Elephantine Bunions and Internships

And so begins every smugling journey into the great ontrac to snatch the snazziest internship stints on offer. We peddle a little bit of ourselves into a page or two, with words elbowing its way to make itself heard. If it had a voice it would shout:

” I AM HELLA AWSUM PLZ PLZ LUV MEH, MR FAAAABULOUS MNC <3.
HIRE MEH, I WILL MASSAGE UR BUNIONS!”

Something close to that no?

I have joined the legions of the bunion-massaging masses and applied for one internship so far. It’s a little late I know. I’m not sure why writing cover letters must feel so dirty. I’m trumpeting enough sound, I hope. I think I would need a banner as big as elephants (because elephants are awesome) for this. We shouldn’t have to yell so loudly. We shouldn’t have to pander to egos that knows how to butter themselves up pretty well without help.

Your work should speak for itself, assured and self-evident. You should be in every word written and in every colour brushed against a canvas. That should be enough. It is not written in a fancy title, collected in time. It isn’t written in your GPA….okay well at least not so eloquently.

Bah! Well a girl has to eat and support her self. There is a bunion-free option I believe. So this girl will learn the rules of the game if that’s what it takes to let them know that I should be paid for living, if you let me do the things that make me awesome. I think I can become A Productive Commodity of Your National Economy! You know, adulthood! =O
Gag reflex needs a bit of training though.

For tips on taking care of your boss’s bunions, visit The Bunion Relief Blog.

Blue & Constant.

It was another Friday and a little close to ten. I am sitting with you, shoulders pressed: my pink jersey against your blue cotton. It was a comforting blue. But it wasn’t blue at all. it was crisp white with tiny blue threads weaving in between. It stood against the flushed cheeks of tired skin. Fingers tracing the outlines of our long day. We talk about school, about life, about dreams, about and about. Never quite about what this is.

All this while I’m thinking about resting my tired head on that blue cotton shoulder. It wouldn’t seem out of place.

More domestic, less romantic. More silence, less noise. Is this what this is?

Imploding Hearts is So Last Summer.

I have a knack for knowing how to make good, close, platonic friends with guys. It comes from having honed pathetic skills in flirting and instead have relegated myself to actually getting to know them as a person. It’s a slow and steady process and before you know it we’ve hit the Friends Zone and he’s telling you about his crush much to your sad pitter-pattering heart. Your heart feels like it’s about to implode, sucking in your limbs into the cavernous squeeze of warmth to the left of your chest. Letters in a song begin to make more sense that it ought to.

I can cope with “just friends”. Honey, there’s nothing new there.

I have been told that my love life makes for a very entertaining read. It is a barren road with remnants of candy hearts and hershey kisses, shrapnel if you will, of my failure to launch. So partly inspired by haikus and pineapples, I shall divulge the titillating tales of my exciting love life.

Don’t worry. It never ends in a heartbreak.

Just implosions.

This Here Giraffe.

Its slender tongue tentatively touched my offering. It was the colour of chewed-up blueberry bubblegum stuck to the underside of a chair. It tugged at the teal green leaves of my offering. I squealed and dropped the branch, scared that it would reach forward and eat my hands.

He had propped me up on his shoulder so that I was as tall as the metal enclosure and almost as tall as the giraffes. I was the tallest girl on earth - giddy with thrill and giddy with fear that I would fall head first into the ground. But his strong hands held me in place, long before the years would turn them callous and dry. I had believed for the longest time that he was the strongest man on earth, that it would mean that I was safe whenever he was around. I would look beside me and see her delicate face framed by swathes of cool white cotton hiding the mass of ebony underneath. She wore that red lipstick then. She only wore one shade. She was our Snow White: the fairest woman on earth. With her, anywhere we went we were home. We were happy. We were the happiest family on earth.

The photographs were all that remained from that day now speckled with green and grey mould, eating away at the edges. I was three and it was our first visit to the zoo - just the three of us. The photographs lie safely in the dark tucked away inside a box, inside our closet, like relics of another life - as though they belonged to someone else. Perhaps it did.

