parsley, are you wasting away in your skin?

2006-11-29T21:26:00.000+08:00

When youre weary, feeling small,
When tears are in your eyes, I will dry them all;
Im on your side, when times get rough
And friends just cant be found,
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down.

2006-11-16T00:41:00.000+08:00

Psychological Exercise

I think I'm shifting. I think I shall waltz over to wordpress, and try to be honest, since I can't here, anymore. If you're the reason(s) why, you should know, not that I blame you (not really) or want to be unkind or Not A Friend. It is just that (even if things have changed where you(s) are concerned) I feel objectified, and my defenses are up like crazy and I hate that, I really hate that. So this is my way of putting you(s) behind me, this is my way of telling myself, I can get away. Even though I know you'll find me eventually, inevitably, it's not that I'm password-locking myself, because I just don't want to be like that, yet. I want to tell myself that I dare to be honest.

So yes, farewell; If you want to know where I've gone just ask, you can drop me a mail at kurzlich [at] gmail [dot] com. If my gmail doesn't spam you out. Eventually people will link me up and I'll be a functioning social unit, all over again.

2006-11-12T23:38:00.000+08:00

Exams, but:

1) It's spectacular how vacant my mind has been, lately. It is not that I haven't been studying, rather, it is that I have been studying, and there is nothing more brainless, sometimes. In some ways I'm glad I didn't start too early because I'd be bored out of my skull right now, and when I read things that I don't find interesting, it puts me to sleep and I don't remember them. But also, the boredom I find in my life right now translates into my mind going all over the place and having very damaging thoughts. I've discovered that I can't Not Engage Myself, because it's just not healthy, I really believe that. Throughout the days I keep telling myself not to succumb to self-pity and the reminder that part of the crappiness I feel is purely circumstancial/situational has been some sort of a hopeful comfort.

2) I can't write for nuts. I hate this, that my vocabulary has fallen to bits. I want to read and exactly what I mean, not this voluminous regurgitation. I hope to wake up tomorrow for my shakespeare paper in a fit of brilliance.

3) And we played in the rain, that day, when the rooftop garden flooded to mid-calf, splashing around like overgrown children, it made me happy like nothing else. Because I like wreckless abandon, innocuous sorta (I only thought about the getting sick after that), but I've yet to find someone who will commit as wholeheartedly to fun as I want to, sometimes. Though they gave in after a while.

4) What was interesting today: snippets of gender conversations, Brandon articulating, and Joel's I think I'll never understand girls. Which was amusing, which I like, actually, sitting down and realising the difference. And trying to empathize.

5) Empathize: this whole A level thing has drawn me closer to my batch, because, really, they are the only people who understand. People like Kinyip try and I'm grateful for effort, but it's just not the same. There is nothing quite as comforting as knowing that you aren't alone, at the end of the day.

6) Empathize: This may be my last bout of Literature exams, because I'm half disillusioned with Literature and am unlikely to do it in University. Honestly, what I want to do is to go to theatre school but that dream is just so far fetched as to be beyond real consideration. Utilitarian, Lit just doesn't seem useful, beyond a certain point, never mind that it comes easy, never mind that it's still a deep-rooted interest. Theatre seems to be my way of making it real.

7) Working with Tim and Selena for worship has been a very interesting experience, because of their fixation with precision. In some ways it shows me the value of formal training that I've only started to really think about this year, and I want to put myself through the process because I've long felt like I've hit a brick wall where my music is concerned. As a musician I'm fascinated to encounter an entirely new style in the form of Tim's playing, and while I listen I take and keep what I like, and discard what I don't, and it's made me that much more self-aware of my own personal style. In my head I am Jewel Kilcher, raw and personal; I am a closet guitarist and it is that rhythm back and forth in my head, but after a few hours of trying and listening yesterday I could play completely unlike myself, and that was interesting. The next thing I want to do is fix is the technicality, my ritard fingers that just cannot do the things I want them to, in my head.

2006-11-11T03:58:00.000+08:00

Sometimes it feels like Jo understands. Oh well, as big of a cliche I am being, with all these philosophies pitting themselves against each other in my head, it is something I think about, and until I resolve it with myself somehow, it isn't going to go away. I can't peaceably pretend the world's one fantastic place to me all the time.

But I do know one thing, though, I need people to keep me sane. The inside of my head doesn't seem to be that bad a place until I get to talk to people again and realise that one of two options makes me much happier, that there are reasons, really, for why I think the way I do. Went for supper with Kinyip and Terence and talked rubbish and non-rubbish and walked home and sat with them in the playground I associate with Kinyip because I've spent hours there talking to him before. I feel like I haven't really talked to anyone in the longest time, and I liked tonight, because the two of them are a good combination because everyone's on even ground where the other person is concerned.

Walking out to meet them, from my house to the bus-stop, I thought about Dennis and how I once walked around the neighbourhood with him and how he'd spottted a bee-hive and wanted to report it. And how he said something about being very civic-conscious, or something like that. Which is something rather strange to associate with him, right now. I don't know why, but he's got a very distinct impression, in my mind.

I repeat, it's been a gorgeous day, outside. I'm glad I got to walk so much, and I'm glad for the company because it's been so long. To be comfortable and personal and as honestly superficial or whatever as I want to be.

2006-11-05T21:19:00.000+08:00

Make Or Break

Nervous: break out the laughing fits and angsty music, the melodrama the hyperbole. There was a gorgeous blue sky, and a moment I might have died for, previously, under A Different Set Of Circumstances. Even with one eye on the clock I can tell, this is gorgeous weather.

Anxiety: because the hours ahead are stacked up, back to back, in front of me on a piece of paper, this will take. A lot of adrenalin, to kick start and maintain, this will need. A lot of pep talks and soothing music, to survive, to live through, and Make instead of Break. Anything close to a nervous breakdown right now would be fatal, as would falling sick.

I haven't stopped kicking myself over GP. I still don't want to talk about it. It is the worse when you know exactly what you have to do, exactly what is required of you, and then you don't do it.

The. The Depressed Of Late has various reasons, and I don't know which one is really it. I love sitting here and talking about it like it will be over, soon, that I will feel happier, because from the inside of my head it sure does not feel like it, has not felt like it. Talk to me, in soothing voices, tell me how I will be A-Okay, tell me how you'll be home and again, and I'll be whole again. Like that is all it takes, another good conversation, a hug and enough hand-holding to feel like someone understands. I hate to admit to the sneaking suspicions, so I will fill my mouth with these inane and mundane words and tell myself to study, to wait it out, that this space is not forever.

So I was thinking, about how I won't know what to do with myself, after the A's. It's been so long that I already feel the whutsthemeaningofmylife, and etc etc etc. I hate what I see of myself, but there is no time to sit down and talk and think about it. Today in the middle of congregational singing I suddenly thought about how I haven't drawn for very very very long. Or written, or etc etc etc. Find myself, after the A's, what I was like, what might make me feel alive. I can see myself watching a lot of movies and spending a lot of money on productions.

I want to do something wreckless, right now, because it would make me smile, because i would give me something nice to remember, from this time of my life. Because it sure as heck would calm me down, to dye my hair green, tomorrow, or something. I want Kevin to come online right now so that we can insult each other for the last ten minutes I'm allowed to be online, because that would make me happy, to have him be the witty sort of pinata.

2006-11-01T21:56:00.000+08:00

I have been so distracted. And now it is here, la la la. I'm freaked like crazy.

Let the games begin.

2006-10-31T00:45:00.000+08:00

you...you.. .BOURGEOISIE! says:
what exactly does cia stand for?
you are the cheese in the cake, the sauce on the steak, and the extra hands on vishnu says:
cyclical igneous association of course
you are the cheese in the cake, the sauce on the steak, and the extra hands on vishnu says:
its a geologist's dream

I love Kevin, and his sense of humour.

Things That Get To Me
-Intergrity, but not a mindless one.
-That fine line between stubbornness and standing up for what you believe in.
-Honesty, most importantly honesty with yourself.
-People who do what they care about well. Who care enough, who dare enough, since a lot of people will cop out and feign apathy where it is just cowardice standing in the way, the idea of failing.
-Intelligent people, but not those that feel the need to constantly prove that they are intelligent.
-A good heart.
-A sense of humour, and an ability to laugh at oneself.
-People who make me not want to be an indulgent self.
-People who dare to be strange, though not ostentatiously so. In fact, people who are sincerely boring and aren't afraid of it I can respect.

The more we feel, and think and talk about it, the more I think that Love Lives are just too much work, and too much futility. I'm not going to rethink this until a good enough reason to do so occurs to me, and forcibly makes me eat my words.

2006-10-28T01:14:00.000+08:00

All Apologies: Sorry, very much so, for not having been honest. This is my blog and more than anywhere else (except in private conversations) I should be honest here, in a long run sort of way, I am determined to.

Sorry to a particular few, because Honest With You is just about the last thing I want to be, right now. I don't think I can be blamed for the way I am reacting, but that doesn't mean I like it, that doesn't mean I should sit around and let myself become cruel. Or anything else, really. Either we mend or we don't, I can't pretend I feel benign towards you(s) right now. But I don't want the legacy this leaves on me, at the end of the day it is me who has to live with myself. I don't want to be affected in ways that I will later not be able to reconcile with my self-respect. I don't want to give a false hope, I don't want to feed a monster inside because I have stood in those shoes and I know how it feels, and must therefore be sympathetic, must at least try, to fight the knee-jerk slap in the face. You are a human being, I hope you never forget that, I hope you never let me convince you otherwise. But that much is irrelevant to the person I am inside, a huge part of me will walk away if that's what it takes for me to be allowed to be myself.

Family: These past few days have helped me see things from Ma's perspective, because I am acutely aware of how she is left here without Da and thus could more than reasonably be feeling rather lonely, and thus have been trying to spend more time talking to her.
It's been interesting, psychoanalysing my mom with her like I would with a friend, talking her round and letting her talk herself round. And observing how she and my dad interact, as a couple, which is what they are, really. Asian values, relevant because of how my family is going; It occurred to me that day that it would make my parents extremely happy for me and my siblings to get married.

A levels: I don't care anymore, it's just the A levels, man. Ain't no end of the world. I'm all anxietied out, from the weeks of nervous breakdowns before, maybe this is an extremely good thing. But Don't Care doesn't mean Don't Study, because I still will still am, it just means don't get a heart attack about it daily. Maybe I'll do well and maybe I won't, it's nice to know there's more to life.

Oh but I found out today that Paper 8 is PC, not Paper 1. Went half hysterical on Sharon when she told me, but it's much better than finding out say the day before that it's a paper I've actually got to study for.

Feeling: Happy enough, holiday enough, clarity enough; I wonder if all the Head On Straightness will survive you. It's one thing to say, enough with the silliness let's put it all behind, and it's an entirely different thing, really, how you feel in the moment itself. I don't want that anymore, right now I am interested in maintaining the happy stability of my universe.

2006-10-27T00:55:00.000+08:00

A worm just crawled out of my laundry basket, and kept very still for five minutes while my eyes bulged out of my head staring at it. It's actually quite interesting, in an unspeakable disgusting way (because the idea that this thing has been fraternizing with my clothes dammit is beyond gross) because it stayed in it's little brown covering looking like a harmless piece of lint, every once in a while poking its little black head/tail out of each end, and retreating hastily upon realising that it was still being spied on. By huge all powerful human, me, who after briefly fantasizing about dissecting it up for curiosity's sake, flushed it down the toilet bowl. Can I say, this is beyond beyond beyond disgusting, and I am thus giving up on work for today to clean my room.

Work: I am so, so completely dead. I can feel myself overstudying for history, and the idea of trying to confront my econs right now actually terrifies me. And I have been dreaming about the end of November, about next year. The freedom to have my head on straight.

And I realised lately that I have actually felt quite stifled in the last two years. Environment, I love the irreverence of humanz, the fact that we get away with so much; People individually are really interesting but sometimes just awkward as a sort of uneasy high-school cocktail and I hate that, being uneasy, holding back. Comfortable, yes and yet not really; Creative, yes and yet not really. At the end of the day academia per se bores me, the ideas on the page don't move or breathe until you put them in the minds and mouths of people who will do something interesting with them.

2006-10-22T23:20:00.000+08:00

Things I Want To Remember About the Weekend

1) The waterbomb fight: the scene of everyone down in the carpark having a good time, Aunty Esther peering down at them with us up on the rooftop garden, Brandon's face when we ambushed him, the evening stillness up at the roof top garden (even if only for the brief minute while I was rushing off for tuition). How happy everyone looked.

2) Sunday's lunch and sampling copious amounts of ice cream, Fong's euphoria at discovering that there was a one for one deal at Haagen Daz.

But I regret it now, slightly, because of the work undone, because of the consequence come crashing down another week closer to my a levels. I can't afford another weekend like this one for a very long time.

2006-10-20T00:50:00.000+08:00

"The horror of that moment," the King went on, "I shall never, never forget!"
"You will, though," the Queen said, "if you don't make a memorandum of it.
~Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

I hope I remember, this happiness I feel right now, the calm and the peace that is unlikely, three weeks from my exams. But I'm glad for it, I'm thankful, I want to say Blessed be Your name, in the land of the plentiful; Where Your streams of abundance flow, blessed be Your name.

The rest is slightly more difficult.

2006-10-19T01:53:00.000+08:00

Clarity

So, I've kinda semi-made a decision, to go to Australia after all, for University. At least I am considering it. Actually this is pending, this is pending the chance that I get into an Ivy or at least a really good Liberal Arts College (Which people tell me I'd love, for artsy-fartsy-ness, among other things), which I'd still go to instead for sheer opportunity. I haven't yet admitted this to Ma, that I'm thinking ever so seriously about it, and I think she'd be overjoyed. But the Right Now consequence of this new option is that I don't feel like studying anymore, and cannot bring myself to, because I am not shooting out for that much. Since Melbourne U is not so terribly difficult to get into.

Hello, Academia: It's been so long, that we've been at this, I really don't care anymore. I just want this to be over, I want my life back, I want to live and laugh and love and feel like someone more than just half alive. Today we talked about the plans to be made, after all this is behind us, I want to make a list, sometime soon, I want to do something to prevent all that glorious time from slipping through my fingers. I'm glad, I'm glad for clarity come one step closer, I'm glad for the realisation that I am not determined by humanz ambitions, that I can take and leave what I want and what I don't, respectively. Clarity, clarity because there are different value systems and you choose the one that resonates with you, clarity because you make for yourself the decisions of what kind of person you want to be, what kind of life you want to live, and no one- no individual or community or institution- can ever make you do something you don't want to.

(The only things that you can't run away from are the practical realities, but I'm getting used to the idea, and most people live through it, in one way or another.)

So, what am I expecting, what is it I want, hello World and The Rest Of My Life, unfold before me, stretch out for my inspection. Really, what I really really want is love, and my artsy-fartsy-ness.I really want to do theatre, maybe this is just because I haven't done enough of it to hate it yet, maybe I haven't suffered enough frustration or prima donna bitchiness. But I'll take a chance with it, because I find it fascinating, because of skill involved, I want to be, ambition takes this form of talent, and whether I am good enough an actress or not is quite irrelevant to the way I feel, right now. Ask me in a while, maybe, when I can't get any roles I want, when I've discovered that actors are just pawns for the directors to move around, to make or break; perhaps I will feel different. But right now, I think of the day jobs, desk jobs, and it is not that I am dismayed, because I will be happy enough.

The way of a fool seems right to him, but a wise man listens to advice (Proverbs 12: 15); Right now, it occurs to me that I wish I had taken advice, about the things done in my life. There is a lot of uneccessary pain I didn't have to put myself through, alot of choices that could have been so much better made had I taken some advice. My refusal to heed advice, in fact my very deliberate turning in the other direction is partly a manifestation of this desire to be my own person, to make own decisions, but I think it is close to the time where I need to put the childishness aside.

And I've discovered something about friends, and what they are, and what they're worth. And how few they really are, how precious few, but a person doesn't really need a heck lot of close enough friends, to get by. There is no way to fake it, really, there is no way to conjure up a fake closeness that might fool anyone at all, from inside, and there is no point trying to do so because all it protects is a bit of face and a lifestyle of unapproachable loneliness. I am not interested in the way it may seem, right now. So this is dedicated to the people whom I love and care about, who have shared with me lives and who have done my the honour of honesty. There is nothing more I could ask for.

2006-10-17T23:28:00.000+08:00

Joyce says:
and tin is a Really Important Metal
Joyce says:
rice.. is a staple carb
Joyce says:
you eat it every day!!
Take it easy, yo. says:
hurhur ah yes. now everytime i eat it i shall observe a minute's silence for its long and turbulent history

This is Joyce trying to impress upon me the value of SEA economic history, which includes the considering of pressing issues like the importance of tin to south east asian economies in the 1870s. And rice. And rubber, and teak, and copra, or corpa, whatever that is. Kill me, I hate this topic.

I learnt today, that cofee helps you concentrate, and alcohol does not. So. I think my A level study strategy needs a bit of revising.

(To Xinyi, because How The Heck Do You Work That Tagboard?: glad to be of service :D)

2006-10-16T00:37:00.000+08:00

let the streets resound with singing says:
hmm, haha we talk about this during bio too
let the streets resound with singing says:
like advantages of asexual repro : no time and resources or energy is needed to find a mate
Take it easy, yo. says:
hurhur
Take it easy, yo. says:
that's quite funny.
Take it easy, yo. says:
YA HORH. see la, guys so troublesome. lets just cut ourselves in half
Take it easy, yo. says:
:D
let the streets resound with singing says:
like it's such a chore having the reproduce sexually
Take it easy, yo. says:
hurhurhur. women of theworld unite! we can figure something out :D

2006-10-16T00:20:00.000+08:00

Take it easy, yo. says:
so he was like well if you think about it, for most of you academics etc are going to be a relatively small part of your life. a lot of you are going to spend a lot of your time trying to find someone to marry anyway
Take it easy, yo. says:
which is quite true la
Take it easy, yo. says:
not the marrying bit, but there IS more to life
Take it easy, yo. says:
and i cant wait to get back to it
Take it easy, yo. says:
i just hope there's something to get back to
let the streets resound with singing says:
mmm=( yes that's quite a depressing thought.
let the streets resound with singing says:
but, yea i do think there will be something to get back to!
let the streets resound with singing says:
i mean maybe not immediately. i think after As we'll be in a state of shock for a few days or smt, lost maybe

I hope I remember this, the maybe not immediately. I can see myself over-reacting and getting very depressed in the period right after the A's, and doing the whole meaningless meaningless thing. Alternatively, maybe it'll be easier than I expect for me to snap back into having a social life, and I'll do the play hard thing as I usually do in the holidays, and find myself more tired than anything else, at the end of it all.

Oh but have you thought about how that was two years of your life? (As is NS, two years of your life). Just like that, in a snap, in a flash, all of a sudden I feel like I'm looking Something Like Adulthood in the eye. Not terrifyingly so, but still. On Friday when Perry said the words I thought about the very first day of school (minus the first two days of academic talks, which I skipped), and how he picked Gery and Aaron as class reps, and the theatrics and the way I first reacted to the tutors, etc etc etc. I don't think it has really occurred to me yet that those two years are drawing to a close, perhaps because there are Bigger And More Consequential things to be thinking about right now. So, so maybe I will mourn after the A's, or something else appropriately sentimental.

NICK [Calla en el dia canta en la noche] says:
you're a happier specimen now

Which is true, I like how this phrase falls together. I am happy this weekend.

2006-10-14T00:41:00.000+08:00

I haven't been honest with myself in a very long time. I miss myself, I hate myself. I hate how I'm melodramatic and yet ever so contemptuous on so many different counts. I want meaning, I'm judgemental as heck and I don't know how to be different. I wish I didn't feel the way I feel right now, the now knowing why not knowing why not knowing why.

List because I'm too tired to elaborate, but don't want to lose what I'm half-learning
1) I've been taking Ma for granted. Living with Michael as a housemate has made me realise how much she indulges me.
2) Mike can be sweet sometimes. He drove all the way down to school today to drop off my file and it really surprised me. But I'm thankful. I love my brother even though I would never admit this to him hurhur.
3) Family is ever so important.
4) Stand up for what you believe in.
5) I've gotten pretty vulgar. It's the norm to me, but there is a standard. This goes for a lot of things, really.
6) I've been thinking about what Lincoln said, about how he knows that at this stage in his life he cares more about the superficial than about things like character, so he's made a decision to wait until it's the other way around, to even start thinking about getting attached.
7) I am so theatrical I don't know who I am.
8) I am sick of being known as angsty, melodramatic, etc etc etc. I hate being trivialised like that, it makes me want to be extremely violent.
9) Now I am purely functional, and nothing else. I can imagine living my entire life like this, a series of events, I don't think I'd kill myself because it is not really that bad, there are cheap thrills enough to go around. But, but it's not enough, but something, something's missing.
10) The defences, I wish they weren't necessary.
11) What I long for:

There is a day
That all creation's waiting for,
A day of freedom and liberation for the earth.
And on that day
The Lord will come to meet His bride,
And when we see Him
In an instant we'll be changed

The trumpet sounds
And the dead will then be raised
By His power,
Never to perish again.
Once only flesh,
Now clothed with immortality,
Death has now been
Swallowed up in victory

We will meet Him in the air
And then we will be like Him
For we will see Him, as He is
Oh yeah!
Then all hurt and pain will cease
And we'lll be with Him forever
And in His glory we will live
Oh yeah! Oh yeah!

So lift your eyes
To the things as yet unseen,
That will remain now
For all eternity.
Though trouble's hard,
It's only momentary
And it's acheiving
Our future glory.

2006-10-13T01:25:00.000+08:00

Answer

So, so about recent developments, I don't know how I feel. Beyond the initial alarm at the decision, I've thought my way around the circle. I haven't made up my mind, what to think, what to fight for; I need to know more about what, what exactly.

I actually have a bunch of question to ask, I would like to know: what is worship. Who will tell me, who can tell me? A couple of months ago I would not have needed telling, a couple months ago I would truly have been able to say that I was serving, as a pianist, in every sense of the word. But now I am not, in my heart of hearts; Recent Developments have made me consider this, have made me consider my own stand (which didn't seem to be a negotiable, at first), and my own understanding of worship, and the idea that I may be motivated by self interest makes me stop short, bite my lip, revise myself, I cannot pretend to mean this when deep down inside I am suspicious of myself. Service is not service if it is service to yourself, and let me admit that this has been me, lately. I've been playing the piano for the aesthetics of it, at best it is a detached sort of tinkering with the music to achieve a certain effect, at worst it is just a stage an audience for my theatrics, a chance to prove myself; This disgusts me, about myself, how I have perverted this thing called worship, by not bothering to try and understand. I can't remember the last time I worshipped with my heart, I think to some extent I've given up on the heart of worship because it is so difficult, takes too much work, takes too much honesty with myself that I haven't been able to bear, lately. I don't know, the entire thinking about university thing the entire focusing on my studies thing has made me revise my standards, my values, and now I'm in this limbo space of not knowing what the heck it is that I stand for, anymore. Where I can find meaning in my life, I hate to use this phrase, because I am sick of being melodramatic, but I guess I can't run away from it. So, so answer me some questions, what does this institution stand for? What do Christians stand for? So how much of it is the standard we strive for and how much of it is the utter depravity inside of us that we cannot run away from? So, so how can I worship if I'm not sure if I even believe in the idea of worship, anymore?

