make me a casserole and I'll build a castle in it

This is what we were watching during the video editing workshop today; I nearly died laughing and you all know how rare that kind of thing can be:



2.4 KM run today was hellish. I will never drink coffee to wake myself up before a run ever again. At the last lap, I started looking out for a spot to puke safely upon finishing the run and it was a horrible feeling that no human being should subject himself to.

Today, I've also learnt that preparing for tutorials can be SO worth it. After managing to complete my history tutorials last night, engaging in discussions about decolonization in Indonesia and the end of the Cold War was so fun. The only major bummer today was not doing as well as I thought I would for my Wide Sargasso Sea essay. I felt as if I had given birth to an ugly baby. Couple that with Adultery by Carol Ann Duffy, when the bitterness and anger of the persona somehow grew upon me and gave me that feeling of knotted tightness in my chest.

Adultery

Wear dark glasses in the rain.
Regard what was unhurt
as though through a bruise.
Guilt. A sick, green tint.

New gloves, money tucked in the palms,
the handshake crackles. Hands
can do many things. Phone.
Open the wine. Wash themselves. Now

you are naked under your clothes all day,
slim with deceit. Only the once
brings you alone to your knees,
miming, more, more, older and sadder,

creative. Suck a lie with a hole in it
on the way home from a lethal, thrilling night
up against a wall, faster. Language
unpeels a lost cry. You're a bastard.

Do it do it do it. Sweet darkness
in the afternoon; a voice in your ear
telling you how you are wanted,
which way, now. A telltale clock

wiping the hours from its face, your face
on a white sheet, gasping, radiant, yes.
Pay for it in cash, fiction, cab-fares back
to the life which crumbles like a wedding-cake.

Paranoia for lunch; too much
to drink, as a hand on your thigh
tilts the restaurant. You know all about love,
don't you. Turn on your beautiful eyes

for a stranger who's dynamite in bed, again
and again; a slow replay in the kitchen
where the slicing of innocent onions
scalds you to tears. Then, selfish autobiographical sleep

in a marital bed, the tarnished spoon of your body
stirring betrayal, your heart over-ripe at the core.
You're an expert, darling; your flowers
dumb and explicit on nobody's birthday.

So write the script - illness and debt,
a ring thrown away in a garden
no moon can heal, your own words
commuting to bile in your mouth, terror -

and all for the same thing twice. And all
for the same thing twice. You did it.
What. Didn't you. Fuck. Fuck. No. That was
the wrong verb. This is only an abstract noun.


a slow replay in the kitchen
where the slicing of innocent onions
scalds you to tears. I want to crawl into Duffy's brain and swim in her thoughts.

what originality of vision

Today, I:

Started reading The Virgin Suicides
Was psychologically scarred during history lecture
Revived my interest in journalism
Got pissed with nothing
Got pissed with something
Forgot to depend on Him again
Got home before sunset
Ranted with my Esther about trigonometry in A Maths
Will attempt to finish everything in 2 hours

Life has been crazy as usual. I'm worried that TIP might leave me gasping for air again during the holidays, but I guess interning at Toa Payoh wouldn't kill me with the commute. PW, however, is becoming more and more pointless as the weeks go by, but I'm glad my group's pretty creative and relatively on the ball and that's still slight motivation to cooperate with the system. Anyone interested in a student-led demonstration at hong lim park?

La la la, whee

This has been possibly the craziest weekend of my life — one is so elated, one has to cleverly allude to the Classics and speak in elaborate convolutions much like crafting grandiose arabesques.

One shall speak of things in reverse chronology; memory is becoming as fleeting and transient as vapour in the wind. One has joined the 9-minutes club after training for the 2.4 km run, but one has to qualify that the 9 minutes here refers to anything from 9.00 to 9.59, so please feel invited to take your pick. Earlier in the afternoon, the master class that was attended bore fruition, but lo! For the quantities of beauty that expelleth from the steel womb of the concert hall overwhelmed and consumed one. Sing, O Muse, of the excesses of consumerism, of the lust of the eyes, of the weaknesses of the flesh! Once again, one lay beholden to the monstrosity of ION Orchard while perambulating through its massive interior, gazing at the endless columns that shamed the Parthenon and spat at the ruins of Heraion.

