new year resolutions:

1. be less angry

2. be less sulky

3. be on time for at least ONE event in a week. baby steps, kawan kawan sekalian.

4. be present in body, mind and soul at college. as opposed to being physically absent from classes, office hours and study groups almost half the time, and spiritually absent all the time.

5. never underdress for new york winters again. skirts and lace tights in -10C temperatures are not very smart

6. make time for self, that is not spent sleeping

7. stop trusting the wrong people

to-do list:

1. get my last cervical cancer vaccine jab. hopefully for free with insurance!

2. buy gloves. i lost the right glove of my fav black pair somewhere in london :( and i accidentally left the left glove of my red pair back in new york. i cant even wear them both at the same time and argue eclectic fashion sense because both of them are right hand gloves.

3. take out the trash. there has been an unfinished box of grapes sitting on the floor for a very long time. as well as an open bag of chips and an unclosed jar of salsa. the person i’m living with is a total slob

4. reply emails. to folks who have emailed me over the past couple of weeks, especially those with application essays, i’m so terribly sorry! i’ve just had no time or internet access :( will get to them soon. but to the folks who sent me application essays, i’ve stopped reading essays for now. muchos apologies, but reading and commenting on the daily inundation of essays were just taking up way too much time.

5. change my blog layout. i already have the cutest idea :) now i just have to execute!

6. get around to sending out my christmas cards. omg i know. and after that i will finish decorating the half-adorned christmas tree

7. start uploading pictures of london and barcelona.. and the painful process of resizing them in iPhoto. sheesh. i miss my batch function in Photoshop.

8. return an oversized dress that i bought at Covent Garden

9. buy a duffel. nottingham here i come! or maybe not.

10. start looking up internships. a strangely exciting prospect.

11. decide what i want to do with my life.

12. decide what i want to do with the next 5 hours.

hello folks,

a chapter of my life has closed neatly. now, like the new year of 2009, a brand new chapter is dawning upon me. keywords in this chapter: embarkation, discovery, fear, confidence, leaping, solitude and education. it will be a time of much healing. 2008 drowned me in its unfair expectations and unwise judgments, but i have a curious suspicion that the new year is going to love me. i will be enveloped. there will be affinity and plenty of socks. there will be dreams and self-sustenance. it will be just me and what’s important.

i’m actually in Barcelona right now. gorgeous, gritty Barcelona with the grumpy old people and dizzy structures, where i will be ushering in the new year. it’s been a most haphazard and disorganized trip; i found myself here quite by chance and almost didnt make it. but now i’m glad i’m here. Barcelona is vast and labyrinthine - the wide streets beg to be skipped across, there is an infinite number of crooked cobblestone alleys to duck into, and even the massive throngs of people dont fully permeate all that Barcelona has to offer. you grasp, but you dont quite get your fistful. quite disorienting, but very exciting. i also had the best chocolate gelato i’ve ever had in this lifetime; Lygon Street has been dethroned.

but what i love most about Barcelona is the languid attitude towards time. everything here operates a couple of hours later than the rest of the world - dinner starts at 9pm, partying starts at midnight and ends at 5 in the morning, people sleep in late and stay up late. 2pm to 4pm are the siesta hours, where shops close and people halt work to head out for a lazy lunch and drinks or go home to take a nap. it’s so indulgent, i absolutely love it. growing old feels a lot less scary in Barcelona. here, it is a cultural and social norm to give yourself time to breathe. and sleep. and take bubble baths should you feel like it.

today i went to Parc Guell. how do i describe what it is? in a nutshell, it is a park featuring Antoni Gaudi’s architectural works that turns that little chunk of hill into an amalgamation of a theme park, the world of Alice in Wonderland, underwater, and a gingerbread house - all within the shell of a normal, everyday park with trees, grass, dogs and other parkly things. one day i’ll tell you guys about the trippy world of Parc Guell; just not today, because i want to talk briefly about bubbles for now.

so i was at Parc Guell, and in the midst of the main terrace, surrounded by a crowd of onlookers, was a man making huge soap bubbles from a pail of soapy water and a hoop of rope. i suppose he works for the park authorities, and his purpose is to make Parc Guell feel even more fantasylike with his big, colorful rainbow bubbles that are reminiscent of Gaudi’s work. they’re just bubbles, i know, but everyone - myself included - was very mesmerized. the sight of huuuuuge curvy bubbles wobbling through the air and catching sunlight is a strangely soothing one. but what disturbed me were the two little children, a boy and a girl, running in circles around the man and trying to pop every bubble that he made. they were young, maybe 8 years old or so, but so destructive for all their blonde hair and blue eyes. it was shocking that such beautiful creatures could be so vicious - they were clearly enjoying themselves while destroying each bubble with their outstretched index fingers, completely ignorant that they were ruining the fun for a hundred other people who genuinely loved the bubbles and all their beauty.