It occurs to me that Christianity never used to be this pigeon-holeable thing called religion, to me. If truth is truth it is worth fighting for, it is worth living and dying for, literally, and that's what people throughout history have done, that's what conviction does, gives you meaning, gives you a certainty you can't explain. I want that back but I am not sure, anymore; I don't feel a guilt trip, I don't feel ashamed of my doubts, but what I do want are some answers. And not a Christian habit, not a Sunday-morning routine, not just a comfortably Christian community (I know we will never be perfect - that is not the point. This should never be an excuse.) What I want to know, is, do you believe, and how do you believe, and why do you believe, and what do you believe? And, and so, so What are the by-products of conviction? What comes beyond the knowing of the model answers, knowing of the way you feel?

It occurs to me. At the end of the day, with my all my ambivalence, I am still a Christian. And though I put my fists up and want to fight even my own faith, it is not with the purpose of abandoning it, it is because I want something more real than the half-baked whatever I am living now. This is still something that resonates with me, this is still a community that I have meaningfully invested in and will probably continue to do so; When I take all the complicatedness away, this is still a community that I care for, and not just because of the people. But I, I would like the answers.

2006-10-10T23:20:00.000+08:00

Simple Things

Funnily enough, the highlight of my day was two hours spent with Aunty Sophie :) Teaching her piano and pottering down the the mess hall with her to get dinner, she's like the grandmother I never had. She's silly and sensible, I'm amused at her to them, you are my sun1 (grand-child), Carson (her 40 something year old son who looks like he's in his late twenties) also my sun1 (grand-child), because it's too much trouble to explain that neither of us are. I'm very fond of her and I am looking for someone nice to teach her when I leave for wherever; someone who will bother to be nice to her and indulge her grandmother-ness. She's a very cute little lady <3

This goes out to my girl-friends, who are the best, and I love you all :) Because everyone needs some.

2006-10-05T22:23:00.000+08:00

Not Maudlin

Pterence the Pterodactyl says:
alternatively
Pterence the Pterodactyl says:
you could fedex yourself to me :D

I'm so tired, I want to shrivel up on this kitchen floor and not move, til tomorrow. I blame youtube, and the whoselineisitanyway videos, and Marcus, for getting me started: much love to all three :D

Ma and Da just left for Australia, and I have no idea when Da will be back. Firstly, I don't know whether the house will still be standing in a week, because I doubt very much that me or Mike is going to do very much housework, any at all, beyond our personal spaces, and this house is just too big for all the work we are unwilling to do. And secondly, I don't know how I feel about this idea of not seeing my father, for I don't know how long and then some time after, even though I don't talk to him much he's been easier to get along with, lately, pottering around the house feeding the fish and bringing our laundry out. I can tell it makes him happier to be at home and semi-retired, and I hope he's happy in Australia, and I hope he doesn't completely lose himself in a world that we cannot relate to. (Not that we do much relating, with each other, other than the blood ties which we- or I at least - had no choice about.) So I am not maudlin, sentimental about his leaving permanently in phases which this particular trip marks the start of, I note with a rather unemotional eye that he has taken my green and black suitcase from the top of my cupboard, and has been ingenious with rafia and rubber tubing handles for the coolers that hold his insulin and computer equipment. But while I am not maudlin, I know Ma would be, about this whole idea, about the family literally being dispersed over different countries especially since I'm not really that old now am I. This is the sort of thing you see when the second generation has gone off to study in a foreign country and fallen in love with some specimen of native and thus has decided to plant themselvs in that new continent. I don't qualify and sure as heck Mike doesn't, maybe Michelle but even so only maybe. It feels strange to think that my family is going to be all over the place, I don't know, what does one come home to, then?

This has been an frivolously eventful bunch of days, and some day when I have recovered from the late nights spent on youtube, I will think about them, and try to pin them down. But this has been a happy enough week, a peaceful enough week, an unanxious enough week, and, and I really should study. I'm not quite noticing the time, the days, counting themselves down; Here's what I noticed today; The world looks like it might through the lens of an indie film camera, because of the haze; the air is a slow shroud blanketing us as we step outdoors, and things are dim and fuzzy around the lines if you stare hard at them for long periods of time. It looked like a gorgeous day from the bus window on the way home.

2006-10-03T00:22:00.000+08:00

Grapple

I find myself newly unable to articulate myself. To articulate anything. It is strange, I don't like this, the silence in my head that is flat and mundane and feeling nothing. The numbness is boring, the saying nothing is boring, and the boring is not only boring, it's frightening and frustating and I want to get away from it. I want to go to school largely too because there are people there, people who talk and laugh and say things and that makes me happy. People with lives and interests and who share my liking for media consumption, people who are not studying too much or too little, and who will still probably all do well anyway.

And not being able to articulate myself is a very bad thing also because of the 26 essays that I will be writing in a bout a month's time, the 26 essays the 91 sides that will determine my future, or rather will determine the process that will determine my future, or rather will determine the process that represents me stepping into my future. The word future has never seemed so scary before, I think really I should calm down and stop seeing things in the utmost extreme. Because I have a sneaking suspicion that all my current anxiety about this particular panic-inducing f word in my life is a little bit of an over-reaction. Please.

And I want so much to say, sorry for the way I have been, sorry for the things I have said. Maybe you make the excuses for me in your head, maybe you accept that this is what I am like, but I won't, I don't want to, it is not a person I want to be. The foot in mouth, all the time, my way with words and how I abuse them, what I have been blessed with and how I have taken it for granted, I apologize. I apologize because I should know better, I am just old enough, and yet not so old that I should be jaded, unsympathetic, like I have been, of late. You wouldn't tell from the way I have been acting that I know exactly how you feel. I don't have a right to be irritated or judgemental, because of how much I have been given, how much I have gotten away with.

So I've been thinking about Law, Studying Law, versus Studying Psych, or English; I've been thinking about the why that Fong said, when I told her that I'm probably going to do law. I've been thinking of what a sell-out it represents, I'v been thinking about how I can find no other reason to do law other than that the money is good. I've been thinking about how much I will hate it, actually, public law and criminal law and etc, the entire process, don't even talking about the practice. Because. Because the institution, the macro view of society, its impersonality, obliterates the human being which I am so fascinated with, and. And I don't think I'd like that very much, and I'm also the sort of person who's worldview, who's social people-view is very much influenced by the intellectual processes that I am put through, I can't really deny that. And with Psych perhaps this is a greater danger, I don't want to turn into a walking attempt to capture everyone else in words and ideas and psychological theories. (Like someone I know, should know: I really don't agree with you.) I don't know, this fairy cloud that it feels like, the burning question of then what, after uni, that I'd stutter and stumble to answer. By the end of the week I am going to have to give myself an anwer.

And I'm seriously thinking of going to Australia, next year. The reason I have fought so hard against it so far is that I don't want to have it forced down my throat, it's little more than a gag reflex and the fear that one concession will see me headed in a direction I have not really thought through. But okay, Yes I have an Australian PR, Yes I have a house in Melbourne and a sister in Sydney, and parents who will be leaving this Thursday to check out said house and make it liveable. Said house is next to a platypus conservation park, or something like that, which is a funny though, I cannot imagine. I cannot imagine living there, but I cannot imagine living here, either, after family has gone. Already it dominates conversations and considerations, already there is a bitterness at the second generation's stubborn refusal to trot down there like good filial children, already the physical home I have around me collapses into boxes sealed with duct tape and labelled for Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

There is only so much says:
but they're going off for a week
There is only so much says:
they're taping up the stuff in my house now
new york, new york says:
:|
new york, new york says:
this doesnt sound real
new york, new york says:
NOOO ELLA
im going to tie u to the tree in ur frontyard
new york, new york says:
do u have a tree in ur frontyard i can tie u to?

This was very amusing. Sigh, oh well, and love <3

I hope I will do all the things I have wanted to do, next year. Because it is an opportunity like no other, and also because the lolling around for 8 months straight will kill me with a boredom that I might not even be able to muster up enough energy to dispel.

2006-09-30T23:20:00.000+08:00

What I Am Looking Forward To At The End of The Year:

I know this is obvious, recurrent: I am looking forward to the end of the A's. This is strange to realise, but I haven't really been looking forward to it, lately, because when I think about that time of my life I can't stop thinking about the I Don't Know What To Do With Myself -ness that I can't help but anticipate, right now. Because I really do think I am going to feel like crap, overwhelmed with purposelessness. Thinking about it now, thinking about how everyone is looking forward to December and Yf camp and everything so much, gives me some sort of hope that I may feel differently, I desperately hope to, I desperately want to. To not be alone in myself, to not be stuck in my own mind, to not feel so incapable of being happy.

I do know why, it is because studying for me is an exercise in the expansion of my mind, because 1) I really do like the things I am studying; It's not just book grubbing or memory work, part of me likes this and that part has been encouraged to articulate and assert itself, to want more than the simple things, to have ambitions. Part of me is fundamentally changd by what I am studying, intellect and academia and etc etc etc. I, some part of me hates this. The rest of me shrugs shoulders and thinks well it's just another way to be, it's just the way I am. And I don't know what to think, after that. And 2), I feel like I have let loose just about all the relationships I have, and they spread and stray from me, like a palmful of sand in the wind. Going everywhere, how can I possibly come back after these months and say hello, how are you, and get to know you, all over again? It feels strange, this entire process has felt strange, and selfish, and... And I just don't know what to do with myself. Because it feels like I don't know myself, anymore.

How my School/Physical/Spiritual etc life has been lately:

School, prelims, work, is bad, or just Not Good Enough. I'm sorry for saying this on so many counts, but I'm not happy with myself. There is anxiety, there is the aftermath of anxiety which has been whitewashed over to result in a great swath of I-Don't-Care-ness.

And I'm becoming a snob, slowly and surely, watch me. Like I know better, like I've gone around and seen the world and you loser singaporean are living in darkness when theres so much more out there , to quote Marvin's elaborations. Feels like steps in that direction, I can feel it and I hate it but I really don't know what to do about it, it is the flipside of the coin to a lot of ways in which I am going. Some part of me already feels tired about having to defend myself, but yet another part of me cannot accept going back and pretending that I have not been challenged to be different from what I have always been.

What I've been thinking about, instead: going overseas to study, being an adult from the end of this year on (maybe, because it feels like it will be required of me), living alone and being alone likely more alone than I've ever been before, migrating to Australia forever, losing touch with people who have made me feel loved and happy and a sort of meaning about my life. Also, being utterly bored, intensely so, meaningless and empty and antisocial as heck; undrammatically, which somehow makes it worse. Also, money, and doing law, and the banality of everything now. This week felt too much like it could last forever, this state of arid mundanity, in my head. This week I said the words lonely, to Elgina, and bored; Actually I said the latter one over and over and over again, smooshing my face into the table at venezia's in a very unglamorous sort of way, while Xinyi took pictures and bought me ice cream. I want to do something, but something that will involve me, absorb me, completely. I want to get out of my mind.

I have no peace of mind, which may or may not have anything to do with my studying. When I have peace of mind, I am a lot less irritable, and it seems I've been feeling nothing but irritation, lately.

And God, God arches over my head, sometimes, it is not that God is irrelevant. It is just that more and more I am seeing how pressing how consequential the Here And Now is, and. And I wish, I wish for faith again, because it changes your perspective, it revolutionalizes your life, or it can, I know it would if I would stop fighting it, because it has before. There is just a better way to be.

Anything:

I learnt to play the bongos, today, I learnt rhythm and was happy with my musicians. The guys played WWF after that, marking out the ring with slippers and trying like heck to push each other out of the boundary, grunting sweating laughing getting bruised and shoved all over the place. Five guys and the most friendly, happily neanderthal thing I have ever seen, but it was amusing. To do stupid stuff, to be twelve year olds again, unabashed.

2006-09-27T02:23:00.000+08:00

Today was fun, in a very mundane, teenager-ish sort of way. Driving down to the airport in Alethia's van to see Kinyip off, and back down again, with the radio playing, Alethia's week-old driving. The van you could store with equipment at the back, big enough for band equipment, drums and amps and wired up guitars. I like the homely touches, the carpet on the floor, the Ikea cushions, how we aren't allowed to wear our shoes inside. Though at first I felt like cargo, or some animal being spirited away to a quick demise.

Kinyip in his penguin suit, Terence and his retard sense of humour, his Tracie the Triceratops. Me and my lousy banana chocolate muffin, that I will sing to, instead of eating, stick my nose into the warm white paper bag. Laugh and talk about everything, nothing; I want to stand there in front of the information board and watch the panels flip. Philadelphia, Bahrain, Shanfhai instead of Shanghai.

I feel like a child, grabbing greedily at these moments and feeling the need to store them up. As if for winter.

2006-09-26T00:51:00.000+08:00

Engineers' Corner
by Wendy Cope

Why isn't there an Engineers' Corner in Westminster Abbey? In Britain we've always made more fuss of a ballad than a blueprint ... How many schoolchildren dream of becoming great engineers?
-- advertisement placed in The Times by the Engineering Council

We make more fuss of ballads than of blueprints --
That's why so many poets end up rich,
While engineers scrape by in cheerless garrets.
Who needs a bridge or dam? Who needs a ditch?

Whereas the person who can write a sonnet
Has got it made. It's always been the way,
For everybody knows that we need poems
And everybody reads them every day.

Yes, life is hard if you choose engineering --
You're sure to need another job as well;
You'll have to plan your projects in the evenings
Instead of going out. It must be hell.

While well-heeled poets ride around in Daimlers,
You'll burn the midnight oil to earn a crust,
With no hope of a statue in the Abbey,
With no hope, even, of a modest bust.

No wonder small boys dream of writing couplets
And spurn the bike, the lorry and the train.
There's far too much encouragement for poets --
That's why this country's going down the drain.

--

This is dedicated to my S Lit exam, tomorrow. Because you are the last of your kind in more ways than one and I hope to end you with a flourish, even though I have done no work and have not really switched my comic reading to something more creditable and therefore might justly deserve to get another Borderline Pass. Save me, PC, but I can't say save me, Shakeapeare, because I can no longer remember anything from Othello or Macbeth or even Hamlet that I could meaningfully spin into a couple of pages. But anyway. Academia needs a sense of fun, and a childlike wonder, it occurs to me that the poems I've read today are are rather straightforward, and something tells me the the Brits marking my papers are going to want something more abstract, something more acclaimed and canonnized.

Today I thought, friend. I forget, remind me, sometimes, that that is your name.

2006-09-24T21:31:00.000+08:00

all walls are great if the roof doesn't fall says:
why are you perpetually in such a good mood?
all walls are great if the roof doesn't fall says:
its quite amazing
your huckleberry friend says:
because bad moods dont help a thing
your huckleberry friend says:
and mood swings get you dizzy
all walls are great if the roof doesn't fall says:
hurhur
all walls are great if the roof doesn't fall says:
how very practical
your huckleberry friend says:
practical and happy is better than indulgent and suicidal :)

I think, in the past weeks, the stress has gotten to me, without my knowing it. Even though I haven't been anxious-neurotic, I have been a lot of other things. I would like to say I have not been myself, I want to say, to believe, that much.

And I don't want to be cynical. You choose the attitude you bring with you when you go about things, and. And I think something I've lately come to forget is that I want ot be happy. I want to remember this, hold it in my hands, even as I go back into this hole of studying. Stay, this burst of clarity, this moment of something-like-optimism.

"...many books
Wise men have said are wearisome; who reads
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not
A spirit of judgement equal or superior,
(And what he brings, what needs he elsewhere seek)
Uncertain and unsettled still remains,
Deep-versed in books and shallow in himself."
-Paradise Regained, John Milton

Today walking home I thought about the simple things. Which is what I have, from today, which is what I hold in my hands, hold to my heart; if anything could ever be this good forever. I hate to say that, but I can't squish the sinking feeling.

2006-09-24T01:21:00.000+08:00

Truce

What do I do. At the end of the day, let me put down this bitterness; When I made the decision I did, I believed it, but that was passion, emotion, the moment. Which I can't be sorry for because I will always be subject to it. But, but one thing I do know: I don't want to be a child anymore.

I just said to Kinyip, love is all you need.

2006-09-23T03:05:00.000+08:00

What I Think

I don't know what I think. It is strange to sit here at the end of the day and wonder about whether or not I had a good time. Or rather, I did have a good time, because I did so many good-time things, but. But I don't know, I feel out of place, or I feel like something is missing, a hole in an important place, at the end of the day, in the centre of me. Just because I can do these things, just because they are options to me; You know some part of me is thankful that I have friends with whom to ever so happily pass the time. And I have nothing to complain about, but. But there's still a but at the end of the sentence, there's still a but in the aftermath of all this carefree conversation.

Fundamentally, I am a serious person. I don't think there's any way to run away from that, despite that I honestly do believe in fun. But right now (and not Thursday when prelims ended) I want to be quiet, right now I want to watch a quiet sort of movie, want to take a long bus ride with my music for company, want to go driving (be driven) at 3 am in the morning down long and empty roads with the windows down, want to talk to one person instead of ten. Even five is too many when I feel like things are only half said; it is not that I grudge your company, it is just: how hollow I feel right now, how very unknown, anonymous. The smaller groups are the ones I want, the ones I crave for, the ones where we don't feel the need to be constantly entertained or laughing at something. Though that much may come. The closest thing I had to that sort of honesty today was three minutes on the bus with Terence. And an sms that I've yet to send to Grace.

I feel like I have grown older, in the last few months. Having ambitions that bring me beyond all this, have responsibilities and a very real sort of consequence that I cannot run away from, having to make my own decisions and take an active control of my life; instead of feeling things slip by like the days are nothing but ordinary singular days. I don't know, I'm not sure if I can live like that anymore, maybe next year, when there really is no more consequence, that I am held accountable to. The things I have learnt, these last few months, I don't want to let go of them, I want to remember so that they will not be lessons I have to learn again. Things like being responsible, things like being steady, sensible, sane, less motivated by insecurity or insanity. On average, I get more sleep during the exam week than I do during the heady social high that follows it, and I don't know if this is a good or bad thing. I am just tired, right now, a little too tired to live up to the bright colours I still wear, a little too tired to be the friendly and the funny and the enthusiastic that I might normally be. More than anything right now I want to be mellow; I want to sit in my concentration cell in church with the lights off and my soft music playing; I want to sit someone down across me, to talk to me; Someone who can be honest, someone who wouldn't feel the need to say something, all the time, fill the air with a copious conversation. Terence, Marcus; Marvin, Nick Wong, Sebbie, sometimes; Most other people, in that once in a blue moon, because I just don't think people would want to have these conversations, with me. It's the way I feel after service when the lights have gone off and I creep up to the piano and play, song after song, while everyone else is socialising. In so many ways I've grown older, and mellowed, and all I want is an undramatic slice of peace and quiet.

So I came home in a cloud of cigarette smoke and shivering from the night, and I'm confronted by the mess that needs to be sorted out, the one that I literally step all over every morning groggy with sleep, dragging myself to the bathroom to wake myself up. Spiders have spun their webs in the corners of my sink, I stare at them while I'm brushing my teeth; There are endless loads of laundry to do, things to clean and organizing that has to be done. Here is a piece of news that I will not forget: I need to study for my A levels, and desperately, because I know very well how much I have not done, how little I have cared for this bout of exams, after the initial weekly panic attacks after the first decision to study. I know Xinyi will think I am crazy and tell me to take a break after the prelims, but this is really not what I think, anymore; we are not on the same page, and our yardsticks are different, right now. And breaks, the kind I want, are not the sort that leave me feeling empty, at the end of the day. This entire process has left me more tired than you know.

What I want to do, I want to wake up tomorrow morning and just lie there, listening to Sufjan Stevens, or KOC, or Sting. I want to eat something nice for lunch with someone who might understand, or who would at least not make me feel like I had to say so many things. I want to watch a good movie. And I can think of a few, right now. I want to watch a seriously good movie, not just something good enough to pay eight dollars for, not just something you'd watch as a sort of social event. Another time, maybe, when I have time to spare, another time when I can afford the peace of mind that fun forfeits, but I think right now I really do need a break, I need to relax in a way that would be relaxing, for me. Which inevitably means therapeutic, slow, quiet, soundless.

I think I should spend my Monday entirely alone, or at least quietly.

2006-09-21T21:09:00.000+08:00

NICK [Calla en el dia canta en la noche] says:
i was distracted by his long nose i think
NICK [Calla en el dia canta en la noche] says:
threatening to poke out of the screen
NICK [Calla en el dia canta en la noche] says:
i don't htink he's hot
NICK [Calla en el dia canta en la noche] says:
i think he looks funny
NICK [Calla en el dia canta en la noche] says:
like a big bird released from a cage

Poet extraordinaire, on Adrien Brody. hurhurhur.

howeth canneth that beith? says:
i have too much of the milk of human kindness
your huckleberry friend says:
oh
your huckleberry friend says:
that rancid thing
your huckleberry friend says:
that i threw out when i joined the ac family :D

Today has been a really good day. I can't wait to watch another good movie.

2006-09-20T23:43:00.000+08:00

Today Marvin said apprecite us soldiers you girl-folk!, and I thought about how I'm such a conservative at heart, really. For all the femanazi noise I make, lately all I've wanted to do is sit down and shut up because I am sick of trying to decipher. Woman with brain is like donkey with violin can be true sometimes, because of what brain connotates: academia and intellect are so screwed up sometimes. Though not limited to woman, because I know more guys than girls who would prefer to take things simply. Someone dictate truth to me, please.

And the more contact I have with America-anything, the less I want to go there. Oh help me, please, or let me be ever so wrong about the impression I can't help getting. But the manic hysterical soul-selling to liberalism is definitely going to piss me off. Or buy me over, sigh, what am I doing, again.

I'm talking to Nick Wong about his winning some poetry competition, but I should be reading about the philosophy of history right now; I wish there was a way to say that entire sentence without sounding so pretentious, in all the ways there are, to be pretentious. Kevin oh pleased me when I told him about my having to read about the philosophy of history, and I don't blame him, because I would give the same disdain. But this really is interesting, because it is written in a very engaging way. Carr and his metaphors aplenty:

"This was the age of innocence, and historians walked in the Garden of Eden, without a scrap of philosophy to cover them, naked and unashamed before the god of history. Since then, we have known Sin and experienced a Fall; and those historians who today pretend to dispense with a philosophy of history are merely trying, vainly and self-consciously, like members of a nudist colony, to recreate the Garden of Eden in their garden suburb. Today the awkward question can no longer be evaded."
-EH Carr's What is History?

I can hear Kenneth in my head deriding some Lit commentary he read for being obscurantist. And I laugh, at the irony: obscur-what?

