!#$%@

Ugh ugh ugh. MY LAST DAY OF SCHOOL IS RUINED MY CAMERA HAS BEEN TAKEN AWAY ARHGHRI:KL"L:.
My mum has to use it to document the opening of the new playground at the church kindergarten.
I am not in the least thrilled about this. (Where is the camera, she demands. I need it tomorrow.)

Hence, because of this, I am now staying up later to import my photos into the computer. It's 12 am and I have a chem test on my weakest topics tomorrow. This feeling is all at once kafkaesque and disconcerting.

It's not as if I'm an unreasonable individual because I understand her need and the importance of this technology at her workplace. It's just that my plans are ruined now. I hate my plans going to ruination.

Especially if concerns my last day of secondary school. Seriously, how many last-day-of-secondary-schools can one have in a lifetime?

I'm having that self-righteous indignation now that presumes that I am the tormented soul here, the most patient son my parents could have asked for and should now be grateful for and excuse me? I thought the universe was supposed to revolve around me. And I am vacillating between bitterness and self-deprecation once again.

Children's Day. Kids.
Won't be surprised if Mr KC shared that same horrifying experience in the past.

Gah. Stupid notions of childhood.

Ugh, it's the second-last day of school tomorrow (read: lots of frantic and passionate cam-whoring with classmates) and it happens to coincide with the period of the month when my skin decides to become subversive and I feel splotchy and dermally- challenged. I will have to airbrush all my photos now, I guess!

And it's official — I am currently at the bottom of the list of Happening Singaporeans this very day because while the F1 is going on and everyone's booking hotel rooms/visiting the high-rise offices of various friends/wondering where to eat in the crowd behind the safety barricades, I am stuck at home eating steamed broccoli and microwaved chicken. This is very upsetting.

Hence, I shall adjourn from playing with the SPORE creature creator and doing A maths to watch cars zoom past my TV screen. I'm having a lovely weekend.

late at night the stars are bright this is a lame and cliched rhyming couplet

Of late, I find myself facing the "Create Post" page, staring at this blank box and struggling to come up with things to write.

Some Great Person once said that the challenge, as well as courage, of a writer was the ability to face blank pages and fill them up. I don't quite agree, because filling pages with your ramblings, your thoughts, your polemics, your diatribes — these are so much easier to do than facing up to truth and writing as if you have the total intimacy of your audience, not having to veil things and encrypt posts with passwords and polysyllables.

So to an extent, yes, my writing life is currently at its doldrums because there's not much life to fill space up. There are too many rules, too many social constructs to follow, that I can only blog earnestly about food and music. But is this why people blog? I already know that most readers sneer upon teens who blog self-centredly. Some have become so madly in love with themselves it's like solipsism on steroids, but let's all be thankful that they don't blog. However, it doesn't take a Sigmund Freud to understand the sensitivity of our minds and emotions, and to realise that we too need a form of release and catharsis.

This realisation that things are only a veneer of what they really are, it isn't new but there are aftershocks and new suspicions.

So what is this feeling? I'm neither depressed nor angst-ridden, because I'm a little bothered by the implications that either will bring.

Maybe I'll have to wait for inspiration to take me by the ankles and shake me from some high, towering place.

Elizabeth's 18!! HAPPY BIRTHDAY E-BIRD!! (who will now kill me because I said this)

I still remember the horrifying episode when I tried making cookies and they turned out looking evil and inedible. It's a funny conversation topic that crops up during this time of the year. Anyway, here's a list of things that are very Elizabeth (or Elizabethan, if you will):

1. Sarcasm and verbal irony that can be so droll we carry out entire conversations and conceits stemming from this.
2. Talking and thinking and breathing dance. It's as natural to her as, well, for lack of a more poetic-sounding metaphor, metabolism and cellular respiration.
3. Laughing sardonically, occasionally.
4. (Using the escalator going in the wrong direction!)
5. Going to the esplanade library, basking in the very thought of being artsy and sensitive, and being there.
6. Being understanding and always listening.
7. Learning to continue trusting God despite life's curveballs.

So, hope you'll have a wonderful birthday! :D you really really deserve one!

(Just realized: it's A BIRTHDAY THAT ALLITERATES! only if you pronounce the "E" in Elizabeth as "Eh", at least.)

the happy pantry

I cannot believe that I had failed to mention this in any of my posts.

I have vanilla beans, black corinth (champagne grapes) and a great recipe for a pie crust.

Need I elaborate? :D

this is the day

Major, major news!
Have finally managed to get A1s for Bio and A maths and E maths! *\O/* Thank God. Now I can heave a huge sigh of relief.
Although admittedly, they were for rather easy papers. But still! I think they still count towards some measure of success and feelings of accomplishment. Will work even harder now, although the days still crawl by and I can't wait for the last day of school to arrive.

