Archive for November, 2008
Title: Do Not Make The Foolish Mistake Of Assuming This Is Poetry
1.
i cant
think
when you are
screaming
into my ear
2.
if the subway was hijacked today
and blown up
and i die
should i be ashamed that
you were the last person on
my mind
3.
this week i learned that
difficult things
are a lot easier than
i thought
they would be
4.
cornbread
is the best food on earth
5.
i am angry
at you, the one careless and thoughtless constant in my life
at you, the conniving little bitch
at you, who sold me out
at you, who forgot my birthday. so now i’ve forgotten yours too
at you, ruiner of plans
at you, the presumptuous stranger i met for all of 15 seconds
at you, myself.
6.
i am now
clair de luneing
it’s bringing me back to sunday afternoons
at jean gan, reading
and waiting for wm to finish her ballet classes
7.
i will admit it
i am possessive
because i found him first
or rather, he found me first
if there’s any right person
it’s not going to be either of you.
you are merely on
the periphery
so back off
back the fuck off
8.
yesterday when i was sleeping
i had a dream
there were trees and big glass windows
larger than life
then i woke up with a start
and realized that i had just uncovered
a very important part of my childhood
the one where i was unafraid of
dreaming
or people
i was unafraid of
anything
and all i wanted to do was climb the Faraway Tree
ring bluebells
and make blackberry tea out of
paint
9.
the place with the trees and the big glass windows,
by the way,
is the Shangri-La hotel of the early 90’s
i cannot believe how drastically different that place
looked to me then, and looks to me now.
back then it was a palace
now it is a dingy hotel.
10.
there is a sinister somberness
hovering above my suede shoes
i fear that
i am not alone
here in this room.
11.
i feel it. i know it.
everything that i’ve been doing
up till today
is all
wrong.
post script:
if anyone, anyone at all, can identify with how i’m feeling in any of the above 11 pieces, i want to hear your thoughts :)
November 28th, 2008
i never thought i’d see the day fruits start blogging, but life’s full of little surprises like that. so sometime last week, i was shown two really cute blogs written by two rather unusual individuals - a Berry and a Lemon! hahaha yes the utter strangeness of it all. so i started leaving comments on their blogs with many stupid puns. like, berry good. when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. and, what do you give an injured lemon? then i facebooked Berry and wrote on his wall that i met a strawberry today, and i asked if they were related. his reply? “no su ann that is a straw man!” HAHAHA. BERRY GOOD!
so the boy Berry’s blog is here and the girl Lemon’s blog is here. they are both boyfriend and girlfriend - a new couple from the looks of it - and they write little stories from their relationship on their blogs. Berry, the guy, has a really quirky male sense of humor, as is obvious from his straw man retort haha. in one post he writes about why it’s good to be ‘purple and pantless’ :
* I stand out in any group photos, unless you shoot in black and white…
* I don’t need to take off any pants going to the toilet
* There’s no yellow snow moment
* I’m waterproof
* If I keep watering myself, I’ll never go bald
* No Monday blues
* Purple matches yellow, so I look sweet with my lemon pie
technically, berries aren’t waterproof because they have a partially permeable membrane (osmosis!), but he’s right about not having to take off any pants before using the loo. hahahaha i think i kinda just stared at that sentence in disbelief and then spent a few minutes giggling when I first read it.
Lemon, the girl, writes about very cute and girly things that I can so relate to. In this post, she writes about how she can never decide what to wear on dates, and either ends up being too overdressed or looking too plain. and she also says that guys aren’t really ‘quite there’ when they’re shopping with us, which is sooo true. all Martian does when he shops with me is play with his PSP :( i remember a time when he was very eager to come in with me into the dressing room and i’d have to kick him out, but now……. haih. very tak dilayan.