2006-09-19T23:14:00.000+08:00

And it has not taken long, to breed this new cutting edge in your voice, that begs reciprocation. Just a minute, while I try to fight the welling up of poison, on the inside of me, while I attempt to convince myself against sinking to your level, while I tell myself that I don't have to bare my claws to prove that I have them. This is not the kind of company I want to be with, want to be.

And my studies are just about the least real thing to me right now. Even after the hollowing out leaves me in the vacant space where people once filled, academia seems a sad and sorry sort of compensation.

Today the guys talked a distraction over my head, and I can't decide if I miss this or not, I don't know how to react. I think I do, because these are people I have spent much happiness with, because my picture up on the wall seems to confirm, entrench me there, and the conditions seem so very familiar, close to what comfortable has been for the past years. And yet I can't help looking at things, at myself, with new eyes, I can't help, even amidst the laughter they can casually evoke, the sneaking feeling of let's see how long this happy feeling lasts. And it is strange, that thought itself is strange, I have become ever cynical yes, but I can't help wondering if it goes beyond that, if I have really irrevocably outgrown this entire outfit, this innocence, this simplicity. Yet some part of me knows that people aren't dispensable like that, convenient like that; But it takes two people to make a friendship, and maybe the closeness is what I haven't been, lately, being so caught up with my studying. So, so if I sat you down and tried to explain to you, what's been on my mind, lately, would you understand? Would you, for the sake of friendship that have been brief, really, try? There really is no right answer to that, and to some extent I am afraid to even ask. To confirm how out of place I have been feeling, lately.

And this is perhaps a taste of what distance and time will do to us, the lack of communication, the moving on of lives, the diminishing of you and me on each other's emotional landscape.

2006-09-18T22:10:00.000+08:00

I don't want to be Psychotic Bitch From Hell. I heard it on Mike's CD today, and it made me laugh. It also makes me realise how close I can come to being someone I despise.

I want to be healthy, good for you, that. That feels like a long time ago, even wanting that much. I haven't been comfortable in a long long time, at ease, laid back. Though I sat outside the clubhouse Sunday evening, with Marcus Terence and Kinyip, and that came close.

Nowhere feels like home, where are the friends I've held so dear. Studying, I feel like; Life is a distraction, right now. It occurs to me that you can't put relationships down and hope to pick them up again later.

Today David said why, and the conversation moved on, but it's been on my mind: I don't know what I am doing. So, so very well, the studying is one thing, but the hoping is another, and is the one that needs to be picked apart, before I make the biggest mistake of my life, not by virtue of What I Do, but by virtue of How I Go About It. Barelling into things, because I don't know what else to want, because I don't know what else to hope for. Because time insists to me that it is running out.

howeth canneth that beith? says:
does that mean ytou've done nothing since 940?
mongolia love; says:
err
mongolia love; says:
well
mongolia love; says:
ive mended my soul

My mind's wasted where literary analysis is called for, I have a very sharp Shut Down Point where it comes to Lit. I'm unhappy because it's Lit I'm screwing up, unless. Unless I wake up tomorrow with the most splendid clarity, which is still possible, and PC my way through 3 Contexts.

mongolia love; says:
sigh
mongolia love; says:
blake shits
howeth canneth that beith? says:
hurhur
howeth canneth that beith? says:
me too

Goodnight.

2006-09-17T21:37:00.000+08:00

The Last Three Days

oneFlipped over the handlebars of Joe Tee's bike, which was a really cool experience, in a strange way. Sitting there with my throbbing knee and the blood and Christl's areyouokayareyouokayareyouokay. And Edric's uh don't tell them horh, if it's too dangerous they'll cancel it.

two Sebbie's Dude you're lying on some rice and Terence's infuriated Dude you threw the rice! hurhur. I like throwing things around, and the mess it makes; I'm amused that I hang out with people who actually say dude. And I've realised I actually like this menial mindless little tasks, because of an easy come sense of achievement, because of a really therapetuc simplicity.

three Going happy crazy up on the rooftop garden on Saturday, flinging my wet plastic sheets around at Jkhoo and Kinyip, the do you think this lift is soundproof, the listen to the rhythm of the falling rain, the let's send all this trash down in the lift and see how they react. I haven't screamed or laughed or sang or been so utterly high like that in ages.

four Suddenly found myself in this missions interest meeting today, and meeting people who have actually been doing things in the rest of the world for their faith. I am half amazed, and yet not, because this is a normal sort of everyday, to them, and that rubs off on me; but I'm definately interested, and not just from today, though it was really something looking around the room and hearing these people talk in their matter-of-fact way about the work towards such a massive cause. I don't know what exactly I will do next year, but I will definately do something.

five Looked through Grace's Israel/Turkey photos, with her running commentary, and am utterly fascinated, utterly determined to get myself there. Because the the ruins and their gorgeousness, the remnants of an ancient civilisation, they intrigue me to no end, even without the fact that it would give an entire new context to the stories in the new testament. One more thing I desperately want to do next year.

six Sneaked into the Sanctuary to play the piano, and Caitlyn kept coming up with random adults to bang on the upper register, and recognized me during the meeting later from that moment. I feel like a piano hog, because I lingered just one song too long, and Lois waited patiently at the side. And I talked to Titus who said he'd show me the Jazz Pubs next year, and I really like the idea of having friends who'd also be interested in learning more instruments.

seven I need to work harder to keep my unsympathetic mouth shut. What I have to say needs to be put into a kinder sort of conversation.

eight And in true fasion, absolutely no work done the last three days, and all momentum lost. Positively, I am asking for it.

2006-09-15T23:55:00.000+08:00

How about getting off of these antibiotics?
How about stopping eating when I'm full up?
How about them transparent dangling carrots?
How about that ever elusive kudo?

How about me not blaming you for everything?
How about me enjoying the moment for once?
How about how good it feels to finally forgive you?
How about grieving it all one at a time?

Thank you India
Thank you terror
Thank you disillusionment
Thank you frailty
Thank you consequence
Thank you thank you silence

How about no longer being masochistic?
How about remembering your divinity?

How about unabashedly bawling your eyes out?
How about not equating death with stopping?

Thank you India
Thank you providence
Thank you disillusionment
Thank you nothingness
Thank you clarity
Thank you thank you silence

-Thank You, Alanis Morrisette (incomplete)

2006-09-14T22:59:00.000+08:00

I feel sane, this is precious. Maybe it's the fact that History and Lit have been good, that's made me feel somewhat less anxious. And the disasters of Monday and Tuesday have receded in my mind.

And I'm considering with newfound clarity what I have been and what I have done, the kind of person I have let myself be, lately. I'm left with the realisation of I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself; Some part of me wants to learn a lesson but there is. Something futile inside, I don't know.

I feel a bit stoical, like I am skirting around things, I don't know if that is a bad thing. There is so much I want to say but. But no words to contain them, no one to say it to. So, So I don't know, maybe I should just sit still and say nothing, and keep my thoughts in control.

2006-09-13T22:48:00.000+08:00

I want to pray, and I want this to be over, because. That prayer meeting was the calmest one and a half hours I've felt in a long time, because it is an entirely different universe for what I have signed myself up for here, and it is one I prefer, because it is real, because it means something. And I long to be so different from what I am now, wrapped up like a child, like the centre of the universe. And I know not too long ago I was so convinced of this need to grow up but now somehow it looks like I have forgotten, all over again; how I have wanted to be responsible, how I have wanted to leaves my childish ways behind.

That day I admitted to Selena that ordinarily I would be able to work things out, in a very common-sense sort of way, but for the times when I am less than stable, I start spouting all sort of cryptic ramblings and then go on to believe them. Right now I would like to say all that was bullshit, I would like to say I have learnt my lesson, but I know that from the inside of things I change and forget and am so utterly convinced of things that maybe, I should just dismiss as the mad ramblings of my hysterical mind. I wish I didn't feel like such a basket case, I wish it didn't make such good sense to me. From the inside of those moments. For now I need more bimbotic or therapeutic things to do, or vents and wastes of time that are somewhat more innocuous.

And I'm an abusive friend; and I hate the idea that you're irrevocably pissed at me. The more I think about it the more complicated it becomes, but also the more I realise how accurate what you said of me was. I don't mean to be cold, but I can only say that I'm sorry that you're so very right.

2006-09-10T01:18:00.000+08:00

kev says:
and shit lah i think i wont marry an mg girl anymore
kev says:
actually no just an sc girl
kev says:
THEY DONT GROW OUT OF IT
kev says:
THATS WHAT I REALISED
kev says:
TONIGHT
kev says:
omg
kev says:
*giggle giggle*
kev says:
its awesome when you're sixteen
kev says:
and wearing cool sailor uniforms
kev says:
but at fourty its ugh

I realised, when I said the words to Sam over the phone, that Kevin is an intellectual bimbo. He would never in a million years admit this.

I want to be smart and sane, but I don't think I ever will be, somehow. Screw my head on right.

2006-09-08T21:48:00.000+08:00

I want uncomplicated

Today I sat on the bus and felt at peace with myself.

I don't care about prelims anymore. If Xinyi is right, that means that I'm going to get knocked off my feet by a massive panic attack, in a few days.

I am alive, this is home, this is the only home I know. I want this time of my life to be over so that I can go back to being a person that I can respect. Which begs the question, why am I doing what I am doing, right now. I wish I didn't feel so utterly alone; in many ways I know good and well that I am not.

I agree that I Think Too Much, but I don't know how to stop it. I should hang out with the guys more, maybe, because things are simple in that world. Let's play soccer, let's go climb Mount Ophir after the A's. I miss that. I wish I could be laid-back, the way Charmaine is laid-back, unanxious. Or at least, not bowled over by anxiety, uptight to the point of manic paranoia.

I read some article today about how during puberty, your brain makes all sorts of new connections and then after that gets rid of the excess ones for a more efficient brain. I think the phrase the lady used was 'swimming in their hormones'. It's a terrible cliche and it amuses me, but. But I wish that wasn't exactly how I feel.

But I am too old for this, or not really, or I can't wait to be too old for this. To grow out of it. I want to believe that it is grow-outable, I welcome the psychoanalytical breakdown of my hysteria.

Who can I call, I am not going crazy. Fong just dumped me for a Channel 8 drama serial. I don't want to study, but I should stop thinking now.

2006-09-07T01:27:00.000+08:00

Today Selena said to me, there is a reality outside our heads that we all must engage with. Which made me think about how I haven't thought about my being crazy in a long time. But after all that worrying I think the least I can do is try to put my feet back on the ground, again.

I'm happy, and feeling stable, at least right now. It's a gorgeous night out, and Charmaine is nice to talk to. After a hours of nagging insecurity, of all these inadequacy attacks, as Marvin once termed them. I'm happy enough to be at the end of the day, and feeling like I can actually breathe.

JobanG says:
you are unbelievably lazy
come on and save me says:
i am unbelievably efficient
come on and save me says:
laziness breeds innovation

I'm thinking about lunch, tomorrow, and the new lows represented by my doing laundry at two in the morning four days after I'm supposed to. The simple things are the only ones useful for preserving my sanity.

2006-09-06T02:31:00.000+08:00

Ecclesiastes 11:7-12:8

(Remember Your Creator While Young)

7 Light is sweet,
and it pleases the eyes to see the sun.

8 However many years a man may live,
let him enjoy them all.
But let him remember the days of darkness,
for they will be many.
Everything to come is meaningless.

9 Be happy, young man, while you are young,
and let your heart give you joy in the days of your youth.
Follow the ways of your heart
and whatever your eyes see,
but know that for all these things
God will bring you to judgment.

10 So then, banish anxiety from your heart
and cast off the troubles of your body,
for youth and vigor are meaningless.

1 Remember your Creator
in the days of your youth,
before the days of trouble come
and the years approach when you will say,
"I find no pleasure in them"-

2 before the sun and the light
and the moon and the stars grow dark,
and the clouds return after the rain;

3 when the keepers of the house tremble,
and the strong men stoop,
when the grinders cease because they are few,
and those looking through the windows grow dim;

4 when the doors to the street are closed
and the sound of grinding fades;
when men rise up at the sound of birds,
but all their songs grow faint;

5 when men are afraid of heights
and of dangers in the streets;
when the almond tree blossoms
and the grasshopper drags himself along
and desire no longer is stirred.
Then man goes to his eternal home
and mourners go about the streets.

6 Remember him—before the silver cord is severed,
or the golden bowl is broken;
before the pitcher is shattered at the spring,
or the wheel broken at the well,

7 and the dust returns to the ground it came from,
and the spirit returns to God who gave it.

8 "Meaningless! Meaningless!" says the Teacher.
"Everything is meaningless!"

---

Kevin thinks I should go to brown because all they care about is drink drugs and the opposite sex, but at least they have a philosophy for it.

2006-09-06T02:07:00.000+08:00

pet pug

new york, new york says:
then i will slack!
wah, close to you says:
nOH
wah, close to you says:
YOU WILL DO WORK
wah, close to you says:
JA?

I think. Thinking has not been the best of ideas, lately, when I've been under the influence of stress, when I've been just too charmed to see things straight. All the complicated question I suddenly feel compelled to ask myself, to answer to myself, I don't know. That day cindy said struggling to find their identity, and maybe this is all it is, at the end of the day, all this needing to believe, all this pugilistic ambivalence.

I think. I think I want to go back to being a dreamer now, ambitions and all, I don't know where they fit in with me. In a lot of ways this means claiming back my some sort of idealism, some sort of hoping, allowing myself to be starry-eyed and in a great sense of things irrational, or at least less militantly rational. I feel the weight of expectation reaching out to me, but maybe I've forgotten that I am still hopelessly, hopelessly young, in some ways, in very many ways. So the cynicism is a waste of time, when things else would resonate so much more strongly with me. To milk my youth for all it's worth, to be girls just wanna have fun, to want to be more happy than sad or ambivalent or out of control.

So maybe, maybe I'm just tired of fighting, like a drowning man (woman), like a wartime society, like some an irksomely bow-tied pet pug. But, yet I do, still, yet I compose myself like a piece of prose, like I am having my portrait painted, the unwinding does not come unprovoked, or perhaps I am just not tired enough to lapse back into comfort, to call the truce and put the navy back into cold storage where it belongs. I wish. I wish there was a way to stave off the emptiness, without the nagging sense that you've just told yourself the biggest lie in the world. Someday, someday very soon in fact, I know I will have to answer to others but more troublingly and more inescapably, to myself, for all the things that I have said.

I went for drinks, with the guys, hung out talking about nothing like I haven't in a long time, this feels. Familiar and strange and comfortable and awkward and. And I don't know. I listened to my own laughter today, warm and clear and heartfelt, and I don't know if this is me, I don't know whether it matters. I've been pissed off with myself for the way I have been, lately, all this smarmy satisfaction, I've been alone and untended inside myself and maybe this is why I feel this need to defend myself. I know I've been cold, and proud, and irritable as hell, every single day this week. In some ways I've come to see who are the friends who still stick around, at times like this, when I just bloody can't be bothered, because I am too confused with myself to see beyond it. Some day, I think I will be sorry for having let myself get so wrapped up in the selfishness of my ambitions, but if nothing else. I know enough to close myself up like a fan, which can be both a good or bad thing.

One thing I have missed, that I hadn't realised I had missed: the utter lack of pretensions. When all I have been is morose and brooding and what is, what am, lately. This is a sort of reprieve. I don't know if I can go back to being this, but I have a feeling whatever happens I will end up surprising myself. Even if it is by being utterly predictable. So. So give me honesty, I ache for something genuine, or. Or I want to be held and told that it is okay, to put down my fists and give myself away. I'm not even sure if I could manage that.

Am I supposed to respond, to over-react, to fight. I'm not having this conversation, it would be childish on my part any way I went about it, because you don't have anything to prove to me, and vice versa. So do what you will, bitch and throw things at me, because you should know, I have needed it like you must, now, and both you and I are too old to be thinking that we are beyond reproach, even if we will act like it, a lot of the time. And cynically speaking: sometimes that's exactly what relationships are made of, the shit swallowing, the tantrums and insensitivity, the murderous comparisons. Bouts of happiness and irrationality and I'm never going to talk to you again. You are inside yours as much as I am inside mine.

2006-09-02T23:58:00.000+08:00

Samantha: im dead :D
but pretending that im not

This is a good description.

I hate what I can very accurately infer about myself right now. There is a lot of truth I cannot help but face, but would rather sweep under the rug, because it would help me feel better about myself. But I can't stop thinking about it and I can't stop watching myself, and the way I go back and forth with people. Sometimes it sickens me so thoroughly to be so utterly ingenuine.

I'm sad now, thinking about you, tell me if this is all in my mind, tell me if all this guilt and sorrow and moonshine is for an absolute nothing. I don't know what to think, but I do know that I cannot be the same way I was before, because I have changed and fundamentally changed and how do I even begin to articulate that even at the end of the day I still do care about you, for whatever it is you are and are not, that I know nothing about. Something inside me won't say a word.

And now I see why, people can bend and fold like flowers in the wind, abandon all cynicism and hard-wired rationality to receive softness. You would do anything to hold love in your hands. -7.25am, 22nd August 2006

2006-09-02T00:10:00.000+08:00

insecure

even though i can work out in my head that this will be a strange time, that i am going to largely be unable to be myself, that things right now are not representative of the rest of my life, i can't stop worrying about it. because i've come to be very much of a people person, in the last two years, and the me, right now, i would never be able to recognize. self control and focus and all things utilitarian. i can't stop worrying about what this all means, i can't help feeling a despair that feels too much like standard teenage insecurity, thinking about all the careless laughter we do not have. and i think too much about what it means, and how all this while i am drunk on all the superficiality. but in moments like these i can't help the wave of desperation, i can't help the sneaking suspicion that this is all i have, that i am worth so much less, because i am not fully a part of your universe.

i don't know what to think about the now or about the past times of general happiness. i don't know why i feel the need to be convinced that one or the other is a lie.

and i also can't stop feeling stupid as i do about the way i have become, now, or more specifically, it makes me feel stupid thinking about why my philosophy about things have shifted as they have. because it makes me cringe to think that i could be this much predictable, this much cheapened and changeable, this much defined by external factors, and stupid factors, at that. i really don't want to bend and fold for the reasons that i suspect i may truly have, but i also don't think there's any point in fighting, denying things, because i am somehow convinced they will just beat around the bush and get me anyway. so i don't see a point in trying to control myself, but that doesn't mean i feel no shame, because i do, because at the end of the day it is just absolutely silly. i also kick myself over this because i have gone this road before and i am certain of a few things: firstly, that this is poison to anything that might otherwise have developed harmlessly, secondly, that i have an utter lack of self control, especially where these things are concerned. i can feel myself becoming wreckless, clarity and common sense out of the window. and so i can just see myself staking my soul to something that could be defeated so very swiftly, with a bit of objectivity. i can logically deduce that my emotion is going to drag me down the toilet bowl.

2006-09-01T01:16:00.000+08:00

i took a two hour journey home, gazing out the window of the bus. with world war one on my lap and all that time to think about absolutely nothing in particular. it's cold outside, i walked the long way home, in a strange way right now, i miss dennis.

there are quite a lot of people i miss, will come to miss. i think i'm going to miss shumay and co, gery and esther and classmates, even jo and gab who i hardly talk to, because they've been immensely fun to be with. i really want gery and esther to make it to oxford, i don't know why. i miss fong the way fong used to be, but that doesn't mean any less of love. in some senses, maybe it means more.

it isn't really a maudlin, gushy kind of miss, like the inside of a marshmallow. i just think of times before and conversations that have passed between us and want that much back, and not just because my life is supposed to be concerned with work, right now. it's like how i want to sit kevin down and talk to him, but when we actually do talk, it's rarely about anything much. every once in a while there's the tell me all your thoughts on God conversations, but most of the time it's hurhur stewpid i'm going to play mahjong now. but i liked what he said, that day, when i said i would rather spend time with people than books, and he said i would rather spend time with people who read books. kevin, like dennis, makes me feel like a kid, sometimes. kevin who calls me at all the wrong times (during lessons, for example), who mocks me with singlish, who answers my angsty-3-am-what-is-the-meaning-of-life questions with a 42, my little sugar plum, or something as cheerfully ridiculous. kevin who has a voice like melted butter, who brings out the bimbo in me despite being one of the most intelligent people i know, kevin who reminds me of calvin, and hobbes, from calvin and hobbes.

suzanne vega has the most gorgeous voice. i think my favourite moments of today were dinner and the ride home. <3 xinyi and the raffles city market place.

2006-08-30T20:22:00.000+08:00

ain't got no life, y'all says:
they eat chickens
muff says:
i eat chickens
ain't got no life, y'all says:
hurhur
muff says:
point is?
ain't got no life, y'all says:
you're meant for each other
muff says:
yeah
muff says:
we can go cook book shopping together
muff says:
the sales girl will be like "mister you can't bring that fox in here"
muff says:
and i'll say "i need a second opinion"

i'm happy today, having done no work, having exchanged words and laughter with various people. and i'm discovering, how good it feels to let things go, how much catharsis. i could sit here all night eating ben n jerry's and having mundane conversation about soduku and washing dishes.

forever, is one of those words i will consign to youth, and idealism. which i feel quickly slipping away.

i want to reduce you. to words, to functions, to a bunch of ideas. so that i can store you in my head, pay less attention to the subtleties; so that i can carry you around with me, put my hands on your skin and wish for warmth, comfort, wisdom, solid ground. some days i am sorry for not treating you like human being, but then, you know. the next day i do it all the same, all over again. what an endless tirade.

now i only think: i am glad you don't take me seriously, all the time. even when i sulk, and stamp my foot, and throw a melodramatic tantrum, i suppose i can be thankful that you do not indulge me. i see now how exasperating this can be, and also how unpleasant it would be to further encourage me to crawl into these holes in the ground, curl up with myself.

and i lapse into chinese, sometimes, in moments of familiarity, doing dishes with my mom for example. it's strange that something so somehow foriegn, confusing can come so naturally, close to home. it is strange the other way around, too.

i learnt about northern lights today. gorgeous thing.

2006-08-29T22:55:00.000+08:00

i'm determined not to be girlish, about this, i don't know why. it's been eating me all day.

hello, meet my chronic seriousness. this is why i really need to get out somewhere and have a night of good solid fun. before i think things to death, puncture a kidney. not that letting myself chill out might actually do anything constructive, to me.

i really hate this way to be.

don't let the bastards grind you down. says:
yes, bimbo kevin
kev says:
WHAT!
kev says:
which part of that was bimbo?
kev says:
HUH, MISS USA?

ella found out none too long ago that north america is usa. and canada.

<3

2006-08-28T22:17:00.000+08:00

i'm sitting here watching the screen roll as shumay rants about how terrible the film version of handmaid's was. hurhurhur.

me: i didn't run today! flabflabflabflab...
christl: but flab is attractive!

the more i study, the more i am overcome by the desire to do Incredibly Bimbotic Things.

