house of mirth

pau with happy calamari rings, bello with panna cotta and JINGO WHOS BACK!!

hockey cheers- of a very different kind!

i think bello's part finger was over the lens in this one. causing our half-obscurity.

--
She allowed herself to listen to their mental processes, the crude vulgar words which she herself could not descend to, yet the truth of which she could not deny. Her mind lingered on the edges of such crude thoughts, yet she dared not step past the threshold and release her own adroit mind to the meddling of such base weaponry, lest her whole person be poisoned by the trade.

so, we went to maxwell food market and was kind of disappointed at the unsingaporean fare they served. it was jingo's first night back in singapore, and the orluak looked rather like the chaitaokuay, pau's watercress soup was too full of the veggies she disliked, (which unfortunately soaked up the soup which she DID like), and munloh and i were subject to porridge because of potential wisdom tooth extraction and flu respectively.

but things got better, and pau especially was acting a little drunk even before we headed to timbre, SUCH was our delirium at seeing each other after so many months, scattered like Babel-ians across the globe to Italy, Chicago, London and three of us to random preoccupations in Singapore. We went to timbre to see Mr. Siva in his band EIC and were glad we went on the correct day and managed to see him. Not that we took much notice of him, we were too engrossed in our talk and too blocked by the fat tree trunk which stood in between his head and our eyes in a most inconvenient way.

i've been tuitioning my cousin for the past two days, and involving myself with rag. but today i took a sabbath from rag and just stayed in bed and read for the later half of the day and slept, before i went to visit the doctor in the evening. I have orders not to sing and not to talk too much to prevent excessive strain on the throat. hahahaha. well well, seeing im supposed to lead worship this week, that'd require godly intervention wouldn't it? i Am looking forward, then. "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." 2Cor12:9
for the conversion of weakness into a glory not mine!

ive just been reading Edith Wharton's House of Mirth, and completed it today. She's a perfect genius with words, and so many of her phrases just struck a chord in me. 'Struck a chord', now, thats a phrase she'd never use, because it is an overused cliche. So bin the cliches, and let us stretch language to the full height of its potential, discarding our lazy expressions, the saggy couches of stock phrases we sink in so comfortably for want of mental exertion, words used too much they have emptied themselves of meaning.

i wrote a lot today, since it is my preferred medium of expression, and since i have a convenient order by the doctor against the medium of speech. but i have had to censor myself, and the bits which are publicly air-able are pasted here in fragments, inspired randomly by the powerful, swaying eloquence of Wharton's words.

The barriers of self-preservation, of social conduct and proper etiquette stifle like a corset. In the properness of how things are done we lose ourselves, we lose the raw integrity and blundering honesty of our souls, we betray the human longing to reveal our inmost thoughts. Why do each and every one of us keep up the charades?

How finely we keep the icing on the cake, the sheer veil of chocolate powder over its surface, the spread of gleaming cream evenly smoothed, when all we really want to do is stick a finger through the pie and taste the inside. No, we deny our tongues the delight, the temptation to animal frankness subdued under stuffy coats and stiff jeans, feet pressed into pinching high heels, faces plastered by make-up compacts, hair fixed by moving rubber- giving the guise of movement and gaiety, but in reality enslaved and attached by the root to a range of fixed positions. What flinging aspirations transfixed by the immobility of circumstance, what wild indulgences anchored and moored to stumpy posts of responsibility and restraint!

dad told me today i should rest instead of running in an out of the house. i would rest more, except that i refuse to nurse my sickness more than is necessary. my sudden eloquence or verboseness now is caused by a drugged wakefulness.

I slept the day hours away, and now wakefulness has come back to haunt me, the promised drowsiness of medicine falling short of their projections, or proving too weak to the accumulated force of release, the current of my words sweeping away all resistances to their flow.

I spent the day nursing my sickness, though I think I shouldn’t. it’s the sort of thing like a blister on your finger, the more you stare at it the bigger and redder it seems to swell, or like the nursing of a grudge- the eyes loom and magnify the excesses of a thing originally small, till it grows to fill the edges of your vision, and becomes the central focus, the centerpiece of an immovable bludgeon, the one prone to blind you to everything else. But what do sick people do but lie down and rest? And if that is no remedy but instead a catalyst for illness, it is no wonder then that so many people in the world are sick. We have all been, for generations, grooming our own diseases in the backyards of our lives, planting the weeds to the demise of our own crop!

