Sixtripleseventhreetripleseven.

This song is my anthem lately:

My world seems to consist of: 
Seaweed shaker fries & ice cream!
Lovely pariah girls!
Yasmin Ahmad!
Daddy’s brilliant explanation of the Nash Equilibrium!
Writeboard!
Kite hunting!
Binggrae Melona ice cream!
Bike rides!
McDelivery Boy!
Spell check!
Grammar check!
Content check!
Random Access Memory!
NVidia GeForce!
Waterfront!
Banana Tempura!
Strawberry Pocky and Macadamia Dairy Milk!
Dealbreaker! Just Say No! It’s My Birthday! Rent!
Boggis, Bunce & Bean!
Way too many chicken wings!
and to top it off an A+ for Capstone. WOOHOO!

“Everything about this is crazy. Especially him. But that doesn’t make it any more fantastic. ” – Mrs Fox.

The only thing that’s missing is the schteeeck.
Yes, the stick for my sad kite.

No More Photos

No more photos. Surely there are enough. No more shadows of myself thrown by light onto pieces of paper, onto squares of plastic. No more of my eyes, mouths, noses, moods, bad angles. No more yawns, teeth, wrinkles. I suffer from my own multiplicity. Two or three images would have been enough, or four, or five. That would have allowed for a firm idea: This is she. As it is, I’m watery, I ripple, from moment to moment I dissolve into my other selves. Turn the page: you, looking, are newly confused. You know me too well to know me. Or not to well: too much.

from The Tent by Margaret Atwood

i want this book! To BORDERS we go!

Boy, Be Explicit.

I’m listening. I am! To every word and… huh?
That almost sounded like you’re…..
Wait… What just happened?

Did I miss something here?
Was I supposed to catch on to something?
Did you mean to ask me something entirely different when you asked…”what about you?”?

What about who?

Forgive me, I’m a little dense. You’ve caught me off guard. I’m in no mood for confessions of my past. Paint you a picture of some exquisite love affair? My love life is boring. It’s just a mundane series of fleeting glances, some random strangers and crushes, exquisite only in the fantasy. Honest! I’ve been single for 20 years in the same way that my hair has been black for the last 20 years. Why? Here’s some explanation but honestly? I don’t know. Guys just aren’t into girls like me I guess. Does that answer your question? If not, you’ve got to help me out here. Hit me with a frying pan and spell it out in morse code.

Thunk thud thud thunk thunk clang.

What was it that you wanted to say?

What was it that you wanted to hear?

Murphy’s Law.

The sable panther is refusing to turn itself on.

I have a to-do list that’s 20 items long. Please don’t die on me now.

Fraternelle.

It must be tiring to see me fumble with my bag, my keys, my phone, my wallet, my mattresses and my opinions. It’s not the first time. But thank you for being there with your nose buried deep into your iPhone, as I stumble my own way out of trouble. Thank you for the umbrella, the company, the extra muscle and the feigned ignorance yesterday. I don’t know how to ask for help sometimes. It meant a lot. I don’t know what would be the right way to say thank you.

 Today it was difficult to watch you, or not to watch you. I’d rather shroud myself in polo shirts so I’ll become the ugly speck of dust in this picture. You’re kind but I know you can see right through me. Honestly? It makes me feel small, ugly, brash, incoherent and ignorant. How? I don’t know. I think that’s what you see when you see me: all shallow artifice. Is that true?

They adore you and you adore them. You are their Ideal Son. I don’t know how to live up to that. Your days with us are numbered. I hope they’ve filed the adoption papers. Please, apply for such a thing if it exists.

At least, it was a lot easier to think of you as a brother.

Chaff and Grain.

A friend is one to whom one can pour out all the contents of one’s heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that the gentlest of hands will take and sift it, keeping what is worth keeping, and, with the breath of kindness, blow the rest away.

Janda (Kid the Learner, 2009)

When you’re outside of me, you either see a very sweet saccharine veneer or a harsh haughty shell. They are both ways to keep your distance. I am neither one. Experience taught me to be guarded: to know what to keep, what to reveal and to whom. Men and women are capable of incredible duplicity so hone your skills to know who you can trust, who won’t take advantage of you, and who you can be vulnerable to. Appear as though nothing fazes you. Of course if you read this blog, you’ve bypassed that but that doesn’t change a thing of how you appear to me.

There aren’t many people I could trust. I could count them on one hand. The rest are people who hold an impression of proximity. Why would I allow you in?

Most of the time though it’s not about how long our friendship has lasted. I guess sometimes you might meet someone who seems familiar, a recognition of all the things that you are, from skin to issues of kin to lofty ambitions and obsessive passions.