--

and i'm sorry. it crossed my mind, today, the slow sheepishness, at the words floating to me from across the table, the sudden wanting to have done you better. to have been a better person, not just to you. i'm sorry because i haven't thought about you at all, all this while, becaues all this while i've only thought about me, me, me. and maybe, maybe. maybe you deserve better than that.

so maybe what i have needed is the space to step back, out of my own skin, to look at things for what they are, to wait for clarity, in the form of another perspective.

2006-08-27T21:28:00.000+08:00

everyone loves amelia jane. says:
yeahh. they're going to be whiny. don't hit them on the head okay.

jeannette doesn't think i should be a psychologist.

i'm not unhappy, i can genuinely say that. so i should stop talking like i am. i've had a gloriously wasteful day. i've lost steam, and studied close-to-squat this entire week. today i played soduku, and a lot of piano, and sat around listening to music in the conc cells in church, with the lights out, trading barbs and guitar riffs with marcus. with marvin babbling half asleep, in the corner, hurhur.

my dear you've become. something i do.

today i choked back all the stuff that i felt had no place, in between us. wait a minute, let me forget, let me. let me try to feel absolutely nothing.

2006-08-26T00:32:00.001+08:00

babble

it's not about pride, this time, it really isn't. it's about the entire fundamental issue: what is and why and how the heck can i possibly know. i was angry a while ago, i banged on my piano, i threw things around and felt, not reality sliding, but the whole damn world breaking into a mindless babbling. i'm sick of this, i'm sick of this, i hate this, i don't want to be here again. i just don't think i can handle it.

but now i'm just tired, i'm tired, i'm sick and tired of fighting. not that i have been fighting, but i just don't trust anymore, i just don't think truth will come in words, i'm sick of words and the endlessly trying to capture things in a jar. something we can brandish, something that we can impose.

i can't find still and unturning centre of things, i want. i want a cigarette because it would screw me up physically and give me a reason to stop thinking. i want to sit in the black of my room playing without you i am nothing. i feel the need to do this destructively, i feel the need to destroy people, to kick down worlds, to destroy myself. destroy myself so that when i heal, things would be coherent, an improvement. and i can say, well i've taken shit for it, well i've had enough. because i had enough a long time ago and i won't. i won't feel that way again.

dennis, in my head, cop out cop out cop out. we are older, we should know better; the excuses i gave i won't accept, for myself, anymore.

i can't believe beyond the chaos. how i want right now, to continue in this everyday-ness. not be challenged to think, because. because the intellectual process feels tedious and convoluted and endlessly endlessly. futile.

and the childishness, i can't stand it anymore. the preening and the pettiness and the giggling mundane stupidity. while i think i'm a terrible person, i also think: you're a terrible person. is this the norm, does it achieve nothing at all, for me to say, stop whingeing like a bloody two year old. i can't stand it. i can't stand your high maintainance, i can't stand my high maintainance, i want to shed myself like a skin. i can't stand all this hypocriscy and stupidity and complaining when we have nothing to complain about, we have nothing to complain about. does it occur to you to be thankful, that the world has never revolved around you? that your renouncing of reality is like your shaking your fists at a giant? how, how stupid, how absolutely braindead, of course you are the master of your own universe, of course no one tells you what to do.

i have only been able to mute all this in the process of the artificial exercise. wait, wait til the fuss dies down, and let me see if there is anything left. can someone tell me what the heck is true, anymore? not just a chasing after a wind, not just for tomorrow we die. because everytime i tread this line it springs back at me, and i pause, this time, i go right to the finish line, i assume that i have not grown, after all these years. after all these years, i want normalcy but that seems to involve the shutting down of my head and i would do it. i would do it because i want to be sane and i don't trust myself, i don't trust myself, to go it alone.

i need to stop thinking about this.

2006-08-26T00:32:00.000+08:00

2006-08-19T22:40:00.000+08:00

patience

sorry for being a brat. i know i dish out when i hardly ever suck it up, and i know normally i don't ever stop to appreciate you, because i'm too busy being obnoxious. i long to be quiet again, i hate the person that i am being right now, but yet right now i can't help thinking put off the identity crisis til after the a's. but that really shouldn't be the way things are. because you're no less of a human being, standing here beside me, at this point in my life, even when i'm blinkered against all else except my own selfish ambition. and as a human being who has taken so much of my crap, you definately deserve better than this.

patience

so maybe this is love, the making of excuses for you in my head. someday i will tell you, when i can do it solely becaues you need to hear it instead of because i'm dying to say it.

because a human being is more than a collection of virtues and vices.

2006-08-18T01:16:00.000+08:00

everytime i think about you, something squelches, shrinks into a ball, inside. i'm sorry, for the knee-jerk, for this immaculate porcelain smoothness; it irritates me to be this way, to be twisted and calculating, ultimately to be unable to breathe, and let go, and be a person who i can respect. i'm sorry, because it is neither your fault or my fault, it is the fault of the space standing in between us that seems to be filled with more than the casual and innocuous small talk that we make.

this also makes me realize that i will never be happy, a levels or not, because no matter how peachy keen my universe may really be, i will find some fault with it, i will screw it up on my own. i am blessed, i do not have real problems, not really. now if only i would act like i could be for a minute thoroughly convinced of it.

i really miss literature, today i think vocabulary, i am going to read after i reclaim my life in 2 months and 12 days time. i can't bring myself to approach lit like a utilitarian, and i don't know how to, even if i were to decide to try. and this worries me, because to do lit instinctively requires a clarity of mind that i am not sure i am capable of at this point in time. and also because it seems disrespectful, the way i need to bolt through all six texts in the next 3 weeks, because i can't afford the time to sit still and think, and consider, and muse, and appreciate.

actually, the a levels have been diminishing, in my eyes, or rather, relative to what it was about a week ago. everything i see in my waking hours now i juxtapose against the way the entire month of november feels, in my mind; ma is sitting downstairs in the hall right now too wide awake for one in the morning, and if the cost of doing well for this bout of exams is a legacy of insomnia i really do think i'd pass. or more soberingly, the real (as opposed to angsty) tragedies that occur, that i hardly encounter in my middle class existance, but which every once in a while wave like red flags in the distance, in the lives of friends that i have or people that i only vaguely know. and even though the answer to do you want to go overseas? is still yes, desperately, it is quieter now, it is less absolute, less dramatic, less suffocatingly consequential. and the more i am able to step back the less and less difficult i find it to let go of my anxiety. i have learnt about alot more than monetary policy or the french revolution, in the last few weeks; i have learnt things about myself, and what i have done and done wrong, and what kind of person i have chosen to be, unconsciously. through all the controlled hysteria. a week ago i admitted to myself that i was terrified, and yesterday after another nervous breakdown i stayed up listening to my accelerating heartbeat, thinking about how i shouldn't have spent so many fruitless hours giving in. i haven't actually done much giving in, i only realised this when i said the words that day: i won't say it's killing me because that would be giving in. and so no, even though i'm terrified, even though i am going insane, i am also dogged, i can be, i have been. but i don't have the tenacity for that kind of pressure, and that's what scares me, the way i can run hyped up on caffeine and adrenalin for 3 straight days feeling absolutely fine, and in ten minutes all of a sudden find myself sobbing audibly in the shower about something i can't even really pinpoint. what scares me is how i have not learnt to control my anxiety, how i have not learnt to be calm. the way i brush people off hurriedly when they tell me i look really stressed and should take a break, and ultimately find myself taken down by the exact thing that i'd been warned about.

and after freaking the guys out that day i really did want to do something destructive, that night. i now know and can admit to myself now that smoking and etc were things that i did not because they really made me feel better, but because they were a way of running away from the things that i didn't want to deal with, they were a distraction, a red herring, they were excuses, like how dennis once said to me, crazy is a cop out, cop out is exactly what i did. because that way, you can say that you didn't make it primarily because you didn't, instead of couldn't, you can say you never tasted true failure because you never really stuck your neck out and gave it an honest shot in the first place. and not just in terms of studying, in terms of people, relationships, things that made you feel like you were worth something. i never really traced what would turn me self-destructive before, but i don't think it's inaccurate to say that, i definately didn't do those things because they felt good, because they don't feel good, not like playing the piano feels good, not like dancing feels good, not like being happy feels good. all that so-called therapeutic bullshit i subscribed to before, and might someday subscribe to again, help me, save me, remind me that i ought know better. that at the end of the day nothing feels better than clarity and being clean and free.

today andrew said, the men are talking and it made me laugh, just like jo's gab's a monetarist, i'm a keynesian made me laugh. i actually enjoy school now, because people are funny, and helpful, and friends enough to be around.

2006-08-11T22:47:00.000+08:00

josiah today said something today about not wanting to define himself by other people.

i said something about reality sliding.

i wish i could tell you the one thing i know: nothing is ever that simple anymore.

2006-08-11T00:23:00.000+08:00

do you worry that our friendship is brass? said:
hey if you like calvin and hobbes you might like agnes
[the satire] - leaving on a jet plane said:
hahah agnes? who?
do you worry that our friendship is brass? said:
http://www.comics.com/creators/agnes/archive/agnes-20060710.html
do you worry that our friendship is brass? said:
that's agnes :D
do you worry that our friendship is brass? said:
she's like a female version of calvin
[the satire] - leaving on a jet plane says:
hahahah
[the satire] - leaving on a jet plane says:
so cute !!!
[the satire] - leaving on a jet plane says:
she has a big nose
do you worry that our friendship is brass? says:
hurhuruhr
do you worry that our friendship is brass? says:
you shallow male!
do you worry that our friendship is brass? says:
no just kidding
do you worry that our friendship is brass? says:
:D
[the satire] - leaving on a jet plane says:
hahaha
[the satire] - leaving on a jet plane says:
she's cute with her big nose

2006-08-07T23:14:00.000+08:00

wind song

i wish i could play the guitar. i thought of a lot of things, listening to this song, thinking about some faceless stranger playing this in some wood-polished studio, concentrating intensely. if you listen out for it, you can hear the squeak of the strings as his hands move over the frets, and it's that singular detail that kills me, that makes this human, real, more immediate than might be any attempt at an intricate perfection. and in the silliest way right now i want to know this person, the one responsible for the music, i want to watch this faceless stranger play for hours and hours and hours.

and i also think of daryl, when he first played this song for me and marcus, brow furrowed at the score. how does it feel, to field these requests, to have audience of human beings who might read you, through your music?

i remember back when i first started talking to kinyip, how we sat in the sanctuary once and i told him i couldn't play, and his response was because i'm here? it really is not so simple as just play lah; you really don't have control over when and what is going to see you self conscious. you can only try to fight it, and even then, too much of the time you just end up awkward, out of place. i've come to realise that the imposition of any sort of structure or Set Way Of Doing Things turns me into a writhing mess, and results in a me that is a hundred times less fluent than i normally am. so. so i'm glad that with piano, at least, now i don't feel it anymore, that i have the thickest skin in the world, sometimes; that i can take a greedy possession of the sanctuary grand every sunday after service and inflict myself on others, as selena might say. after the initial bashed inertia (about 2 songs) something inside me takes over and could go on for hours.

one of the biggest reasons that i have for being sore that tuition will be on sunday afternoons now, is that this means i'm not going to get any chance at all to play like that, for a very long time. not like that, really. nothing like that. and also that i can see how alien my friends are going to look, after a while. i feel the space around me hollowing out as we all move in different directions, however slight the difference might be. it is not the same, all of a sudden it's solitaire, i'm solitaire. things are dramatized, absolute in my head. i remember what christl said, once, about how she was afraid that after disappearing, you'd return to find that nothing is the same anymore. will nothing be the same anymore? what might happen in four months, it really isn't difficult, is it. to water down friendships and to wander off without realising that slowly it's come to a point where you just aren't on the same page as some particular one else, anymore.

and i also thought about how friendships and relationships need maintainence, which is funny because the person i get along best with (kevin) is the very person i talk to the least. so, so maybe it's better this way, maybe i'm just this selfishly voyeuristic, with friends who are people who sometimes i think deserve more than this. i don't think i can see beyond the immediate, where people are concerned, because i'll make and morph and mould myself according to the surroundings. i'm thinking about this because i'm thinking about how this time next year i might be packing, flying off, God willing. i told ma that i don't really want her to come with me, even though i know that's what a lot of parents do for the first week or so, when their kids go overseas to study. but some part of me wants to be alone because i want both the chaos and thrill of figuring things out on my own. even though i can see myself getting into a huge mess and regretting it on a long hindsight.

this is dedicated to chenghui, who thinks my blog is sad. because that's not really what i am, right now.

2006-08-07T01:00:00.000+08:00

and i'm also bored of the way i play. or not bored, i want to do something else, i really wanted to have that conversation, with titus, let's talk music, teach me jazz chords. i'm not flattered anymore when people tell me i play well, because i have seen play well, and geez, this. this is nothing.

2006-08-06T23:28:00.000+08:00

eventually, all walls must fall

i'm bored to tears of my words. i want to read again, to go through books like a dream. and to take on someone else's voice for a while, because i'm finding my own ill-fitting, insufficient.

i like The Handmaid's Tale. atwood's voice resonates with me.

kwanie says:
dear ella...
thank you for messaging,
so happens i am busy.. and yea.. our candles can't seem to meet..
i'm doing pretty well... just the bane of doing boring stuff at this point of time...
i wanted to call you today, but i stumbled upon your blog. you were in the a quiet mood

i miss kwanie, really, and i hardly know what is going on in his life now. and i miss kevin too, who has slowly grown up under my very nose, and who i really can't talk down to, anymore.

and i miss sebbie too, strangely. i haven't had these conversations for a while. i like the sound of it, how it feels, rolling off my tongue: Irgendwann fallt jede mauer, or, eventually, all walls must fall.

and i'm not stupid, a girl can tell, with these things. but i will pretend, for a while anyway, to be ignorant, because. because i like it better this way.

2006-08-06T00:27:00.000+08:00

i wish i were playing for the entire service tomororw, and not just twenty minutes of congregational singing. it has nothing to do with the hymns, i don't like them any more than i ever have, it's just: i want to sit at the piano throughout the entire message. i like it there, in that cave, that hole in the wall. that's how i want to feel, safe and sound, sanctuaried.

actually, you feel safe, but then you get half a million complains after the service that you aren't sitting properly, or that the back of your pants is riding too low. or i do. and then you realise for however comfortably cocooned it is you feel, every eye is caught on your slightest move.

actually, what i want, is to sit in a semi darkness, and play, whether there are people in the sanctuary or not. i have a feeling i will be melancholic tomorrow, at least until i hit the afternoon.

2006-08-04T23:37:00.000+08:00

how do i feel right now

i don't know what to say. or i do know what to say, it is jus something inside me that needs to choke on things, to figure them out, to bring them to the level of words. i don't know, because this is not something i allow myself to dwell on, because. because once again i am supposed to be studying, and so i feel a strange disjoint, between me and myself.

i went back to nanyang today. hello, hello alma mater, hello seniors and juniors and team mates, hello blue skies and a sunset that has not left me breathless for a long time. standing amongst all that green grass, with christl, last now, looking up at the fast fading sky, at grey clouds framed in a swath of orange light. i am feeling. i am feeling nothing, and nothing, nothing is the worst thing in the world to be. where once it was things like these which made me feel ever so alive, right now i think back to those moments then when christl's breath was caught in her throat in an appreciative silence and all i feel is nothing. all i feel is: this was so long ago. it is not just being back in my alma mater, it was. it was before all the flipping and dancing onstage and the screaming and the doling out of hugs and flowers, in that moment sitting out on the grass near the swings, by myeslf, in that moment of silence i remember the peaceful feel of the grass and the cool wind all around me, i remember feeling feeling happy to be out and feeling free, but more than anything all i remember is feeling was sad. thinking about that right now just makes me ever sad, because that was the stillest, most peaceful moment i've had in a long time, sitting there looking out at a fast fading sky, i can't even remember what we were talking about, me and christl, for those five minutes, but it just felt like i was slowly starting to feel alive, at ease, in my own skin, again. and. and it is not that i didn't appreciate watching my juniors perform, it is just the briefness of that moment, the swiftness with which it was spirited away, i was spirited away. and all at once i feel lost inside myself, inside a lot of book grubbing and rushing around, inside a lot of passed over people and conversations, inside an over-riding desire to do well just because. just because i have always done well, and to a perhaps equal extent, a desire to fly across an ocean and stay there for the next three or four years.

i'm overcome with panic, because i have been. right now i feel like i have wasted my last two years by leaving things to the point where they have gotten right now, i know things are said like you are smart and you can do it but right now i do feel like i have the clearest idea of how much shit i have gotten myself into, and i don't think anyone would disagree, if i were to list things out: all the topics i have not studied, all that i didn't bother at the time to fully understand, most frighteningly all the material that i do not even have, to even start working on. and i feel a regret that i can't get away from, because i know i am smart, i know i can do it, but the fact of matters is that i didn't. and i have wasted what has been given to me, my intelligence and the environment that i have been put in, being so surrounded by so many incredibly intelligent people, and having money thrown at me to study. i think about gery and elgina and jo and the many people i know who so badly want to go overseas for uni, and who so rightly deserve so, and who will only get that chance if they manage to scrape a scholarship. and i want them to make it so badly because they have deserved what i do not, by applying themselves. the idea of competing with gery for english at oxford makes me not want to, even though even if i did she'd probably get in instead of me, thinking about how she looked when i said i didn't need a scholarship to go overseas. i don't know, you see i have scraped through everything in life surprising myself, waiting on miracles, and it is childish, irresponsible, unfair, for me to want the same again. what is up with this? i have 4 months to slog, to try and earn a place somewhere i want to go, and i feel like i have to suffer to deserve it.

and i've been avoiding talking to people, i'm. i'm ever sorry marcus, i'm ever sorry marvin. there's nothing i can think about, right now, that is not A level Obsessed, University Preoccupied. it is not just my being utilitarian, it is just the fact that i don't trust myself to put What I Feel Into Words, and still function as a normal social unit- it is tiring, being sociable, some times, really, i wish i didn't have to try. there are people with whom i don't have to try, but they are few and far between. it is tiring to try and empathize. it is tiring and already all i feel every day is just tired, tired from lack of sleep, tired from worrying, tired from all the studying i'm trying and failing to get done. and i don't think i realised how stressed i have been until christl li turned around in class that day and asked if i'm okay and i dissolved into tears and incoherence. but, but i am, and this is killing me, the trying not to let this kill me is killing me, i feel like a lizard stuck in a jar that is slowly being sucked clean of oxygen.

2006-08-01T01:38:00.000+08:00

smoke your way through this one

i have no time to communicate, and be a human being, i am sorry, but then i am not sorry, i am utilitarian, utilitarian. forcing this on myself like a fascist, but then a facist would involve some sort of resistance, would require of secret police, to quell the malcontenders. instead i am greeted only by boredom's hohumness, like the dull indifference of someone who is supposed to greet you at the airport but who has instead fallen asleep in his chair at the arrivals hall. i even have loss the inability to say, lamentingly, oh how i wish it weren't so, with a characteristic angst, because right now i am a bored too of whining about the a levels. perhaps i can say, like a snooty colonial official, it is most unfortunate. it is most unfortunate.

i am characterised by the acute feeling of a lack of control over my life. let me say that again, and once again not in the active: i am characterised by the feeling of a lack of control over my life. this go get it generation, this carpe diem business. well.

nocturnal it is, folks, and bossa nova music to keep me company. i have discovered again that the night time is the time to be alive, the time to be awake and aware of every shuffle and silence, the night has to offer. and the day time is too punctuated by lethargy or distraction to be productive, anyway. perhaps i function best on lack of sleep, caffeine and a copious amount of tim tams, cool night air and the freedom to walk around my house wearing no pants because everyone else is asleep.

2006-07-30T21:50:00.000+08:00

i think the guys cheered me up with their guitar playing. daryl, and random cheesey songs from the nineties, and a sunday evening to sit around and chill out, with chocolate cake in our midst.

i remember sitting on the floor looking straight ahead at joel's fingers, moving up and down the frets right at my eye level, and thinking, this, in front of me, is the most real and immediate thing. the silver knobs and the texture of the wood, joel's bitten down nails with the blisters and peeling skin. just when i'm finding myself increasingly confused, about everything that has ever made sense to me before.

there are three things taped to my computer, control (taped over the power switch), don't worry about about it (which joel kept saying during that one phone conversation i had with him), and joel's letter. i'm grateful for the friends i have. you don't have to look into my life and ask me if i'm okay, and try to understand, but you do.

2006-07-29T00:11:00.000+08:00

i think, i will move too fast and find myself not knowing where the heck i am going, what the heck i am doing. i need someone to hold out a hand in front of me, to deny me things, to be a stop sign, adamant. for me. i'm. i'm getting really depressed thinking about this, thinking about our wasted lives, and me, here, now, in the process of squandering it.

there is a party girl, at heart, i admitted to daryl. i'm tired, i. passed off drinks with dennis and some dartmouth friend of his because i can't get the Studying I Am Not Doing out of my mind. but there are so many places i would rather be right now, or not right right now, but 3 hours ago, when i was thinking about it being a friday night.

and i have questions without answers, the Why Am I Doing This, that i am afraid to think about. why do i want to go to america, i suspect it is because, because i want to lose myself. i don't have model answers, i don't have any answers at all; right now i just feel like i am bobbing below the surface of chaos, saying things like there is no truth, i don't know i don't know i don't know. and i really don't, thinking has been like a philosophical box but i want to do it, i want to do it now. and why, really. really.

my mind has stagnated. and the friends i had, i have let loose, into the wind. could i bring myself to be honest to you, for ten minutes? let me tell you why: i can't bring myself to stop shaking, long enough to. to put sentences together.

where i want to be right now
-watching a good film, or a good production
-at the art gallery, with someone nice to go to art galleries with
-playing soccer, some sport, watching the guys go at it at the street soccer court behind church. only if there's gorgeous weather.
-dance class, taught by Bryan, after which i'd hang around Lau Pa sat with xinyi and christl
-staying over at terence's playing bang, random games on his ps. nosing through tim's book collection, terence playing his guitar.
-reading a good book
-talking to someone, mucking around town. because town feels sufficiently far away, to be an indulgence
-somewhere gorgeous, with someone who is gorgeous (not physcally, necessarily) to be with

Irgendwann fällt jede mauer says:
full?
Why should my victim be so unattractive as to be inedible? says:
full?
Irgendwann fällt jede mauer says:
full?
Why should my victim be so unattractive as to be inedible? says:
(ok. ella has ceased to understand this)
Irgendwann fällt jede mauer says:
that was bound to happen
Why should my victim be so unattractive as to be inedible? says:
so why did you go full
Irgendwann fällt jede mauer says:
why did YOU go full
Why should my victim be so unattractive as to be inedible? says:
you said it first
Irgendwann fällt jede mauer says:
who said i said ti first
Why should my victim be so unattractive as to be inedible? says:

Why should my victim be so unattractive as to be inedible? says:
my music bank has stagnated
Irgendwann fällt jede mauer says:
full?
Why should my victim be so unattractive as to be inedible? says:
full?

