aversion, the aperture which closes shut before the shutter can flash.
i just want to shut your words out and build a wall but a wall isolates not one but two-
like the Berlin divide split the nation right down the middle

i wanted to blog but there are no words
aiyah, and i dont want to be emo nor be reminded of potential emoness
so why am i here?

when u dont have answers, what do u do?

korean komrades

rag was at its most fun today, i think. because we came up with some way to mechanize mass-production to optimize efficiency output of papier mache rocks. hahah. so we can now papier mache surfaces in 1/6th the time or something. HOW? don't tell you. and thats not all! while we were in the arts forum, this group of south korean tourists, about 20 of them stopped by and started asking what we were doing.
"uh.. production, parade for floats..."
"fuh..lote?"
"ah, yes. like a..."
"ay.. fes-tee-vahl?"
"yes yes. like a festival"
"OHH! -excited korean mutterings- arts festival!"
he then motions at the stinky papier mache ball in my hand and points at the rock cave to show that he wanted to help. i was so amused (and quite glad to dispose myself of it hahahah!) and passed him the wad of damp mache.

communication was kind of difficult because we were talking over their heads in english and they were talking over ours in korean and there was this mismatched crossfire of words but good intentions saved the day. so whenever we didnt understand something we'd just laugh. someone remarked that we are more likely to do things we wouldn't normally do when we're overseas, just because there is no embarrassment to deal with- no aftermath to clear up, no former reputation to preserve or sequel to continue, and the Present becomes a quirky, curious and irresponsible child without any strings to tie it down. it is free to be itself!

and that is part of what i love about being overseas, too. that i can be someone other myself, yet strangely, be more of myself than i ever used to be. so anyway, i made friends with the korean guy who came over to help me and he kept shaking my hand and pointing out to me the younger korean boys and saying "handsome boy!" then at another "handsome boy, too!" then, "come come, photo!" and we all took a happy family photo in front of our rock cave structure. hahaha. highly amusing experience.

and then the next surprise was, one of the freshies who came down to help revealed incidentally that his ex was my rj classmate! they apparently met during pre-university seminar, which i attended as well, and she ah, so sneaky. we didnt even guess. all along we thought she had something going with another of our classmates. tsktsk. NOW I GO BLACKMAIL HER! muahahaha

have a think.

suppleness is flexibility, and while a soul is supple it is stronger
than if it were tough. like a reed, it gives the feel of weakness,
of yieldedness, yet it is this flawed screen of its brittleness which
is its shield. when she momentarily acquiesces, the uninformed read it
as a weakness, and foolishly satisfied, they back off and are led into complacence.
but the reed is merely accumulating its momentum, like in the hush before a storm.
the knowing notice the way the bending backwards of a reed procures a backlash, that
leaps back onto the attacker in one smooth, graceful swish,
while the attacker has turned his back and begun to walk away.

Suppleness is strength sheathed in silence, in gentleness and forbearance-
three very Chinese qualities.
if you are supple, you know it by the backlash when your secret thresholds are crossed.
you do not break, you merely wait
in the shadows biding for opportunity, for silent and insidious recovery,
for resurrection recoiling from the face of death.

be quiet

"The Lord is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth." Psalm 145:18

"We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to God." 2 Cor 5:20

"...We were harassed at every turn-- conflicts on the outside, fears within. But God, who comforts the downcast, comforted us..." 2 Cor 7:5-6

"Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death." 2 Cor 7:10

"The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ." 2 Cor 10:4-5

--
because when human words fail, human strength is wanting, only One thing remains.
and i hold on to you. let no one tell me otherwise.

point of information, please.

hello pretty sky in faber drive. i was on an evening walk home in my estate.