reading Berry’s and Lemon’s blogs reminded me a lot of how Martian and i blog about each other. earlier today, i went back to my archives and looked at all the posts Martian wrote when he was guest-blogging for me while i was away on a 10-day camp. it’s been almost two years since he wrote those posts, and reading them now, in 2008, evokes a lot of nostalgia in me. i remember the ‘us’ from two years back.. i remember how he called me while i was at camp to ask me how to put up photos on my blog (yes please excuse that horrendous picture of me in the ‘egg shaped muffin’ post… we’d just got off a long flight and i was so engrossed in my chocolate frappe at the airport that i didn’t care enough to delete all the bad-angle pictures from his camera).. but most of all, i remember how happy i was when i came back from camp and read those posts. now that i am reading them again, i feel like i’m extracting a whole different meaning from those posts. kinda like Antoine de Saint Exupery’s The Little Prince and how the meaning to that story always changes when we read it at different points of our lives :)
i guess most of you dont know that Martian used to keep a blog :) he started blogging a few months before we got together, and at the time i’d always read his posts with some kind of nonchalance. but when we got together, we fell in love so quickly that i got a bit scared. i didnt know too much about him, and he didnt know too much about me.. plus the distance made it a lot harder to integrate our lives.
so i started re-reading all his blogs, in a covert attempt to learn more about him. i remember reading the comments from his best friends - i wondered about these people, if i would ever meet them, or if Martian and i would get to a point in our relationship where we were friends with each others’ friends. I remember seeing an ex girlfriend’s name on his blog, and while at the time the only meaning i could pin it to was the story he told me about how he dated two girls with the same name before, i wondered about his exes and if he was best friends with them the way i am with my own ex boyfriends. and then there was a post where he blogged a brief but funny story about his friend A from Hong Kong. back in 2005, to me, A was just the star of a blog post and someone who i’d probably never meet.. but now i’ve met A so many times, and just from reading the story, i can instantly tell it’s him even though Martian changed his name.
then there are the pictures. true, not many in Martian’s blog, but there’s this one that i took of him in front of the concert poster in Bangkok. that shirt, those shoes, that pair of dark green khakis.. so meaningless to me back then. now, i know who gave him that shirt for christmas and i know where he bought those shoes and exactly when he likes to wear those khakis. around his neck - in the photo - is a concert pass and the voodoo doll i didnt want, which i would later come to be very familiar with as i walked to and fro the guestroom in his hong kong apartment. the voodoo doll hangs from the doorknob, together with the cirque du soleil and coldplay passes.
another secret: i’d actually read about Martian on someone’s blog a long, long time before i actually met him in person. she’s a good friend of his and i stumbled across her blog sometime in 2001; she and Martian hung out pretty often and every now and then she would talk about him. he was the guy in her blog who wore the tshirt with a funny leaf on it, the guy who has a kitchen he never uses. it took me way too long to actually put two and two together, but that is irrelevant.. the point here is: Martian used to be Leaf Tshirt Guy to me. on a blog. written by a girl i’ve never even met. and now, he’s my whole world. i know exactly which shelf of his wardrobe that leaf tshirt sits on. and i’ve met Stephanie.. she’s the coolest person ever. and i still read her blog :)
Martian has blogged about me a few times on his blog. funny stories are attached to all of these posts, but there is a particularly special one where he wrote about the first time he met me. in that post, he called me gorgeous and smart (hahahahaha i must hold on to this. with time, i find, he has stopped complimenting me) and talked about how if he died (in Hong Kong) the next day, i wouldnt know. weirdly enough, it’s actually true.. cos at that time, we barely spoke to each other. there is also another post where he described the journey from his house to mine, and in one part he says that he texts me that he’s arrived about 10 minutes before he actually reaches my place. cos i always take so long to get ready. 2 years later, he’s STILL doing that, but sometimes he texts me as early as 20 minutes before he actually gets there -_-
i miss Martian’s writing :( he doesnt even write me long emails anymore… T____T *twiddles thumbs* Martian if you are reading this, this is a HINT!!!
and i miss Martian.
