Well now. I suppose I should welcome you.
*adjusts mike*
HELLO HELLO MY NAME'S DIBO
Oops. Sorry. Wrong line. Try again.
Welcome. TO MY SECRET LAB.
No. That's the wrong line. That one's from 'Kronk's New Groove'.
You should go watch it it's funny. Yeah.
This place is where I publish the written form of my most cherished everyday moments...and some dollops of something called Love. :)

Today I met R after a futile day of iPhone SE-seeking with my dad.

I had called up the Singtel hotline and checked which outlets still had available handsets and the dude told me Tampines Mall and Comcentre.

So Dad and I went for lunch with Mom and then to Tampines but the Singtel guy, when I asked him, "Do you have iPhone SE in stock?" said yes at first, then went to check and came out to say, no, they had just sold out.

I was determined, so we went to the Comcentre, where I had never been. Well, so now I know where Comcentre is.

But, guess what, no stocks either.

Liar liar.

I was so upset but well I managed to get my dad's non-existent Singtel online account set up so I can just buy it online when it's back in stock, which should be next week if the woman at Comcentre wasn't also lying to me as well, those pathological Singtel liars.

Okay okay they probably didn't mean to lie to me.

Anyway, I spent my off-in-lieu day with Dad walking around Orchard while talking to Singtel customer service officers - one after another - who did not help much at all because I figured out how to set up his account on my own in the end.

Then we went to Muji and I got Iced Sunset Tea for him and Iced Ginger Ale Squash for myself and I asked if I could try his tea.

"Mmm. It tastes like... Sunset."

I burst out laughing and told him about Baobao's Summer Blend tea.

I had meant to go home and freshen up before heading out to meet R but that was not to be.

But despite my terribly lacklustre appearance I think we hit it off pretty well.

He had wanted to go to Nakhon at Hougang and we met at Kovan where I greeted him like an old friend.

I asked him if I could interview him for a report. Hahaha occupational hazard.

"At least get to know me first??" He said.

Nakhon was too crowded and we were sweating buckets so we walked up and down and wound up at Subway. Yes. Subway.

"You are really weird," he said in a totally complimentary way.
"And that's coming from you."
"Yes, and that's coming from me."

While we were searching for Nakhon we had walked past this pool place and he asked me if I wanted to play pool.

"But I don't know how, I suck at it. Do you know how?"
"I used to play competitively."
"AND YOU ASKING ME TO PLAY WITH YOU??"

But after dinner we did go there and the whole thing was hilarious because I settled for "making the 'clack' sound of when the ball hits another" while he shot ball after ball into the pockets.

"The last time I came here was to the bowling alley with my boyfriend when I was 14 and it was such a bad memory that bowling always makes me sad now, you know what I mean?"
"Yes. I know."

After a million pool lessons and facts about competitive pool later we adjourned to Xin Wang Hong Kong cafe which was the only place nearby air-conditioned and still open and we sat there for over an hour nursing an iced milk tea (mine, of course) and a sour plum Coke which we both agreed was just Coke with sour plums in it.

I laughed so hard showing him netizen comments and introducing him to the kooky characters on ST's facebook and at one point he started laughing at how I was laughing before speaking.

"It's like you switch gears so abruptly, I'm just laughing at how you're laughing."
"I can't help it I watched too many cartoons growing up,"
"Yes, you cartoon."

Anyway it was just nice. I have made a new friend. It was nice and I was happy, which is why I am writing here.

Well that's a sooner post than I had planned for.

Good going, contedefee19! I was a kid when I chose that name, damn.

Tomorrow I go back to the grind and boy am I ready.

scribbly scrawled at; 12:46 AM

The last time I posted on here was May 2012. That was... nearly four years ago, short by a couple of weeks.

I had a sudden whim to post here. Perhaps because I have Sunday and Monday off as I'm clearing my off-in-lieus. Perhaps because I'm trying actively to be happy, and this was my "happy" blog for years, until I stopped... I don't know.

Today I went out with Pearlyn, whom you know, I call Baobao.

We went for lunch at Orchard Ion - she had been to her gym.

We sat there and spoke about our lives, the people we had been seeing.

Up the escalators I told her - you know, we met in JC. We were locker mates. That was... oh my goodness, that was 10 years ago.

She laughed and said, yes, it has been a decade.

I am feeling very strange today. I told her, as we sat in a boutique cum cafe, sipping "Summer Blend" tea (which, I told her I wanted to try because what does Summer taste like? "Happiness? Bright?" She said. I sipped it and thought and said yes I guess this Is Summer Blend.) that I feel in between. On the cusp of something, I don't know what yet.

She told me she wanted to learn how to swim and I told her I'll go with her.

I have been filling my days with places to be and people to meet.

We dropped by Kinokuniya and I picked up another book - I've been buying books and polishing them off on the same day, a fantastic habit that I'm so glad I'm retrieving from my file cabinet of "Things I Used To Do That I Should Again".

