there is method in it

2009-06-14T01:09:00.000+08:00

Everything seems to just remind me of how I am not her. Not someone good enough to splurge on a vacation for. Not someone from the same place, speaking the same language, knowing the same code. Not someone to experience new things together with. I'm just a tourist, just a foreigner, just a visitor, never a resident. Not good enough.

jesus, etc

2009-06-13T18:35:00.002+08:00

If you take one knockout pill and a whole lot of cough syrup, don't expect a dreamless sleep. This is no Hans Christian Andersen. This is no Michel Gondry. This is strictly anti-aesthetic, anti-conduct book.

It is a hodgepodge of Sims 3, Wilco with an ivory grand piano in a makeshift concert hall filled to unpleasant proportions with heartland types, a dead friend still alive and not yet a friend. Chaotic? Completely. Poetic? Not really. I'm not sure that this is a pleasant combination. The seamless harmony is not so seamless and the layers of surrealism are lost on me. What happened to good old dreams of witches dancing around a fountain while you go after a giant Lizard as an Asian version of Lara Croft with about 300 percent less sex appeal?

I'm uncomfortable with my dream life. I've always liked to believe in naivete that the dream mes go on living in a parallel universe. Parallel universes full of dream versions of me, often slightly nightmarish in appearance (this is faithful to reality).

The irony - let me interject to say how much I hate the incorrect application of this word - is that I would rather be in one of my dream universes than in real life with real feelings and real disappointments. Real hopes dashed, real desires carelessly battered to a drop of microscopic dew, real dream vacations becoming nightmarish (dream destinations at this point become your top hated place on Earth, even if travel magazines will tell you how beautiful and exotic and - wait for it - romantic they are).

Excuse me, I seem to have gotten carried away by my real reality-induced (I rue reality) feelings. (In an ideal dream universe, I'd like to be a numb android. Please?) I was actually writing about...cough syrup. Barely a month and I've already gone through the bottle. Maybe I should try a different flavour this time.

allaroundbackgroundsound: Naive Melody - Talking Heads

i feel ugly

2009-06-06T15:05:00.002+08:00

It is a cold, self-deprecating blast of wind that never blows away. I'm not one to indulge in a melancholic post into cyberspace. Since I haven't posted in a year, since no one reads this anymore and no one is likely to see it, I feel I can expose myself for what I am worth. (Which at this moment feels like a sad sum of nothing.)

It's about time I confess that I am ugly. I'm no paragon of beauty. I'm no Helen who launched a thousand ships. I'm not even that girl with plastic surgery who convinces herself she is gorgeous, even if her face does look like a stack of mismatched lego pieces.

I don't look at myself in the mirror. I don't surreptitiously glance at my reflection in the train when it scurries through the tunnel like an electric robot rat. I have never enjoyed my own refelction, or partaken in moments of self admiration. I don't have Johnny Bravo moments. I'm more a rough combination of Ed, Edd and Eddy, as far as my mind will have me believe.

Is it possible that I love myself so little? I am spent. I just want to be alone. Romance can go make love to itself. I realise I am perhaps better off alone, where there will be no one to chase away in the first place.

2008-06-26T13:55:00.002+08:00

I'm definitely not siding with the international terror network. Thanks to their death sprees, I am now burdened with luggage woes: I cannot bring my toothpaste and creams on board, lest the air pressure should alter my sanity and create in me a death monster, eager to build bombs out of Listerine Antiseptic Mouthwash. If it was a two hour flight, d'accord. But a shortage of creams and other liquids/gels for more than seven hours is pure torture. Add to that the vicious smell of airplane food and the intolerable ear popping moments and that is why I don't like to fly.

biography of a small metal object

2008-06-13T15:07:00.003+08:00

The Marquis de Sade called me last week to say that he wanted his insanity back.

Having been possessed by some supernatural heat wave that descended upon my quiet suburbian neighbourhood, I was unreluctant and unrelenting, and often speaking in my sleep. A nap, any pediatrician will tell you (for a superlunary consultation fee), is a good thing. Having outgrown child status, I have yet to outgrow this philosophy. I take it very seriously. I nap at all times a day, not just once a day. It is a victimless crime: I nap alone, quietly, and myself harvest the objectionable fruits of spending too much time lying horizontal - a bigger bottom.

My bottom is big enough to rule the great firmament.

"My bottom is big enough to rule the great firmament." (It looks better and less ignominious in parentheses.)

