ugh I bought a dress online and when it came it was tiny as fuck. it fits, but a little too short and snug for my liking. shit this dress was made for babies. I'm really short, it's time I faced it. so for something that small to be made, they either ran out of cloth or were measuring against some impossible standard of beauty. by that point I had already started thinking about salad dressings because it's easier to just man up and diet instead of changing your ideals of beauty. some things are much easier to change. anyway, I've been really well and happy, I just wish my relationship with my parents was better. a work of mine is going to be exhibited at grey projects, and it opens this saturday
- wheeee go seeeeee

lucky13

1. What did you do in 2013 that you'd never done before?
I completed my thesis and graduated university, traveled to North America in the spring and played with heaps of cherry blossoms and did blow with a hundred dollar note like a true baller, also did ket in the bathroom with some girls (weird stuff, poor man's blow, really) met and hugged a tiger, visited a vineyard and went wine-tasting,


I started work - had 2 jobs this year so far, one in service/hospitality (gross, please avoid) and the other in art (yay!), did proper design work and got paid for it (who woulda thunk?!), learnt Adobe InDesign in half and hour, found a buggy by the side of the path at Gardens by the Bay with the keys in the ignition so of course I had to drive it


ate so much spacecakes on the bus ride home from KL I nearly puked chocolate fudge, interviewed Skream and Benga for JUICE and then partied with them afterward including having to reject Skream's wedding proposal, had my writing published in a legit magazine, painted on wood and fell in love with it, learnt how to play mahjong, went for yoga (and didn't like it), went to a friend's wedding.


2. Did you keep your new years' resolutions and will you make more for next year?
I resolved to fix my ankle, so I can resume running again... did not happen. I resolved to lose more weight, and I did! Quite a bit of it. I resolved to create more art, and I did, also quite a bit of that. I resolved not to think mean things, but that's something that's so deeply entrenched in my personality.

In 2014 I resolve to save money to do more traveling. I resolve to properly start thinking about the future. I resolve to be better behaved, especially when it involves Jordan, that poor boy.


3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
nope

4. Did anyone close to you die?
nope

5. What countries/cities did you visit?
KL, Malaysia. I go a few times a year.
Vancouver, Canada.



Phuket, Thailand.



Sydney/Hunter's Valley/Canberra, Australia.



Phnom Penh, Cambodia.


oh yeah, who knew that Cambodia would be cold!? the second day we were there it was 17 degrees.


6. What would you like to have in 2014 that you lacked in 2013?
Direction.

7. What exact date(s) from 2013 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

ASOT/FMFA - I love trance with all my heart and ASOT ranks up there as one of the festivals I absolutely had to go for before I die. A guy in the crowd offered to let me sit on his shoulders, and it was a different world up there. I was face level with the lasers and they were caressing my face. It was awesome.
Later we discovered that we shouldn't have smoked the only joint we had, because the e turned out to be extremely speedy. We tried everything to fall asleep, to rest for the second day of proceedings, but sleep did not come. The next morning I was riding a potent wave of caffeine and coming off the e, when my favourite Slovakian Na'avi offered to let me knock back a line of blow off her thigh. At some point in the evening I thought I was going to have a heart attack. Very unpleasant experience. Never again. I was saved by a sneaky toke in the crowd, eventually coming down just in time to have my brain blown to pieces by the fucking Prodigy. I hope I'm that awesome when I'm fifty.




getting off that plane in Vancouver positively shaking with excitement and then walking out of the arrival gates to see Jordan waiting, and then feeling such a surge of happiness knowing that we were finally done dating long distance.


please no never again.

Bass BBQ - legendary house party dripping with booze, made better with the presence of barbecued food. lols all around as everyone got epically smashed. I vaguely remember skating by myself, only in socks, both drunk and high off my face. I remember taking half of a 5, something I hadn't touched since I was 19, and getting completely wrecked. I remember broken glass everywhere.


Mount Boatday - boat ride out with my closest friends to an island I never knew existed. Its nature is still quite untouched. The sunset was beautiful.


Hugging a tiger, although shortly after the photos were taken I cried like a baby the rest of our stay in the reserve. I'm not a big fan of captivity, and even less so of exploitation, even though I did pay to meet the tigers, even though I've always had a cat at home for as long as I can remember. so I guess I'm a hypocrite. Fuck me, right? The tigers we met were 4 months old and still very frisky and it was incredible just how similar the big kitties were to their smaller counterparts. I watched one of them nimbly hop up onto a table, chasing a toy with its paw, its face alert and curious and determined. It was so much like my own cat. Cue feelings of guilt at domesticating an animal that is clearly meant to be wild.