amandaaaa heng at macs before she fleww

met gerry to lunch at mos! see she smile until so happy

1. i passed driving! the rain stopped before my test! thank GOD. :D
2. i should type simply, if paul represents blog readership, i am simply not making sense. ahah
3. i have worship practice this week! been reaching home quite late.
4. dad just told me that maybe God spoke to Mary face to face (through an angel) while speaking to Joseph in a dream, cos nobody can argue back in a dream. hahaha! clever.
5. the first time i discovered the use of the rain swipers on the car windscreen was when i was trying to signal left.
6. the first time i forgot to put on my seatbelt while driving was during the driving test. 2 points.
7. TWO POINTS!! hahahaha -shock of disbelief-

seven seems like a good number to stop. oh ya happy birthday joel! but that was yesterday.
must i really type in point form in order to be understood. How about perfect punctuation? With the full-stops at their proper places, and weekly spell-checks on Wednesday mornings where the word-prefect comes along with her micro-ruler and pulls out your belt from your pinafore just to see how much it sags? Not to forget that tuft of hair messily stuffed behind your ear! No, child, every single strand must be submitted to the merciless scrutiny and restriction of gel, clip, saliva or pin into a taut flawless ponytail. GASP! i'm doing it again!

much too much of

As The Poems Go
by Charles Bukowski

as the poems go into the thousands you
realize that you've created very
little.
it comes down to the rain, the sunlight,
the traffic, the nights and the days of the
years, the faces.
leaving this will be easier than living
it, typing one more line now as
a man plays a piano through the radio,
the best writers have said very
little
and the worst,
far too much.

-

is there always gonna be a too much in everything, a cap you burst such that it is no longer entre no longer appetising, is it possible that even roses may mellow and be meagre and odious, that in a buffet spread all that is served is excess, and much too much, much too much, creeps covers clouds congeals and it is all bloat?

Imagination, in debut

My words have grown wings and left me,
When I used to be so full of their flutterings
In my mouth, choking to the palette cleave
In contorted musings

My soul is unsettled within me, disposed of its restfulness, insomniac insanity griping and grundling. I make up words to describe the distress, but words are not enough, words and their punctuations and sentences and units and organization, subjects and objects, tenses and grammar, syntax and oontext. Words in all their orderliness, oh! They do not appease me.

Yet they are all I have.

-

I am thinking about imagination, how it is a particular talent of humans, one exclusive to the temperament and nature of our species. We are limited by vision, circumstance and constrained to the fixities of time, yet we have longings and capacities larger than ourselves. We yearn for the beyond, desiring to break through all these swaddling cloths of limitations, to break free and be larger, to stretch and see to the very end, to the back of our heads, although our eyes are indicted to be restricted to a scope of a certain width, beyond which vision blurs and is no more. We have something known as peripheral vision, but it is not enough. Our insides hunger for something more than this, more than insignificant borderline peripheries, because we understand that ‘The End’ is a concept created by the subjects of limitations for their own comfort. The end is the boundary line which demarcates your limits, where your eyes cannot see beyond, where light is not cast onward, where the world flattens out into a single line called the horizon. For God, there is no such thing. For what can end that has no beginning, but just is?

This, then, is the conundrum. With our bodies we stay rooted in our smallness, yet with thought and imagination we project ourselves beyond ourselves- forward to endless eternity and upward to vast galaxies, beneath to deepest lava and mantle core of earth, inward to invisible atom and quark. But there is no end to this extension of our knowledge and our search, once satiated, is at once abetted, and our struggle between contentment and ambition contorts in shrinks and swells.

every time there's one step forward, there's two steps back
square dancing never got anyone anywhere.

a child's eyes.

-
the child's silent, searching stare
suggesting depths beneath the sheen of innocence
delving richness which experience cannot dive into,
placid calm that the turbulent, surging waters of
worldly knowledge cannot demean.

and where we find the truth
is in a simple cusp,
the hollow of a nautilus shell
where a white, enclosing crib buoys up
a fragile truth.
a truth only time, and always time, erodes from childhood's grasp.

a child's wisdom is birthed in a place
(not by swaddling cords of adult embellishment, strangling tight, umbilical.)
but in wombs of emptiness, voids and spaces.
and is provoked, not by experience, but by its very absence
such that no indicting discolouration or bias, shall stain its heart.