Thus began a resusciation of my gym locker key. Hitherto disregarded and plainly ignored, it has since been allowed to leave the claustraphobic confines of my dresser drawer. I must announce in public (even if it be a cyber public, and a non-existent, deaf cyber public) that it has served its purpose well - never have I encountered such a smooth-turning key, so beautiful in its design, angular yet rounded, and rounded my bottom must be! Upon my gravestone will my gym key be saluted and honoured.

Of course, I regretfully anticipate the day when (my) arrant slothfulness will once again repudiate the poor gym locker key. To its wooden jail cell it will go, while the bottom of its unpardonable gaoler swells and expands ever disgracefully.

Ipso facto, I write this short historical account of my gym locker key (it is at present unable to write its own autobiography) to remember it, before I again forget it.

thank you iskandar for distracting me

2008-04-09T13:41:00.003+08:00

If I get a C for my term paper, it's because of Iskandar and his warped mind:

Incapable of fully concentrating, I found out first about the vaginal dentata, a pregnant man, and Andy Roddick's perverted inclinations.

word.

2008-03-27T14:08:00.003+08:00

In an effort to make a lot of money and become as famous as Britney's head back when it was still bald, I decided I would try to make the greatest sandwich the world has ever seen:

Great sandwich.

The greatest sandwich.

Ah, what a difference a hand makes.

chance encounters

2008-03-19T23:28:00.002+08:00

Home. In my room.

I am flipping through "Contemporary Islamic Thought" pretending to be a diligent and productive member of society when, between Page 264 and Page 265 I find a note.

It's from a reporter's pad. Lined paper. The average off the shelf A'Zone essential. It has no name, no date, nothing distinguishing about it, except that in blue ink and happy handwriting there is this:

"I love life but
I have too many
suicidal thoughts since
I was 15 years old.
I am 20 now, and
I'm still a walking contradiction."

This is the saddest chance encounter but in some ways, extremely beautiful.

the ___________ one

2008-03-19T22:42:00.002+08:00

Sources have confirmed this morning that I have ___ been making a best effort at being a productive contributor to the blogosphere. The combined effect of self-ruin packaged in the fun and exciting disguise as The Sims 2, coupled with excruciating tree-culling capabilities needed to print and reprint lecture notes are responsible for this tragedy.

Most important of all, there have been no new developments and I refuse to succumb to the temptation of commenting on fugitive JI leaders, even if I am right now writing an essay on the JI. Six books from the central library are guests in my bedroom and although the deadline is four days away they have remained as yet unopened by me. I am not going to be the Straits Times' tool at appearing in touch with the internet - a "netizen". No MSK (abbreviation deliberate) discourses for the moment.

__________. The blanks are here as a type of code. Not of the morse variety. But still a code of equal credibility especially since it has been invented for the sole purpose of letting _____ know that this post is for ___. This is my version of what people like to term a "shout out" even when no actual shouting our outing is involved.

____.

2008-01-20T14:17:00.000+08:00

2008-01-15T16:29:00.000+08:00

Tell me why I am sick of this space

"maybe then you can say to them, 'thank you for the memories'"

2008-01-08T00:15:00.000+08:00

The meeting point between two years means:
1. We have to buy new calendars - some of us are lucky enough to have them bought for us through the sneaky mechanism of the Christmas gift phenomenon.
2. We spend the first few days of the new year slapping our coarse hands on our heads for getting the date wrong, hence that dreaded parking fine.
3. Everyone sets out to make their resolutions, and then blog about them. Eventually, most people forget about the resolutions but this is a fact that is taboo and best left ignored.

The above 3 points are a given, no matter the continent or country. As long as Cuba and North Korea produce calendars, then yes, this includes them too. The blogging in the third point leaves room for debate though - one is unsure of the blogging regulations in a country such as Cuba being of the social variant that is Ignorant First World Citizen Who Only Equates Cuba With Castro, Cigars and Colourful Shirts.

Aspiring social deviant that I am, I neglected to make any resolutions, let alone blog about them. I saw this as not really social deviance but simply being pragmatic and out of character. First, I felt I was bound to break a resolution so why make one anyway? Second, I had my mind occupied by other matters. Things change, they say, and I have chanced upon one resolution - my 2008 theme is selfishness.

