Archive for October, 2007
the sun rose a few hours ago. the neighbourhood aunties must already be at the local wet market, chatting loudly amongst themselves as they tuck into a hot plate of wantan noodles, satisfied with their morning’s purchases of the choicest meats and vegetables.
how nice it would be to be part of that picture, to once again be the wide-eyed little girl sitting in between all these other people’s grandmothers who smell like her own grandmother, having breakfast before school starts, meticulously picking out the vegetables from her own bowl of noodles and hiding them discreetly under the plate. how nice it would be to fall back into that sepia-coloured world. but it is a life left behind in a forgotten pocket of time, discarded alongside bicycles and Enid Blyton books; moved away from, in transition to the bigger adult world of cars and RSVPs. this here is quite now, and i am very aware of it. when did the comic section in the paper become a reprieve, when did food suddenly taste like it had one tablespoon too much sugar, when did it become an option for corners to be cut?
it seems like it’s always morning. i open my eyes, it’s morning. i close my eyes, it’s morning. i take a shower, go for a swim, wash my underwear, it’s still the freaking morning. either i sleep too much or sleep too little. the chicken-flavoured instant noodles and chocolate chip cookies i’m munching on feel so real right now that i honestly feel this is not reality, but a very, very lucid hallucination. it doesn’t get any better than this… it just does. not. 8.25AM is a time for the gods and their golden goblets.
i missed an extremely important deadline 2 days ago, and i was just really, really angry at the circumstances. i thought to myself - cmon, let me just trip over my own feet and then when i stand up and brush the dirt off my skirt, i will find that it’s yesterday again and i will not have missed this deadline. but i didnt trip, and i didnt find that it was yesterday. in fact it was still today, very much so, painfully and realistically. okay fine. whatever. in the cab on the way home, i continued wishing i could turn back time, entertaining myself with the infinite possibilities of daydream.
rewinding ONE day was all i wanted, really. but the farther i drifted into this fanciful time-traveling fantasy, the greedier i got. i found myself wanting to go 2 months back to fix that other one thing, then 1 year back to not have missed that other deadline, then another 4 years back to right that relationship, then another 6 years to revamp my high school life, then another 11 years to that first day in first grade where my whole world was just right before me in one long paved path lined with trees. yeah - 11 whole years, at that moment in the year 2007, i felt i could re-do and do it a whole lot better. shameful. maybe it’s a good thing we dont have the ability to turn back time.
life is a time for us, our golden goblets, and no regrets.
8.42 AM, Sunday morning while waiting for episode 5 of Grey’s Anatomy to finish downloading
October 30th, 2007
got this in my email the other day. sooooo cute and so hilarious, i just had to share!!!
Superdog! hahaha!
spiderdog, spiderdog .. :P
the Cerberus! complete with a little Harry Potter :D
dress like Yoda this dog does
not that much of a turn-on, but..
it took me awhile to realize this was that Monkey God character. thought it was a reindeer at first. but damn cute.
this is actually my favourite photo! haha!
perfect facial expression
nail polish, even!!
the other dogs in the neighbourhood must relish the sight of this :D
October 27th, 2007
i was latelatelate as usual this morning, and while rushing into the car, i hit my head rather painfully against the doorframe part thingy of the car. the result was a huge bump on my forehead that just wouldn’t go down (thank you, fringe) and a wake-up call, in more ways than one. things just seem a lot clearer sometimes after you’ve been given a big smack in the face. or in this case, on the forehead.
i’m growing up. it’s a strange thing to realize about yourself, but it’s true. things, and people, look different to me now than they looked a couple of weeks back. i’ve lost my appetite for lollipops. and somewhere along the line i also lost myself. there are days when amidst all the period cramps and coffee table magazines, i wonder to myself where my identity went. who is this person holding this book and walking and talking on autopilot? i mean yeah sure people change.. but there’s always a core of themselves that they maintain. but i don’t know if i ever knew that core. i think once upon a time, i did. but it’s probably lost somewhere in all those yellowing high school yearbook pictures.