Irgendwann fällt jede mauer says:
i think the fact that its 0120 might play a huge part in my actions

i miss kevin, i haven't talked to him for weeks. i want to sit him down with a cup of coffee in a large sofa and make him talk to me.

2006-07-28T00:13:00.000+08:00

Quote of the Day

Winston Churchill - "History will be kind to me for I intend to write it."

i am a Fischer-ist. history is just one damn thing after another.

2006-07-27T22:14:00.000+08:00

sucker that i am

and all i want is to sit and dream, to look at the sky. i got to eat the haagen daz fondue today, and i wish. i wish for nights like these, nights that might have nothing on my mind. i just want to sit down and talk to people for hours, upon hours. inhale a copious amount of decadent sweetness.

it is a selfish thing to say, but i want more Interesting People to talk to. it is not that i am not interested in the lives of my friends as it is, it is not that how are you doing is in any way small talk. it is just me so badly wanting to prod at the world with my fingers, to toss it back and forth in words with someone else who might offer me a new kind of perspective. i want someone to open up my mind and make me think, i am. a little tired of being the one to make people think, all i want right now is to be. completely bowled over. i want to be pushed beyond myself, i want to be allowed to be a full myself, to not have to put everything in simple terms. sometimes. sometimes i like the complication. before the point of noise and chaos and drunken stupor.

and there really is a difference, between being intelligent, and being able to speak the jargon. i like what dennis said that day, after spinning some very grown-up sounding yarn with my parents about business/the economy/___________, the i don't know what i'm talking about, i've just learnt to speak the jargon. even though i don't actually believe in his cluelessness. but i thought about __________ and her apparent taste for the intellect, now, and the disdain she has for a previous bimbotic self, and part of me just wants bend over and laugh, because how much of it, really, is just a lot of pretentious jargon. there are two movies everyone who wants to pretend to be an intellectual artsy shit should watch: Requiem For A Dream and American History X. i don't actually do much media consumption, as much as i enjoy it, but in the most inane way, i've found that these two movies give you a lot of mileage, in the sort of pretentious intellectual small talk that people like to have to show that they aren't brainless. these are seriously good movies, by my bet, but it really does make me laugh, to think of how typical we are, how easy it is to pretend at least superficially that you're some kind of intellectual. how typical and how stupid and how predictable, how inane, how classic, in our rebellion against the selves that we would hate to be (and why, tell me. why?). it's the same as the stereotypical high school popularity catfight, it merely looks more intelligent.

i thought about you and how you speak in poetry. clever, and in a slow and soft voice. charm me, because, the smoothest talking is so much more than just the right words, at the right time. this is me, hooked like a sucker, sucker that i am.

and i've been thinking about the people who think i'm interesting to talk to, and how that half flatters me, and yet half makes me really really sad. to think that i have to keep up. well sometimes i do think i'm an interesting person (though certainly not now when i am not being the bookish drone that i am right now), firstly because being myself i have fashioned myself to appeal to my own tastes by exposing myself to media and influences which i find interesting, and secondly because other people seem to think i'm interesting, which i'm gratified for, but i don't think any relationship has ever survived on being interesting. interesting are the people i hardly talk to, the conversations i have every once in a blue moon, i find them interesting, but it's not possible to function like that. because ultimately if you're looking to be entertained sooner or later this is going to get old, and mundane, and mind-numbingly boring. and i've hopped from friend to friend to friend on that basis of being interesting, and i have resented myself for it, slightly, it really is quite selfish. kwanie said to me, you want to conquer the world, ella, and it's true, i have a lot of intrigue, a whole lot of enthusiasm for a lot of things, which also means that i leave a lot behind, very very regularly. and so interesting feels like self-gratification all over again, interesting feels like exploited friendships left behind. i think about. the people who i have been close to, the people who i have had these madly interesting conversations with. i thought about you and what it would be like to talk to you regularly, and the more i think about it the less and less i can see myself being like that, all the time. it is tiring business, being fascinated, or not tiring, but absorbing, consuming, distracting. but you know during these times these plain vanilla feet-on-the-ground details don't appeal to me at all, and all i want to do is pursue this. this piqued interest.

and yet sometimes, it is: even if i could hear what you said, i doubt my reply would be interesting for you to hear. because i haven't read a single book all year, and the only film i saw, i didn't like it at all. so, so give me this much: i'd rather dance with you than talk with you.

i have learnt something, at least, this time, and that is that i too am a person, i too am more than a collection of ideas, a certain way to be. i have realised how different i can be, this time, from the next time, from the previous times. for all i have said before, all i said about people and about myself, it is a reminder i still need, to be yourself, no matter what they say. it is not even any more about they say, it is all about this What You Want To Be, and Why You Want To Be Something That You May Not Really Be, Inside. so now, looking at myself through your eyes, i think about how all this while i pretend to be someone i am not, about how i offer up this hypocritical simplicity, this wholesome package of a person who is really in many ways not what i am inside at all. and at the end of the day i realise that there is no one particular me, at all, it is ideals some time and whim and fancy another.

and i think. i am the sort of person who does something, about the Whim And Fancy. once when stability was the point of things, for me, i would have fought against this.

the song playing on my computer says will you find out who you are too late?

and i can put myself away, for a while, when it is convenient. i am. astounded at how madly utilitarian i can be. do you think, i will lose myself? this is how i will lose myself: i will stop believing that there was ever a myself worth keeping, at all. and who, really, who is to say the right and wrong, who is to say where i stand, when there is no Correct Answer, to questions like well okay then so who the heck am i at the end of all this useless talking?

and i'm a literalist, you see. once when you said, you're everthing to me, i thought about what everything means (noun, all things, entirety, absolute, the sum total), and i laughed at you for saying it, laughed myself out of believing. for all i may have been and tried to be. this is all bullshit to me, sometimes.

i want to feel safe. i feel safe when i'm close to someone, when i'm in confidence. sometimes i feel like i have betrayed you, in my need to be honest, all the time, with you and with other people. the way i quote people all the time, saying things so deeply personal, it is not that i intend betrayal, neither is it that i value your honesty flippantly. i have this thing about giving due credit, i can't pretend that things are my idea when they really aren't. like my stubborn refusal to read literature commentaries, which will definately have to cave someday. it is why i spin so much elaboration in my trying to make simple points, it is a homage, really, to the memories, to the various people from whom i've garnered wisdom. i respect ideas that much. shumay seemed genuinely surprised that day, when the answer to then where do your ideas come from, if you don't read was uh, my head. and perry is convinced that i need to read to prevent my mind from stagnating, and honestly, it is something i can feel happening, already. and so after my a's i am determined to read, all the books i have always wanted to, i am determined (somewhat) to wrestle my laziness down to the ground. for more than the spurt of adrenalin required to study for exams.

someday. i am likely to regret, take back, all this cockiness. but even if this is stupidity, let me at least admit that these thoughts have gone through my mind.

i will be troublesome, this time.

2006-07-25T22:04:00.000+08:00

Eleanor --

[adjective]:

Sexually stunning

'How will you be defined in the dictionary?' at QuizGalaxy.com

Ooh la la.

2006-07-25T21:38:00.000+08:00

drone

i thought about what i said to you, or rather, what i said to you in my head. right now i can't think of a single reason to not do exactly what i want to. i could be downright manipulative, right now, because i don't feel a thing and it's a perfectly plausible way to be. from the inside of the What I Want, a chiding like girl, restrain yourself means nothing to me, as does regret, as does reason and morality and. and a few other things.

you have been here, i am sure you have been here. and therefore, therefore i cannot be blamed, therefore i cannot be absolved.

i'm likely to feel otherwise once i have time to sit down with myself and think things through. but that takes time, and peace of mind, i have neither, right now. i am sure i have more good sense than this, it is just that i am passion-driven, you would call me that, and right now i would let my passion drive me all the way down to the doorstep of my own destruction. i don't care about consequence, gimme gimme gimme. instant gratification, i say.

i want to go to america, i want to go to yale, or brown, or somewhere interesting. i'm closing my eyes to the true state of my academics, in order to be ambitious, it is like a shot in the dark, it could be me. right now i have finally reached the point of wishing i had put in the effort where work is concerned, these past two years, because a lot of the stuff i'm doing is muchly interesting. and because, so, so much hinges on this, because i have finally drawn up the schedule and realised (though not fully), what is to come. and how helpless i am going to be, how much hysterical.

right now i am too busy being utilitarian, to think about who i am. i cannot recall a day being different, i cannot even imagine wanting to be different- the weekend is far away still. studying is swiftly turning me into an intensely boring person. i speak in a monotone, because that is all i have the energy for.

i feel like being absolutely bimbotic tonight. where's kevin?

2006-07-24T01:16:00.000+08:00

Executive
by John Betjeman

I am a young executive. No cuffs than mine are cleaner;
I have a Slimline brief-case and I use the firm's Cortina.
In every roadside hostelry from here to Burgess Hill
The maitres d'hotel all know me well, and let me sign the bill.

You ask me what it is I do. Well, actually, you know,
I'm partly a liaison man, and partly P.R.O.
Essentially, I integrate the current export drive
And basically I'm viable from ten o'clock till five.

For vital off-the-record work - that's talking transport-wise -
I've a scarlet Aston-Martin - and does she go? She flies!
Pedestrians and dogs and cats, we mark them down for slaughter.
I also own a speedboat which has never touched the water.

She's built of fibre-glass, of course. I call her 'Mandy Jane'
After a bird I used to know - No soda, please, just plain -
And how did I acquire her? Well, to tell you about that
And to put you in the picture, I must wear my other hat.

I do some mild developing. The sort of place I need
Is a quiet country market town that's rather run to seed
A luncheon and a drink or two, a little savoir faire -
I fix the Planning Officer, the Town Clerk and the Mayor.

And if some Preservationist attempts to interfere
A 'dangerous structure' notice from the Borough Engineer
Will settle any buildings that are standing in our way -
The modern style, sir, with respect, has really come to stay.

--

today i said to dennis, savoir-faire, and i thought of this poem. dennis reminds me of kevin, a taller, more sophisticated version (in embroidered shirts and gorgeous shoes), who says some of the most interesting things to me, and who makes me feel small, seen through, like a naive little girl, knowing nothing.

i like talking to dennis, but not in the big groups that tend to occur, because he goes stiff and suffocated, awkward as hell, and is so much less interesting as a person trying to be someone he is not.

2006-07-23T01:23:00.000+08:00

i'm completely incoherent these days. i don't know why, but these days i'm content to let the thoughts drift through my head and out the window, without my tagging them, pinning them down with words. there are actually a lot of things i've realised over the last few ________ that i think would be very useful for me to capture in words. so that i remember, so that i can move on in my life without losing sight, losing track of myself.

lady, observe how i am not so terribly impressed. i'm dying to sit you down, pick you apart, see how you might react. outside the big words, please. please be honest with me. when i see the claims you make in the life you live, i will respect you for all that you are. and you have every right to demand the same of me, and how. how i wish i could live up to things, all the time.

i believe in my own intelligence, this doesn't mean that i think i'm a genius. but it does mean that i don't feel the need to prove it to myself, neither do i feel the need to be more intelligent than i already am. what worries me, talking to you, is that some day i might, some day i might feel this need to prove continually my worth as a human being.

words, say them, aim them at my face level. today i hung out with the gardens guys, sat in zhixian's car muchly amused at their company, the jargon, the way they toss things (physical and otherwise) back and forth, at each other. zhixian said some things to me today about studying overseas that i'd really like to keep in my head. there are quite a few conversations i'm supposed to have, drop me a line, we'll talk about it. i'm excited, it's exciting, but i also haven't the first idea, what i am doing here.

i'm not terribly bowled over ecstatic. as i been, i know, on these sort of saturday nights. i walked around my neighbourhood wearing fong's goofy picnic hat, and looked strangers right in the eye, just for the fun of it. somewhere in the back of my mind there's a pile of books symbolically representing all the studying i need to get down to.

it was school day at yf today, and i was really have impressed by how sporting everyone was. my nanyang uniform felt strange, and yet ever so familiar, once i put on my school shoes, (dug up from the bottom of my cabinet, even complete with authentic sec 4 dirt)i felt like a grubby secondary school kid, again. it felt like i was going to school on a saturday morning for training, again, and how. there's a bittersweetness to this, ~~that i don't want to admit because marvin said the words to me a few hours ago and so it feels like i have taken his idea again even though i had that thought myself~~ thinking about how i would lug myself out of bed on saturday mornings, go for training, dream of milk tea and lunch while waiting for my turn on the trampoline. it all feels so hopelessly young, in a way that i never realised, when i really stood in those shoes, precocious, carefree, in a way i never ever would have felt, that i would never had admitted to. i don't want those days back, somehow. but i do think about them.

2006-07-22T00:50:00.000+08:00

i want to talk to one person, instead of ten. it frustrates me, or rather, leaves me unsettled, and empty, after having to spin an Intellectual Yarn, with liyan, xiehuan. because the world and its gorgeousness could spread out before you, a clear, still night, and still all you would want to do is __________. fill in the blank: what would you like to do?

i don't want to explain myself. i can't be bothered, tonight.

i have so much ambivalence, with intelligence. i like being challenged, intellectually, every once in a while, it mildly interests me, in a hey cool sort of fashion, the way trivia might interest a factoid king. but i would not collect it because fundamentally i just don't think it's worth my time. intellect bores me because there is just so little beauty, so little poetry in it all. because people are people, instead of a collection of ideas, virtues and vices.

i want to dance. and play more than an hour of piano, and find, read, more Poetry That Agrees With Me. and take more photos, of you and us and this gorgeous night. this sound artsy shit, but this is where i am happy, take this moment please, and make it last. ever after. and that makes me think of dennis and how he said sell out, in an unjudgemental way: that people do, that i might do. and i think, middle class, this is why i am so many things outside the feel goods, this is why i suspend my feelings and beliefs and disbeliefs til the weekend.

it is the weekend. no time to be sitting still.

2006-07-20T22:49:00.000+08:00

scrawled on an envelope i found in my drawer

what is it with these chinese festival things, the oranges, the colour red. my feet hurt, from too tiny shoes, from dressing up like i was about five years older than i really am, ten years older than i really feel. why do i bother to dress up, again? the skirts and the accessories and the shoes for the occasion, but more pressingly, the balancing on heels, the keeping of one's knees, together, when sitting down, the walking and talking like a lady. underneath all this really i think i am just. fifteen years old.

i'd like to be small again, physically small, to be able to escape notice. to run through the legs of adults, to be thrown up into the air, in an uncle's arms. i was never that sort of kid, but don't i get a second chance? now that i've seen just enough of being a grown up to want to crawl back into the treehouose with my rollerskates, with a tub of ice cream? with a comic book and a good friend?

hello. i don't know what i'm doing, i don't know what i'm up to. what are you doing, where are you going, why are you so busy. questions like those throw me, completely, i. haven't got a clue. why study so hard, why do all these endless endless things? or maybe nobody knows the answers to questions like that, and the stumbling around in the dark is something all other people, most other people, can stand, can function with.

all of a sudden i'm thrust headfirst into the belly of cordiality, it's kicking, squealing mundanity.

i'm slowly losing the ability to articulate myself. there is nothing slow about my everyday anymore, no time to think, but also no time to get angsty, the way i tend to. i remember this exact moment, i remember wandering out of my aunt's house on chinese new year, i remember going down to 7eleven and buying a pack of envelopes and a ballpoint pen. i have a thing for envelopes, i had a thing. i remember sitting on this bench overlooking the carpark, i remember it being a cool sort of morning. i remember kicking off my heels to be more comfortable, i remember writing a letter too, to i think kinyip, on another one of those envelopes. i have the clearest of memories, for the queerest of things - like that conversation with xinyi in some public toilet on the way to dance about how i love talking to friendly canteen aunties, and what not. why did i think of that.

by the way. i really want to dance. watching bryan dance last night just about floored me, and not (just) because he was cute. it'l be years if i ever learn to move like that. or even if not, i just want to dance, the way we danced at sec 4 lifeskills camp, free and happy and play that funky music white boy-esque.

please, someone please, take me out for a good time, before i turn into the bookey drone.

2006-07-17T01:42:00.000+08:00

i'm terrified for prelims. it'll take me til wednesday, to recover from the weekend.

2006-07-17T01:20:00.000+08:00

so

i thought about what i said to you, all the ideas i use, confident words i throw around (but i really do think-)to sidestep what i know you're thinking of saying. i don't know, at the end of the day there is something i'd admit only to myself, that really lies at the heart of everything: it is not me, this time, it is you, it is the fact that you are not you. it's not that i really am saying all these things, that they would apply across the board to every single relationship i have in my life, but it is. really. a simple and stupid and painful fact. that i hate too, honestly, because not liking someone is the most liberating, and i want that back a lot of the time, i want to be that free and that unthinking. i don't want to think in those terms anymore but any teenager might know, it is a difficult thing. and you know, some things have not changed in that: i still don't know how to say no. everything inside me may confirm it but i can't bring myself to put it in words across to another human being.

and then i think about what christl says, leading him on. and then i think about what terence said, she doesn't know what she wants. and then. and then i see how these things go, and while i'm charmed as any girl might be charmed (more than i'd like to admit), i'm also. so damn fed up of the entire song and dance.

i'm thinking about the closeness i've had with the different people, and how easily something like that is lost, and. and i feel really really sad. you know, i really don't see the point in risking the friendships, sometimes, but at the same time, you know and i know and everyone who's ever fallen for another person knows, there's really nothing very much you can do to push that that thought out of your mind. or it sure as heck feels that way. and. and i don't know, really, i suppose there really just aren't any words to be said. because even after having said and accepted the some friendships just aren't worth risking, there's the but if it works out argument to deal with. which we all want, i know, admit it my dear. but. but i'm frustrated thinking about it, and i'm sad anyway, at what it might cost. i was sad to grow distant from terence when he first got together with julia, and that night at church camp when he made me tell him what was wrong with me i just felt really really really sad. and though i'm glad we're talking again, i just. i just don't see that happening for a lot of the other relationships that have somehow been let go, by you or me, or by the something in between, that has made the biggest mess of things, really. it's that something in between that i'm afraid of now. it's simple enough in that: i just want to be honest. even if i'm saying the stupidest things i'll ever say in my entire life, i want to admit that they've gone through my mind, i. there's really nothing i hate more than that pent up feeling of having to choke things down, of having to fill this yawning silence in between with an endless and desperate conversation.

i'm sad because having come to a point of friendship as we have, i don't want to go back to being strangers.

2006-07-15T02:06:00.000+08:00

i am the centre of the universe says:
i hate american english
teamwork is a lot of people doing what i say says:
I KNOW, SO DO I
teamwork is a lot of people doing what i say says:
and i'm like...okay. eye-rak

hurhur, it took me a while to get that. kevin, LOVE :) soaking up the american-ness is hahvahhdd summer school right now.

but i really do hate american english. there's a different rhythm, to it, a different aesthetic.

2006-07-15T00:52:00.000+08:00

today felt decidedly strange. hanging out again with the yfers, after a week, after this change of focus, where my mind is concerned, is strange. seeing terence, his being funny coupled by my inability, today, to reciprocate, jeannette and remembering that we have weekday lives. why does that thought come to me? i don't know. i was already massively tired going down to meet them, but not so much physically tired as emotionally tired, i don't know what this week has done to me. i'm probably a lot more stressed than i think i am, right now, because. because i have so much on my mind, because sometimes in the middle of the conversation i just want to stand up, and leave the table. which i did, a couple of times. the first time i walked into a christian media shop and leaned against the shelves, listening to the music playing over the speakers. second i walked into a second hand bookstore and just stood there, couched by the smell of ink and paperbacks, and just breathed, for a while. and picked milan kundera off the shelf, read a page of his prose, calm and lulling. what i really want to do, i want to sit down with one person (none in particular, really, instead of ten, you and a cup of coffee and hours to kill, tonight, friday night, not a care in sight. and okay fair enough, because i wandered off into a conversation with daryl, wandered off into spotlight with sebbie, and just lay there on the fake fur rugs, talking and feeling comfortable, until a little alarmed lady told us to get out please thank you very much. i. somehow i really would like a hug, but sebbie is slight and hurt, by the things i say about him. even though i am just being truthful.

i can't explain it, or. or i can.

i have had a lot to say, this week, and so little time, so little of myself, really, the end of the day, to say it with. in short, i feel like i'm losing myself, to Being Happy, to the Making Of Frivolous Noises, to Studying And My Designs On An Overseas University. yesterday perry compared me to holly golightly, and i really really really really really was surprised. to hear that. when jo called me a partygirl i thought it was just him, knowing nothing, but the more i talk to people, the more i think about shumay's there's no smoke without a fire, zhiwen saying how girl's just wanna have fun over the radio was totally my song, the more i'm starting to think that maybe i don't know myself at all. because i don't think of myself as a partygirl, not that i don't think of myself as a partygirl as all, but really, that has not been a big fat part of me so far, the way i see it. being happy go lucky as perry called it, is something i would rarely associate with myself, though when i think about it i see where that impression comes from, really. i very much like being mellow, doing mellow things. and actually my indignation at these various people saying these various things is probably an overstatement: i probably would enjoy being a partygirl. at least once in a while. dingo called me socialising, not realising that my idea of socialising is probably not very far off from his idea of socialising - i just like to do it more often. very very often. but being a partygirl is decidedly different, i... really don't know. i can definately see how i might like it, but really, how long can i go on like that, before feeling like i have become a cardboard cutout of nothing? a lot of loud laughter and nothing deliberated, on the inside?

and at the same time i really really do believe in having fun. when i said this to marvin (when was that? last week? two weeks ago? and it felt like an age ago, and comfotable like nothing i feel, right now) i realised how much i do believe in fun, even as a principle, which is not something i would have ever have thought of myself. i found out recently, that humour charms me like nothing else, which is probably why i'm so throughly pleased hanging out with sebbie, terence, marvin. and what marvin said last week (or whenever) about how people might not take you seriously if you didn't have a serious reputation, is making a new sense to me. does it scare me, people not taking me seriously? i don't need everyone to take me seriously, just a few people, and even then, maybe not all the time. i really do think this is a new development in myself, learning to have fun, to have a sense of humour. and then, and then i really do wonder what these things say about myself, sometimes i think, i suspect. there is something about myself that i am getting ever so completely wrong.

and i am afraid of going to america for university partly because i might lose myself. well i might lose myself anywhere, but when you're Having A Lot Of Fun, it is just all the more likely. and everyone keeps telling me how i'm going to Have A Lot Of Fun in USA, because of how agreeable i might find the place, and all that freedom, on a silver platter. i can see myself going crazy, i can see myself losing myself: my sanity, my Christian identity/character (which honestly is quite a peripheral right now), my certain likes and dislikes, the mood according to which i function. i suppose lose myself is just the same as changing, which i seem to do a lot. but there really are things i don't want to give up of myself, and i'm afraid that i might find myself convinced to do so. i see now, right now, how this is a very strange argument, and how. maybe i'm just caught in the middle of having to make that choice between USA and UK, and afraid on so many counts of so many things.

i told daryl that i want to fall in love with wherever i go to, i want to be charmed. and that is true, that is one thing about me: i'm a complete sucker for charm. and in the Knowing Nothing Much state of my informedness where USA and UK are concerned, UK does seem to be that kind of place. i. i'll probably be happy wherever i go, it's just that before that decision's made that i will decide to love (i know i will), it's a toss up process.

and this, a levels, university, is just about the biggest thing in my life now. it's strange, to find myself trying so hard to muster up the will to study, thinking about the letters i owe and the people i'd like to catch up with, and then stopping myself from thinking about these things, because I Need To Study. i never realised i had this much focus in me (or maybe not, then, because i'm still not studying). i don't feel like myself right now, i'm afraid of getting so stressed out with studying that i forfeit the clarity of mind, which is exactly what i'm banking on for so many of my subjects, all but one, really. barnard calls it wit, perry calls it natural intelligence (and is convinced that if i don't start reading my mind is going to stagnate), but it's really a very tempermental thing with me, because i am a tempermental person. this is something i'm tempted to forget, about myself, it is easy, really, when my confidence and over-confidence in myself is being bolstered from so many directions.