In an instant you’ve found a friend.

I’m just grateful for collisions.

(=

Say It Out Loud.

I woke up with this tight constricting pain around my chest. Naturally i ignored it. It didn’t go away. In fact it’s getting worse and I feel breathless.

I lost a pair of mattresses today too. Yes, mattresses. I lost them. Mattresses. Who in the blue hell loses mattresses? I do. That’s the whole story.

I had lunch with V and went over to my F’s school today for an interview for his journalism project. That was a lot of fun. I forgot about the pain for a while. They were very sweet and funny people. Things were moving so fast, the conversation was a complete blur. I wished I knew them sooner. They’re a different bunch.

A and I made our way to the embassy for a meeting. I shouldn’t have gone. I didn’t really expect what was to come. It was a meeting between all the major stakeholders in the Indo community here so there were representatives from all over: the professionals, sailors, domestic workers, religious communities and entrepreneurs.  They want to create some sort of a universal forum that would transcend all the organizations. We thought it was a brilliant chance for us to introduce them to Diaspora. Considering those in attendance, it would have been strategic for me to be there.  

I didn’t know this. A and I weren’t prepared a meeting that would last till 11:30pm. We didn’t expect they’d be building one entirely new organization right there. There was discontinuity here: we weren’t there for the first meeting on Sunday where they had conceptualised it all. Still, we were the first to arrive at 6:30pm. The meeting started close to 7:30pm. by the time we were close to 9pm, we’ve just finished INTRODUCTIONS. It was necessary but this could have been moderated better if a) we were given the meeting minutes of the previous meeting b) given the agenda of the meeting beforehand and c) were tasked to prepare for a more fruitful discussion.

I don’t think I was really there half of the time, between trying to concentrate and analyse what was being said and trying to forget about the pain. I had a few points to bring up, namely the construction of a channel of communication. It’s all very technical things. But let’s face it, when it comes down to it, you can have all the ideals and the concept that you want but if they’re not translated into a method of participation that works and would be enticing for people to join, it’s not going to happen. It will just be confined to the same people and frankly, I’m not going to be one of them. I brought up the issue of dividing different channels of communication to filter noise. It was brushed aside as “masalah teknik”. Technical problems.

Right. ok.

Perhaps it’s the attitude in the room. Perhaps it’s just the time of the day. Perhaps it’s because they hadn’t fed us any food at all till 10pm at night. Perhaps it’s just me and I’m tired and I’m not ready to be open, constructive and creative. Perhaps it’s the headache.

Perhaps it’s just that kind of day.

I couldn’t take it. I left the meeting early when they handed out the food. I feel bad for leaving A there even though he wanted to leave too but couldn’t. Someone had to write the meeting minutes. I was on the verge of tears.

So there. I’m tired and when I’m tired it’s best that you don’t aggravate me by starving me, putting me in a torturous 4 hour marathon session, which is held somewhere at the topmost hill in Singapore where it is haunted like no other, on a Wednesday night where there is hardly any taxi around to ferry me home.

Now I look back. Read it over. 
It’s all so trivial. By keeping my mouth shut and not voicing out what I wanted, I was being immature by thinking that I’m invincible. I should have said, no enough, I can’t do this right now but a collaboration would be wonderful. Exit stage left, gracefully.

Instead of this.

I don’t care about that meeting. I don’t have to. It’s okay if I don’t care. It’s alright.

It ended with a phone call with a friend, putting my fears in place. I listen to her and she does nothing but amazes me. It is finally making sense: this boredom, this isolation, this itch. I know where I’ve been going wrong.

One.

One more exam to go.
Ohh boy.

Fuzzy Blind.

Thursday meeting ran late. At midnight, I was still waiting for my last bus. I’ve been without specs since Monday. It doesn’t get any more vulnerable than wandering around outside partially half blind at witching hour. Thank goodness it didn’t take long for my connecting bus to arrive.

That ought to teach me a lesson in possessions.

Sometimes I Can’t Believe That I Believe

It’s tailor made, says the myth. I know I can’t see it when it’s right in front of me but this time?

I don’t know. The older you get, the more you know, the less you think you know and the more unwilling you are to say it out loud. Why? Because you don’t want to jinx it. It’s a silly superstition but maybe there’s some truth to it. Anything can happen.

So when it comes with details tailor made it doesn’t really surprise you. There’s no fanfare. Just: understanding, trust, time and attention. And a random assortment of complements.

That’s all anyone can ever really ask for.