We were at our third winery of the day, and it had sculptures and installations all over its compound. For some reason I just felt like running, so I did - between the grapevines, up a hill and down to the pond and all around. It started drizzling and I started laughing and couldn't stop. Later that day we stopped by a field to catch the sunset. The wind was raging, and again I felt like running and spinning around and just feeling my body soak up the feeling of being in a large open space. I like space


8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
I finished my thesis, graduated university, quit smoking cigarettes, got to my weight goal of 100pounds, got a job in an industry I love, celebrated 1 year with the most amazing boy, was happy quite a lot.
(I don't know if I can call this an achievement but) I apologized to a girl who I've wronged in the past, and tried to make it right by doing something that involved a difficult moral decision. She and I have made up since, and are on better terms now.

9. What was your biggest failure?
I was very, very temperamental. I picked fights and was a massive bitch to Jordan at times. I didn't graduate with first class honors.... just kidding I don't care.

10. Did you suffer any illness or injury?
nope.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
the usual. concert and festival tickets, flight tickets.
I bought a Gorillaz shirt to express my fangirl love for them.


12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
Jordan, for putting up with me when I was shouty and fighty and sobby.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
this year, no one!

14. Where did most of your money go?
probably taking cabs.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
ASOT/FMFA in KL, going to Vancouver and finally not having my boyfriend a zillion miles away, Phuket with my girls, ListenOut festival in Sydney, Hospital night at Zouk with Netsky and High Contrast (though that ended up disappointing in the end)

16. What song will always remind you of 2012?
Royals - Lorde
the whole damn Disclosure album fuck it's so good and I'm so ashamed to admit this because only hipsters like Disclosure
Swimming Pools - Kendrick Lamar
Angels - The XX
So will be now - John Talabot & Pional


17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
i. happier or sadder?
way happier

ii. thinner or fatter?
THINNER MOTHERFUCKER. this is the first year I can say this with confidence.

iii. richer or poorer?
Richer. I'm a working girl now, booyah.

18. What do you wish you'd done more of?
Working out. Writing.

19. What do you wish you'd done less of?
I had a particularly nasty depressive episode the whole of November. One fucking month of that shit. Waste my time.

20. How will you be spending Christmas?
Spent Christmas Eve having lunch with my family, traditional turkey dinner with Jordan's family and then a pig out session at Dan/Ili's place while watching Home Alone 1 and 2 with friends.

(every year I wonder where #21 went…)

22. Did you fall in love in 2013?
No, I just stayed in it.

23. How many one-night stands?
NONE. I HAVE NEVER ANSWERED NONE TO THIS QUESTION. BAD GIRL GONE GOOD.

24. What was your favorite TV program?
Adventure Time, come on grab your friends, we'll go to very distant lands.
The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, The Ali G show, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?
nope.

26. What was the best book you read?
Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
The Time Traveler - HG Wells


27. What was your greatest musical discovery?
Lulu Rouge, Blu Mar Ten, Ta-Ku, Dusky, Banks, Solar Fields, caught Just Blaze playing an amazing set at ListenOut,

28. What did you want and get?
I wanted to lose weight.

29. What did you get and not want?
I got drunk, and then sad sometimes.

30.
i. What was your favorite film of this year?
CLOUD ATLAS.
The Great Gatsby (though not as good as Luhrmann's other ones)

ii. What was the worst film this year?
no idea.


31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
At around midnight, my sister and I partook in a celebratory toke in her red lit room. At 9 in the morning I took a longass plane ride to Vancouver where I landed at 1 in the afternoon. it was still my birthday. longest birthday ever. so we went back to his place, got high and had sex and then had japanese food. that was all I remember, I was terribly jetlagged and in shock at being there.

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
nada. it was a very very satisfying year.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2013?
I would say 90s meet bohemia.

34. What kept you sane?
I love you mary jane
deep house and drum and bass and above & beyond group therapy
our late night cruise sessions - driving around exploring and searching for peaceful, high up places to chill.
and Jordan, although he drove me insane quite a bit as well.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Diplo, always Diplo.
I fancy you, Aaron Paul, you big cutie.
and I guess Jordan's a minor celebrity by now hehehe ok maybe not

right?? isn't he adorable??? this is where you say: UH UH SIOL.

