birthdays and such

its been such a long time, blog. but its my birthday today so i thought i'd do a little post, on this rarest of occasions i'll add another rarity of blogging today.

definitely a mix of feelings. you know how some people love to celebrate their birthday, throw a big party, feel all important and centre-of-attention? I usually want to avoid that, and keep out of the crowds and people who want to wish me well. which is odd, i know, but i just can't help it; birthdays make me feel...oddly detached and unhappy. especially mine. i sometimes just wish people would forget its my birthday, not say hello and happy X to me at all, which would make me feel better because then i wouldn't have to force a friendly reply out to them. this time around, i was hoping people would forget entirely. maybe its weird to feel like this but perhaps i just hate the sense of obligation to do certain things on birthdays. getting presents, surprises, acting happy because you don't really have a choice when you're surrounded by friends who deliberately planned something for you...these aren't the sort of things i'm into.

so when i started getting messages from friends in farflung places and lives last night...it was a strange feeling, but strangely nice too. I didn't expect to be happy about it, but i was.

but anyhow, i'm avoiding facebook and all sorts of mass communications til this whole thing blows over. grant me some indulgent escapism on this day.

i'm going out skating with tsg later. this is the sort of happiness that i'm after, i think. not the woohah one-off birthday tirades but the quiet pursuit of everyday joy that comes with being with the people you love.

What the truck.

Current obsession: little cars and trucks from gachapon machine. These are so cute, they're the size of a one dollar coin and come with a little pull-back mechanism even.

At 13 out of 15 designs now, but going into serious redundancy cos I churned 27 already! Just how many more to get all 15 designs?! I just can't help myself when it comes to really nice gacha toys.

There's only 8 designs in this pic though.

Bothersome

The weather is so erratic nowadays. It was cool and breezy, so perfect for sleep in the early afternoon. By the late afternoon it had turned into a humid heatwave, where even a nap wouldn't save you from the irritation of sweat and still air. It makes it hard to study when it's already difficult to start. I realize one of the other post I made was on this very same topic - and nearly exactly one year ago. Mein gott.

I need to stop using my laptop so that I can concentrate on my work.

Maybe tomorrow will be nicer.

blood

It's curious how blood smells like a new metal pipe.

what's more awesome than a gigantic doraemon? A gigantic doraemon WITH WINGS!! :D

I've never seen NTUC sell kites before, but when it did, it's really.... special. Only at Fairprice Xtra, Jurong Point.

Happy Campy

Camping with you. I can't believe we planned to do this within a day and even bought a brand-new tent. Can't believe it, but in a good way.

Just getting to the beach was an adventure in itself. Going for dinner, looking for an AXS machine to print the permit, hunting for apples and barley drinks at shop closing time.

The first time I've spent a night in a tent, and not in the army... I never expected that you would be game for such an adventurous outing, but yet you surprised me. We didn't manage to stay up and talk about deep stuff, like I imagined we might, but I guess in the end you still had a lot of fun just poking me the whole night and refusing to let me sleep. You're so interesting that way - on the one hand not doing some things the way I expect, yet on the other hand being totally surprising. I don't know why I amuse you so much, but maybe that has to do with why I don't know why you amuse me this way either.

And then there were the three bugs trapped in the tent with us, the toilet trips throughout the night, the breeze-less night, among other things. And that we were dressed like we were going shopping, on a camping trip... insane. But I know we'd do it again, you and me.

little green men

Toy soldiers are the awesomest.

mehmeh

I have to so update this place. SO MUCH BACKLOG!

Bite marks

Bitten by a small shark. It left a painful mark. :(

Company Calls Epilogue

Synapse to synapse; the possibility's thin. I'm dressed up for free drinks
and family greetings on your wedding date. The figures in plastic on your
wedding cake that I took were so real. And I kept a distance:
the complications cloud the postcards and blips through fiber optics,
as the girls with the pigtails were running from little boys wearing bowties
their parents bought: I'll catch you this time!

Crashing through the parlor doors, what was your first reaction?
Screaming, drunk, disorderly: I'll tell you mine. You were the one
but I can't spit it out when the date's been set. The white routine
to be ingested inaccurately.

