a small window on the lower right of the screen gives me the treasured opportunity to peer into his world, to see strange cushions of hot vapour billowing out into the snowy air, as he bangs and clangs around the kitchen, always narrowly missing the coffee pot. from so far away, it is magical to behold that vapour — it looks like smoke from a chimney, sauntering upwards into the morning air pompously, and almost seems to me to puff forth from the pages of a fairytale script. but more magical than anything is the truth that if i speak, he can hear me. sometimes that is all i need. somewhere i have read, and in life have been shown firsthand, that this sort of thing can be dangerous. it is so dangerous that i don’t even want to define it, lest i realize it is exactly what my affliction is. but then there is trust. and nothing makes sense henceforth.

some pictures from a jaunt into williamsburg, brooklyn earlier yesterday:

test blogging from my new iPhone. yes, I have joined the legion of Steve Jobs’ bright eyed and bushy tailed. liking the device very much so far, but like I tweeted recently, the iPhone 4 isn’t perfect until FaceTime can be used on 3G and there is an app that allows the phone to expel air conditioning from the speaker vents. but ok la still quite awesome cos it feels like a new world has just unfolded at my fingertips.

am attaching a photo of the Brooklyn bridge against a shimmering manhattan canvas. Kafka and I went to dinner last night in Brooklyn, and the view from our table was just spectacular. the restaurant rests on a barge anchored to the concrete shores of the East River, floating just under the majestic Brooklyn Bridge and ensconcing diners in the marvel of lower manhattan from afar. I have this recurrent dream where I wake up alone in an apartment tinted dark blue with this city’s amorphous skyline. the view from my bedroom window is always the same yet never feels familiar. it’s just one of those entities in life that will always be so gorgeous to the eye, but just a little painful to reflect upon.

i’ll be home in KL by two days. summer in New York has been exciting and relaxing but as always I can’t wait to be back in the familiar folds of friends, family and sang har meen.

could get used to this blogging from phone thing!

aiyak lari margins. will fix from home… on my macbook. haha.

it’s been a weekend of tiered festivities, what with chinese new year and valentines’ day falling on the same day this year. Flushing, New York was redder and more boisterous than usual this weekend, with stalls of roses lining the streets and calls of 新年快乐! being jostled back and forth amongst the exuberant crowd. some of us had gotten together for our own reunion dinner the night before, courtesy of carol the domestic goddess, and this morning we all went for a dim sum brunch before scattering back to our various locations in the american northeast once again.

as we ate, we could hear the faint sounds of the lion dance drums rolling up from the streets beneath us, the familiar thumping rhythm calling out to our homesickness like the pied piper. some of us wanted to leave the restaurant to quickly catch a glance of the lions, but how lucky we were that the lions came to us instead. two of them, white and red with silver skin, burst into the dim sum parlour along with their troupe, and we dissolved into such excitement. i wondered aloud why they had the same colours. ‘twins!’ he responded. and suddenly i was young again, short and sitting on my dad’s shoulders, watching two lions with big eyelids prance around the crowd, soaking up love. ‘twins,’ the adults would nod in marvel and say knowingly, as if twin lions were rare and magical. i used to cry when i saw the big ceremonial platters of roast pig with its head still intact (complete with flower in its dead mouth), but i loved the lions. i loved the wooden ladders and watching the two lions dance up and down, up and down– before one of them would emerge victorious with the red ribboned vegetable in her mouth. i loved getting a fraction of the prize money from my parents if they won the gamble on either lion. and i did so hate chinese new year music, with its annoying pitch, but i loved the pink plastic cherry blossom trees and the red paper fishes that we used to help our aunts make out of angpau packets.

and of course i loved angpaus too. chern han and i chanced upon a little temple in flushing today, and we stepped in to offer joss sticks. they gave us little angpau packets (from Citibank!) as we left, and i thought they would contain some Taoist good luck charm, but instead each packet contained $2. i was so very thrilled, but the slice of authenticity felt strange in my hand. it was my one and only angpau this year. if i were back home, my brothers and i would be hoarding red packets, counting to see who got more this year. my mom called me today to talk about some money that i owe her, and i jokingly said that she could help me keep my angpaus from her friends as part of the repayment. she snorted and said that’s more like a rebate on the angpaus she had to give out this year anyway. and i laughed because it still seems so familiar to me how my mom used to usher us quickly into a corner and make us check how much Uncle This or Aunty That gave us, so that she could ‘pau’ the same amount for their children. in my semi-angsty teenage years i used to think, wow, how artificial this practice of giving angpaus is! but who cares! money is still money. angpaus are still angpaus and they’re still awesome and i still want them. the adults can worry about all the red packet politics!

we didn’t gamble last night but we did play games with cards. chinese new year does lack something without the crackling sounds of mahjong and the smell of new crisp paper notes. i was always the ‘water fish’ so i shied away from gambling, but now i wish i’d learned how to play from my parents and my brothers, who are all incredibly pro at anything involving cards and money. it’s something that you miss out on, just like how you’re missing out on a whole world of existence if you can’t read chinese and you find yourself in flushing or little bourke street, taipei or hongkong, or a chinese dessert place with no english menus. but at the very least i am redeemed by my ability to peel a very mean mandarin orange uni-peel.

i called my parents the other day to wish them a happy chinese new year. they were having reunion dinner at my grandfather’s home, as is the annual tradition, where my aunt makes the best foochow fishballs, steamed fish, fried glass noodles, wined chicken and all sorts of wonderful festival fare. my parents passed the phone around, and for 5 minutes, my soulless suite was filled with life as my relatives gabbled down the phone. so much shrieking! when they hung up, all was quiet again, and it was just me in a house of people who don’t quite get along, in a wintry state, surrounded with schoolwork and the problems introduced by dictatorial democracy, frenemies, long distance, and growing pains. i’ve grown so much stronger being here, even if i often feel helpless. i guess giving up some years of chinese new year and valentines days is a worthy trade.

this is my campus in the snow. it looks beautiful. i was late for class one day but stopped to admire the vast fields of snow as the blizzard raged. days like this i love my school and can’t imagine myself anywhere else. especially when we get snow days where all classes are canceled and there are snowball wars! though i’m still very bruised from particularly well-packed snowballs.