November 27th, 2008
i remember how during exam weeks in high school and college, lofty proclamations of X hours of non-sleep were often thrown around nonchalantly in pre-exam palaver: ‘i havent slept in 24 hours!’, ‘well that’s nothing.. i’m running on 2 hours’ of sleep in the past 48 hours!’ we simply couldn’t resist the one-upping - on one hand, it was competitive spirit; on the other, it was a self-consolatory measure of how hard we were working. but back then it was easy to keep tabs. over here, there are no days. existence is the composite of big blurry blocks of several mornings and several all-nighters. i was a little bit stunned when i walked into my room this afternoon to the awareness that there was a huge pile of stuff on my bed, a pile that was accumulated over the span of the weekend, at the bottom of which were my clothes from friday night. can it be that i’ve not slept since friday? i honestly do not remember. such crime. what violation! my weekend has expired.
it’s been a long, stretchy, elastic week of many findings. i took it all in with a slightly hazy mind and with a huge pinch of salt. here i must say i beg your pardon if i start sounding a little bit incoherent. it’s the delirium kicking in, but i assure you everything will still make sense in the morning. so i played Taboo this weekend and rediscovered its yardstick properties. i love it. that same night i encountered the best wantan on this side of the planet. i took a photo of it to share, but because i havent quite learned how to use iPhoto, i cannot show you. a description to facilitate your imagination: it was big, brown, crispy on the outside, juicy on the inside. it sounds like any normal wantan, i know, but even the most exceptional wantans sound like any normal wantan. that’s why they’re special. cos you dont know they’re special until it’s too late.
i dont think i’ve changed. one bit. at all. remember how in high school i used to disappear? and in college i was never around either? it’s happening again. i keep disappearing. some of my friends accused me of having a secret affair with a wall street investment banker. another is convinced i’m running about Manhattan participating in those studies that pay $20 an hour or something. but the truth is i just want to be alone. i just want to go away and think. i want to be distracted like i always have been, because i find my purpose in distraction. when i break away, i win.
what else. oh. i’ve been angry. but now i’m not anymore.
i’ve been hoping. but i’ve decided to stop.
here i want to take some time to tell you guys about this guy in the math help room. i dont know his name, but i find myself eager to seek math assistance if it means i can be witness to his temperamental antics. the most recent: i asked him a question about the mean value theorem, and he turned the question back onto me. presumably i said something really stupid, because he slammed the table, yelled ‘NO NO NO you’re not getting it!’ and then he sprang to the whiteboard and started scribbling shit. i cannot begin to describe how intrigued i am by this guy. i have always had a thing for math guys.. but a math guy with a temper? irresistible.
then there is the opposite of him, my economics TA. now he deserves a whole post of his own. one day i will. this one, i know his name. i’ve remembered it since the first day i met him.
this is my life now. i’ve always had the suspicion that i’m actually not in malaysia anymore, but the other day i caught a glimpse of permanence in the reflection of a bathtub. and then again in the wooden walls of Max Brenner. a piece of sidewalk at Times Square. the cold wood of a random bench in Soho. Joy’s nightly knock on my door to say goodnight. and then finally, just a few hours ago, in the yellow light of the paper lamp i bought when i first moved here in August. this is, quite undeniably, my life now. isnt it crazy. when i got my admission letters in April, everyone kept saying how excited they were for me. i would then politely express my concerns of missing home and that i may be making a big mistake in choosing to go away.
but now, i am excited for me.
with that said.. i’m so tired. i really have to sleep. this has been the most
cathartic
post
ever
goodnight
November 24th, 2008
it’s one of those ridiculous days where everything i touch seems to crumble. i am flailing in a sea of my own skin. i also have this frustrating urge to fly.
i did a million things today but i still feel like erasing everything. with many rough, jagged, vengeful swipes. except for that moment at the MoMA store where i picked up the prism photo frame and turned it over in my hands. that moment, i want to keep. because it resonated with me. i feel like i’ve encountered that block of glass at some point in my life and it’s something that’s going to be very important to me. do you believe in resonance? i do. i believe in resonance, and i believe in affinity. i believe in trust. i believe in tenderness. i also believe that there are cures, but i was sorely disappointed today at the hokkien mee in Nyonya that failed to heal my heart. so i guess i’m still broken.
November 21st, 2008
… is what the temperature will be in two days’ time.