Owing to a long string of mental and emotional discomforts, the root cause of these has been attempted to be uncovered. Letting other people shape my life (viewpoints and decisions and eating habits all included) has somehow made me an embarrassed handicap. I need practice to make my mistakes and do what I want to do. I even have approval from enough Authority Figures in my life and will begin doing what I want. If that means downloading music illegally, so be it. If that means crashing into papaya trees and ramming the nose of the car against the tree trunk repeatedly, eventually dying rather tragically from a wayward papaya and not from any automobile-related mishap, then so be it. If that means eating noodles with a fork and not a chopstick, then chopstick manufacturers can kiss their tree-felling, earth-wasting, life-culling businesses goodbye!

Besides, it makes me feel less condemned and judged. I don't have to walk about feeling like all I can make are mistakes and all I can do is myself in and all I can be is a renegade. It gets tiring making people happy. I'm like a carrot feeding a hare family and I'm running out of orange.

2008-01-06T14:23:00.000+08:00

Nick, do you like this one too?

a two minute pet

2007-12-29T17:20:00.000+08:00

I saw the most lovable moth half an hour ago. I wanted to adopt it and baptise it and raise it as a Protestant but send it to Catholic school. It fluttered its wings at the bathroom window and, out of a surge of extreme pity, I opened the window. It rested its mothly arms on the ledge and stared like a romatic poet out into the Christchurchian view. It was of the garden wall. Not a very pretty view in particular but I suppose pretty is relative, especially between different species.

a spotless mind

2007-12-28T18:10:00.000+08:00

The scenesters love it. Kate Winslet with blue hair. Kirsten Dunst jumping about in her underwear. Generally, elements like these make for perfectly enjoyable watching. I imagine that we have all held the DVD remote control close to our hearts, pressing the pause button to get a bowl of chips from the kitchen, again to go to the toilet, and just one last time to pick up the phone and divert the lady looking for your mother on to better pastures of the mobile phone variety. We've all thought about the Clementine song and tried to grasp some hold of the lyrics from within the shadowy recesses of our pre-maturely aging minds. We have inwardly cursed Jim Carrey while at the same time pondering Kate Winslet's shampoo habits and perhaps the extent of oxidisation.

I used to think it was a horror movie. I considered it a vile perversion of the human mind to dream up an idea so base as the erasure of memory. It seemed like a Brave New World, a Gattaca, yet another marketed dystopia to thwart our attention away from an already degenerative society. Today, I think it a fantasy. To be able to reach into my mind and sort through my thoughts without any help from Harry or Hermione and throw the ones I'd rather not remember into the waste paper bin of the universal vaccum would be legendary. And quite desirable.

There are many things we'd rather not remember because emotions attach themselves so thickedly to memory, that even the most stoic of us struggles to retain control of the heart when the head has impolitely intervened. How many things would I like to forget? How many people? How many places? How many words? How many smiles? How many inside jokes and secret passages and knowing glances and the quick brush of a hand? Countless. Countless beyond even a fertile imagination.

The suggestion of losing humanity defiles us in its inhumanity but still we grab hold of it, hungry, desiring, desperate to be relieved.

allaroundbackgroundsound: Lay Lady Lay - Bob Dylan; There She Goes - The Velvet Underground

2007-12-27T12:11:00.000+08:00

I looked at my results and felt relief. But I still wasn't happy. Strange.

allaroundbackgroundsound: Charmer - Kings of Leon

falling out of love with the little drummer boy

2007-12-22T12:54:00.000+08:00

Consumerism used to love me at some point in time. I was a compulsive, impulsive, person of the purchasing inclination. I had no credit card and not very much cash but my spending power was high. I was spendingly powerful.

The token of appreciation I got for wiping the shelves and mopping the floors and hanging the clothes and dressing the mannequins at your high street chain store - some delusional people call it a pay check - quickly withered away like an aged dying old lady left starving under a eucalyptus tree in winter time. I'm not even sure what I spent on. Until today, I throw away all receipts in order to minimise 1)guilt; 2)mess in my waller; 3)the felling of trees for paper.

Lately, though, I find an oddly inaccurate thread in my personality. I have no desire to spend money at all and go out without cash a lot of the time. (I caved in and bought some clothes here and there so the sale-makers' sale signs won't go wasted.) I feel a little bit happily diseased. I am not myself and frankly don't mind it. The season has lost its etheral glimmer and glow and christmas cheer has become a little figment of days gone by, much like Mattel.

I am much content envisioning for myself a Manic Street Preacher lifestyle. I think of Julian Casablancas when I tie my all stars. I sleep on my right and stare at a portrait of Damion Albarn. I visit Borders and touch the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald and feel unknowingly enchanted. I imagine the great Gatsby when I bite into a hand-made chocolate. I look at the oven and think of Sylvia Plath and her bell jar life. I dance and think of Matisse and his painting of the dance and I feel not graceful at all. I listen to The Decemberists and think of Coleridge. I speak to Shakespeare in my head. I can smell Vikram Seth when I smell an old book. I feel unhappy with Murakami and wonder what he means. When it gets dark, I think of Marlon Brando and his wry old non-smile and leathery skin and darkest eyes.