2006-07-12T00:00:00.000+08:00

bruise li (: don't court this disaster says:
placebo (:
my japanese is better says:
hurhurhur
my japanese is better says:
why liyan i do think you might be my soulmate
bruise li (: don't court this disaster says:
HAHAHA, but a friend with weed is better... than a soulmate

it would take a placebo fan to understand this. woohoo :)

2006-07-09T00:02:00.000+08:00

arrest

i hate being made to say things, small talk. i realise it's a very big part of being a social unit etc, but i really do hate it. like seeing someone at the bus stop who you know only slightly, and whom you know takes the same bus as you. it's really tiring, to sit around and smile, and be less than honest.

today i arrested theodore in conversation, for five minutes, and forced him to say something honest to me. and i thought about that one day during church camp when i was all wired up and caffeintated and started asking him weird cryptic question after question, until he turned around and said stop making me think. and i said that if he wasn't the kind to think, no amount of effort on my part would have been able to make him to, and he agreed with me. so, so that was fun, when i'm just so absolutely certain (why?) that there's something in that head, that would understand.

my room smells like my shower, clean and shampooed. i want to lie on my bed listening to simon and garfunkel and thinking about how tired i am right now. i'm tired beyond the point of wanting to sleep, but i'm sure that will come, give me five minutes, just lying there. simon and garfunkel is one of my favourite kinds of mellow music. i. i really need this moment right now, because being sociable like i have been today, in big groups, is really. really tiring and i need to collect back the pieces of myself that have been leased out, bit by bit, in every casuall ypassed conversation.

i want to play chess tomorrow.

2006-07-08T03:44:00.000+08:00

why i am __________

i haven't been deprived of people to talk to, lately. even though i expect that much once i start studying. well once i start studying and really get into it i'm astoundingly focused; i just don't know how long i can keep this up for. studying for prelims in sec 4 just about knocked me out so that i couldn't bring myself to pick up my studies again for the o's. yesterday barnard said to me it's a relatively short period in your life, and i keep thinking about that, and trying to look beyond, which isn't difficult, really, because looking beyond involves possibly university life overseas and at very least an 8 month holiday.

it really did surprise me how much i enjoyed talking to barnard, yesterday. i'm astounded by the faith he has in my intelligence, not because (in the true spirit of cockiness) i doubt my own intelligence, but because i don't think i have ever done anything at all intelligent, in his class. rebellious, challenging, subversive, unrepentent, oblivious, maybe. it's alarming to think that he notices that i drift off, and et cetera, i wonder if he knows that i am doodling on my laptop, while he waxes lyrical about the great depression. a long time ago i was interested but now i think i am just fed up, disillusioned, with how badly i am doing in this subject. i don't know whether my failing blocks is an indication of my own hopelessness with the subject or simply an indication of the fact that i did not open my textbook even once for block tests. but. but barnard seems to believe i can do this, (if i put in some work, which he keeps saying, gesturing at the books on the table, along with other things like with you it's a pure discipline problem and i know you can do it, it's just a matter of whether you will. which is actually. a pretty good assessment of my entire situation, i think.) and because he seems so sure of my intelligence, which reinforces my own faith in my own intelligence, it removes a lot of the psychological barrier that i have been having towards econs. that and the fact that he gave me list of a level textbooks i can look into, in my refusal to plow through sloman because it's just got so much extra shit inside that i'm not willing to spend my time on (opportunity cost, my darlings), i actually really, really do think i can do it, now. today i sat in starbucks with xinyi and a cup of coffee and i covered half of national income accounting and i really think i understand this now. when previously just looking at it (granted, now i'm looking at a strictly a level textbook, instead of a mass of information out of which i'm supposed to pick out what is really crucial to the exam taking) induced these suffocating waves of restlessness or lethargy. and i think i'm really going to start studying now, because of barnard, because he seems to believe so much in me (not in the personal way but in a very deadpan, factual, you've got the personality but if you don't have the grades- i'm not going to rank you but if you do well enough for prelims for us to predict 4A's then you've got a shot at scholarships sort of way), and i want to prove him absolutely right. i want to prove that i can get a C by prelims, an A by the A's. is it standard procedure to predict an A for someone who gets a C for prelims? if it is: are the prelims going to be that devastating, and if it is not, does he really think i am that capable? cheesey inspirational-ness doesn't quite fit barnard, but i think it is what is getting me to study.

and he's convinced i like my rebel reputation, which i don't really know how to take, i don't think i have much of a rebel reputation, anymore. i don't think i'm much of a rebel anymore, really. well i actually know some people who would disagree with me: perry, the people who set the 16-pf test, various schoolmates. sigh. but really i think that's only because they have not seen what i used to be, and anyway they see a certain side of me, when i'm under certain conditions that i really just refuse to obey. i can't mindlessly obey rules, especially when i know there's an easier way out. in church God comes into the picture, and even then sometimes i find it ever difficult to swallow myself and obey. in nanyang i forced myself to tone down as a strategy of avoiding trouble, for the same reasons i've learnt to placate authority (even my mom, in a lesser way), because really it doesn't make sense to mess with someone who's got a bigger stick than you. what eventually broke me surprised me: i remember sitting in that room with ms lee and the gep counsellor after getting into all that shit and ms lee asking how do you think your parents feel and i thought about ms dee coming into class so furious that i had gotten into so much shit when she was the only one of all my teachers who had anything at all good to say about me and i thought about ma especially and how upset it got her when michael got into his own shit in primary school. and i remember before that moment they had never gotten me to cry or show a sign of repentence, which was what they were looking for, after all those hours upon hours of interrogation: why did you do it how did you think she felt don't you see anything wrong with what you did. the minute i broke they proclaimed me sensible, left me alone (enough to even not get involved when i got into trouble again later on. geez.). looking back now i can see how that was really all they wanted, and how, it amazes me. i'm amoral by nature, by inclination, or i was, very much so. i can still talk about what i did casually now, because she was never much of a real person to me, (except very briefly, in long emails that said sorry and it's okay and can we be friends and nothing more) it's only after i started getting pinned down to real people that i wanted to take it all back. because it wasn't worth it, it really isn't worth the people you hurt, in the process.

i think it's that much that stops me from being a rebel, anymore- i think to be callously rebellious like that you have to have a certain level of devil-may-care-ness, which i can't make a claim to anymore. there are people and things and principles i care about strongly now, there are times when i buckle down and submit for the most smallest of reasons. and i told him that in many ways i am your typical conservative Singaporean. i think fundamentally i can't pretend to myself that i am a rebel anymore, and so i can't even begin to put forth to other people or be proud of having a rebel image - i really do think that the minute you scratch below the surface i'm very little of a rebel at all. and i'm so much less rebellious than what i used to be that to me this surely cannot count as being rebellious. subversive maybe, like in my automatically taking the opposite stance to any argument being put forward by anyone. but i really really really have toned down. to borrow marvin's words, i think once i get some sort of indication that the other party is making some attempt to understand me, i can gracefully put away my claws, or just agree to disagree. i don't think i have been beaten or bought into submission, i think my subversivenes has subverted itself: any main philosophy must have the holes in it poked out and exposed, including that philosophy as well. and even after arguing myself into a hole, you throw in things like believing (and i don't just mean God), you sit down shut up and listen to what people say to you, and you realise that there is some truth, somewhere, people have their reasons right or wrong for believing certain things, so they should at least be given that first chance. and then furthermore start to see that people are people instead of ideas, that people are more than a collection of vices and virtues. i think the softie in me that michael pointed out in my six year old self has survived much active repression from my conscious self, over at least ten years since.

i think i really have changed a lot, in my soft-ness. i think my previous self would sneer at the me i am now, but the difference is that now i am happy, then i was not. i really am happy now, talking to people makes me happy. over the past week i've talked to various people for hours on end each and there is really little else that makes me happy like this. joel was talking about going out today with daryl to buy pa equipment, and i really like doing things like that. even when they're to do with something that i know next to nothing about; i just like the hanging out with people i love. i bummed around all last sunday afternoon with sebbie, talking, not talking, people watching, and i think i realised a lot of things about sebbie. talked to marvin on tuesday, and i think i realised a lot of things about myself. and about him, of course. but the realising things about myself surprises me because they are things that i realise just as i am saying them, and they make the most perfect of sense. talked to xinyi last now after another gorgeous nightmare of a dance lesson, and came to the conclusion that it's liberating, Not Liking People; before getting kicked out of carls junior and onto the streets. these have been major high points of my week, people. and i really am grateful for that much.

by the way, i'm irritated at having to play for main service again this sunday. or not irritated, my heart is not right, and i am such an incompetent pianist because this is a style i can't play at all. i think i'm going to need someone to vent this to, later today, before it builds up into a bitterness, i don't want to have bitterness with piano. joel tried to placate me but somehow it just gets me more and more irritated, and how there's this politics with everything, and why can't we all just get along harharhar, this. this is a stupid, and i wonder, if i am secretly competent, at the end of the day, with this being just another discipline issue. but i really don't think so, i think i've heard myself and geez, the standards should be so, so much higher. i'm not enjoying this at all, but some part of me keeps thinking that's what service includes, so grit your teeth and swallow it, we're all in this together.

goodnight.

2006-07-05T21:43:00.000+08:00

i want to go to the national library again, actually. i'm missing the south east asian reference section, the cavernous hall and the carpet, the gorgeous view, the quietness. i told charles about my happy relationship with the elevator, and just thinking about it makes me very happy.

there was an adorable toddler sitting next to me on the bus, with this happy grandaddy who talked to me about my studying arts instead of science, in chinese, and in this happy grandaddy kind of way.

talked to lizzie for five minutes in the canteen today. it's been a long long long time and i wonder how everyone is doing. there are quite a lot of people i want to talk to again, lucidly, find out How You Are Doing, what kind of person you've become. people can be so different, really, in those conversations, and it really does intrigue me: so which is the more real, the person you are on the streets, or this talking, talking, give space and time and the attention of another human being, to think about things.

i should be studying.

2006-07-05T00:35:00.000+08:00

talked to marvin over dinner, and even though it gets me worried that i am slowly forgetting that there are ten weeks to prelims, i had fun. the plan is for me to Really Start Studying now, so tonight was the last Thing That Felt Like A Holiday, and i need to take hold of things with both hands. and get the rest of my life sorted.

i don't have a strategy to combat my overthinking. offer one, please? good movies, good media, i am afraid that studying will leave me on a nervous edge. i know now how badly i can mess things up, by the endless revisions in my mind, by the wanting, and the hopeful force-fitting of evidence, and the hypersensitivity of being insecure. i tried to Not Think on the long bus ride home, staring out at empty streets, and i really did find it difficult. i'm starting to see i might have reason to be afraid to be left alone with my own thoughts, no one to validate my reality, and tell me when i am starting to go insane or even simply unreasonable. when marvin asked me about my issues last now i couldn't think of anything, going to that compartment of information in my mind it just looked like this large lump of inscrutable mess. but i suppose at the end of the day there is this one perrenial thing: the way i get so screwed up, sometimes. i'm fine right now right now, i've been happy, lucid, tonight, the last few days, but somehow i think i expect more sadness and frustration and restlessness than happiness, out of my days, i expect that the sadness or melancholy is my fundamental state. and these carefree little moments of genuine laughter and coherent sentences are one heck of a bonus.

i don't know whether i'm really as big a basket case as i think i am. thinking about what grace said to me that once, probably not. but those moments of hysteria terrify me, and feel real like nothing else does, sometimes; i don't know what to do, from the inside of them. and honestly i'm afraid of someday being stuck in that box and never being able to come out. but maybe this negativity that i feel about myself and the inevitability of my crashing is just another self-fulfilling prophecy. so, don't think about it?

i think we both live in the misunderstandings we have of each other. all this strongly believing, i think we both want too badly to believe in our own intelligence, well who wouldn't, really? and well i do believe in mine, but not fully, does that mean i don't believe in it, at all? this and other things, they're complicated issues that stand between us, and i don't think we'd be able to get them sorted till we have the time to sit down face to face and trash things out. and even then, maybe not, because there is so much that needs to be put in: honesty with self, honesty with each other, admissions of frailty - these are just things that i would need, let alone you. i have the strangest feeling that fundamentally we won't understand each other, because the values may not intersect, because things said may not be things heard for what they are rather than what they represent, because a lot of the most grusome misunderstanding is that which goes unnoticed, and because of a fundamental not being able to see why the other person believes a certain thing. there are so many things, after all, that determine how a person might think. so let's have that conversation someday, realistically speaking not very soon, but til then we can always mutually agree to a sort of peaceful coexistance.

2006-07-04T01:48:00.000+08:00

please be yourself

i can feel what our separate school lives have done to our relationshps, somewhat: what are we to each other? this time we spend together, doing nothing in particular (though we might pretend to, like the way we pretend to study), i'm really really glad for it. everytime we come together again from the rest of our lives, it feels like we have to redo the orientation bit, at least some of it. i wish we had more free time to sit around and talk about everything, and nothing, and to play soccer and guitar and all the games of chess in the world.

this has been a pretty good day, a pretty good weekend. i played chess today, down the a boardfull of kings and pawns, then down again to the doubledate of mine and andrew's kings and queens tangoing all over the board. i like chess, does anyone want to play chess with me? i really do like the challenge. we played soccer too, and i bounced distractingly around, and tried to be competent, and scored our first goal in a moment of sheer taikoness.

and i cycled, and soaked in the overwhelming gorgeousness of the sky, and sat on the windowsill of the rooftop garden for two hours, and talked honestly for more than five minutes, with chenghui. and spent 2 hours in the sanctuary talking to God, and acknowledging that He is not a very big part of my life and consideration, right now. yesterday the weather was gorgeous, and i sat at the back of ding's car with joanne wearing one of his grandma's hats, and read, and wrote for the first time in a long while, and admired the gorgeous day. it really was one of the most gorgeous days i've had, lately, lately being the last week, at least.

i'm not actually bimbotic, in my concerns, at the end of the day. i don't say bimbotic as a bad thing, i just don't have another word. but i've realised: it's tiring to try and be that sort of person, socially, for very long. i can't really make that happy sociable noise for very long, unless i am already close to whoever i am making it with, a lot of the time i'm the most happy when i'm being quiet. i let myself be myself, for a while, my challenging, endlessly annoying, cryptic self, which i am sometimes. i haven't done this to someone for quite some time, but i did it to chenghui today, spun an eloquent yarn. and the fact that he still offered me company for dinner means that it didn't weird him out too severely.

i've been thinking too much again. i really can't help it, my mind just picks a path and goes all the way down it. or as far down as i can, which isn't always helpful. i think i should read more so that i don't have all this spare consciousness, on my hands.

and the wanting, i realise, is not always useful, what the desire does to you. some times you want things that it doesn't really make sense to want, you want something just because you want it, and once you get it, you have no idea what it's supposed to mean, what you're supposed to do with it. like wanting shoes that don't fit. and then sometimes you just want an actor to put on that costume that's waiting backstage, and emerge from the wings with the right lines at the right times. anyone will do, really, in the daydream, no wonder reality disappoints us.

and i really do want to be close to people, at least one person. i don't necessarily mean that in the bgr sense, it's just the having someone else to understand, to be there. i'm coming to terms with my neediness, not the violent neediness of me being upset, but just the wanting, liking, appreciating having people around.

but at the end of the day it's just you, really, in your own head. you're solitary, floating in the world, even if you have a healthy circle of friends etc etc etc. there are some things, sometimes just this inpalpable feeling, that are just so completely personal that they cannot be shared with another human being. i'm slowly learning again that no matter how much empathy you pump into something, there is a point beyond which, people suffocate. you'd think i'd understand all about needing space, and i do, me and my independence and et cetera, it's just that every once in a while this wave of insecurity blindsides me, and instead of stepping back to consider things calmly you cling on to whatever you have in a fit of manic desperation.

and i had a lot of thoughts in my head, last now, that i'd wanted to pin down and secure, for clarity, but now they are gone.

2006-07-03T01:01:00.000+08:00

for five minutes

you should know: the words only make you feel better, they don't make it okay. the words are cheap i know, oh how i've spent them, oh how i spend them, still. but at the end of the day step back and be honest with yourself, step back acknowledge your own hypocriscy, your own fallibility, your own humane-ness. step back and honestly admit at least to yourself that you might, there is a possibility that you might, have gotten every last assumption you've made about your life and what is true/important/whatever completely wrong.

no one is going to go down on one knee and beg you, it really is your life. i mean that kindly, actually, even though it doesn't seem so, because at the end of the day you are a friend and i really do want the best for you, i really do want to be there for you, like i am sure you'd be there for me. and of course it's not easy, don't be silly, i would say the same to you, were we standing in each other's shoes. you're allowed the temper tantrums, the whining fits, the panic attacks, and i really do think that's what friends are for, sometimes, just to understand, just to hear you out. but something sarabelle said to me once, that has really stuck in my head, is i think it's pointless to get upset about it if you're not going to do anything about it. well i believe there is a lapse time, actually, of self pity, that a person can reasonably be allowed, to vent and et cetera, but it is a slippery slope, and really, eventually, pick yourself up already. there comes a point beyond which the indulgence doesn't get you anywhere, in fact, it only drags you down, all the while feeling ever good (while masquerading as ever bad), all the while you're trying to defend its existance. some things are complex, i know, most things, in fact; but a lot of things also aren't. and with a lot of complicated things sometimes too there is a mindblowingly simple answer, or something completely unexpected, and no one can find that for you, though people can be there for you to bounce your ideas off, to nudge you in helpful directions. to empathise. and while it's certainly more poetic to be in pain, it's a choice you make, and a difficult choice to make, a difficult situation in which to not sell out, all the things you believe in. so once you've made that choice please remember that once, for maybe the briefest moment, on at least a half conscious level, you had a choice, and you made it. and that you are faced with the choice of whether or not to prolong the daydream, everytime you look at it again from the reality's outside. please know, life's a bitch for everyone, in the different ways, no matter how picture perfect they may seem on the outside (and i find this really difficult to believe, sometimes). and while the cyclic thinking, the confusion, the complaining etc really don't bother me (not really- during those times i tell myself i need to better understand or just be more patient), the fact that your unhappiness with yourself fuels only a long rant and nothing else that's more helpful/productive/corrective, worries me. because there are ways to heal, and they don't include the stabbing of the self, over and over, the opening and complicating and mutilating of what was there originally, and what was never there at all. and i'm sad, for you, because i have been in that bear pit of hysteria, of self-pity, of well plain angst, really, and the shit that it feels like, i don't like it there, i don't want you to be there, either. especially when, from the inside, it certainly does look mighty like the rest of the world is strange, irrelevant, or too far away a thing to aspire for.

and sometimes i think there's no way to force clarity, really, when it doesn't want to come. there are some things it probably isn't helpful to do though, things that drag you deeper, things that attempt to distil out that nugget of pain.

it's not eating me anymore. but, for the right reasons? because i have let go or because i am not in the position for it to be eating me, anymore, at least, i think so, feel so? while, i hope, some good part inside me does hope, it is not eating you. because it's a shitty feeling i know, i am all too painfully aware.

so i don't think i've let go. sigh.

2006-06-30T00:50:00.000+08:00

i actually had something to say, but no time to say it. i'm looking forward to weekend because it is free, i am free. ella will read a great lot of margaret atwood, carol ann duffy.

am i quiet. this nervousness excites all this random laughter, talking, talking. stupid things throw me off balance, i would like to say: i am not myself. would you want me when i'm not myself? when at the end of the day, i'm hardly ever myself, anyway, and myself is this random girl with whom i am hardly acquainted. grab hold of it, ella, with two hands, grab hold and don't let go, because so much depends on it, all your security. that's really stupid, sometimes, because it is the willingness to let go that makes me feel ever my most free.

uncle ho says:
do you happen to have a white and lavender dress you could lend me daryl?
Daryl Yap says:
I have a couple of pairs of male briefs on coat hangers that I am more than willing to lend you.

i miss talking to sebbie. ~~run away, ella, into what you don't really have, anyway.~~

goodnight.

2006-06-26T23:02:00.000+08:00

koc's cayman islands

so i was thinking, i haven't felt this way for quite a long time. there's something about that moment that resonated with me, ever clearly, ever fondly, and i miss it, or do i. i know that there are things inside of me that i am not fully aware of, and this latest roll of stability has also put me a little bit further from that part of me that aches, in this way, for something, something specific. something dreams, inside of me, the same something that gets me so incredibly happy at the sight of gorgeous blue skies. i haven't felt things so clearly for a long time, it's like a new realisation, a re-realisation of something that has been there, all the while.

so i don't know which comes first, the specific distraction or the fact that i don't want to concentrate on my studies, on a subconscious level. but whatever it is, was, here you are, stuck in my mind.

2006-06-26T00:21:00.000+08:00

stewpid

psycho bananaman says:
sweat dreams til sunbeams find you
psycho bananaman says:
hey wait!
psycho bananaman says:
SWEETE :D
SUPERKID! says:
sweete?
psycho bananaman says:
well
psycho bananaman says:
better than sweat

so fly, lullaby says:
i spent like half an hour embarassing myself trying to insist to some other sean on my msn list that he was you pretending not to be you in order to bullshit me
so fly, lullaby says:
and he was like
so fly, lullaby says:
"run along now"

and no, my history essay is not done yet. woohoo.

2006-06-25T22:00:00.000+08:00

one more thing i want to take back: it's just your nature, you're just like that.

so i'm not mopeing anymore, or i will try not to. i think the mopeing is something inside, an antisocial blueness to the way you look at the world, and not really about what it looks like. although, really, who could tell the difference, from the outside. i still like playing the piano, i still like wandering off, i still like sitting and watching people go about things, but i'm not really antisocial about it, or i haven't been, these last few days.