36. What political issue stirred you the most?
the merlion was talking to us and spitting fire at children during the national day parade.

37. Who did you miss?
Marie. I have no idea where she is.

38. Who was the best new person you met?
probably Vivi, who is my manager. She is Colombian and reminds me a lot of Marie in her expressions, gesticulations and articulations.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2013:
take it super slow

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:
No one here is alone, satellites in every home
Yes the universal's here, here for everyone
Every paper that you read
Says tomorrow is your lucky day
Well, here's your lucky day

It really, really, really could happen
Yes, it really, really, really could happen
When the days they seem to fall through you, well just let them go



-


2013 was an amazing year. a simple quiz meme is barely sufficient to do it justice. i'll be back with a proper tribute. till then, happy new year, party responsibly.

part 2

but I'm not all that pessimistic about where I am right now. the year has been challenging, but also so much stupid fun it hurts. I don't have a halloween costume this year but I do have, so far, a completed thesis, hit the one-year landmark with an amazing guy, lost enough weight to make the dresses in my closet not tight enough, quit smoking cigarettes, went to a few flights, scored one of my dream jobs working in art. No, I need to get this down so I remember, the next time I sink into depression, that I should remember instead the things I do have, and let them buoy me up.

part 1

And sometimes I see places and moments that happened in the past. I could be doing something completely unrelated and then it would pop into my head like a photograph, except tactile and auditory. I was painting the other day, in that calm bubble that comes with blending colors, and suddenly thought of a large neon sign in Sydney. It was purple and pink and I used it as a point of reference to where I was going and how much longer it was going to take. By now I know the city like the back of my hand. I thought about how often I walked past the neon sign both trips I was there, and how comforting it was to find it again after a year. I thought of how comforting it is to have certain places that don't change, in order to have specific memories attached to them, which quite sounds like a weird kind of territorial pissings. And then I thought of all the places I could be instead of here, and wondered if I would be a different person after that fact. What if that neon sign became an essential part of my day; instead of seeing it only when I return to said city, I saw it every day, I had to pass it to go home. Would that make the neon sign part of the fabric of my personality? I would think of myself in relation to the neon sign: I live in the part of town under the sphere of influence of that glorious neon sign, therefore I am apart and different from people who do not live under the sphere of influence of said sign.

Another scene that flashes in my head quite often is waking up in Angie's apartment in London. I woke up on a mattress on the floor of the living room, my legs freezing because they were too far away from the heater. It was Sunday, in February. Too bright. There were white curtains right above me, over a window. The sound of someone tapping on a keyboard. I don't remember getting there. The last thing I remember was getting out of the cab and throwing up on the sidewalk. I think it was that profound icy stillness of that morning that really stuck with me, and the utter insanity that is waking up in a place you don't recognize. A bizarre mixture of beauty and terror I won't soon forget. It wasn't a particularly beautiful morning either. Cold and grey.

Some specific places and moments resurface with specific people in them, and all too vividly.



"I am tired of the cult of youth. The cultural rejection of old age, the stigmatization of wrinkles, grey hair, of bodies furrowed by the years. I am fascinated by Diana Vreeland, Georgia O’Keeffe and Louise Bourgeois, women who have let time embrace them without ever cheating. Society today condems this, me, I celebrate it. For this session of fine jewellery, I imagined a man and a woman who had been together for a long time, faithful to each other and always incandescent with desire."
TOM FORD

Me too. We youths are a special brand of stupid. leaving school was a nightmare, it feels like being forced to walk off the edge of a lake into a sinkhole, with everyone I know in it, every single young nubile one of them gasping to stay afloat. absolutely no idea what we're doing. grasping at straws, stumbling in the dark etc. Getting it together is tiresome business and the sooner I'm done, the faster I can enjoy basking in the awesomeness of being a proper adult, while waiting for death to swoop me away under wings of darkness. Maybe the innate philosopher awakens as a person grows old, as soon as one feels the flesh start to wither away on their body. Maybe everyone gets a chance to grow wise right before they die, maybe it's a rite of passage like the elite four. Slowly freed from its material prison, the mind ascends to greater levels - obviously as far away from stupid as I could ever hope to be.