Synapse to synapse: the sneaky kids had attached beer cans to the
bumper so they could drive up and down the main drag. People would turn
to see who's making the racket. It's not the first time.
When they lay down the fish will swim upstream and I'll contest but they
won't listen when the casualty rate's near 100%, and there isn't a
pension for second best or for hardly moving...

nightingales melt in summer

On the News tonight: Singapore recorded its strongest-ever winds of 83 km/h last night. I think it was just Sun Wukong on his speeding cloud.

It's been too warm to do anything recently. Too warm, too warm. My brain wanders and never goes in the direction of my notes in front of me. I so need to study, but I just can't. The heat oppresses like any authoritarian Lee, and there's nothing the opposition can do about it but be quietly quashed by this tropical heatwave. Now you know LKY was right, in a way; warm temperatures make you dumb and lazy.

Do your best, boy, you know you need it.

the brilliant green is brilliant.

in warmth, in wind, in ochre of the wilderness sky

A freak wind blew through tonight, howling like the ghost of a gale. Trees bent like fern fronds, and plastic bags and styrofoam shards swirled in invisible funnels on the street below. The clothes rack in the balcony fell over and my windows slammed shut like eyes afraid to see. Lights came on all over the blocks opposite, bewildered faces appearing behind panes and watching for the sound they could not see, but for the whipping of branches and the cold fingers against their skin. Primal fear must be in their hearts.

A sepia image. Village mothers chasing their dusty children indoors, boarding doors and bolting shutters. "Demons are coming," and men with shovels and hoes brace against the encroaching forest of things they cannot see, but things they can feel through gritted teeth and in the depths of their animal souls. Spirits and demons.

A demon wind blew through tonight, and the sky churned red with clouds of brimstone.

I guess we will always fear that which we do not understand, and that which we cannot control.

simple things.

You're something else, you are. And I would love to love you.

different names for the same thing

Alone on a train aimless in wonder.
An outdated map crumbled in my pocket.
But I didn't care where I was going,
Cos they're all different names for the same place.

The coast disappeared when the sea drowned the sun.
I've no words to share it with anyone.
The boundaries of language I quietly cursed,
And all the different names for the same thing.

There are different names for the same thing.

And 8, and 9, and 10.

A pink and purple pen.

When I think of you, I think about your smile, your eyes, your lips; the sound of your laughter, the sound of your voice, the funny little noises that you make. I think about how it feels to hold you, to put my arm around your waist, to hug you, to hug you tighter, to feel like lifting you up and carrying you about; to hold your hand, and such simple things; to touch your skin, and keep you warm – even though you’re the one who radiates heat. I think about your scent, and how you always manage to smell nice. I think about Penhaligon's, and a mental list of all the things you've ever said you like or dislike. The way your face crinkles when you smell something bad. The mental snapshot of your face lit by the cinema half-light after I first kissed you, the way you looked so young, so innocent…so vulnerable (and how I wondered what you were thinking). I think about the way your persona changes when you turn on your intellect, the assumption of easy seriousness and strength, the depth of knowledge that tells in your eyes, and how it sometimes seems you want to hide this facet of yourself. I think about the way you always punch me or kick me, and wonder why you like abusing me so much.

I think about how you make me feel. I think about how I don’t think I’ve felt the same way about you as I’ve felt about another girl, and how I don’t know how to describe it. I think about how I sometimes feel out of my depth when I’m with you, and I don’t know if it’s a good thing or bad. I think about how I get so easily distracted when I’m doing my work and your messages come in. How I have to push you out of my mind sometimes just to be able focus on something else. How I feel like I don’t want to lose you, but yet not even have you in the first place.

I think about what our circle of friends would think, and how the group dynamics might change, or not.

I think about how you're probably thinking about many of the same things.

I think about the (not many) things we have in common.

I think about all the different maybes we might become, by next year.

I think about you, and the difference between love and infatuation.

I think about how I feel so jaded of relationships, and whether this has changed.

I think about the perils of over-thinking, and reading too much into it all.

I think about taking pictures of you, and how it actually sounds quite perverted to say that I’m
thinking about it.

I think about how you might feel about me.


And how the list could go on, but for self-censorship.

rainbows in the sunset

recipe

cook psychedelic
hippotamuses with
ajinomoto.

haikus can be so meaningless sometimes.

et toi.