I cannot believe how annoyingly general the answer scheme for biology was; I had thought it was all about specificity and being a stickler for spelling and usage of exact terminology and the rest of the nitpicking pettiness that we were paranoid would spell out the difference between a distinction and a pass. But that is only peripheral to the main source of my ire today.

It's an oblivion to the obvious, that others have pointed out rather ruefully, which is disturbing me. Perhaps it's the everyday routine of hearing and experiencing this that has desensitized me from such annoyances. However, it did come as a shock to me that others have started to view this with jaundiced eyes and countenances that would not unfrown themselves. In fact, the more I inspect the situation, paying closer to the details that have incurred the displeasure of others, the more I realize that this new and revealing piece of information has insidiously sown its seeds of contempt within me to the point where I cruelly sneer inside every time I am met with the same pieces of conversation that they so deride. This is perturbing me and it probes at the transient nature of our social lives.

And yes I had to be deliberately cryptic and polysyllabic! I just hope it'll come to pass, because I will soon be tempted to smack the person very hard with my bio textbook. Metaphysically, of course!

I want to go for the lasalle dance showcase! Does anyone else want to come? It's not like the school will drag you out from the audience and punish your conscience for idleness, or whatever reasons people give.

(I can't snap out of a certain tone when I write sometimes.
Shuffle does not know me well enough.)

yay velour

Oh
save me from
knowing myself
if inside
I only melt.

- Eileen Myles

A few things I will remember about being secondary four:

• chewing on mints 
• running out for lunch at the usual chicken rice place
• sneaking buns from the bakery back to school
• having no tie, and having adrenaline running through my veins, feeling rather foolishly but triumphantly and proudly rebellious. So this is what I've been missing out all the time.
  

This photograph is of the sunset I saw today. I like how the clouds are ever so wispy and delicately structured. They glow so beautifully against the sun. 

(Off-topic: Why do the songs that I least like appear on shuffle, all the time?)

everything

I have had such an unproductive weekend and I cannot for the life of me concentrate when my grandfather's coughing and wheezing resounds as ominously as a tolling church bell (another sign of my morbidity and preoccupation with death) and when the air is so humid I feel submerged underwater all the time and when there is no comfortable spot currently in the house where I can finally hear myself think.

Anyway, I'm doing a little photo project on the things I notice while returning home from school.






And my dad bought salted caramels from Fauchon at the basement in Takashimaya! All of us agreed that this tops the usual marks and spencer ones that can get a little hard and sticky at times. These were really soft and creamy, though I wouldn't say gooey because it doesn't stick all over your teeth. Rather, It was pleasantly malleable. And after the first few moments of buttery-caramel ecstasy, you hit the first few salty notes from the fleur de sel, which will send you into rapture.




I'm pretty stoked about finding out about their caramels, because Fauchon is to eclairs as Pierre Herme is to macarons, and hence there is a quality associated with these quaint and established Parisian patisseries. At around $12 after discount for a box of 18, it isn't exactly something I'll be buying on a regular basis, but for a quality beyond the usual supermarket fare, it's worth every single penny.

Also, I really enjoyed the dinner outing with Andrea, Mingting, Angeline and Shiyun at cafe cartel last Friday! I was looking forward to it all week, daydreaming during champions! day, during maths mocks etc.
I guess I really really miss working together as a team now, and especially so because everyone's on slightly different paths now. But I look forward most when these paths converge :) And for the record, we've resigned to using the borders voucher for Shiyun's baby shower gift at the rate that we're going.

angsty, angsty, angsty.

Angsty, you're a stupid word.
You offer us the satisfaction of summing up how we feel without really understanding everything.
You claim to be a blanket definition of what it means to be a teen.
You epitomize blind conceit, careless convenience, and blatant ignorance.
Oh, I could enumerate your crimes, your monopolies over vocabulary, your insidious influence:
I hate your vowels, your consonants, every clumsy phoneme of your mere utterance,
your underlying existentialist meaning, your hoity-toity origins, your complicated emotions,
your ambiguous expectations, your tenuous reasoning, your pettiness, your self-absorption,
your suicidal tendencies, your parasitical behavior,
your limiting factors,
your relationship with Defeatism,
your pointless and detrimental existence.

I loathe you, yet the more I do the more I entangle myself in your web of deceit.
(and the more I lose myself)

of first unwrapping a salted caramel

Don't confront me with my failures, she sings,
I had not forgotten them.

colossal youth

I realise that I am sixteen. I am now expected to have faced losses and to be able to grow used to them, to think maturely, and to be able to shrug it off as an aside bearing little importance to the grand scheme of things — or whatever people say when desperate for comfort. I should have already gone through that stage of pubescence, in general, confusion, disorientation — a very middle middle class, run-of-the-mill, uninspiring coming-of-age story that would matter to no one but myself.