oh haha, i was such a character back in high school, which of course was not very long ago. lemme tell you what i was like. being in the top class of the form has its expectations, and in the words of West (Heroes reference, is Season 2 boring or what) - when in the top class, you’re supposed to be a robot, not an alien. but i was an alien. robotness just wasnt in my blood. which explains why i was really mad when Claire didnt do that backtuck off the tower. hands up how many people felt this rumbling disappointment in their stomach when she turned around and said, ‘you’re right, cant do it’ like a really bad imitation robot. cmon girl let that alien in you out! but i am digressing.
so yeah i’ve been in the top class all my life. but like everywhere else, there’s always a certain character type that people expect you to be when you are lumped in a stereotypical category, and if you dont fit that prototype, sometimes it confuses people. my classmates were all really bookish and tight-laced people who were always eager to please, and sometimes this robotness scared the hell out of me. i remember how i had this really huge screamfest with one of my teachers, and every single one of my classmates were looking down at their tables the entire time. i mean, no one even dared to look up and watch, let alone say something on my behalf. for goodness sakes lah, what’s so scary, she’s just a teacher with a short fuse. anyway i ended up in tears in the bathroom; that sense of total alienation was just looming all over me and it pissed me off that i could be affected by something so little.
if there is anything that taught me the pains of conformity, it was being in that class for years and years on end. being a top class student, you were expected to be really goody two shoes and stuff. there was them, and then there was me, in my skirt cropped 2 inches too short and only turning up in school once or twice a week or something. i could have been like them, yknow, apologizing profusely for the littlest mistake or kissing Cikgu ass every lunch break, and it would have made my high school life so much more pleasant, but i just couldnt. i liked my skirt even though it got me a lot of flak from the more conservative teachers. i liked not being in school because school didnt make me happy. i liked sleeping in class during the boring lessons. i just did. i mean, i totally understand why teachers and some of my more super uptight classmates thought i was being disrespectful, but i was really just being an individual. i was never rude or anything, everyone can tell you i have the biggest smiles when talking to people, and i’m always very warm and friendly .. but geez.
i never understood it. the thing that got me really angry was when i wanted to run for student council president, and i thought i would have done a great job at it. apparently a few of my classmates didnt think so, and they voiced this out to the pihak-pihak berkenaan, and so my nomination was withdrawn just on account of that. yah i dont get it either. what do these people have against someone who is not like them? i dont judge you despite the fact that you are a boring kiasu shoe-polishing twerp robot; why should you judge me for having some colour and knowing how to speak my mind?
i remember how teachers used to tell me in Form 3 that i would probably be the one person in my class who wouldn’t do very well in PMR. yeah they would always say this to my face. i ended up getting straight A’s and a few of their apple-bringing pets didn’t. they said the same thing to me in Form 5, i would probably fail this or that if i kept up my ‘indiscipline’, but look who came up top student for SPM. look who got 12 A’s. suddenly there were all these warm smiles and claps on my back, and murmurs of well done, we knew you could do it. yeah right. i remember every single word of discouragement you gave me through all the years, encik-encik dan puan-puan sekalian.
aiyah i dont actually know how this post turned into such a rant. all i wanted to say was that back in high school, i really knew who i was and i would never compromise my identity, despite all this pressure to conform to the goody top-class mould. i was the butt of all absentee jokes, a lot of teachers would have loved to see some proper punishment slapped on me, and it was hard to relate to many of my classmates, but i really stuck to who i was and i was darn proud of it. darn proud of the fact that i was an alien, and not a mindless robot.
but these days… i dont know. i’m getting a lot of robot vibes from myself. help.