I may have pieced the memory from bits of old photographs, painted the cracks and scraped away the mould. Maybe I haven’t. Maybe it did happen. I don’t know the difference. I don’t think it matters. All that matters is that there’s some truth to it. it’s enough to keep. It’s just enough to believe that maybe we were still the same people. Just a different photograph.

Amidst All The To And Fro

“You’ve gotta hope that there’s someone for you as strange as you are
Who can cope with the things that you do without trying too hard “

Lords of the Donut Rings

Tissue papered hands gingerly holding rings of pastry - glazed in white chocolate, encrusted in almonds - together at the center.

Let’s call for a toast!

 

To the newly minted president of voiks.
To missing keys and a homeless girl’s sleepless night with her handmade sellotaped daggers.
To furniture that are “like a vagina on stage!”
To being comfortably sedated by a chicken thigh.
To margarine flavoured durians.
To transplanting armpit hair from beards.
To awkwardly squeezing male buttocks.
To “what do I caaaaare?”
To an invitation to convocation.
To finding a tale, a dream and a person large enough to fit Esplanade.
To the silence of suffering, shared.
To friends.

Gaya 08

The Process.

8 months condensed into pixels would be insanity. I don’t have a camera either. I can only tell the story from swiped pictures from Ayu and Helen. So this is what has taken up the better part of my life. I really wish I have a camera.

pictures under the cut
——————————–
Rehearsals are long and boring, often excruciating. But a girl just needs a mirror, some bored friends and a range of props to entertain herself.

And when you’re trying to kill yourself, boys try to look up your dress.

That Wasn’t Funny.

Boo.

I am being terribly unfunny lately.

I shall tap my funny bone into place and you know deliver you Elloelle, the xanax’d happy version of the girl who’s writing all of this nonsense. Let me find something horrible that I can laugh about. I’ll be back in jiff! Toodle-oo!

Catharsis.

I can’t tell you how it felt on stage. I can’t remember. I can remember the lights on my eyelashes like glitter baubles at the tops of my vision. I can remember the squeezing of a heart to sing the words right. Everything else? I can’t feel it. I am just thrilled that it is over, thrilled that there is only one show and nothing more. I don’t know how well I did on stage and I don’t believe whatever you said happened on stage. All that’s left is a sense of relief.

Reward does not come from applause in an amateur theatre. The applause will come no matter what. It has to. The applause will come perhaps out of sheer puzzlement or pity or pride. It gave me nothing. It was a forgiving audience which is both a comfort and an insult. So it didn’t matter who was in the audience. Rather, it didn’t matter who wasn’t in the audience. Just to be there on stage is a reward by itself, a place to squeeze out every inch of me like a selfish relief. Like catharsis.

Watching the video makes me want to crawl into the space between the chairs and die. There you see me - not Dyah Pitaloka, not sinden - hiding under a thin shell of make believe, vulnerable.

So what’s left?

The Hours And The Minutes.

19 hours
You told me they didn’t like it. They wanted to change it. They thought it was too confusing, that there’s not enough distinction, that I look too much like a bride and that I shouldn’t sing. I wanted to explode. My eyes leaked instead. Goddamn faulty explosion mechanism.

18 hours
You tell me you’d fight for me. You would even take a stand to cancel the show altogether. It was touching really and you knew I would not have the nerve to let that happen. I made you promise we’d kick butt tomorrow instead. Messages came in saying that they liked it as it is. Why is it so hard to believe?

15 hours
I wondered how I’ll justify the need for me to exist on stage, wondered how we’d be able to extricate myself out of it smoothly, patching up the plots and the choreography in the small space in my head. For once, I knew I wanted this. I want to be there tomorrow. I can’t remember how I fell asleep.

9 hours
I lied. I didn’t overslept. My limbs were light but they weren’t weary but I couldn’t bring myself to move fast. I drank water. Forgot to eat. I still wondered what would happen if I don’t show up, if a truck runs me over on my way there. I do that sometimes.