Autumn Sweater

I want to renounce my Chinese ethnicity. It unnecessarily burdens me, and I'm getting tired of feigning interest in a culture so dominated by superstition and tradition, that hearing crises of disappearing practices and values day in and day out is becoming so gratingly commonplace I can no longer feel any sliver of pathos. It has milked me of all the interest I could ever possibly give, and all it does is take, take and take.

Besides, I've often detested being labelled Chinese. What about the rich Hokkien heritage of the generations before me (assuming that I do care for whatever they did), or the Peranakan way of life which popular media has so conveniently appropriated for entertainment value? It seems to erase a part of our past by imposing a blanket term to cover everything that is evident in the present. It seems to suggest that nothing else matters now that one is Chinese and Chinese alone.

Interestingly, I stepped into JC thinking somewhat naively that Chinese lessons were going to be more enriching and meaningful this year. Perhaps I might come to appreciate the beauty of the adages that the wise men of yore penned down, I would imagine, drinking tea in a fit of suppressed euphoria after an enlightening moment. However, all I'm getting is a message marred with a sense of imperialism from this Middle Kingdom, that one is Chinese and therefore has to follow all its rules and customs.

I think it's not right to be forced to learn Chinese because I am "Chinese." Because of that label alone, society subjects us to the supposed shame of not knowing one's own language. I for one think that this "responsibility" to "know" your "own" culture is fiction to begin with. And do I, by any chance, look like plant to you? I do not own these "roots" that everyone speaks of. I can survive well enough on my own, thank you very much.

Hence, I am not Chinese because I've been labelled that way by the government. While it can expedite the management of society to a certain degree, it still carries the connotation of a homogenous mix and this erodes the meaning of our identity. It makes an immediate link to a mother land that I cannot identify with, a place so distant it feels more like a fabrication shamelessly etched into textbooks than an origin so often romanticized.

ahem.

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K goodnight.

I have A Level Chinese Oral tomorrow and I've just come back from Udders after having the best hot chocolate I've ever drunk in my entire life! I can sleep happy now, if not for the fact that a) there's oral tomorrow and b) UNAS PRESENTATIONNNN!!! IS!!!! IN!!!! ONE!!!! WEEK!!!!

I'm a little hyper but this is really the chocolate in me speaking. It also is, unfortunately, not doing anything wonderful to my throat, unless you count that hairy feeling in your gullet as something to find any delight in.

Anyway this is really weird but I'm channeling the New Man of late. Laughing and crying while reading a book on the train is one thing, but tearing during Econs lecture while remembering the lines is perhaps a sign of insanity.

Hmmmmmmmmmm

Hmmmmmmmmmm

Hmmmmmmmmmm

I'm so narcoticized and everything around me is trying to make conversation.

I want to sleep but this person keeps calling the house phone to talk to my grandpa. Now he's just entered the front door. I can hear him sit on the sofa. His voice sounds like a snare drum crossed with a kazoo. My grandpa and him will have a long conversation. I will never be able to rest. :(

4th of July: Bearing Fruit

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Today wasn't so bad. I got caught in the mid-morning rush, had a headache and nose like a clogged sink for the whole day, strained my neck during civics, then spent the rest of the afternoon worrying myself to death about JCT results.

I went to HMV to kill some time while waiting for my parents, and to my horror, found myself at the epicentre of the I-Can't-Get-Over-Michael-Jackson's-Death movement. Blaring at full volume from the speakers was Michael Jackson asking the man in the mirror to change his ways. I walked past the bestsellers' rack. Michael Jackson. I took a look at the DVDs. Michael Jackson. I rummaged through T-shirts. Michael Jackson. I looked at newspapers and magazines. Michael Jackson. I stared at the book rack. Michael Jackson. I looked into the mirror near the counter. Michael Jackson. (I'm kidding, thank God it was just me.)

Anyway, I apologize in advance for walking around looking like a train wreck. I blame it on the JCTs and other things that have no right to bother me in the first place.

There's also going to be a blood donation drive in my school! There was a talk about it (which went on forever) this afternoon, and I was thinking how much better it would have been to drain the blood out of the people at the back who clearly had all the intelligence and maturity of a bowl of oatmeal instead. This way, you save lives AND take away the inconveniences as well.

I'm so unusually grumpy. It's like a long and protracted periodic male tension nightmare really. I shall christian this week The Week of The Grumps.