The book caught my eye because of the freckles on the cover. Redheads and freckles have always intrigued me. The title made me stop, and I picked it up, flipped through it and a line tugged at me, so I bought it. It is "The Not-Dead and The Saved and Other Stories" by Kate Clanchy. The title story won the BBC National Short Story award, which, again, did contribute somewhat to my purchase.

I told Baobao about what I had been doing, and the things I plan to do.

What is it about telling others about your plans?

Sometimes I feel, when you tell others, you feel a certain extra push to actually get them done. Perhaps that is why I told her.

I have been feeling a mad need to leave. To leave and "discover myself", cliche as it may sound. I have a mad need for strange streets and unfamiliar landscapes, and not in the way people have with their Instagram feed and implied "Look where I went that you haven't" but in a wild, unhinging, I need this to keep my sanity because I am so, so acquainted with my daily steps that I need madness to make them strange again to me, because I am a large well inside that has churned with the same water and that needs gurgling from a fresh spring.

On my literature/animation blog, which has been growing slowly but steadily and now has 700 followers, I used this quote by Cormac McCarthy, "All the Pretty Horses": "He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activities in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all."

I love this quote, and I think - how true it is.

I look at my last post - May 3 2012. What had I been doing? I had my final examination in University.

I had no idea, back then, four years ago, that I would be where I am here.

"Remember when we were at Evelyn's wedding?" I asked Baobao today. "I told you about my job search and I wasn't even sure that I'd get the job, but now I'm here."

And she had been, so sure, in the way only good friends who love you and think the world of you can, that I would.

And I did. And I have been here for a year and four months now, and how mad is that?

"Can you believe we'll be 30 in three years?" I asked her, in the train. Her face broke into surprise and loveliness.

"Yes! I can't believe it too!"

That day a morbid thought occurred to me, as I looked at Facebook and scrolled through the posts of my friends, my peers, who are getting married, having their first and second kids, growing through life, people my age.

Often when I change the newspaper in my cat's litter box (Yes, I have a cat, I've had him for over two years now how mad is that and you know how much I wanted one, didn't you) I look down at the paper and one day it was a page of obituaries.

I always feel vaguely bad for using obituary pages for my cat's litter box, so I turn them over if I can.

Sometimes I stop and read them, to see the messages that people leave their loved ones. Sometimes I look at a stranger's face and think of the people that must have loved them. They are around for a while, and then they aren't any more.

That morbid thought that occurred to me was this - imagine how it will be, when I am old, and my friends start dying one by one, how strange a feeling it must be, watching them fall away like fish caught in a tide?

I have grown so much.

I know this, and it is clear even to myself.

Look at that May 3 post. That girl, not knowing anything about life in the rat race, not knowing about... the myriad responsibilities and weights that come with growing older.

Look at that girl and how full of hope and possibilities she was. She was, at that time, attached and hopeful of marriage. She had, at that time, in her mind a clean slate, and she could do anything, be anything.

Oh, I still can, of course. I still can.

With the wisdom of years comes a price - which is a reluctance to venture out, knowing, from past experience, the chances of scuffing one's knees are extremely high.

Still.

Perhaps I will return and write you a nicer tale.

Perhaps I will return and tell you of my exploits. Oh, I have had so many, these four years. I have had so many.

Perhaps I won't return so soon. Perhaps it will be ten years before I come back to this page that I keep open out of sentimentality, which makes up half my soul.

"He said he doesn't want to see me anymore," I told Pearlyn today, as we traversed the tightly peopled corridor from Wisma Atria to Takashimaya. "I feel like, all these guys they know I'm nice and will do anything for them and that's why they're like this. With girls it's great 'cos I have great girlfriends but with guys nooo."

She laughed.

"But that's why people love you, it's because you are so nice."

It was a small thing, a small thought, but often it is these small things that slip into the crevices of your heart, your mind.

It touched the surface of my inner wellspring.

My days and weeks fly by, and I have so much ambition, so many things I want to do and achieve, so many places I want to go.

I will do them. I will do them and I will live a varied, wonderful life, and I will write about it, and I will get there - I will get to that place I so want to be, to have a richness in my words that comes of personal experience. But to get there I have to step out and risk personal affront, and failure, and possible embarrassment.

But oh, what are those fleeting human skin-layer things but pinpricks in a vast ocean?

If you who are reading this are a friend of mine, I hope you are doing well.

If you are a stranger, I wish you the same.

These days, I have developed such a loving for strangers. We are all strangers, I think. And we are strangest to those whom we know, and who think they know us.

I turn 27 this December, and nothing has turned out the way I envisioned them to be when I was a little girl.

And perhaps, this is good. Perhaps, it is what life is about.

And suddenly I feel alright with it. Suddenly, I understand that things can change in an instant, a week, a day, an unexpected encounter, a letter from an old friend, a long-lost memory retrieved from a purse while clearing a cupboard.

Life will pass us by. My new hope for myself, is to fill it with things and places and people and doings, so that when I read my life back as an old woman, I can laugh and cry and be at peace, knowing I lived.
scribbly scrawled at; 11:20 PM