I've been gone so long. says:
the world can't take two ellas
I've been gone so long. says:
one is enough to confuse me
I've been gone so long. says:
:)

so thank you, thank you so so much, for honesty. you have no idea how much it means to me. when most of the time all this talking that goes on between people isn't really saying anything. i'm a heart-to-heart junkie, sometimes, but it's not that you give me a kick that i could get just anywhere, from anyone- your willingness to be honest has made you important to me. aw, how cheesey.

daryl played his fancypants guitar for us again today. i'm aching for the day when i can just drop my studies and do stuff i really want to do. my grand-piano-studio-apartment daydream is making me really happy.

and i really want to reply my letters. to kinyip, to marcus, to christl, to shumay, to joel. i'm real sorry, for how little time i have, to put into relationships. and this is me fresh out of holidays, this is me gearing up for a 5 month long mug camp. i really do need to Get My Life In Order, particularly my academic life, i'm clinging onto this hope that starting after june is not too late. today kinyip said to me, don't let expectation weigh you down and i started crying. it's not just your expectation, the expectation you have of me: it's my expectation. it's my expectation of myself, it's my expectation of your expectation, parents teachers peers, because i have some sort of a reputation for being smart, because i have some sort of track record for fluking out where exams is concerned. it's made me massively overconfident, and ambitious, oh help. i'm so afraid of school and what it might do to me, the grade grubbing, the lack of sleep. today three different people asked me if i hadn't slept, so i think ella should sleep or go zen, for about a week. this is probably a bad week.

so thank you, everyone's who's been nice to me today. to joel and christl and charles and kinyip and vanissa and marcus, who just called me to wish me good luck for blocks. i feel some awful corny right now, but ella is happy and happy will be as corny as she likes.

2006-06-24T22:43:00.000+08:00

i think distrust is a very big part of our interaction with each other, interaction with the general society, the average person outside your comfort zone. i wish singaporeans, or people, were by nature considerate, then all this bitching and suspicion wouldn't even have to come into the picture. i think about lois and how she once came armed with tissues to play the sanctuary piano, and if i were her i might cringe at me, this amateur of a piano player, not because of the skill of the musician but the ability of the musician to take care of the instrument. sometimes when i'm sitting up in the clubhouse and i hear someone banging on the sanctuary piano i'm feel uneasy inside, for what it might be doing to the piano. i don't know enough about the instrument itself to be able to tell, don't even know enough to know what damage i myself might be doing, but the piano, that particular piano, is important to me, and i worry, the way it would be expected for a parent to worry about a child with whom she does not communicate, and therefore is at liberty to imagine the worst, about. today when i was almost disallowed from playing the gardens sanctuary piano, i started thinking about how, really, you have every reason to distrust me, since you don't know who i am (not really), don't know if i am a competent pianist, or even just simply one who respects the piano. and so i feel sorry, half sorry, inconsiderate, for stepping out of line, as it were, for being determined as i am, to play. i wish i could tell you that i am on your side and that i care for it as much as you do, don't worry. if i were you, i wouldn't trust me neither.

or am i getting carried away says:
i want grand piano
or am i getting carried away says:
was telling rachel last now that i wanna buy one some day
or am i getting carried away says:
she was saying get a white one
or am i getting carried away says:
or a transparent one
or am i getting carried away says:
but i think i'd just get a black one leh
Joel says:
HAHAH
Joel says:
get pure wood colours
or am i getting carried away says:
the gardens grand in sanc 2 is wood colour
or am i getting carried away says:
but i didnt like it cos of the sound
or am i getting carried away says:
i want like
or am i getting carried away says:
this wooden room
or am i getting carried away says:
wooden panels on the floor
or am i getting carried away says:
with like windows
or am i getting carried away says:
biiiiiiggg windows
or am i getting carried away says:
that can see the sky
Joel says:
haha
or am i getting carried away says:
and i'll line one wall with mirrors
or am i getting carried away says:
and i'll put the piano right in the middle
or am i getting carried away says:
and it'll be on wheels
or am i getting carried away says:
so that if i want to use it as a dance studio i can
Joel says:
how about a clear glass ceiling ?
or am i getting carried away says:
OOOOOH clear glass ceiling
or am i getting carried away says:
niiiice
Joel says:
:D

i know one thing i want now! in my mind there's this like studio apartment top floor of a very tall building, with no pesky neighbours downstairs who will complain if i play at 2am. next year i will learn to play more instruments, i really do want to. and find a good lyrical jazz class, or jazz ballet. i think everyone should dance, really. however shit you look, however shit you think you look, it feels really good.

i carried uncle lawrence's baby today. well actually, i held her chubby padded hand, or she held onto mine, and frowned, and drooled, and squirmed and shook her head and stared off into the distance. doesn't sound very cute at all but she was, and when grace plonked her onto my lap i kinda didn't know what to do. but a happy kind of lost, a happy kind of oh help, until she started grappling and was whisked off into daddy's arms. where it must feel so awfully safe, familiar, home again.

i can feel myself having grown up just that much, like leveling up in a computer game. i see the difference in my self when fong says things that would have applied a short while (or long while, sometimes) ago, but that now do not. and i like that i am growing up, seeing things more clearly. i don't feel the need to dissect everything anymore, to think so fervently about everything. i don't want to swing to another extreme either, so maybe. maybe i should hustle while waiting for things to occur to me.

or am i getting carried away says:
what's your full name?
Irgendwann fällt jede mauer says:
yap hand some sebastian

today kinyip said to me, your blocks are in two days. i haven't woken up yet, it seems, even though we semi-panicked that day, about there being about ten weeks left to prelims. i haven't started studying for econs, or lit, or history, but i have done two chapters of math. of course i am prepared to screw blocks, to come this far, to be sitting here and breathing normally while thinking that much, two days before exam week, a girl has got to be okay with screwing blocks. i just hope i can really really really get down to studying after that.

(by the way: hello, you, the breathing space has done us good, i think. i'm really glad, that i can think straight, be a normal person where you are concerned, now. i've unloaded myself elsewhere, and now, i'm a little bit closer to knowing what i want.)

i try to breathe, thinking about (other) you. sometimes literally. i place myself an arms length away from my obsession, and tell myself that you are a human being, i am a human being. so sometimes the songs get to me, the ones that mouth the words i would say to you, or suspect you might say to me. and sometimes the loneliness gets to me, sometimes the insecurities get to me, sometimes i think about ________ and it is a struggle to keep myself feeling okay at the end of the day. well all said and done and talked out of, don't be silly, of course it hurts. but i'm ever set free by the notion that whatever happens happens, and whatever happens or doesn't, i will get over. that really, at the end of it all, this isn't the end of the story, this isn't my entire life, all my emotions, hinged on, this really isn't that big a deal at all. i like the knowing that i don't want to, have to, work so hard.

2006-06-24T00:16:00.000+08:00

there's only one thing i actually really really want, right now: i want to talk to you. to really talk to you, as opposed to, oh well, you know. you know what i mean.

actually, that's overly dramatic and a little further from the truth than this: you wouldn't make me perfectly happy now. there are a lot of things i want, actually, or want is strong: there are a lot of thing i'd like. i'd like to play some piano, i'd like to sit around looking at the sky (again). i'd like to dance (lyrical, not street). i'd like to sleep. but the difference between want and i'd like that is that with i'd like that, i'm perfectly complete without you. and that is true, of me: i am complete without you.

i'd also like home cooked food. i haven't seen home cooked food in weeks, literally. today i walked into the food court and really didn't want to eat anything at all. i haven't derived enjoyment from food, lately. ma bought xinyi, fong and me lunch at crystal jade today and it's the best thing i've eaten in at least three weeks. i'm talking to kwanie about these chinese soups boiled all day and i'm feeling mighty hungry, right now.

running for the bus last now, i yelled out what's the meaning of life! somewhere in between run, forrest, run! and something else. hohoho, because that was fun, and i think i am stressed, because i have been high, nervous, theatrical, gurgling with the silliest kind of mirth.

things about today that made me happy
-talking to grace in the sanctuary today. her conclusion that i am human, i wasn't aware that my blog-self didn't sound human. maybe this is just what human is like for me, periods of time being stuck in some box. i am stable right now. everyday i say it and everyday i really am thankful, because in exact same circumstances i might not be, and at least right now, i'm acutely aware of that.
-talking with xinyi up on the roof. and kinyip, later, all that rubbish, watching lightning flash all over the sky. the laughter gets to me, the laughter is really just what i need.
-making ma happy by bringing my friends out to have lunch with her.

and i realise something said about comfort zone. more and more i'm comfortable hanging out with the people i've been with in the last few days: terence, fong, xinyi, marcus, joel, christl, job, charles, justin. so slide in and slide out, the little world marked out by the roof garden walls. sweet dreams til sunbeams find you.

2006-06-23T00:06:00.000+08:00

(semi-) clarity 2)

i've been overthinking. to some extent i don't even think i can stop it. but i'm glad that this time the overthinking hasn't gotten me all angsty again. i'm still feeling fine and really grateful for that much. even after realising that i've been complicating things, i think i'm quite prepared to step back and not get all uptight about it. because this is life and i am living it and i am a human being and i am going to make my stupid mistakes and say and do all my stupid things all the time. and my friends, the friends who are really my friends, are those who are going to accept that and love me anyway, for the strange reasons that they have. and vice versa, i need to stop pointing this accusatory finger all over the place. i'm so sorry, for my stupid mouth, so much of the time i think about things i've said ten minutes ago and i want to take it all back.

here's a few things i'd like to take back
1) your brother is so very un-male
2) "worse" that that
3) no but it's true
4) always like that
5) geez could you be any less irritating?

sometimes it's the little things i know: the things that leak into my conversation, the words i use and regret, the ones that slip out, reveal an unconscoius bias i didn't think i had. i'm sorry, for being unthinking, i couldn't count the toes i've stepped on, as a result of being so damn i-don't-know-what. and the friendships i've damaged. but the friends i've discovered, as a result, the ones who have taken my shit and are still somehow here. superstars, all of you, i wish i'd give you the credit you really deserve.

so i want to stop overthinking. i've got my head in the clouds, my feet off the ground. and that messes me up because the overthinking never seems to lead anywhere, and also because back on earth, things have been happening in my life that i have been neglecting, and will some day have to pay the price for. today was so thoroughly enjoyable, playing piano for an hour, sitting out underneath the sky, talking, dancing, singing (literally - all those things, we did them. it felt like an endless picnic, carefree, gorgeous). i really could wile away my entire holiday in this heartfelt laughter, this feel-good, this gorgeous company. you are, by the way. gorgeous company.

marvin said something about how i'm perpetually mopeing that day that really cheesed me off. but at the end of the day i suppose if i'm honest with myself, my reaction would be much different.

and i need to listen to more happy songs. it's like self-medication, it's like, hello sunshine, come into my life

i think i've been learning lessons everyday, it's just that i'm so overwhelmed by them that i can't hold on to them for more than 24 hours. i really do need to learn to be more sensitive, but really, all i want right now is a good night's sleep. not to mention the mountains of work that i have, as well, the four thousand word essay that will not write itself. never mind my making the decision to really seriously study 3 days before blocks, never mind the shell shocked but surely fading panic attack about prelims being in about ten weeks. i'm torn, i can't multi-task, and i don't know what to do.

and i'm also sorry, for being so very very selfish. it's all about me, is it not, it's all about how you may pander to my needs. it's all been me not caring about your life, not caring about your feelings, not caring about the fact that you're a human being. sigh. i wish i could tear down the illusions i have about myself, and be more honest.

i'm afraid i won't be able to keep stable throughout this long and arduous months of studying. will you talk to me, will you keep me safe? will you vanquish the voices in my head for me, will you fill my head with sanity, will you be my guiding star? i very much know that i am not in this alone, but somehow i'm not sure if it will be enough. though i know it will help, you, you and you and you and you and everyone who i've been studying with, i really do need you guys around, i really do need to know that we're in this together. that we can panic and be sea anemones together, that we can beat off distraction together, stress and scream and do cartwheels together. so what now, when school starts, where do we go? you know something: i really don't want to be alone. i don't trust myself to be stable if i'm left to my own defences. desperately needy, i am, for all the independent i seem to be. i need you to reach out your hand and hold me, keep me from drowning in the black hole that is my own mind.

and my mom is funky, i'll admit that. i don't know what it's like to have seemingly or actually unreasonable parents.

and i do think that i'm very strange. sigh, oh well, i don't really know. i have my whole life to think about it.

2006-06-22T01:08:00.000+08:00

today

1) little miss foot in mouth. me i mean. i wish i could stop saying things that hurt people's feelings. my Way With Words, i think i have abused it.
2) i have this thing about control, why is that. me, and the relationships that i have with people. i am ever so sorry, not really. sorry for being like this, perhaps, but not sorry for doing things the way i do. because some part of me knows i might never stop.
3) i'm fighting to be where i should be. why am i always fighting? like geez, what am i fighting against?
4) i've been beyond reproach. when fong and terence were trying to scold me last now i couldn't help but fight against it. when i think sometimes i really shouldn't. when i think sometimes it would do me good to have the pride peeled off and away.
5) i'm hardly honest. it's not a malice thing, it's a pride thing, because i'm hardly honest to myself, either. all this strength that i seem so determined to have. when say the right words, i melt into a puddle of goo on the floor. but i liked the softness, i like being vulnerable, and having people be vulnerable to you. it was like a secret shared, away from the rest of the unfeeling world. i think i have in the last few months become that unfeeling world, and. and i really don't like that change.

but i laughed myself insane in the last few hours. terence is one of the funniest people i know. and he is right, we should meet up, drink cofee, talk, often. because we are old enough. and i thought about how i used to do that, social eating, a lot more often than i do right now, and how i have missed it. having someone across the table to understand, both in terms of understanding, and being understood.

2006-06-21T01:10:00.000+08:00

stable

i feel so very very stable, considering___________. i played piano and some soccer today, and missed again what i have been missing, all this while. so we pottered around and laughed a lot, took a 3 hour lunch break, sat around watching the rain and playing the guitar. and, somewhere in between all that, got some work done. this is a holiday, really, don't tell me otherwise. i can't believe this is the last week already, really what i want is this, these last two days, this week multiplied by four.

fong is downstairs, anticipating a violent stomachache. ma says, akan datang, what's this. never heard of people anticipating this kind of thing before. we watched michael jackson videos again, me and fong, fong who is not a function but a human being. and there's so much more to being a person that what you can achieve.

i like carol ann duffy's poems, muchly. lit gives me so much enjoyment, studying for it. i'm glad that at least one of my subjects (or two, actually) engages me to such an extent.

grace said that day that this blog self is very different from the person i am in real life. it makes me think about myself, actually, and how honest i am with myself, how honest i am capable of being, with myself. i don't know, really, because a lot of the time the me on the streets feels uncomfortable, and yet a lot of the time the me in words, here, is under some sort of emotional pressure or pretence. i'd love to talk about it, but not to myself, because that would be a conversation in which nothing could ever be figured out.

and okay, i do have self-discipline, at least some. grace says i might be too hard on myself, grace says. i like knowing what other people have to say, it is a point of interest.

and i'm still charmed by what selena said that day: you're so real you might as well materialize.

i keep forgetting that i'm eighteen. when people ask my age there's always that lapse, or a hurried answer that i don't even realise is wrong. eighteen is one large step closer to adulthood, and i don't really feel like i have taken it. i've lingered behind in a world without consequence, happy, happy unthinking, unthinking about my future and how i must (i am told) seize it with both hands now now now. the a levels are not real to me now, even though i know they come, even though i know i will put myself through the slow and plodding process of studying, in the next few months. i don't want to stake my happiness, my worth, on this, anymore. i think i'm slowly starting to see clearly, the things that matter and the things that don't, to me.

and i love these uncomplicated friendships. i don't want to complicate my relationships anymore, any of them. i am trying so so so hard not to, to Not Think So Much. to not suck you into this black hole that is my mind.

so at least right now, i am stable.

2006-06-16T21:21:00.000+08:00

Standard Operating Procedure

1) put down/step back.
2) go away.
3) play some piano, breathe. look at the sky, do something unrelated. laugh.
4) talk to someone sane. trash out, think about why you feel this way, whether it stands or not. what you believe in, what you want to believe in.

and then after all that, you really do have to deal with it

2006-06-16T18:37:00.000+08:00

clarity 1

there is a lot i can and can't bring myself to believe, given the place, time, change of mind. you can spend weeks months years having the same thing said to you, or even saying it to yourself, without really realizing that that voice, those words, are directed at you or you too, and without really realizing what they mean, as a truth as well as to your life. and then one day you hear the words out loud, something about it snags you like a hook and things that maybe you've half realized all come tumbling out, clarity like freedom.

i feel sane today, clear, for the first time in 5 days, despite how i am aching to crawl into my bed and stay there for the next few hours. i don't know what about church camp made me feel so messed up, or maybe i already felt like that, when i went there. the return of the voices in my head, voices that might have been mine, but that i couldn't shut up or stop listening to. i don't want to hear you ever again, i. really do think i should find myself in frequent company, to keep myself sane.

things that people have said to me that i really do need to think about
1) taking a stand about the little things, the liberation of simplification, the necessity of the artificial barriers
2) just because someone has a reason for thinking/acting/being in a certain way, it doesn't make it right
3) respect, being capable and worthy of it
4) restraint, self control, and how i have none of it

i'm not having this major issue with the whole premarital sex thing, i've just been raising it because it is the more obvious example. but i really am thankful for the people who have bothered to talk things over with me, me and my amorality. i'm touched and thankful for charmaine, who really went out of her way in giving me a book about it, and i'm really thankful that there are older ones in yf, at least a few, who bother to listen and talk to me and give advice. my concerns have started to shift, and i really would like to chuck some very teen-age angst out the window, because more and more i feel like they are overstaying their visit, more and more i find that i don't really believe in the things that cause those problems, anymore. and the things i care about, the things i want and the way i want them, have changed, or need to change, so that i can grow, and stop feeling so very claustrophobic in my own skin.

i'm thankful, right now, for the friends that i have, in whatever capacity - i have a sneaking suspicion i don't lack love, despite how i feel that way so very much of the time. when liew said then maybe you should stay in Singapore, i heard it for the first time, and the idea that i might not be able to take the disjoint from all these things that keep me sane and grounded (emotionally and spiritually and etc) makes me consider it seriously for the first time. i'm not sure if my faith can survive university, i'm not sure if my sanity and stability can survive university or another country, i guess it's futile and a matter of pride, really, this trying to hold on to this belief that i might be able to make it, that i am strong enough, i really don't think i am strong at all.

i've sorta decided to be a nicer person. i've sorta decided to be a nicer person, which involves not being so completely self-centered, all the time. it's a difficult thing to abolish, really, this self-obsession, this i me mine.

i really do want honesty. i feel claustrophobic when i know that there is something else i have to be, something i have to choke back. i'm frustrated sometimes by how little honesty we all have to go around, and how guarded we seem to force ourselves to be. i'm realizing something i knew about myself a long long time ago, and that's that i'm very much a one-to-one person, that's where i really am the happiest. i haven't been a one-to-one person lately i think, i've just been strange and force-fed, and right now i do want to give in to empathy and the things that really are natural to me. (to me? to God in me? i think there are things about me that God can use, or inspire, or bring out. and that's His choice, and He knows me better than i know myself, anyway.)

and i really do need therapeutic things. i honestly think that if there had been a decent piano at the hotel that i might have had free access to, i really would not have 1) drank so much coffee 2) eaten so little, as i do when i'm upset 3) generally felt so very shitty, even while talking and laughing and doing other things. and i really do think i should go learn another more mobile instrument because if i do go overseas next year, i really don't think i am going to be able to survive without music, which is my most frequent fix right now. listening to music isn't really enough, when there's something on the inside that's just dying to get out of the building.

emotionally i'm just about drained dry. leading worship last night took a lot out of me, or it usually does, because i'm just so afraid of choking out words that i don't mean, because God can tell, even if no one else can, even if i myself can't. being messed up and alone and in company and caffeinated in the past week has exhausted me. but i'm thankful, somehow, unexpectedly, to stand where i stand now, i'm thankful for the thankfulness, which is not comes naturally to me. and i'm thankful for marcus, i'm thankful for sarah, i'm thankful for terence and julia being nice to me.

this post is dedicated to jeannette, who might or might not read this, who has borne patiently with me and my weirdness in a kind of lostness for the past five days. and to fong, who has borne patiently with me the past five years, through shit and un-shit, and who lobs chocolate and other assorted goodies at me everytime she doesn't know how she can cheer me up. muchos love :)

and to kevin who has this time gotten the brunt of my neediness.

2006-06-12T01:25:00.000+08:00

laundry day

i love the smell of clean laundry, just tumbled out of the washing machine after 40 litres of soap water, 6 rinses and 12 minutes of spinning. i spent about ten minutes hanging up that one load of laundry cos i couldn't resist the urge to stick my face into each piece and inhale deeply. it makes me so unreasonably happy.

doing housework is some incredibly therapeutic, with its mindlessness, with its easy-come sense of achievement. maybe i'm only saying this because i'm not really being forced to do all this, overtime, pushing my body to the limit of exhaustion, juggling a hundred other concerns and commitments at the same time. or because i am not like a house-wife who has to do it for a whole bunch of people and everyday. but it has a happy straightforwardness, everytime i start to think about the studying that i haven't done, the studying i am going to have to do, i come home and can believe that my biggest problems aren't my block tests or a levels or even the million and one issues that i have with myself. but instead, a load of harmless laundry, docile dishes waiting to be washed.

i'm cleaned up behind myself, i'm leaving everything in good shape, before going off for church camp. i like how simple my world is now, the hanging out with people who don't mean the entire world to me, the gorgeous rain and piano playing, all my holiday fixes. holiday means i get enough therapy to not hurt for it, holiday means space enough to breathe, to sit down and let go of myself. holiday means i can think about the major things, the things that matter, without their getting edged out by the urgent-unimportant. holiday means speed, so much speed that you don't have much time to think too much, if you don't want to, but holiday means slowness, slowness enough to listen to a song, to take a long bus-ride, to sit around and look at the sky. today the rain made me insanely happy, the rain and the company and the guitar playing in the background, and lunch, and five stolen minutes of a good song on the piano. and all the unaccounted silliness which i have missed.