And to add insult to injury there's all that crap they're feeding us, shit that passes off as popular culture these days, to distract from the suffocation. I hate you Miley Cyrus. Of all the routes to greatness, you chose the stupid one. We're a whole generation of people doing stupid things, and I'm sick of participating.

here, have some liquid dnb.

Sometimes I see things that aren't there. Though not in the way you expect - I don't mean walking down the street one day and then seeing or coming across a unicorn grazing quietly by the sidewalk, no. If I had to hazard a guess, it would be that my depth of perception got significantly fucked up over a course of time, or that I suffer from a heightened sense of apophenia, the tendency of human beings to seek meaningful patterns or connections in seemingly random data. As if the world has been collapsed of its 3rd dimension, and everything I see is made up of interconnecting lines and shapely empty spaces, all laid out for me to interpret chaos into order. Take for example: trees against the sky create a negative space with the outline of their leaves and most times my brain interprets this space as a figure it recognizes. so it may seem that I'm completely comfortable walking down a street, until a bear looms up in my peripheral vision, courtesy of sparsely flowering foliage. Most times I ignore it but occasionally I have to catch my breath, especially when a sinister clown-face or coffin presents itself out of nowhere.

It's a lot like watching the clouds sail by, except instead of saying I see a rabbit jumping over a fence, the rabbit jumps out at you and tells you what you're seeing, simultaneously setting off a battle between the rational part of the brain and the part that enjoys betraying its person. It's not there, I know it's not, but the more I don't want to see it, the clearer the picture gets, and it forces me to confront it full-on, ensnared in the tricks that my mind insists on playing.

did Man create God or did God create Man - in a time when both arguments are exhausted and trite - in a time when most things feel flimsy and seem inauthentic, when skepticism dogs you like a shadow - we set out to create our own. we painted a goddess, if only to make damn sure that she's real and that she exists. like a real god, she demands our love and devotion: each swirl of blue into grey qualifies as prayer, each dancing shade of orange expands the fire of her greatness, each streak of the aurora borealis in the background celebrates her divine power. stuff like that. there were candles, smoke and a great deep vibration of a higher frequency. there was such a flow to that afternoon. and what is a goddess without a mythology? we have a serpent too, and a fallen angel. flowers that look like vaginas, because why not? did I mention the aurora borealis? that's pretty magical. like a real god, we hope she's immortal, because ultimately isn't that what artists long for, to create something that lives forever. maybe we're all pieces of art. maybe I'll be an artist, or maybe a god.


instagram.com/allupinatizzy for more art

i think it was something he said, something like "look at us fucking with not a care in the world" which then prompted me to think of having a scary amount time on my hands, having absolutely nothing to do or achieve, and then getting excited as well, because like a blank canvas I'm allowed to fill it up any way I please be it productive or otherwise. most times i choose otherwise, and choose to bask in good vibes for hours, but i have lots of time. let's imagine time as a currency to be traded for only the things that please you. how many days would you like to put into this book? how many hours would you like to spend time with your cat? how many minutes would you like to sit in the bathtub? choose carefully. do you really want to invest in this one fun thing while 10 other things are also worthy to look at. Isn't it overwhelming, the things you could do if you had nothing to do, all the places you could see if you were able to. the world is so big and i want nothing more than to be absorbed by its magnitude and be one with its infinity. being really free gets as exhausting as being really busy, with so much more at stake, I feel, because bliss and that pure state of being carefree is so easily ruined by a myriad of ways and intrusive bad thoughts. we're so easily tipped into guilt and pressured into adhering to a recommended timeline, that it's easy to forget living life slowed down and wrapping your entire being with the experience of that moment, again and again, moment after moment. a child should have as much time as possible being a child and absorbing everything the world has to offer, but what if we alter language to make 'child' quit its meaning as a certain age point but as a way of seeing the world. imagine being as old as 75 and still being a child, maximising play with minimal work, fully absorbing for as long as possible everything the world has to offer without having the taint of responsibility and burden - spend all day every day in wonderment and excitement, and never have to be bored ever again. if only.

glass towers

where do I even begin... life's been really good since I was rid of that job.

