he who has already lost it:

Dear all,

In the wake of the recent lapses in my sanity and my eventual descent into irreversible psychological damage and incipient madness, I will now temporarily cease to exist on Tuesday evenings, from 7pm to 6am the following Wednesday, to recoup the losses in my sense of Being and to better cope with the anguish caused by periodic existential angst. I regret to inform you that this entails the non-acknowledgement of smses and phonecalls, the deliberate non-compliance to deadlines, and general apathy. Do note, also, that this is because I no longer exist in your mind, and will hence refuse to comply with external pressure to resume existence.

I am deeply sorry for the inconvenience caused, but will look forward to serving you better during working hours.

Yours faithfully,
Samuel Lee

I'm listening to the Jay Chou CD that Olivia lent me last week.

:O

WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ME I AM LISTENING TO JAY CHOU OF ALL MANDOPOP ARTISTES I THINK I MAY BE LOSING MY MIND

:O

Some hilarious Catherine Tate sketches about upper class-types. Watch the last one with the gooseberry and cinnamon yoghurts!

In other news, I've just come back from choir camp! It was really exhausting and fun, we ran to east coast park on saturday morning and then spent the whole afternoon during choreography. Because evidently I fair terribly at the whole rigmarole of hand-eye coordination coupled with singing at the same time and memorizing dance steps, I'm probably gonna dread choreo and I'll need a teacher with more than the patience of an angel.

only slightly macabre

I am sitting in my chair in silence and pain as I write this.

Nah, I'm not exactly moody or especially gloomy now. It's just that I am nursing a series of cuts and bruises at the side of my mouth after falling hard face-first doing the standing broad jump item during today's mock napfa. In a rare moment of clumsiness I jumped at the wrong moment and found myself face down on the mat and the PE teacher said something to the effect of "are you jumping or diving?"—I was very touched by his concern and care.

After the next two jumps, and in my shock, missing the target by a centimetre, I happened to press my sleeve to my mouth and found bloodstains all over it. You know how in situations like these, the last thing on your mind is how bad you look? I asked Wei Shee, my CG mate, whether I was bleeding (a stupid question) and kind of pulled up my upper lip to expose my gums. I think I must have alarmed him a tad too much because I saw his eyes widen with horror, and immediately felt the bandages mummifying my face in a hospital surrounded by loved ones with a mirror in front of me and a smiling doctor gently telling me to unravel the strips of gauze to see how my facial reconstruction went.

Anyway, I continued bleeding all the way from Bedok to the dinner table and spent the evening shoveling food awkwardly through half-parted lips. I stopped bleeding briefly, and then everyone at home urged me to gargle my mouth with salt water, as if the pain and humiliation that I was still recovering from was not a punishment harsh enough for bungling a simple jump. I bled even more after that and slightly desensitized by the blood and gore, amused myself by doing Joker and Rihanna abuse picture impressions in the mirror.

So yep I had an exciting day.

Also, HAPPY BELATED BIRTHDAY TO ANDREA!! :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D
It's a little scary to think that we were bratty and juvenile 13 year old kids when we first became classmates in sec 1! Time flies!

Hello there I'm taking a break from working on poems and looking vacant and poetic all the time. Anyway, I've come up with a title for a poem called Bacchus Night and it makes me feel so insanely happy with myself.

Oh blogger post editor, will I ever see you again?

maggie and milly and molly and may

maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

e e cummings

I shall post my favourite poetry here until I find something more newsworthy to blog about, because stories about waking up late and baking chocolate cupcakes in the morning are, quite frankly, maddeningly boring.

teardrops on my modified 12-string ukulele

OMG KRISPY KREME HONG KONG IS NO MORE, GEEZ I HATE YOU WALL STREET.

RANT. FUME. :(((((((((((((((((((((

In other news, I went out today and bought things and it was fun but whatever joy has been totally and utterly negated and extinguished and annihilated.

Nick and the Candlestick

I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Waxy stalactites
Drip and thicken, tears

The earthen womb
Exudes from its dead boredom.
Black bat airs

Wrap me, raggy shawls,
Cold homicides.
They weld to me like plums.

Old cave of calcium
Icicles, old echoer.
Even the newts are white,

Those holy Joes.
And the fish, the fish -
Christ! they are panes of ice,

A vice of knives,
A piranha
Religion, drinking

Its first communion out of my live toes.
The candle
Gulps and recovers its small altitude,

Its yellows hearten.
O love, how did you get here?
O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.

Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses,
With soft rugs -

The last of Victoriana.
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well,

You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.

Sylvia Plath (1962)

The poems during Sylvia Plath's Ariel persona period makes something inside of me die a little and then resurrect after the last line~~~~~~~~

Anyway I went to kino with my dad earlier today, picked up The Bloody Chamber (by Angela Carter, you know, the one with The Snow Child) and Madame Bovary (because I liked the cover, yeah I'm shallow like that) and this book about molecular gastronomy, found out more about my lit teacher's double life after thumbing through her book in the Local Writer's section and placed it cover side-out at a more conspicuous location and felt really good about myself after that, and went running to offset the massive amounts of Krispy Kremes that my parents will definitely have to buy from Hong Kong at me and my sister's behest. (OK we will say please and thank you.)