It's not as if I'm having an epiphany. It is also not a state of immense clarity and the euphoria of being all-aware. I would describe it as if a fog had descended upon me to reduce my visibility, and this myopia, in a sense, has forced me to look at the things that are coldly corporeal and this is an upsetting feeling. It is the feeling of discovering that you are no longer a child and paranoid members of the public will eye you suspiciously, because they have forgotten you were once a clumsy toddler, waddling, ambling, tumbling, alongside pillar-like legs, being scooped up, scrunching up your face into a tight knot as you feel the cool dampness of a wet-wipe sweep past cheeks that are never spared the regular affectionate pinches that you gradually felt disdain for.

Now I can only see my grandfather regress by the day, languishing in this evening's humidity, watching the news at nine but concentrating more on the bag of party nuts he stubbornly snacks on and then stows away, though it is common knowledge between us that it will be eventually forgotten. Lights, in technicolor, flit across the walls and ceiling from the almost spectral glow of the screen, and I accidently cut my gum while observing him grapple with the crumbs from the unyielding rigidity of the packaging and the reality of an existence that is starting to wane.

I hate the metallic taste of iron in my mouth and the action of swiping across the tender spot to discover a film of incarnadine gloss, flecked with scarlet specks suspended beneath the shine that gleams under the lights like gossamer. In the living room, my grandfather finds himself in another coughing fit. In silence I apply pressure to the crest of flesh below my tooth to watch blood pool to form a wispy crescent against the enamel, and in silence I realise that sixteen is merely the start of more coming-of-stage stories, of celebrating firsts, of moving on with lasts, of life and of loss.

refresh, refresh

It was a day of cold
Raw silence, wind-blown
Surplice and soutane:
Rained-on, flower-laden
Coffin after coffin
Seemed to float from the door
Of the packed cathedral
Like blossoms on slow water.
The common funeral
Unrolled its swaddling band,
Lapping, tightening
Till we were braced and bound
Like brothers in a ring.

From Casualty by Seamus Heaney

For you Social Studies buffs out there, this is from a poem about the Bloody Sunday incident in Northern Ireland. I like the continual imagery of water and fluidity throughout the poem, and how he describes the coffins as seeming to float from the door like "blossoms on slow water".

On a separate note, I'm pondering about how the things we find security in make us insecure in the most inconvenient situations. And I'm saying this as if no one had ever realised this before.

in point form

1. I can talk about the environment in mandarin, but I cannot say "I don't want you to cut-up my popiah" or "oh, this is actually an eraser" in chinese, as seen from real-life incidents that you may find hilarious.
2. I went to watch Wall-E again! With Andrea this time. I finally got one of the gaffes that Wall-E got into. (the ultrastore trolleys)
3. I have a new favorite writer, and his name is Robert Walser. 
4. SPG outing was great today. I am now broke, but I have a bouncy red netball ball now.
5. I went to watch Elizabeth's dance concert alone! I was also surrounded by rows of empty seats at the back. But I didn't feel lonely or upset, just much freer and comfortable because I had two armrests to myself! 
6. I went Lei Gardens at chjimes before that for expensive and disappointing cantonese cuisine. It is interesting to observe the types of people who patronize this place. Some resembled Imelda Marcos (mostly female) and the men were the types who would drive hideous champagne-coloured cars. (Am exaggerating slightly here. However, the service rendered was impeccable and I am thankful for that.)
7. I am highly grateful for the volleyball module we had to take in semester 1.
8. If I could compile all my revision worksheets into a single pile of paper, it could rival a long-sighted readers' edition of War and Peace.
9. I have a piece of gum that is flapping from where a wisdom tooth is sprouting, and it is an extremely awkward yet entertaining feeling.

If Pigpen's only looking on, just wave goodbye and then be gone

I have this on replay in my head.

swirling in cream

I've just returned home from watching wall-e with elizabeth! It is exponentially more appealing than the clone wars. Ha.
On a sliding scale of Pixar movies, it's in the same league as The Incredibles, and better than last year's Ratatouille. At least, I've never gone misty-eyed as a result of watching robots holding hands to tunes that seem to come from a crackly old transistor radio (in actuality, it was a grimy iPod nano. I guess in years to come, that could translate to a kind of romanticism for people like us).
Anyway, I read that the designer of Eva also designed the iPod, hence the similar aesthetic.
The first thing that came to mind when I saw the grotesquely and morbidly obese people was their striking resemblance to jelly beans. In a way, there was a quietly terrifying moment when human beings turned out grossly distended and were revealed to have lost much of their bone mass. I have to stop here or else I'll end up spoiling a perfectly good movie.