking in bed

Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.
Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside, the wind's incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds in the sky,
And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.

--Philip Larkin, who died the year i was born

Who loves me
who love what i do
i
say i do

twentysomething of february

2007-02-27T11:33:00.000+08:00

because the neighborhood was quiet and grey at 9:10am, when i walked home from the clinic.
and because the construction (that never ends) has started now and its drilling into my head.

i choke on cheap tomyam soup, and someone is unhappy with us i dont know why. and i am trying to write a french letter using a dictionary three inches thick explaining why i am not in class now.

After years of expensive education,
a car full of books and anticipation,
I’m an expert on Shakespeare and that’s a hell of a lot but the world don't need scholars as much as I thought.

Maybe I'll go travelling for a year,
finding myself or start a career.
I could work for the poor though I’m hungry for fame
we all seem so different but we're just the same.

Maybe I'll go to the gym, so I don't get fat,
aren't things more easy with a tight six pack?
Who knows the answers? Who do you trust?
I can't even separate love from lust.

Maybe I’ll move back home and pay off my loans,
working nine to five answering phones.
Don't make me live for my friday nights,
drinking eight pints and getting in fights.

I don't want to get up, just let me lie in,
leave me alone, I'm a twenty something.

Maybe I'll just fall in love that could solve it all,
philosophers say that that’s enough,
there surely must be more. Ooooh

Love ain’t the answer nor is work,
the truth eludes me so much it hurts.
But I’m still having fun and I guess that's the key,
I'm a twenty something and I'll keep being me.

doh dah duh dah, do duh dah dah dah
doh dah duh dah, do duh dah dah dah
doh dah duh dah, do duh dah dah dah
doh dah duh dah, do duh dah dah dah

I’m a twenty something.
Let me lie in, Leave me alone.
I’m a twenty something.

doh dah duh dah, do duh dah dah dah
doh dah duh dah, do duh dah dah dah
doh dah duh dah, do duh dah dah dah
doh dah duh dah, do duh dah dah dah

magnificent magnificent!

2007-02-21T18:35:00.001+08:00

in celebration of all things impractical (that are really in fact, practical), i share with you,

divination in some form of literature--that is what i do (not dimiss).

for those who have yet to develop the divine eye to see that the above image is linked, here is the instructions page. (because everyone deserves a second chance). as you can see, if you do not like your fate as prononced by Neil and his Magnificent Oracular Journal, you may be given unlimited second chances.

for me,

said, "Spread the word."

this is my second chance. (in all my inadequacies in handling infomation on the machine, i lost my first divination--but it was more than applicable)

"Spread the word" then.

just nude

2007-02-21T02:11:00.000+08:00

i was looking at nude photography.

there is one photog whose sets are utterly sex-ed. perhaps my constituent unit is the amoebic cell, i dont believe in nude being just sex and sexuality, sex and nothing but sex. so i flickred around, and found my consolation.

disregard, literally, the sexed pictures. they must be important to them. it is meaning. and surely, these are just a certain set of pictures. there must be more.

it is not about them being sexed, but them selling it, and just it. but i shall not i should not i cannot judge. disregard.

the keyword is "just". just, justified, just disregard.

the female body. that particular male one.

i find myself needing to find like-minded people. perhaps i am not different from them, the racists, the chinese, the sexists, the men, the -o-lo-gists. i look at differences and i look for similarities. i need to find what i find in my books. myself. sometimes you. but i believe, mainly myself. (everyone has a self, its fair.)

one day, im going to shoot you, you and you, sexed and unsexed--up to you, or up to you in me. (if this sounds like sex to you, perhaps you are not the one)

and as for a question i asked and am trying to answer: yes, i will do nude. just shoot my hand.

(dont they say it is the experience, and not the outcome?)

--------

in other cells of my brain, where i collect sad images and piercing emotions there has been an addition. it is from desperate housewives (desperate tv maybe, but thats beside the point) when Lynette, clip in hair, stands outside the door, and looks through the glass to see Tom go up the stairs with a woman wearing a black dress. his heels, shoe clad, look sad.