the child's adroitness penetrates through filmy layers of insouciance
her eyes are secret slits, knife-edging through superficiality, despite
their compelling, wide-rounded naivete.
a child sees all-
yet blithely, in indifference, casts off all judgement
ignoring the petty adult game of score-keeping
the latter ever seeing, but never perceiving
ignoring the adults, who blindly assume vision without realising their myopia of grudge.

a child sees all,
but as long as childhood remains,
sight is restrained, unarticulated, below the churning surfaces of the deep;
midst-while undercurrents of understanding swirl violently and grow impatient,
waves gather momentum as what is under surges up and forward
to crash upon the rocks in the slurring, slushing white foam outbreak
of cynical adolescence.

@$#%I*$#

had one of those distressing days. you see, i received a call in the afternoon from BBDC which told me i had to book one more driving lesson by TOMORROW, otherwise my driving test date would be cancelled. but the problem is, bbdc lessons are booked to the pit and drained to the dregs (read: no lessons though i kept refreshing the page every 30 seconds for 3 hours). so? i called one of my hockey juniors n asked if she happened to have a class tomorrow which she could give up to me. n she said, yes! the prime time slot at 12 plus, n we both camped at our computers and she cancelled her class, while i tried to kope it. but guess what?
???
someone koped her slot before i did, even though i was there the very second. like ARGH! heart pain. and then i was reading gerrys blog in between the fingerclicks on bbdc, and i saw the verse, 'unless the lord builds the house, we labour in vain' and i felt bingo -heart sank further- its just like that. and i dont even know why im repeating it to myself cos it just drums the facts in deeper, but aiyah, i just need an outlet. im so :[ ;[ :( (insert weary, disgruntled, yet-i-still-hope, stop-telling-me-its-easy, sigh emoticon)
-
what does it mean to be the best of myself? i guess i would have to be happy, since thats what my name means. and it applies to everything, in the fight against middling mediocrity. i mean, of course there may be things im just average at, but i shouldnt settle into my shoes and sit in my hips and settle for it. if at first you don't succeed, try, try and try again. and then i can reassess if i am meant to spend my time wading through all the mediocrity, or re-divert my attentions and energies towards something else.
-
how the new philosophy works:
1. not on blackmail.
2. on continued conviction.

i told my friends i would repent from my slow or sometimes non-existent sms replying, and actually TRY to reply promptly. but the sms ahlee sent me last night just stumped me; so you can't jolly well expect a reasonable and prompt answer to a shocking statement. she is often either too deep or too full of nonsense, that girl. n i could rattle on about this "philosophy" but it is so much common sense i'd rather not, and leave you to find out your own philosophies about your own lives.

-
by the way, transformers rocks.
by the way, what does this phrase mean? what way? what is by it?
i think i am going mad. somebody help.

just to break the silence

take me somewhere/whisk me away
on these glass-slippered feet/ treading lightly on fragile dreams
cos its about to be midnight/ and hope is seeping away into these hidden rags/
while the shimmer and sparkle of gown and shawl dissipates;
but a dance with you would be/
as miraculous as a walk on water.

this hiatus has been.. because i use other mediums other than this blog. blogging denotes a sense of boredom for me now, and that means the output tends to be more negative sounding than i usually feel, because well, boredom just clouds over a pallid sky, and the world has caught a flu and there remains only a blur of experience, of masked smell and dulled sensation of the skin, of dilute taste and blocked hearing; bored eyes that perceive the world lack a certain sparkle.
-
happy birthday jacjac. :) u add sparkle to our lives. kind of like the woh ringleader, but we let you unlead sometimes, just cos leading aint always that fun.
-
n gerry i loved talking to you on sunday, so without airs and without veils, so natural like we've been doing it for years. and i know the words we exchanged in confidence wont drop further or ripple beyond, even though we didnt say 'dont tell this to anyone', because because i dunno you get to a stage when you just start trusting, you dont ask if the floor will hold, you just stand.
-
now, now, i just need clarity, and i need time off for myself.