Nothing Says Good Morning Like a Nosebleed.

Yesterday I lost my glasses and my student card. To top it off, I got drenched in the thunderstorm.

Today, I woke up with a nosebleed. It’s nothing serious. Usually nosebleeds are the best indicators of fatigue so I went back to sleep, partly to quell my sudden fear of … well nevermind. I’ m fine.

I think I’m going to go down and get myself some lunch. It’s close to 4pm. I really should learn to take care of myself better.

This Was Your Fight.

“Roark, before I met you, I had always been afraid of seeing someone like you, because I knew that I’d also have to see what I saw on the witness stand and I’d have to do what I did in that courtroom. I hated doing it, because it was an insult to you to defend you–and it was an insult to myself that you had to be defended… Roark, I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: their halfway, the almost, the just-about, the in-between. They have their justifications. I don’t know. I don’t care to inquire. I know that it is the one thing not given me to understand. When I think of what you are, I can’t accept any reality except a world of your kind. Or at least a world in which you have a fighting chance and a fight on your own terms. That does not exist. And I can’t live life torn between that which exists–and you. It would mean to struggle against things and men who don’t deserve to be your opponents. Your fight, using their methods–and that’s too horrible a desecration. It would mean doing for you what I did for Peter Keating: lie, flatter, evade, compromise, pander to every ineptitude–in order to beg of them a chance for you, beg them to let you live, to let you function, to beg them, Roark, not to laugh at them, but to tremble because they hold the power to hurt you. Am I too weak because I can’t do this? I don’t know which is the greater strength: to accept all this for you–or to love you so much that the rest is beyond acceptance. I don’t know. I love you too much.”

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand.

Though it has never got to this point, it was strange to watch you – for a time – sleepless and muttering things in the night, hunched over the dining table because you were so afraid, so frustrated, so tired of clinging on to your sense of integrity when it is thrown in your face like an insult to your idealism, to your books and to everything that makes you, you.

I don’t like the men that kept my father awake at night.

There are reprecussions here, smaller ones. One of them, I think, is your stomach flu but that’s just my haphazard theory on how hypochondria works.

We’ll see.

Thank God I’m Sober.

“I yearn for muscles to ache so much that all I can do is sleep so i can chalk this heart ache to a tiring day.”

I got what I wanted. My feet is keeeling meeh. Apparently I don’t need alcohol at all to get really high. Just give me two weeks of unadulterated stress and a rock concert. You’ve got a girl ripe enough to lose it. Her mind, that is.

I had fun with the girls! No self-consciousness whatsoever. Who cares if we’re obscene, right?

Okay, I do. In a few days, evidence shall resurface that will probably mortify me some years down the road. Probably? I can’t remember how I looked. That’s the whole point: forgetting about how I appear and doing something because I felt like it.

It was a great end to a tiring week.

Good night.

It All Started with..

Lunch: some ramblings on the sociology of religion, Shiite revolution and academia. None of them mine.

“So is it just something you are born into or something which you have chosen to accept as true?”

I am somewhere in between. Can’t you just allow me that space and time for me to choose what I believe in? It’s not even a choice. It’s an inheritance. Allow me some space and time to come closer in the only way I know how through books, dialogues and rituals. This faith is the most important thing i inherited from my father. I have an odd relationship with it. Religion has constructed my world for the better half of my life.

And then, it fell apart.

You can analyse it from a socio-economic perspective, the issue of ethnicity and race, the politics of ex-spouses and kin, islamic family law or just simply another bildungsroman.

Sometimes you catch yourself feeling sad. When life has had the chance to carve sorrow so deep, laced with a heady cocktail of guilt, anger, fear and hatred, it’s only natural for you to grow a thick hide. Of course the scars heal over. Just when you think you feel numb enough to tell an account of your life to a stranger uncoloured by emotion, floodgates break several hours after.

I don’t have to explain myself. It’s not self-pity if you can’t see me cry.

I pretend things are okay when i catch myself coming home to a quiet apartment, unable to sleep. I drown in music and in other people’s words but i feel miserable. Do I deserve this feeling of mysery when everything is going okay? Do I have to explain why I don’t feel hungry? Do I have to explain why it’s sickening to see you laugh and stuff your face with food as if this was a celebration? This was a farce.

You don’t care. But I can’t. It sickens me that you can feel that way and I CAN’T.