The year is about to come to a close and I am now in the place I was a year ago. (Wow! Genius deudction, Jacqueline! Bravo! Bravo!) It is the time when I have to contemplate 2007 and semi-predict 2008 and make that list of resolutions that often goes unobserved and forgotten. The trouble is I have no idea what happened in 2007. I don't even know if that person living my life was me.

in the summer of 07

2007-12-15T17:23:00.000+08:00

When I get back, they'd have to pass me through immigration via the conveyor belt normally reserved for luggage and boxes of kiwi fruit Singaporeans tend to like smuggling back, from what I have observed. Boxes and boxes. All I have been doing is eating fried chicken wings daily, such that my girth is expanding faster than I can blink. I don't think I'm being delusional when I say my pants are getting a little bit tight.

I am also considering the rather dubiously named "NZ Stoner Rock Fest".

2007-12-14T05:44:00.000+08:00

After a while, it all begins to look the same. I suppose I've always been aware, in my own unaware way, that there was a pattern that existed. Now I see just how much of a pattern there is, and just how deep it runs, how many times its details are repeated and stamped across. It's all like a sheet of curtain.

They are all the same. After a while. It becomes hard to differentiate between you and you and you; you are the same. It is unfortunate. Unfortunate that you are the same, and unfortunate that I should have encountered the misfortune.

I cannot victimise myself however. It is as much my own fault for owning some serious stupidity. At the moment, still, I would like to fling my head and heart against the wall, and leave a dent the size of my foolishness.

2007-11-19T01:09:00.000+08:00

Once upon a time, I made a mental note to not blog about things that are depressing or upsetting or generally producing an effect opposite to that of ecstasy. I don't think I have kept to this mental note rule. Today, I need to consciously break it. My friend Bartholomew J. Simpson once told me rules were meant to be broken. Whatever that means, I will break this rule tonight and begin a process of crying my heart out.

The reason behind my wailing eyes and distressed state is this: university, my university, is at odds with me once again. I am not upset with the university. I am upset with myself. It seems I have a quirky talent. I have some quirky talents but this one is the most quirky of all because of its self-jeopardising characteristics. My quirky talent is that I have a great ability of doing (or not doing) things to specifically mess up my future. I control my future, and I let it die. I LET IT DIE.

As of one hour ago, a gateway to a wonderful world was closed. Had I been just one minute early, I would have made it. They say time waits for no man. I must be a man, then, because time has not waited for me. Now, not only am I without that future I dreamed of, I am also confused about my sex.

2007-11-15T21:22:00.002+08:00

So, it seems that I tend to post many posts at once. We can call this efficiency. Or, anything else. I just thought that I would say: I really like going to supermarkets. I really like pushing the trolley in supermarkets. I really like it best when they play Christmas tunes while I push the trolley in the supermarkets. It is like a drug to me.

I'm psyched about Christmas. I'm even glad about my birthday for a change. I think it has a lot to do with getting my driving license (see two posts down for non-details). Now there is a bit of a hoo-ha between my father and I. We are disagreeing on choice of car for me. The new Jeep, which only arrives in June. Or a beetle cabriolet, which arrives anytime I want, baby! I think perhaps it is useless to get a car now since I am likely to study in Europe next year. So, whatever, I don't care!

Sad thing is, why must I spend Christmas on a different continent on a different ocean? I wish I could have all the girls I have ever loved (in a non-homosexual way, you pervert) spend Christmas with me. And I wish Fab Morretti and his band could be there. But, whatever. I don't care!

I should really get to working on my to-do list.

My To-Do List (talk about efficiency)
- Pass my driving test (done)
- Write 4 term papers (done)
- Discover myself (not yet done but in the process of doing)
- Watch Marie Antoinette (done)
- Go to India (not done)
- Find my ring (not done)
- Europe applications (not done)
- Edit that online magazine (not done)
- Clean my room (not done)

Ok, I am bored.

2007-11-12T23:23:00.001+08:00

Enough ranting. I have been thinking again. I think there are some people who are absolutely beautiful. People who have more than looks (though they do have great looks, I assure you) but heart and mind and spirit.