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early last night we walked past one of those flower warehouses that was open all night in preparation for the valentines’ day rush. the buckets and buckets of flowers and fillers and strewn newspaper everywhere reminded me so much of valentines day in 2005, and the flower project that we had in high school. we’d went all the way to cameron highlands, song jun and i, to look at the different grade of roses so that we could order them in bulk to make bouquets for sale. i vaguely remember us having them delivered to someone’s (aira’s?) house and storing all the flowers in her bathtubs before we started the wrapping. jamie, who’d worked in a florist the year before, taught us how to wrap bouquets and shred curled ribbons. it’s a lot harder than it looks, as is de-thorning roses. but we made so much money! it was the most exhausting valentines day ever, but so memorable. this year, i have a silly smile on my face. it’s quite like the silly smile that sieutheng used to get so aggravated by back in form 2. :) there is a lot of health in how i’m feeling. these smiles keep spreading across my face like– dandelion seeds! in the wind. and they are really quite unstoppable.

happy chinese new year, happy valentines day, and happy life, everyone! :)

thank you to those who wrote kind comments in the previous post or sent me such lovely emails :) i really appreciate the time you guys took to comfort me or to leave me a little bit of your stories. the primary purpose of that post was closure, and i believe i’ve finally found that now within myself, with Martian, and with all else. and having achieved that, i want to close this chapter of my life. i thank all of you for your kind comments, but i really am so done with all this baggage. right now i just want to chase that bit of happy. happy that is found in things like:

#1 cupcakes! these are my favorite red velvet cupcakes from the Hummingbird Bakery in London, and they truly are the best cupcakes in the world. you think Magnolia is good? nothing in New York compares to this. absolutely nothing. these came with much love all the way from across the Atlantic, on an almost-missed flight, and really brightened up my week. i finished them all the first night they got here, and now i regret not making them last :(

#2 emily coming from the UK to stay, though i dont have any pictures of us :( actually, i barely saw her while she was here cos i was so busy with deadlines. wtf. she went out shopping one day and then couldnt come back into my dorm room cos i’d crashed after finishing all my work and didnt pick up her calls… so she had to go and stay with her other friend. yes i am the worst host in the history of the universe. /ashamed

#3 SPRING IS HERE. I LOVE THE WARMTH AND THE SUN.

it’s even warm enough to sit out in the grass now. i spent a delicious afternoon yesterday catnapping in the sun and getting a bit of color back into my pallid post-winter skin. it’s so good to be able to wear shorts again.

#4 Friday Me-Days. last friday was the first friday in the semester that i actually didnt have anything to do, papers to finish or people to meet. of the nine fridays this semester, i’ve spent three of those out of town, and the remaining six agonizing over work that just never seems to diminish… so it was absolutely lovely to have a nice spring friday all to myself to poke around the city. i used to have such frequent Friday Me-Days during my first few months in NY, but ah, how times have changed :) i have, quite tragically, become one of those college students obsessed with obtaining a 4.0. nevertheless i had the best friday i’ve had in a long time, exploring Hell’s Kitchen and having a quiet brunch by myself with a good book <3

at Good Enough To Eat, my favorite breakfast place near college!

Good Enough To Eat is really into cow motifs. the cuteness!

an anti-doormat at a card boutique in Hell’s Kitch

#5 The Strand, a huge secondhand bookstore in Union Square, and one of my favorite places in New York. i can spend hours in there just reading. spent half a day there last week reading a volume of Virginia Woolf’s letters, random cookbooks and travel stories, perched on a ladder in a quiet corner of the bookstore. the smell of crusty paper remained in my hair hours after i’d left. bliss.

#6 prawn mee. even if it’s americanized. it’s STILL PRAWN MEE.

#7 awesome things in the mail :) truly AWESOME things. i know i’ve been neglecting my What I Got In The Mail category… but one day very soon, i will put up all the pictures of the beautiful cards and gifts that you guys have sent me over the 8 months that i’ve been here. y’all have no idea how much i appreciate these things and the thought that comes with them. miraculously, i always find something in the mail whenever pangs of homesickness and sadness hit me hardest. sigh. and then i am happy again because i am reminded what’s most important. some sneak peeks:

yes i really did get this in the mail… haha.

#8 Food Expo. omg yesterday we had this Food Expo in our dining hall where random food n beverage companies set up stalls to give out free stuff during brunch hours. i wanted to kick myself SO HARD for having eaten breakfast and thus couldnt really eat much more. BUT THEN… i got a free sample bottle of what is now my new favorite tea — this brand of fruity tea called Guayaki. the passionfruit flavor is yums.

#9 umbrellas. when i first arrived in the city and was constantly getting rained on, carol sent me the cutest stripey umbrella in the mail. last week i took it out during a rainy night and accidentally left it at a bar :( went back the next day to get it but it was no longer there. sigh. as commemoration, here are some pictures of me, the lovely carol, and our umbrellas, meant to be put up a long time ago, from a day that carol and i traipsed down to Chinatown in search of bak kwa and hokkien mee:

#10 one of those days where everything is just perfect. oh and canceled meetings on sleepy afternoons :)