but isnt that the thing about beauty? i dont dare say everyone, but i do think that the more ambitious of us yearn badly to be one with beauty, to be associated with it or even to have some fleeting form of contact with this ethereal concept. and so we stretch out our index fingers to touch, so engrossed in our own thrilled feelings and lightheadedness that we dont realize we’re innocently destroying the very thing we worship so. we all want to leave our mark and impose our influence on beautiful things, eager to carve our legacy into this beauty, but really, we are ruining these things forever with our selfishness. no one beyond us can then partake in the joy that was once brought to the world by that ephemeral beauty. and how do we live with the guilt, if ever it occurs to us? how do we make amends?

it’s kind of sad. and only 8 years old or so.

but then i’m 20 and still learning.

here’s to a happy 2009, everybody :)

if there was a sound for silence, it would sound like stars. and if there was a sound for the shining of stars, it would sound like a million needles falling together, the tinkling crashing of their dissonance playing in an infinite loop that never seems drudging or tiresome. instead, this limitless sound feels naturally eternal. if you listen to it long enough as it rings in your ears, sometimes you can hear the truth.

after i hung up the phone, i sat for a long time listening to the sound of silence. it is such a passively piercing sound. but its permanence comforted me. it also didnt expect anything from me, and that liberated me. it is a kind of liberation where i’m sitting in a booth. a very small booth. we always think that freedom is a vast open field where we can run and flail our arms and air our screams of victory… but all those histrionics are demanded from us by the blue skies and endless green grass. we see before us an expanse of verdant, sloping hills, and our instincts tell us to run and chase the wind. but why? why do our instincts impose such expectations on us? what if i want to just sit on the grass, in that very spot i appeared in, and just sleep? i dont want to run with wide open arms and scream; all i want to do is be idle. and that’s why my liberation came in the form of a small phone booth with no phone. here, nobody can find me.

and thus, i can heal myself. far, far, far removed from the toxic aid of humanity.

i was a field mouse hiding at the bottom shelf of the bookcase, clutching a tome that felt larger than life, shaking with fear. the world swiveled around me in curvy waves of pounding feet and harsh fingernails, and i felt like the whole of Selfridges was going to swallow me alive. Gerrard lay forgotten on the floor somewhere and i would probably never see him again. remember the day he came to me, delivered into my hands unsuspectingly in a little jewelry packet? all this time later, i lost him and didnt even realize it until i missed the familiar thud it would make against my heart. an hour ago i was running helter skelter through a park behind Bond Street and laughing with the taste of chilly London air on my tongue, but as i crouched there in Selfridges amongst the towering stacks of books, i felt truly alone. actually, i’m so sick of Selfridges. i’ve been there for days on end now. and tomorrow (actually, in three hours), i’m going to be meeting some friends there for the Boxing Day sales, but i am optimistically relegating the whole jostling, elbowing and snatching shindig to the category of spectator sports. i also cant do the queue thing. queues drive me up the wall; there’s just too much foot-tapping and fidgeting on my part to be had. and then there’s the dangerous thinking that is inevitable as one waits. right now, all i want to do is not think. coz i’m on holiday. this new-found aversion to thinking is precisely the reason why i’m even here. ah, life. ah, london. so full of pompous cupcakes and prickly christmas trees.

merry belated christmas, everyone :)

how did you guys spend christmas? please entertain me with lovely stories of hot chocolate, crazy xmas eve parties, kisses san mistletoe, church service, gift exchanges or turkey from Mr Ho’s Fine Foods .. :) or even lovely stories of none of the above.

as for me, i ushered in christmas day with a congregation of crazy malaysians cramped into a little enclave in Butler’s Wharf - we had pizza, played Pictionary and passed around a strange-looking thing called a beer bong. then i hibernated until 4pm and woke up to milk chocolate digestive biscuits. watched Before Sunrise in intervals. stuffed myself with turkey stuffing later on at night. talked all night long. took a long shower with my favorite papaya soap from Body Shop. quite perfect.

some pictures:

a stand at Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park where i bought hot blackcurrant. Ribena :)

toffee apples, something i’d only ever read about in books up till this christmas. i’m still not exactly sure how to eat them though… i stupidly bit very hard into one and almost broke my jaw in the process. so i ended up sticking the apple into the oven to get a gooey sugary coating instead. that was a lot nicer.

my santa hat, which i later found out was actually a santa stocking. quite embarrassing.

a nice huge christmas eve bratwurst. happiness! this came with mulled wine, which is supposed to be a christmas favorite, but was kinda awful-tasting in my coarse and unrefined opinion :\

crazy malaysians! spot the beer bong

big floating snowman in Carnaby Street

outside Selfridges

… gorgeous.

updates soon, when i find time and buy an SD card reader so i can upload pictures :)

tomorrow, i’m going to the oh so famous Four Seasons roast duck in bayswater with tamtim. excitement! let’s see now if it’s really as good as the rumors declare. better than roast duck in hong kong, some say, but i meet that claim with much skepticism. but then see how lah. i am prepared to be taken by surprise!

i also will be getting my UK phone number tomorrow; so, fellow friends in the UK whom i have yet to call, i beg for your patience! do not take this as a sign that i love you not - it is the roaming charges that have backed me to the wall. roaming charges, as we all know, can be most unkind.

interesting london fact of the day: they have marmite flavored potato chips here. marmite.