2007-11-12T22:45:00.000+08:00

I will talk about nothing in particular. Days of marathon term papers have subjected me to tedious hours of thinking up clever thesis statements to blow the fannies off my professors (there is a low chance of achieving this both literally and figuratively) in their comfortable academic offices. While everyone was fast asleep dreaming about their A+ grades and making the dean's list once again, Asya and I were thinking up ways to cheat the wordcount and still sound more brilliant than Winston Churchill. For the next five or ten minutes, I am ignoring term papers.

I realise that what I am most discontent with in university is contentment (and obviously not my own). How is it that our supposed students' union is made up of nothing more than people who harbour socialist ideals about making the student population into one big blob of plasticine that they can twist this way and that? How is it that students, especially those fresh-out-of-college-wow!-I-don't-need-a-uniform?!?! freshmen, find this to be the most exciting, most "happening", coolest place their squinty eyes have ever seen? How is it that we are supposed to be the future leaders and elites of this country, yet if we want to put up a flyer, Momma spank us if we don't get it approved by Aforementioned Students' Union? How is it that nobody sees it necessary to do anything about anything and something and everything?

Let's not get too carried away, Jeko. After all, the threat of having a huge footprint on one's arse if one so much as mentions student riots is real and pertinent but not justifiable. Nor is it justified. When was it that we took off our hats to socialsim and bade farewell to democracy? Student bodies are historically key players in the revolutions that took Asia out of the white man's burden, out of communisim and military rule, and here we are in the tewnty-first century, armed with better means than ever (wikipedia, people!) but still many students just care about turning the hallways into catwalks and joining pageants and going to Zouk on Mambo Night. There is a world to change but no one dares to.

AND IT ANNOYS ME! Even if you don't want to do anything about it, even if you don't want to take up a call to action, even if you don't know what else to expect, then why can't you just get annoyed at it too? I'm disillusioned for sure. If you have a voice, use it. If out of this, this, comes the formidable force that is to rule the world in twenty years, I need to check again what formidable means, and what it means to be a human with human rights.

2007-11-09T00:05:00.000+08:00

"So many fish there in the sea
I wanted you, you wanted me
That's just a phase it's got to pass
I was a train moving too fast

Didn't understand what to see
Yeah, then I got a different view
It's you...no.

Wait, I'm gonna give it a break.
I'm not your friend,
I never was.
I said wait, I'm gonna give it a break.
I'm not your friend,
I never was."

an opportune moment to strike up the band and declare recess and allow brain functions to temporarily wane

2007-11-07T21:20:00.000+08:00

I know the annual day of celebrating my birth is just around the corner like a boogie monster, lurking in the gray shadows, eyes downcast while letting that translucent darkness envelope him as he holds up a placard with "Happy Birthday" on it in Helvetica, font size 42. I don't particularly remember any fantastic or exuberant celebrations since I was a kid and all I wanted was that washing machine toy (and thank you Jackie for convincing your parents to get it for me - you will forever be remembered for this inexplicable kindness). One year I dumped a basin of dirty-feet water onto Michelle Yip's head when she got a little bit too trigger happy with the water guns and water bombs at the ubiquitous water fight. No child is complete without a water fight. No child from an inhibiting convent school life is complete without a water fight.

My birthdays have since then been a date on my mental calendar, privy only to myself, my family, and random people from Friendster and Multiply who only wish you because the internet told them too. Naturally, I have been guilty of returning the passionate favour. The fact that my birthday always fell/falls in the exam season is a little bit of a party pooping machine. I could only dream of having a party where people would show up and if they would show up, without their binded notes and textbooks trailing behind them like little baby ducklings following mama to the pond.

Tonight, I feel happy. A parcel arrived in the mail from the UK not for my father, not for my mother, not for my brother, not for Peanut/Barrel, not for Charsiewbao/Charles/Chucky, not for Toby/Runty, not for Sheep/Bumfluff, not for T-Rex/Trex/Robo/Stinko/AhFoo, but for me. Pour moi, as the French would have you say. (But be careful to say it right; they are known for being rather...particular.) A birthday gift of [insert very loud sigh here] clothes and earrings and a lovely bracelet. And a, uh, soft toy. I have never ripped apart a large envelope with that much vehemence as I did half an hour ago. The contents are now splayed across the bed like toy soldiers on a 6 year old boy's battlefield.

Knowing someone cares - that is one of the most venerated feelings of them all.

(And now, I have to fulfill my obligation of writing my 3 term papers at the speed of light and with the greatest mental capacity I can offer up.)