Watched slumdog today, again. Hearing the score a second time, I don't really understand how it could have won anything at all, except perhaps for unsocialized, cloistered US bookizen critics who have (probably) never heard or seen anything from outside the continent, and hence think mediocre indian-glish fusion-music is set to revolutionize the industry standard. Bah. Watch some Bollywood, SAG.

I will remember today for soft lips, and the whisper of soft breath.

As the Weatherlight falls into forest

Watched slumdog with sh. She wore a blouse and a skirt, things I hardly see her in around school. Should I take this as something more? I wonder really… what does she see of this? A date? A friendly movie? Perhaps a bit of both. I hope she doesn't think I’m leading her. After the movie we both went our separate ways, her to home and me elsewhere, with a pang of guilt, asking her out to a movie, and only a movie. Nothing more and nothing less, though for a moment it might have felt like it could have gone a lot more, somewhere. I knew, at least, not to court social mishap by extending our little meeting further. I run back to school to find that perfect sunset spot.

It took two hours (or less? I dunno, it felt like a long time) of climbing up and down stairs, sweaty shirted exploration of deserted stairwells, locked access hatches, closed doors all bolted chained. Then the sighting of yet another possible peak in the distance, yet another possible rendezvous with another rooftop.. arts to engin, and in between. I think I climbed every climbable place. But in the end I found something worth it.

Along the CDTL, a forlorn staircase stands off to the side as if abandoned by its parent, water-stained and muddied, 12 flights of leaf-strewn steps – what’s another set of stair after so many already. I climb it but discover there’s a barrier of daunting wall at the top… someone left a chair at the bottom of the wall: it must have been climbed before then.

I scale it, and go up. I look out, look down over the roof of the central library. Almost magical, to glance over the six-storey drop and yet there I was some minutes ago, on the ground now so far away. The dipping sun glares from behind a cloud, though I’m already quite high up now. A fireman’s ladder sits against another wall.

I go up again. I come out higher, on another roof. Another fireman’s ladder.

I go up again.

Suddenly the boundaries disappear, the walls fall away and the landscape yawns expectantly as if chiding ‘What took you so long?’ An expanse of sky and land and sea stretches out ahead and around, opens up before me like a panorama of sunset and Singapore. A bird’s eye view of here to the limits of sight, cloudless intersperse of air, no more obstructions of concrete and cement.

It takes the breath away, it does. Just… me, in the atmosphere, almost. As I stand on that little piece of roof, on the very pinnacle of that building, I realize I hadn’t found a spot of sunset. I’d found a circle of serenity, my own fairy ring of peace. A spiritual place. Up this high, you don’t see people, or troubles, or commitments, or facades, or any of the myriad other things of tired life. There’s just the air surrounding, and clouds above; the land rolls out below like an orange-painted canvas, surreal as a cubist’s dream. You feel detachment; you fall into ethereal thrall. The mind looks inwards as if an immense God holds you in his gaze.

The red sun peeps like a playful child over the horizon.

There and then, I felt at peace, more than I’d felt in a long long time. My feet anchored to the floor, but the mind afloat on a string. The senses calm, and I felt… small, and insignificant, but perhaps therein was the message; I am a mote among millions, and the world is big. This respite of scale, of knowing your place in the world, of the careless belittling of the self... made all the more amazing by the fact that it hides right in the middle of mundaneity. In the middle of NUS, for crying out loud. I took my time in reflection and in solitude, and of wind against my face.

The sun goes down, and throws its last rays across the higher heavens as the crawling dark creeps up behind me. I go down soon after.

A herald, in glass.

Two movies in a row is omg so tiring pls, plus the cinema was at that funny temperature where its cold enough to feel the the chill but not cold enough to wear a jacket... bargh. Valkyrie was cool, for once a suspenseful, exciting movie where Tom Cruise doesn’t defy metaphysics, reality, bullets or all three combined. He even dies at the end. Cool. My dad said Benjamin button was really good, and I take his word for it, though… after a while it gets a bit boring. You know where he’s headed ultimately, but you just wonder in what form he’ll have his death. Curious indeed.

And your hands are so small. I wonder if you come with a label that says ‘Fragile’, instructions to handle with care.

In this moment, I am fearful. Porcelain falls into shards.