--

most times i refrain from letting words leave my mouth, because they tend to assume lives of their own, along the curve of an evolutionary trend much devolved from my preferences. Like God, I presume to speak them into being, except, unlike God, I cannot be sure of their being made tangible. And the failure thereof will return to smite me with redoubled mockery, the mockery of my hopes, a public flogging. Better to leave in the dusk of secret wishes and hints of light in the cavern of mystery and darkness, than to leave glowing trails leading nowhere but the recesses of a dead end within the cave.

aborted tongue.

while attempting to do my weekly room clearance [the weekly felicia thing], i came across last year's organizer, which attempted to categorize my disjointed thoughts into separable days and months. then i came across a snippet of writing (edited), which i was quite pleasantly surprised to find. it's like finding money in your jeans pocket. it smacks of a political-something, like i had a gripe against society, which is now lost, me being the apathetic/contented/disinterested/bribed singaporean:

(.aborted tongue)

the nation speaks.
thrown together,
like ingredients onto a pizza crust
surprised at each other.

cast into the scorching oven
of war and battle, melted memory
gluing us in place.

how we struggled to form speech, to burst
through our swollen, pregnant, long-accustomed
muteness-
speech, the question marks left hanging
that tilted sideways
and hooked together the
fragments of us.

but all we could stutter in naive lisp
was a half-
tongue, a conjoined hybrid
of languages-
singlish.
that was all we had,
all there was to remove,
and they did it.

one successful campaign,
like the stop-at-two birth controls;
but babies unborn are
they are babies dead.
dead are
aborted into a wasteland of the Nation's rejects
like unfinished sentences where meaning once-survived

their uncried screams, unfalling tears, unspent kicks
adding to the jumble of a (struggling) unbloodied birth.

-

on the long journey home from east to west after the planetshakers concert, i got a chance to talk to aaron and amos. they asked if i was 21 or 22 years old, i said 20.
'wow. ok.'

'why? how old do i look?' (fine, shoot myself in the foot. question to avoid, if in doubt.)

'uh.. about 26 or something. or 24.' - aaron.
'you DIE.'

hahaha. TWENTY-SIX!

muteness

"diaries are records not of fullness, but of emptiness."
and i agree absolutely. the reason i do not write, is not because my mind's a blank. far from it, it is too full i do not know how to unload it, and i can't actually, really, unload, unwind, unleash. there aren't enough ears and there aren't enough words and i aint enough trust.
-
somehow the most precious thing i could give to a friend is not hugs or sweets or advice, but trust. because it comes so rarely with me, my inner clockwork mechanisms run on suspicion or guardedness or something. trust dont come easy. now i sound like scrooge on a hypersensitive, excessive paranoia homerun, but arent you wary, too? guess im just made like that. ive always had a few close friends rather than a heapload of hibye acquaintances, and secrets are secrets kept for life. and i get irritated when people tell me to keep secrets and i keep them for years only to find they went around telling their secrets to other people themselves hahaha. prfft. bummer. but i digress. why TELL when others cant understand, cos they cant see that specific angle of things which only you in your unusual position among friendships stand, why be honest when itll hurt or confuse others and not help yourself? and thats the reason for the silence. all the thoughts jamming up the machine and not given utterance.
-
i'd much prefer writing in verse,
cos i can be honest in the cryptic-ness of it.
and honesty is very important, when opportunities to be so are so rare.
and you should always be honest with yourself.
-
choice is such a difficult thing, because it never ever comes alone.
first, memory and experience are baggages of the past that unpack themselves very slowly, so they tend to tag along.
next, there's responsibility and expectation that weigh on your neck and prod you this way and that.
third, choice is a string knotted at two ends, in the heart and in the mind, and the weight on the string jerks up and down in an unpredictable flux.
fourth, choice mates with fear when the future is unknown- fear of regret, fear of not knowing.
but choice also hooks up with faith for the Believing because that unknown future necessitates it- and faith and fear collide like disoriented, slippery fish in the ocean.
so you see, choice is such a big thing coupled with other things imposed on one space, ONE position to fill. (thus arises the concept of opportunity cost)
-
i wish i could cut the chase and just SPEAK SIMPLE UNDERSTANDABLE WORDS but i cant i cant i cant.

picture bang

thanks swimming capped people! zhon n ahlee wore their swimming caps in changi airport then popped up and said hi to me. i couldnt stop laughing. they looked ridiculous! haha. <3

here's proof that i got your stuff from korea!

that funny looking thing is an orea wafer stick! you should go try it. yum.

just some random rose bush in korea! i dont see anyone taking photos beside singapore's bougainvillea bush!

i like the shadow.

cool right. i took it! hahaha

'smile, dad!'

random SUNFLOWER field. twas gorgeous.

been so long since i last blogged. korea! well, here are a few of the 947 photos i just uploaded into my comp. i think ive contracted chronic lethargy or something. haha inertia to do anything. well.
now that ive uploaded so many pictures and neglected my msn friends long enough, its time to let the pictures do the talking and sign off. be back... next time. when i have less to think about and more to say.