There's also this incredible balcony. We noticed that people coming here have the inclination of pointing out places they recognize. "Is that bugis?" is an incredibly popular question. Suppose it's natural to orient yourself once put in an unfamiliar environment, but look at that view, it's calling your name. there's a patch of light - in the day it is silently dull and stretches past KK hospital toward bugis, at night it's a golden spotted ribbon with green and red and white sparkles going on and off alternately and changing shapes every night. in the day, next to this nocturnal patch of light, is an area thrice its size and completely green in all shades and hues. this green gets everywhere, it springs up between the glass and concrete towers, until it seems like we're just a field of rocks. up here, you actually see a whole load of green, and it's so beautiful, but at night they become this impenetrable dense blackness as if the sky had extended over everything, except there's more stars on land than sky. but still, beyond that need to orient oneself, lies a penchant for chaos and disorientation.

we went on an adventure:







that was bananas. I said, let's take the first bus that comes along, and he said, let's stop at the twentieth stop. We found a maze of big, old houses, and the sleepy suburban vibe you see on TV, which leads to a trail that lies between the backs of those houses, and the fringes of a forest. it goes uphill, and goes steeper and narrower as it goes until it suddenly cuts off into a dead end.









i love being way up high, and i love this guy. we went to a wedding the other day, and for a brief moment, i met eyes with the previous guy i liked and I swear he held my gaze with something probably like curiosity, at best. and i was curious too, because it's curious how much things change over a span of a year. who could've expected things would turn out wonderful after all, this time last year? certainly not my pain. and later that night, we had guests on the balcony and some guys started talking about the game, and that it was necessary for men to inflict deliberate pain and evil onto the women to entrap them. and it works, i can vouch for that, but why vouch for something so abhorrently cruel - even if cruelty diminishes over a much larger timeframe, ultimately proving what doesn't kill you make you stronger and better than ever.

i was talking to one of the yoga teachers a long time ago, it was about meditation, and she said it better than anyone i've read: "meditation doesn't have to be an act in itself, but in an act that nourishes you. you could sit somewhere quiet and just breathe but if you like surfing, then that could be a form of meditation as well. it's anything you like." in that case then i've done plenty of meditation this holiday and it's really nice.

We start fasting tomorrow. This year maybe I'll try and do it better, as thanks perhaps for everything that has been going well. Or maybe it permeates and self-perpetrates, that all things being good enables and stables the mind to the point of readiness to welcome different things, even better things. I've began to hate alcohol recently, it's been the cause of many fights and tears in June, and it brings out the demons. But I'm not adverse to getting high, not at all. That's something else altogether, a communion with the earth, the partaking of god's breath, ascending to an elevated state.


We're losing Night & Day. First it was Pigeon Hole and Broadcast HQ, then now N&D. All our dirty little upstairs hideaway secret, all gone because of stupid beauracrazy. No more late night chats on Mount Emily, with me falling in love with different girls who are so alike in so many ways. No more curbside communion, drinking from 711, and stealing ice-cream. We're losing the histories and the stories of the people from all over the world who graffitied its wall, too:
2) PH: There I peeped around the window and he peeped back and that night he said I was cute but few days later he quit.
1) BHQ: we snuck around in the alleys, breathing in smoke and letting the adrenaline run wild in our veins/ I drove 7 drunk men there once with my heart on my tongue.
2) N&D: was my first published review and my first event design, which is rather poignant now considering its impending demise, and event if does move elsewhere we stilllose the histories and the stories of the people from all over the world who graffitied its wall, too.




I'm sure the next space will be just as good. The party is in its people.

I spoke to Marisse on Friday. I had dreamt about her the previous night, telling her she was wearing a lovely dress in a picture she recently took and that I had one similar too. That Friday night, she told me she was happy for me, because even afar we still keep tabs. We spoke of the years that had elapsed, and the realization that the vibes remain the same. We exchanged various tips on staying happy. Turns out we've been doing the same thing, and then using it to Create.

And I love the people, though this job is an extensive reminder that I, introvert, will never be a natural people-person, because people are exhausting and I fake it until I make it, I am nice to people because I will myself to and even though I do it well enough it is still exhausting. Truly if I wasn't drained by the constant demand of humans for attention I would Create more but on my off days (like today) I prefer to the immersive meditation of elevated wonder at the limitless, in which it means stretching a point beginning from myself and far out into infinity, and then stretching another point inwards inside me into infinity. I prefer to be consumed in the sizeless immensity of the universe, and then consuming it piece by piece by piece through the various lessons falling softly into my lap, or stumbling over it inside the world wide web of interconnected brains and communing with the rest of the world like so. If the rest of the universe beyond ourself is connected, could the internet be the medium in which the insides of our minds connect and communicate with each other. brb I need another hit.