So in the end you feel alone, cocooned inside your own deafening silence, without anyone else to pour your frustrations onto because you’re afraid of saying all it is you need to say and being judged or hurting another or worse, being unheard. I tiptoe around taking the politically correct route until in the end there’s nothing left to say. No expletives. Nothing. I’m looking for some cathartic release to set me free. So I write but even in writing I’d look at the words and see how ugly it is, how mean it is, and i don’t want to read it anymore and poof it goes to the trash. 

I yearn for muscles to ache so much that all I can do is sleep so i can chalk this heart ache to a tiring day.

nothing more.

“Maybe it means that the rest of your life will be peaceful now”

I hope so. But nothing is for certain.

A Little Less Madness.

Despite the kind of crap i spew out here, in real life (where actual things happen) I’ve been a little swamped with three presentations, two reports, an exhibition, an assignment, two performances to pull off within the space of 9 days. Insane much?

I didn’t want to write about it because a) I don’t want to turn my bitching into self-fulfilling prophecies and b) it’s probably about classmates that you know and how much i reaaaaaaaaally don’t like them and their whining and their procrastination and their excuses and their non-cooperation. Generally, how much of an aneurysm they are to me.

That’s not very nice and i think I’m capable of very colorful expletives. I’m a responsible writer. I know I’m already someone else’s headache so let’s just keep the good karma okay?

Keeping things inside does nothing good for my system. I think it appears on my face though which is why I probably look like a monster for the last 5 days.

So, I’ve taken a breather.

Now: I have an interview with 93.8fm, a presentation, a research paper, an assignment and one final exam plus Diaspora.

yep. After that madness? This is totally manageable.

I’m not a man, not yet a woman.

I’ve spent too many days lately pretending I’m a child to court affections. Allow yourself a weakness, she said, so they’ll be strong and have a reason to be there for you. Guys aren’t looking for a comedian, sweetheart. They’re looking for an audience. Sweet, coy, unassuming, demure, unintimidating, safe,

enough

 I’ve read so much psychological babble about love from the biological makeup of attachment, the evolutionary aspect of choosing a mate to the psedo-intellectual ramblings of a dating blog found in stray pieces online. Yes that’s sad. I’m sick of this. Sick sick sick of it, Kinsey and Freud.

Between being hypersensitive and oblivious, think I’ll stick with the latter from now on. If you like me, hit me with a frying pan.

I am pretty sure you can google any cure for any ailment. Ask Jeeves! He’s your modern day apothecary. But you can’t cure what ails me if what ails me isn’t a sickness really.

Oh forget it. I’m moving on. My baby diaspora is crying for attention. Our Agenda and Perspektif section is growing in unexpected ways with so many possible collabs in the future. Big names with big brains to boot, with very big boots too.

Dad: “The interview questions are good. So when does your exam end?”

Me: “You’re paying for the airfare?”

Dad: “and food and accomodation and clothes and fruit and vegetables. Hurry before the ministry starts doing actual work”

I’ve got thrills you can’t buy, baby. Bye bye.

How to Grow Tall.

You get to a point in your life where you realise you are a singular entity: a being of your own design. To be single and still without pining for a future former lover. Forget you! You’re not my salvation. Open up the folds of skin around your eyes and there’s an entire path laid out before you, some bright world that was always there. The colours seeped at the folds of your graduation gown some three and a half years ago. Where’d you go, girly girl? You were bubbly, caustic, brash, random, and an organized hurricane when you wanted to be.

This time it is different. I am different.

I’m comfortable in my own shadows which swelled quietly into bloom, I know that an iron will necessitates the softness of touch. There are always at least two ways of doing things; it’s a conscious choice. Language is kin, not foe. Numbers and the art of reading them is power. Love is a function, not a gift nor a feeling, so love thy neighbour. Make your own tribe. Ask a stranger. Know your priorities. Be kind, be honest, be present, be critical: things that we lack in this world. Don’t think (about some things). Think (about everything else).

Oh, grow up.

Let Me Have Your Words In My Mouth.

Bitter and metallic with a hint of sweetness. Is rust sweet? I’m irrevocably in love with your thoughts and the way your words line themselves up for an action: a stab, a twist and a surrendered palm. You exist. Your words exist and I devour them.

You do not offer salve nor quick conclusions. No balm is offered but by being close to the visceral, there is penance.

Maybe? I guess. I don’t know.

I want your courage.

Week 11

was fantastic. really. ups and downs, twists and turns. sweet apparitions and toils and troubles and much tears. A lot of tears. Actually too much tears that I care to admit. My face feels like a twisted mop.

 But there were some real good times and highlights. Tiny gestures and small words that can make your feelings soar. I wrote it in detail but i realised how incredibly mundane it is to you. But not to me.

I suppose that’s life.