Just yesterday evening, I discovered that my granddad cuts his high blood pressure/diabetes/high cholesterol pills with the paring knife I use to slice my fruit. This, in itself, is not the most shocking thing of course, seeing how pill-cutters are not the most elderly-friendly pieces of equipment due to their miniature size encumbering slightly rheumatic hands. What alarmed me was the fact that the knife is never washed after the pill-popping ritual, leaving behind a trail of white powder on the blade for the next person to ineluctably consume, potentially disrupting the balance of hormones in our bodies resulting in sustained damage to our nervous systems over time.

This is only the second theory I have thought of to explain the general feelings of gloom in 2009 though.

The first one lies completely in the fact that I have to travel to Bedok every school day and spend most of my waking hours in drudgery, wallowing in a hot and steamy cesspool with hundreds other indifferent individuals. I guess I may be mean and merciless in my condemnation of this entire part of Singapore at times, but it's true that I've loathed having to trudge through the early-morning sludge of human traffic since Day One of my misery, and visiting this area for random events in my secondary school life had only sowed the seeds for extreme dislike for the years to come.

I've professed my deep dislike for Bedok so many times already, I'm beginning to feel quite adept at expressing my disdain. But give me about 30 years of absence and perhaps I will return with a faint sentimental attraction to this neighbourhood. The keyword here is "faint".

Anyway, to answer my title, I cook because it helps me calm down, and the act of creating something nourishing alongside tactile, olfactory, gustatory, visual and aural stimuli is a very rewarding process.

I cook, also, because if I don't, I'll end up with heart disease by the time I cut the triple-layer buttercream-frosted cake for my thirtieth birthday. Without the autonomy of making informed dietary choices, I'll be repeatedly force-fed processed food drenched in oil, or so-called traditional ethnic cuisine swimming in lard and clarified butter. Every dish later on in life becomes
a gamble with Death, a sorry state my forebears had to put up with.

I like to cook also because I treasure the moments spent sitting down to eat without anything else on my mind. My breakfasts are spent walking briskly to the MRT station with a sandwich in one hand and a frown that I attempt to cooly drape on my face, to match the agony I smell in the air. There was a nightmarish period in my life when dinners were waffles and stale bakery buns that I would peel and chew at 9 PM while running away from the horrors contained behind me. I love to sit down at the table and smell the rosemary and thyme, not caring for the idiocy that seems inherent in everything else, while peeling a tangerine and scooping seeds out of passionfruit as the phone rings on silent mode in the far-off recesses of time and space.
It's also a nice feeling to see that meals still retain their importance in the midst of the madness without having to become intravenous nutrient drips.

So there, this is my manifesto for the more important things in life. I'm going to blaspheme epistemic principles by saying that I know I exist not because of my consciousness, but because food you put effort into creating is just so darn tasty. Just sayin'. I need to satisfy primal needs.

The weather's so amazing, it is a sin to do anything at all.

Hence, I shall sleep and perhaps wake up tomorrow to mug frantically. Over a mug of hot coffee. This will be the death of me, but whatever, y'know?

Anyway, I'm come to closure about something that's been bothering me for the past week. If only time can tell, then I'm counting on it to do a 10 episode documentary for me. I'll lie in wait, watch from the sidelines, observe what happens, and then enter much like a deus ex machina when something happens.

I've been wanting to post this up for a long time.



A Softer World

I think it's clever and sad all at the same time.

Helped my mum hang up national day decorations around church for the kindergarten (read: climbing up dizzying heights with shaky old ladders).

My family went to sakae later to eat sushi and it started to rain. Heavily.

It was still pouring when we reached Bishan. We're going try Italian-Romanian food at the market later, but seeing how it's still raining out there, maybe we'll have to settle for something else, like dumplings and soup. I'm not complaining though!

Anyway at Cold Storage today, my mum emerged out and surprised me with a potted basil plant as a half birthday present! It's currently my favourite plant at home now. I have a pet basil plant.

Oh, and I did this facebook album as my half birthday gift to everyone - blast from the past

The sky is covered with dust bunnies leaping heavenward. The wind is cold but not piercingly so. The rain is momentarily stopping, but it looks like it's going to pour again. I'm surrounded by poetry again.

I've been watching episodes of Pete and Pete and it makes me feel genuinely happy for a while, and then sad because I still live in the 90s.

Anyway it's this show that aired on Nickelodeon in the early nineties, and I love it because it's so bizarre and often surreal but hilarious. It's also surprisingly clever for a kid's show - its synopses read like "Older Pete's class takes a trip on a yellow school bus driven by love-spurned Stu Benedict, and everyone gets to examine the deep recesses of their souls."

I could watch it all day. :)