God

(Friday, 9 June 2006)

i don't know how i feel. i have a taste of it, a taste of what i want to be, again, i have a vision and a purpose and a point to getting up everyday. but somewhere in the back of my mind i'm so endlessly jaded, and yet again i'm trying to fight it, i'm calling you satan, i'm acknowledging something i'm really quite afraid, to admit, for a couple of reasons.

some part of me still doesn't want to take up this identity of being a christian. because it looks silly, when i look at it with my secular eyes, because my secular self, amoral and a lot of other things, is very much the path of least resistance. the most natural thing for me to be. if there is no God, don't talk to me about being a nice person, really, it isn't something that i naturally am. and i've been trying to make christianity a part of me that is sheflable, trying to do this religion thing without letting it engulf my value systems, my life. is this something we all do, to some extent, in one way or another, i do think so. but i think some part of me has known all along what i have been doing, and i have been less than honest with myself because in classic fashion i have wanted to be in control, and i am not ready to give up this habit, this convenience, this crutch of being a christian. for social and emotional and all sorts of other reasons. and so i've played a hypocrite's card, and so i've done the whole if-i-ignore-it thing again, and wandered down an entirely different path of living and thinking and being, while setting up this cardboard cut-out of myself in my old place, so that as and when i want to come back to it, i can. who am i fooling, i don't think i am fooling God. i might be fooling everyone, though, certainly i've been swell at fooling myself. and now, really, i don't know where i stand. or rather, right now right now i do, but i'm just so unhopeful of fighting against time's ability to change my mind, about my ability to stay at this place of certainty for very long. hello, secular world, you are my entire life: the studies and the people and the ideas and the remedies to life's disease. i have bought into your philosophies. said philosophies, i don't think they're working for me, but somehow i always tell myself that that is my fault and that if i tried again, if i do it right, i might some day suceed in reaching happiness by that path. secular philosophy is incredibly frustrating but that doesn't mean that i can give them up, or want to, even. i think some part of me will still try to work things out in secular terms, without God in the picture, because reality to me just seems to include God less and less, because the secular world, everything that is not God, is really just so overwhelming. by sheer volume, by sheer seduction, by sheer sense, some times. hello world, how can i ignore you? to be in the world but not of the world looks to me some incredibly impossible, and the thought of that makes me want to throw in the towel and give up the fight. like i have done before, like i know we all do, at some point of time.

so what have i been doing, this past few _______, all i recall is feeling a lot of tiredness, a lot of pointlessness, a lot of loneliness. a lot of wanting to fly away, a lot of cynicism and little, if any, hope about anything at all, don't even talk about God or not God. i don't think i want to live like this, but some part of me just thinks that's life get used to it. is it naive of me to say no i refuse to, i refuse to get used to it? because what you accept you embrace and you aid in its coming true. but all the hope in the world won't change what reality is, or would it, would it? unfortunately i think i'm a cynic at heart.

____

(Sunday, 11 June 2006)
(in response to what i wrote on Friday. and other things)

but God is not a function, God is not an accessory, not a compartmentalizable part of the self, not even a part of the self, in the mind, God is not a tame God. and i, i would like to not have to wrestle my christian identity into an embrace. the whole let go, let God, it all sounds so cheesy, and that might be why i am finding it so difficult to admit and accept. which really doesn't at all mean that i can choose to run in the other direction, because that's called fear, and cowardice, and i am all those things but really, truth and what i am isn't going to change to fit what feels the most comfortable, or what is the best for my socio-emotional resume.

i know i write like God is not a part of my life, like my happiness right now might be reduced to holiday fixes, music and sunshine and the wreckless abandonment of my work, but it really isn't like that, at all. or it has not been, this time, and i would like fight this urge to take things into my own hands, all over again. my christian identity is something i need to come to terms with, because, i am in some ways ashamed to believe and i can't get around that. the relinquishing sovereignty over my life to God has been the most terrifying and liberating thing, and i don't want to be a hypocrite again, so i should at least admit firstly that i am a christian, (not just someone who goes to church and has all these christianish habits, but that i believe in God and Jesus Christ and the payment for my sins and eternal life), and secondly i should also admit that i am ashamed to be one, in some ways. i want to stop fighting myself, to stop oscillating between faith and the cynical so-called intelligent disbelief, i don't want to fight my christian identity anymore. there's a cynic in me that would like to jump around asserting things, but i think at the end of the day there is hope, there is purpose, there is the ultimate point, that speaks to me more than reason ever might. and saying all this just makes me realise that i feel this need to give reasons for why i believe, when really, i think my reasons go beyond words, or rather,t i don't need reasons. i find it difficult to explain because i am so reliably full of cynicism, sometimes, and for every arguement i can think of some other logical loophole, that has been missed. but stuff the logic, really, because it fails to cut it. God has done something with me and that's how i know He is real. and yet the rejection of that value system has been impossibly difficult, at times i'm so full of Rational Explanations for the things that have taken place, when at the end of the day it just leaves me feeling so very empty. like i am not the person that i am, not the person that something inside tells me i am, but rather a faceless something that is not a person that the rest of the world, conventional wisdom, worldly yardsticks and the media, tells me that i am. and of course i feel hollow, displaced. and of course, i am happier, more at peace with myself, the moment i stop fighting God, the God who made me and knows me and loves me enough to bother with me when i'm just full of this hypocritical bullshit. who wouldn't be happier, who wouldn't feel like they had been set free. when i experience God working in me, i don't need to be told to praise, to sing, to love, and a lot of things. there is no other more natural response.

________

this is a very strange post. but it is three am and abruptly time to fold my mind in two, and stow it safely under the seat in front of me. so much for coherence, good night.

2006-06-01T22:32:00.000+08:00

futile

so, so maybe you were right about things. after all this time it isn't any easier to swallow and accept, maybe circumstances would be a little differen now. or not, actually, i can't get away from this sneaking suspicion that everything is just inevitable. no space for regret, but no space for hope, either. i don't know if it's pointless to wish that you were still here. was it you or me, that walked away? but then i suppose people, people can't be owned, caged like pets, possessions. you, yous or me. there isn't a point in playing the blame game.

i'm sad, that lives don't intersect for any substantial length of a time. maybe i am overstating things, maybe i am pessimistic, maybe i think old friendships, once snuffed, are really difficult to bring back. i don't know, understanding was, is, precious. i have friends and family and i know i am loved, but there is some hole inside that somehow they cannot fill. i don't know, if ignoring it is an option. somehow at the end of the day after doing the many things i do to keep myself occupied and sane i just really find myself feeling nothing. and with questions like what am i doing? going round and round in my head. feeling like everything is far away, under-water, just another lucid dream.

i make a lot of high pitched noises. does this mean i'm nervous? sometimes i feel like i don't belong here, wherever here is.

and i really should dive into my pile of work. i wish i could go to sleep for about a week, and wake up with everything new, clean, fresh. i think this might be why i want to go to another country: so that i can leave myself behind. when somewhere in the back of my mind i do know that a person can't run, can't wander forever, and that familiarity and routine are just so sorely under-rated. but change, change is difficult to do when you're standing still, because every new wave of change starts out from inside you, and people are always going to expect the same old thing. i don't know, i don't suppose i could blame it on you. but i just find myself endlessly changing and changing and changing, and with every new wave of change somehow it's been easier to walk out on current circumstances. until you find a day when everyone's a stranger, or there are no more other circumstances, to walk into, or no way to walk out of the Right Here Right Now. but what barnard said that day, about the next few years being a time when we'll change more than we ever will in our lives, somehow i've had that sneaking suspicion too. fueled perhaps by the imagination of a glorious unknown, or by this discontentment, like a stone in my shoe, this rabid wanderlust.

i want an hour of laughter, i want a few hours with silence and a piano. early afternoon that stretches on forever. i want to call someone up and go hello how are you, i want to see the nanyang gymmers again. i want to do something gorgeous, without feeling futile, everything feels futile, now, somehow. but not absurd, or not yet, i. stopper my head, stop thinking so much, because it's just so freaking pointless. all over again.

i want to be told about God. by someone who is still certain that he is somewhere, out there. i want to. curl up amd feel safe, somewhere. the old answers don't make sense anymore, or they are insufficient, i don't feel a single thing at all. i'm feeling. very amoral, and fine. hollow and strange but i really can function, like this. crash and burn and recover and get on with life. it all is very mundane, but really. all the shit and happiness i feel, i know time will obliterate.

sacrifice clarity for the endless babbling. stop now. be alright, do alright, like some sort of. punctuation. i need sleep.

2006-05-31T01:10:00.000+08:00

forty eight hours ago, fong said i sounded stable. i am stable. just melancholically so.

2006-05-31T00:59:00.000+08:00

ache

Sunday, August 21, 2005 // 12:56 AM

"You can't blame me. I mean that literally. You're incapable of blaming me. You're human. Being human is choosing freedom over imprisonment, autonomy over dependency, liberty over servitude. You can't blame me because you know (come on, man, you've always known) that the idea of spending eternity with nothing to do except praise God is utterly unappealing. You'd be catatonic after an hour. Heaven's swiz because to get in you have to leave yourself outside. You can't blame me because - now do please be honest with yourself for once- you'd have left, too. "

"Astonishing. Tears. Jumping Jimmeny Christmas. She moves fast, this girl. It's been two-and-a-half years, going on. Gunn turns up, they open a bottle of wine, he tells her he wants to talk to her and zappo- the heart opens its wound and starts to bleed all over the place. (It is, you must concede, unpleasantly messy, this business of having feelings, this mattering to each other. I've always thought of it as gory, a sort of perpetually occuring road accident- eveyone going too fast, too close, without due care and attention, or with too much...)"

-(Glen Duncan's 'I, Lucifer')

i. i think of what dennis said, that we are just chemical creatures. you know, in the past few months/weeks i've regressed a couple of years in this aspect, my brain has fallen asleep in my head. i'm no longer charmed, and so, so i resolve to think no more about it, to draw the line at a full stop, this full stop.

today i realised that i act brain-dead, a great fat lot of the time. today grace said the words intellect gets in the way, and i thought about it, and they were the words i needed, for realisation.

i want to be fit(ter) again. i would go running right now if i weren't all seventh-month scared (i am). fitter, fitter happier. because since i left ny i've been able to put all sorts of crap into my body without even thinking about it, and i've gone for weeks and weeks without exercising, swimming for pe does not count. swimming anything less than ten laps does not count. i suppose only obsessiveness could inspire me to put up with the pain, and so, so i don't, not anymore. i wish i liked running, i wish i liked healthy food, the way fong seems genuinely happy, eating her copious veggies.

i'm resolved, i need to escape the meaninglessness. how, how do you live with yourself, how do you live with all this time? all this endless not knowing? i don't mean to scoff, i'm completely lost too, even while knowing the right way, to go. there's something inside that can't be rationalised away, do you know what it is? i want to someday change, i want to some day have the right to complacency, but i know it won't happen, and i know that if it does happen, it's going to be completely bad for me. oh please, i do know what's good for me, even if i often don't want it.

and i feel like letting go.

i want to ask where i went wrong, i want to force you to be honest with me. i know you would call this a lack of eq, well, well maybe. you should know, i'm impossible to get along with, some days, but really that's just me, not wanting to simplify myself, too selfish to make room for your preference, in the picture. im sorry, some days i will try, some days i just want to take you right out of your comfort zone. because you've gotten too comfortable, there's something in me that needs to tear down your complacency, perhaps for the sake of it? because someone, someone, has to be willing to say the things that everyone else doesn't want to hear. i'm sorry if i go overboard, i am learning, but i'm sorry (perfunctorily) because i'm not going to stop, i'm never going to stop. cos i don't believe you have all the answers, and i need to insist, there has got to be something more.

oh i'm not always that hard to get along with. it all depends on the strength of my resolve, at any given point of time. this need to take things seriously, it's utterly boring, i know.

hello darling. let's be matter of fact about things. let's pack up our lives and move on with it, let's get over ourselves. of course we've been lost in worlds of our own. so maybe, maybe we need a kick in the head, maybe we need a singular piece of shock, to take ourselves out of the haze. so let's... let's do something, let's watch a movie, let's do homework, let's have mundane conversation. something utterly uninteresting, something completely lacking in beauty. darling we need to learn not to think so much, darling we need to get out of the logicbox. please, please agree with me, i don't think either of us want to stay in here forever, with the lid close over our head, cramping our style (how does this work, grammatically?). so, so darling. let's get out of here but quick, before our visions blur, before our heads implode.

____

i liked the sound of my voice, there. yesterday, yesteryear. i remember this book, i remember this week, i remember crashing the most violent in two years, and skipping some school event (not like i would have gone anyway) and meeting shaoning for lunch, after that. i remember sharing something at crystal jade, the receipt is still in my pocket. i remember messaging half a million people on my phone, at 4am, desperately upset. i remember talking to michael, honestly, for the first time ever, i think.

and i was a lot nicer to marvin then i think. i say this because somewhere else in that post i dropped his name and it makes me think about how long ago that was. hurhur. how strange does that sound. at least, compared to an sms a few hours ago and how i really do roll my eyes. this. is a strange development, my being less nice. but i think it sticks, i think i am much less nice to a lot of people, to be honest. and nicer to others, it is kind of. a shift of things, in a horizontal direction.

i lack understanding. that saddens me. that i have no patience, that i'm really capable of being so terrible a person, somehow.

honestly, i'm aching to talk to someone. i don't know, it seems like it has been a long time, even though if i did the math i would know it has not been a long time at all. it has been twenty four hours, actually. some part of me wonders if i'm just being meanass in that i'm disatisfied with the people i do talk to. but i don't think that's it, somehow, like. like how i talked to kin yip on sunday night, friction-less. i want to be friction-less, uncareful, and. and how i have kicked quite a few friendships in the head, where that is concerned. you, there are a few of yous, that feel. like we're not on the same page, anymore. on saturday i said part of my life to kinyip, and i suppose. that's what it is, really, you, yous. not being a part of my life. while other people have come to be, yet others have gone away. i'm. sigh. i'm a little fed up at myself, or else a little sad that this is the way it is to be. i don't know whether i'm sick of people, or just. i don't know. there's a sort of bitter aftertaste, to things now, to sweet songs i used to sing, to old letters or old conversations, old understanding that we'll never have again. is it possible to get it all back, is it reasonable, realistic, to want it all back? i want it all back.

i want. to understand, and to be understood. to have someone look at my thoughts and tell me about them, i suppose. and vice versa, because. the walls aren't closing in, but it does seem so very empty. and all the while i know i do this, turn relationships into battlefields, or friends into victims. i'm bitter, i'm both needy and bitter and armslength away, all at the same time. and, i, really really really can't pretend that this is what i want, that this is contentment that i look like, right now.

i had a really good day but i've talked myself into feeling shit again. i don't know whether this is something lying at the bottom of things, or if i'm just thinking too much, all over again. somehow i don't think it's the latter.

2006-05-29T02:05:00.000+08:00

up-tight

sigh. i don't have the time to study this holiday, it's only been the first weekend and already i can feel craziness kicking in. sigh. it's not just the discipline to study, it's the discipline to stop doing all these million and one things that are going to take me away from studying. somewhere in the back of my mind i know i am asking for it, geez. i need a study buddy, to chain me down, to make me sit still.

but my week has already been booked, every single day. oh shit. week one out of two that i have to study, oh my goodness. four weeks is incredibly short enough a time, and two weeks is. is.

i need to sit still, i want to sit still. to take a day out and do something completely therapeutic. because play hard is an incredibly tiring way to be, probably more so than work hard, because even after play hard, the work remains and begs to be done. i have so much work to do i can feel a panic rising just listing them out, for history alone the sheer amount of research and writing is just massive, i want to. die. sigh. sarabelle said to me, i think there's no point panicking about it if you don't do anything, and so, and so. i will not panic. or rather i will not give into the hysterical noise of panic, or i will try, at least. tomorrow when i can think straight enough i shall make some sort of study plan, to keep myself in line.

don't die on me ella. i don't deserve a break and yet i think if i don't take one, i just might fall to pieces.

2006-05-27T00:25:00.000+08:00

the last 24 hours

we bladed (bled?) around school today and i thought of nanyang, and the good old days. of all the getting into trouble, of hysterical laughter, the kind that is just so gloriously lacking in self-consciousness. i miss doing stupid things, i can't help feeling so endlessly old, now. now that i can't remember the last time i did something recklessly fun, like that.

and we went up to the roof too, and i want to remember that moment forever, seeing it for the first time, looking out over the ledge at the school and the trees and houses sprawling beyond, vaulted blue sky arching over our heads. how far away and inconsequential everything else feels, how still and how silent it is, up there, how mellow. the still and unmoving centre of the universe.

it makes me think of kwanie, as an afterthought. and how he would take a hundred and one pictures and be as fascinated with things as i am. or at least be very patient with me while i curled up into the mellow-ness.

and looking at the sky makes me feel like nothing else, as cheesy picture postcard an idea as it is, me sitting on the ledge reading atwood as the rainclouds came and went with the sunset. i could stay forever, it makes me so thrilled-kid ridiculously happy. and there were stars splashed across the sky when we finally walked out of school, chinese high is eerie-gorgeous at night. things haven't felt this gorgeous for a long time and i would like to soak it all up, like a sponge.

production being good is quite a peripheral. gorgeousness has made this a very good day.

2006-05-18T23:29:00.000+08:00

i wrote pages and pages about what i think about this, and then i decided. stop short shut up look at yourself. and if you are okay with what you find, why the heck do you feel a need to propogate your image of youself? i wish i were secure enough for things to slide off like water on a duck's back, but i am not. but, in the spirit of steeling myself, i am also ready to whatever lah and not take part in the argument. it doesn't seem to do any good, really. not to me or you or anyone else. so, so step out, so take yourself out of the ballgame. out of one more futile exercise.

it is natural for human beings to want to talk and argue things around because there is just so much that we don't want to admit and so much we do want to think of ourselves. i don't think i can fight this even if i tried, at the end of the day i am just left with human frailty, yours and mine and everyone else's. and all the gaps in understanding, all the misunderstandings we let slide for no good reason we could think of. so give us, give us our illusions of ourselves, because we need to tell ourselves that we are okay, that we are lovable and worthy of respect. it is difficult to function without.

i'm going to stop thinking too much about this because there really isn't a point. if anything it only shows me how insecure i am about myself and what i believe in. a good thing to do would be for me to look my issue in the eye and deal with it, to stop running away. but instead i think i shall do just that, run away, or turn my back on it. into work, a comic book. because i don't really feel anything anymore.

2006-05-17T23:11:00.000+08:00

every woman adores a fascist

so i've been thinking, i confess, i'm finding it a little difficult to get out of my mind. somewhere inside i just know i am making a mistake, and yet i will go on making it. i don't know, what is it, what is it? i really don't know. i've been bowled over by i-don't-know-ness for days.

i have another confession to make but i refuse to make it. you'll have to come at me with picksaws, jackhammers. or a simple request if you can play me right, geez, geez. i can't believe how i crumble.

with some people i don't bother to argue because they know exactly how to take me on. and exactly how to shut me up. that's really amazing, how, how did you know, how did you do that. how did you know that i am a reactionary, over-reactionary, and that. that sometimes i need resistance to go on and on and on. and i am lost as to what to say, what do i do now, what other meaningless noies can i make. to mask my feeling of utter inadequacy.

and i will feel. foot-in-mouth if someone comes up to me and tells me that he/she suspects, suspected, has been suspecting. for the longest time. because i'm still embarassed, or not embarassed, but i haven't gotten over myself, haven't gotten over the sheer unpredictability well-done-ella-ness of it all. it's stupid, really. to not give up this desire to dictate my own emotions.

and this. this running conversation in my head is stupid. because it's Not That Big A Deal i know, but somehow that kind of answer is never enough. i need to let it out, like steam, like good news, bad news. what is it with me.

but i have learnt something very very new, about myself, about human beings, about these seemingly-but-not-quite-random emotions that i am so ruled by.

________

hellooow dawwrnnn. when did ahh say ahh was cormpleks ahh? ahhh theenk ahh dooo theeenk too marchhh thooeee. (so i might have said that huh) orr peeeeperrll tell mee sohh. deez zaat kounnt?

MOOOOOO. ellar give dawwrrnnn beeg huuugg and keeess :D

oh help. hurhur :D

2006-05-15T01:03:00.000+08:00

give up, give in

i don't know what to say anymore. i've consciously discovered the futility of fighting my own thoughts and my emotions, or not even fighting them, trying to contain them, or even know them for what they are. so i don't know what i'm doing, i'll admit it, i don't know who i really am and i don't know how i feel about ________ and ________ and _______. don't ask me because i don't know, or maybe, maybe you would be able to observe an answer in my muddled confusedness, one that i might not have been able to see with my own eyes. pick me apart and enlighten me, my darling, you know i am just wholly incapable of doing it myself.

and i'm going to run around doing things carelessly for a while. i can't take any more over-analyzing, i'm going to explode out of myself. there are a few things i know but don't want to do anything about for now, at least. firstly that i'm a spoilt brat (and linus outlined me very astutely just now), secondly that i'm semi-abusive a friend. it's not what fong said about me taking out my upsetness on people who don't deserve it, it's the fact that i measure friends by how much shit they take from me. is that problematic? sebbie said, but then you'll know who your true friends are, and while i half think so, i also half dont. someday i will take this thought out and look at it again, and try not to over-obsess.

but oh how i do want to soak up gorgeousness, every once in a while. i got another visit to china club today, how i love, i really do. the mellowness of the place, the sheer beauty, and as if that weren't enough, the gorgeous city view 52 stories above ground level. i think the waiters must have thought i was crazy, for my wandering into their empty rooms and sitting there with myself and the view. while the rest of the dinner party goes on elsewhere. i do love. dark rooms, music or people far away, something gorgeous, someone close or just myself to talk to, or to sit in silence with. moody yes i am, but moody can be ever so happy, as well.

moody is a word that will always remind me of marvin. justin is a really nice kid. and i think that's worth a million times more than a witty sense of humour. comics you can buy to facilitate laughter, but all the money in the world won't buy you a single ounce of love.

but pearls before swine really really really makes me happy. as does agnes, to a lesser degree.

and close, things have not been, i have not been, feeling lately. i felt like hugging sebbie today because i can't remember the last time i talked to him honestly. with some people i am just ever so callous, i deliberately Think Too Little for fear of Thinking Too Much. or i am just callous all the general time, my most carefree, prancing around stepping on toes all over the place. knowing that i am but not wanting to care. i don't know what to say. that i want to continue, that i want things back the way they were? i don't know. a friend good enough to take shit from me doesn't really deserve to have his feelings trodden all over. and i'm not okay with the idea of you hurting from something that i said. sigh. i don't know. i just feel like there are things left unsaid, that really do need to be dealt with.

i can't help feeling like some people know the inside of me and not the outside of me, and some people know the outside of me but not the inside of me. which is strange because somehow i don't think the two are really separable at all. somewhere they overlap and somewhere the edges of both sides of the coin wear away into something that is unreal. posturing or a self-illusion.

me trying to find out the expiry date of my passport: ma i need my passport
ma: why? running away ah? elope ah? which boy?
me: ya lorh, sian la now no maid must do housework i better siam first
(ma whips out palmtop and runs through the list of my entire family's passport expiry dates)
me: eh why i last wan?
ma: you most important ma, most important must last wan.

i love my mommie. and not just on mother's day.

2006-05-13T23:08:00.000+08:00

i think i can be happy again. i am. not pissed off with myself, i think i am over that much. but i'm still kicking myself all over the place, for being so completely ridiculous ~~but ridiculously happy~~.

and being so stupidly, ridiculously sad when i suspect that i could explain it all away in terms that are just far too familiar.

there's this gorgeous hymn with five flats for tomorrow that i can't play but want to badly enough to stay up for another hour to practice.