I was supposed to send Sherina off yesterday but I missed the boarding time and Gwen tearfully called me to say that Sherina was now gone, and sounded forever apologetic for forgetting to remember to sms me before it happened. I'm kinda glad now that I managed to catch her online the night before, and shall think of cool and very Asian things to send back to the US! I managed to catch up with Joey, Gwen and Nigel (Sherina's primary school friend?) to drown our sorrows in buckets of oil at Popeye's, which is the best place to get fried chicken in Singapore at the moment. It was great fun :D

however:
I HAVE A PORTFOLIO TO COMPLETE!! WHICH IS CURRENTLY NON-EXISTENT! AND I'LL HAVE TO ENDURE A HORRIBLE SENSE OF AWKWARDNESS EVERY TIME I PASS BY MY LIT TUTOR IN THE HALL NOW! AAHGJkep@E*

why can't we look the other way

Things that have happened/are happening in my life:
Lit night was great fun and the lit department has very good taste in light refreshments.
I love H1 Maths <3 and pissing off seat mates.
I'm waiting for a call or email or something that will speak of scholarship interviews and application forms. Yeah like that would ever happen.
Wide Sargasso Sea.
History tutorials are always so intense.
CAP portfolio. I need to quit writing introspective poems all the time.
I am supposed to be having the time of my life.
SYF and choral workshops = actually fun.
I need to get out of this country or I shall go mad. (Note to self,
remind parents to pick up clothes from H&M.)
I'm sleepy and shall soon develop a serious caffeine addiction problem.
I will attempt to make a delicious savory tart sometime.

I'm not normally given to emo moods but of late I've been roaming
my consciousness with an only slightly neurotic
bent.

It was all very sudden. My principal went up to the podium this morning, very briefly mentioned the excellent A level results, and then declared today a half-day! There was an outbreak of joy, but in some people's cases, a profound sense of ambivalence as they came to terms with the fact that there was still pdp training today. I had choir practice today but I'm not complaining because SYF IS COMING SOON (:O :O :O :O :O) and I still reached home before 5pm. Or at least, before the sunset.

Before watching the amazing race/studying for econs, I shall leave you with part 1 of Lick the Star, Sofia Coppola's directorial debut. I think the soundtrack is awesome! And the cinematography too if you're into that sort of thing.

the author as pantomime artist

I guess I felt really lousy on Friday when I found out about the pre-u sem interview results. It's not like it meant the whole world to me but I feel as if I've been severed blow by blow with news of the disappointing and damning sort all the time. And the worst part is remembering walking out of that room feeling as if I did my best, because this obviously means that I may be screwing up interviews without even realising it and that is obviously not a good thing.

So I slept early and had this dream about being trapped in a faulty elevator that was plunging down a thousand stories. I was the only survivor because the other guy killed himself by slamming his head on the walls to knock out himself cold in a desperate attempt to remove himself from the impending doom.

Anyway all this talk about God's plans for me me me; I have to confess that even I can get cynical about the whole deal - I don't exactly see myself looking back and saying how everything worked out because you can always reflect about the past and create your own interpretation of a certain sequence of events and then somehow impose your own meaning onto it.

However as I look back now I'm somehow clinging on to hope on how he works because this morning I discovered that CAP's on the exact dates as pre-u sem. And I'd rather be stuck in NUS with CAP than pre-u sem. Although this would mean that I would first have to get through with my portfolio and somehow gain their acceptance with my humble offerings.

So I don't really know how to describe how I've been feeling all this time. I've been feeling mainly zoned out and plugged out of reality and creating my own morbid Bell Jar-esque fantasy starting from the point where Esther Greenwood plunges into a state of depression following a series of disparaging events that included a rejection letter from a university course that she wanted, and assumed would be able, to attend. I fear this might end me up in a mental institution that happens to be the IMH which is not as cool-sounding as the institutions in the book.

hello there what's this strange piece of technology in front of me

I passed by a certain banner hanging outside a certain secondary school which proudly proclaimed the glories of its recent academic achievements, and I thought to myself, how nice it is that everyone is happy and doing well and on track to a bright and successful future that even we pragmatists like to believe lies well within our clutches. And then. And then, I tell you. And then. I recognised for a split second who it was who appeared to be gazing contentedly back at me, and remembered that it was he who borrowed my pen to fill in a particular form for a particular thing and is now in some happier place while I'm still drowning my sorrows, lamely, with herbal digestifs and terra blue potato chips. And this compels me to express my angst in some highly poetic and artistic way that I will later, with the curse of retrospect, regret.

On a totally unrelated note, I can't believe what had all just transpired and how I can react to everything so calmly, as if while expecting the worst in everything I had unwittingly caused these nightmares to materialise.

Finally, this 3rd paragraph is more of a rant about how I can't change the password to my matrix account because NOTHING in this vehicle of education has been for the past 10 years, and will be for the next century, compatible with my computer.

Now that I've got the whole tortured young soul thing revved up, I shall now channel a starving artist while designing my class tee.