… is also my score for the weekend. though if i were my own judge it’d probably be -20000. i’ve been very, very bad. some things, like unfinished homework due tomorrow, can be easily fixed with some time and effort. and some other things, like tequila, can be expelled in the morning. some things, like disgusting calculus midterm scores, won’t go away but are ultimately irrelevant in the bigger scheme of things. but some other things however. just stick.
more Halloween pictures!:
#1 sizzling hot firefighter bananatan and i
#2 K who was a kinky schoolgirl. also one half of the blow-up dolls the next day
#3 i have no clue who this girl is… haha but she’s a funny drunk. she was dressed as a sailor that night too, and as i was walking past her she just threw her arms around me and said OMG IT’S YOUUUUU I LOVE YOUUU LET’S TAKE ANOTHER PICTURE COS WE’RE BOTH SAILORRRRS. haha we didnt take an earlier picture, but i obliged and took ‘another’ one with her anyway. only cos she’s cute. that’s the Pope behind her
#4 the sailor, the pirate, the firefighter and the flight attendant! all very smexy
#5 B, who kept getting his suspenders snapped. i think he was a construction worker…?
#6 look! mario, luigi, and even PRINCESS PEACH HAHAHA
#7 this is T, one of the Mile High Club attendants from this night. i think i saw her in like 4-5 different costumes at different parties during Halloween weekend, and even the weekend before Halloween! shit la i osowan multiple costumes now
#8 E, whom i think looks sooooo much like Claudia Schiffer. anyway.. you guys wont believe who she’s facebook friends with….
#9 azn love! E and Y, two of my floormates. they are super cute :D Y has stickers of Disney princesses on her door
#10 number of crossdressers spotted : 8. at least. but my favorite halloween cross-dresser will always be androo <3 pictures here-on are from the actual Halloween day, where a bunch of us went out to the parade!
#11 when i stepped out into the lobby, this guy in the mask just started running at me. hahaha it’s actually quite scary when you’re being faced head-on with such a mask. and the annoying thing about such masks is that the people wearing them NEVER want to take them off and reveal who they are. but this guy started talking and his thick Nigerian accent gave him away. haha. hello alexander. i see you.
#12 THIS was what i wanted my nuffnang wild live party costume to look like!!! but noooooo instead i went as a sissy ladybug :(
#13 batman and wife taking the subway!! Batpod’s in the shop eh
#14 a sloppy obama. i am unimpressed. number of Obamas spotted: 3
#15 BANANAS! though i’m not sure why they have moustaches?
#16 i was quite blown away by this costume. i really was! but then as we walked around the parade, lots of people were wearing the same wind-blown costume. so.. cheh. at least this guy could pose well.
#17 choi sun do!!
#18 hahahaha a hot dog eating a hot dog
#19 not exactly a halloween costume, but this dog was MASSIVE. it’s actually BIGGER than the girl it’s trying to pounce on O_O
#20 girl in the middle? totally hot. and i think the girl on the left has a prettier sailor costume than mine :( i totally saw the costume at Ricky’s (default NYC costume store) weeks before Halloween, but i figured because it’s available at Ricky’s lots of people were going to be wearing it. WRONG! this girl was the only one i saw with that costume. bah.
#21 hahaha batdog and cat face-off!
#22 little batman <3
#23 a homemade robot costume. so awesome!
#24 and a little mummy! i asked him, “hey little man, are you a mummy?” and he went, “nooooo im a monster!” and started scuffing his shoes on the ground. i think my heart kinda melted.
#25 number of jokers spotted : 58390854. but no Joker Nurses, and definitely none as cool as Jolene!
#26 french friesssss~
#27 GUYS THIS IS THE BEST HALLOWEEN COSTUME EVER. EVER. EVER. THIS IS A POPE!!!!
#28 WHO CAME WITH THE WHOLE FREAKIN’ CONFESSIONAL BOOTH!!!! hahahahahahahaha he even called himself Pope Fiction. see his real legs on the ground? he made that look like the legs of a nun who was lifting up the whole confessional booth. totally awesome!! he really was attracting so much attention. there was this crowd around him everywhere he went
#29 this is nicole kissing the pope hahaha
#30 nick and i groping the pope, though the photographer cut nick out. okay mom dad Martian if you’re reading this i didnt really grope him okay! that’s a fake pair of legs!
#31 the Beijing Olympics panda haha
#32 girl picture outside bananatan’s room!
#33 and the most adorable duck i have ever seen :)
November 17th, 2008
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