-------

the fall

2007-02-05T01:30:00.000+08:00

I wish a falling star could fall forever
And sparkle through the clouds and stormy weather

I know a falling star can’t fall forever
And let’s never stop falling in love
No let’s never stop falling in love

--pink martini in let's never stop falling in love

i would like to think that adam and eve fell for love, and not out with each other. perhaps a fall so great, they must end up in hell, where for eternity, they repeatedly fall.

it is quite romantic.

notes (not yet on a scandal)

2007-02-03T23:26:00.000+08:00

finally left the bed to sit at the desk, which really is a living room display piece, not a study's work top.

the table is heavy. and it leaves little space for me.

love sometimes slips, i feel the saddest about this. on the train everyday, husbands ignore their wives to stare at other women's chests. the wives nonetheless slip their arms into the husbands'. in the park every evening, a man vents his sexual frustration on a spring-coiled rocking animal. then of course, there is someone who saw him at that party, and many others told to keep quiet.

so must i, keep quiet.

today i saw my mum leave the house 3 times, to the market, to the library, to somewhere, anywhere. my dad works in the office, comes home at the end of the day. what happens in the day is the saddest-- because it is left to the self, which, already damaged by love to become a half, can never be whole again. because love separates as much as it engages people. love is, unfortunately, for a lifetime.

waiting to see notes on a scandal. because i may find reprieve and a kind of understanding in glass's music.

when ordinary humans fail, we turn to geniuses. suddenly am reminded of what dr. yeo said last semester, that she feels closer to the characters in the book than people around her. i thought i heard a tinge of sponge steel in that remark.

my head is falling over in love with moschino un-heeled sandals. and also, i think im on the verge of boycotting strip for its male-oriented mission statements and ad campaigns.

re-member

2007-01-28T00:57:00.000+08:00

I love Glass's music almost as much as I love Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and for some of the same reasons. Glass, like Woolf, is more interested in that which continues than he is in that which begins, climaxes, and ends; he insists, as did Woolf, that beauty often resides more squarely in the present than it does in the present's relationship to past or future. --Michael Cunningham on The Hours (extracted from a longer piece here.)

Sometimes i wonder if anything posted here will be read by another. Of course there are the usuals, these people in my sphere. Why do you see me on this site? Another light?
Perhaps it is for a future me, to remember--what a word!--then i wonder if this link will work.

what to remember my undergraduate life with? waking up one semester to crash that early thursday morning class for the thrill of hearing people say, "Mrs. Dalloway said that she would buy the flowers herself." What a lark! What a plunge! Thursdays are when i go insane, sit in on a class im not registered in, and see the collection of free hair in the empty center of the class circle, shifting very quietly as a group of people discuss a dead woman's words. and i listen. i guess ive always been a listener.

and philip glass has a hold on me.

and i remember a picture of his in Camera Lucida that Roland Barthes put in. Roland Barthes, another writer, another semester. French writer, who had an eye for life, and who made my C+ French worth all the shame.

If death ever is eternity it would have to be Woolf, Glass, and Barthes who seem to know life so well.

appetite

2007-01-24T01:21:00.000+08:00

if u ever want to know why eyes light up , body eases, and mood lightens at malay eateries, watch this.

laugh, go on. that done, use a thought.

this may not be a malay stall--im not sure what RK house is (except tt it sells the things i like)--but this is perversion.

it is no different from a gang of men deriving pleasure from " Please please let me go! Dont touch me!" Exaggeration? This is just a joke, come on! you think. but i call it scaling. like zooming in to see the details and out for the bigger picture.

im gg to pronounce i hate the chinese as i say i hate men.

too late

2007-01-04T03:22:00.000+08:00

depressed. trying to be feel fortunate, more than those who are less fortunate. but compared to my ex-schoolmate havocing in venice, ex-classmate partying in london, ex-french classmate studying in sorbonne, friend 1 in some P state in the States, friend 2 who just returned from the netherlands and 10 cities she toured, friend 3 going to switzerland, friend 4 who adventured thru the boot country, friend 5 recently back from morocco but immediately to be found in Turkey for a mini holiday away from the "gloom of London", friend 6 who travelled most of 2006 et cetera, i am less fortunate.

im sorry but going to these places when i have a wallet of bank cards, a LV trunk of heels, or a man by my side is not the same.

im too late for europe.

love humour

2007-01-04T02:45:00.001+08:00

image from xkcd.com