happy days from school :
October 24th, 2007
for a fleeting, few, scary, heart-stopping moments, i realized that i had forgotten what you look like. there i was, with my breath catching in my throat, desperately grasping for that one mental photograph in my head, my lifeline, my pillar of support, my prozac, my everything. but whatever brittle fragments of imagery that provided a brief flash of relief were fast slipping through my fingers like broken lace, rusty dust. there was just this. blank. spot. vacuum. thing. in my head. like someone had broken into my mind and stole you away from me. and so i tried to think of all those face-to-face moments, the across-the-table moments, all those times i looked up at you while lying in your arms and you would be sleeping and i could count your eyelashes and truly see you for who you really are. but it didn’t work, and i started to feel even more scared. it was really weird because i could feel you, here with me, but i just couldnt see you. the panic was starting to bubble over. is this what it is, when a patient’s body rejects the organ donated to it? is this what it is, when you have the flu and your nose feels like it’s this alien appendage attached to your face that sporadically and uncontrollably makes your entire body seize up in a sneeze? is this what it is, moving on? is this what it is.. forgetting.
hollywood road was all over the place. taxis, antique shops, pacific coffee. sighs from me. missing all those things, missing you, not understanding. i cannot possibly forget how you look like. you’re supposed to be always here, omnipresent, never leaving.
there are times that i think maybe it would be for the better. but then in those quiet peaceful past-midnight hours of watching you while you sleep, i cant bring myself to repeat the thought. the undiluted truth just presents itself in the most coy of manners, in the most vulnerable of times. and who am i to question this truth? i close my eyes and suddenly i see you, your face, your james blunt shirt, your smile, that teasing grin. carpe diem, someone once said. this is me seizing it all the way.
October 20th, 2007
life has been nice and slow lately, but there is always reason for panic. i accidentally pulled the emergency alarm at Martian’s apartment the other day, and then suddenly there was all this clanging, and bells, and whooping, and ringing, and this automated woman’s voice shouting Emergency! Emergency! Emergency! over and over again.
i half expected security to barge into our apartment with their guns blazing, and so i quickly started formulating in my head the excuse i would give them when they really do come crashing in. i mean, i cant possibly tell them that i tried to hang my bathrobe on the alarm trigger, right? what would they think! anyway, no one came barging in. just my boyfriend, who looked very confused at all the noise. me, i was just sheepish. had to look at the ceiling and twiddle my thumbs when explaining how the alarm went off. sigh, i got a good spanking after that. hardly a punishment though, heehee.
i dreamt about a mirror the other day; one of those full-length, ornate, Victorian mirrors that you set on the floor. it looked so unbelievably gorgeous in my dream, that when i woke up i just knew i had to have one of those beautiful mirrors. so together with Timtam and my Slutboi, we went mirror-hunting all over Singapore (exaggeration!! but it really did feel like all over Singapore), but it was a futile expedition that turned up naught. i was mightily disappointed =( surely a step-into-my-boudoir mirror cant be so hard to find! i did however end up buying a toy seal i now call Polar Bear. and then Timtam decides to tell me that polar bears actually eat seals. grrrrr leave it to him to tell me all these random disturbing National Geographic facts. i still assert that polar bears eat fish. FISH!
we also went to eat burgers. it was my first ever Carls Jr experience, and i was extremely shocked to find that the burgers were about as big as my face:
oh the massivity
me eating chili cheese fries, although they dont look very chili cheese in this picture
this is Polar Bear!!!
the spanker and the spankee
dinner at Ming’s place
hahahahahaha look what we found!!!!!! see see this Kenny damn excited. the quote of the day was when Ming said, “guess no one is very interested in my copy of the Harvard Business Review..” :P
isnt this photo gorgeous? =) Huiwen, Nadnut, Xiaxue, Pinkpau, Estee
i’ve been back home for a few days now. had dinner with the family tonight at Sek Yuen, that really old place in Pudu where the waitresses are straight out of the early 90’s, and the old man behind the counter uses an abacus. when our fish came, i stared for the longest time at its open mouth; lips already deep fried in batter and soy sauce. do fishes open their mouths in their death or are they forced open by the cook? i didnt know the answer, but it was a mesmerizing thing, that fish’s gaping mouth that i know will soon be forgotten.
in Sek Yuen, hot checkered handkerchiefs are given out after the meal instead of those soapy wet tissues in plastic. i accepted mine gratefully and put it across my eyes. it smudged my makeup but that’s okay - nothing feels nicer than a warm cloth pressed to your face.
October 17th, 2007
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