(Beest not mistaken — the charms of shopping at ION allureth my fancy, but my wallet hemorrhageth so! Did mine eyes tear at the state of my personal economy.) Sing, O Muse, of the Mushroom Pizza I had at NYDC! Sing of the intoxicating garlic sauce and the beastly heap of mozzarella that smothered a Mount Olympus of mushrooms! Sing of the generosity that everyone displayed in cheese-sprinkling their oven-baked delights! It was a cheesy feast nonpareil. Queer, in various ways, but still cheesy.

But I beseech thou to sing of Saturday's madness, for behold! We have ignited the flames of Temasek, festooned the hallowed halls of this green institution with sweet garlands of victory, of the triumph of destroying the Cerberus! This erstwhile plain of Lethe has become a palace for celebration and feasting! Sing of how we came in first for Saturday's presentation, of how our flag was hoisted up! Sing of the Sophists, their sage axiomatic sayings, and their quest for knowledge! (Thou has to understand that the plenaries were unbearable as always.) Sing of how it has finally come to pass, of how half this nightmare is now but a shadow caught in the past! Sing also of the joy of movie theatres, O Muse, and the contributions of Epicurus! Sing of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and its blockbuster delights!

Sing now, O Muse, of the horror as the week descends into Dionysian-style madness once again, of the cyclic nature of things and the futility of hope! Sing finally of my labours with EoM and Chinese Essays!

A Color of the Sky

BY TONY HOAGLAND

Windy today and I feel less than brilliant,
driving over the hills from work.
There are the dark parts on the road
when you pass through clumps of wood
and the bright spots where you have a view of the ocean,
but that doesn’t make the road an allegory.

I should call Marie and apologize
for being so boring at dinner last night,
but can I really promise not to be that way again?
And anyway, I’d rather watch the trees, tossing
in what certainly looks like sexual arousal.

Otherwise it’s spring, and everything looks frail;
the sky is baby blue, and the just-unfurling leaves
are full of infant chlorophyll,
the very tint of inexperience.

Last summer’s song is making a comeback on the radio,
and on the highway overpass,
the only metaphysical vandal in America has written
MEMORY LOVES TIME
in big black spraypaint letters,

which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back.

Last night I dreamed of X again.
She’s like a stain on my subconscious sheets.
Years ago she penetrated me
but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed,
I never got her out,
but now I’m glad.

What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.
What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.
What I thought was an injustice
turned out to be a color of the sky.

Outside the youth center, between the liquor store
and the police station,
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;

overflowing with blossomfoam,
like a sudsy mug of beer;
like a bride ripping off her clothes,

dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,

so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It’s been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.




Love this poem.

you get so alone at times that it just makes sense

I snuck off to Borders after school today to look for poetry and be happy/sad.
Basically I realised I don't really know anyone anymore.

But I think I'm falling in love with Charles Bukowski. His poems, I mean. I think he's hilarious, eloquent and searingly honest without being glib.


rhyming poem:

the goldfish sing all night with guitars,
and the whores go down with the stars,
the whores go down with the stars

I'm sorry, sir, we close at 4:30,
besides yr mother's neck is dirty,
and the whores go down with the etc.,
the whrs. go dn. with the etc.

I'm sorry jack you can't come back,
I've fallen in love with another sap,
3/4 Italian and 1/2 Jap,
and the whores go
the whores go
etc.

Charles Bukowski 1963.


I made my virgin shopping trip to Ion Orchard today. I stepped inside and immediately felt the long-absent thrill of consumerism rush up my head to seize control of my body (in my surrender and total stupor.) While floating along languidly with the current of the sea of similarly dumbfounded shoppers, I was carried by the waves of absolute wonderment, bobbing every once in a while to a stall along the food hall. FRESH CREPES AND TAKOYAKI the signs screamed. FRUIT TARTS. GOURMET GOURMET GOURMET. PASTRIES. MAKI ON THE SPOT. My sister and I could only scarcely gasp a little while taking it all in. While taking the escalator up to the 4th floor supermarket – STEVE MADDEN RUBI SEPHORA. We spent half an hour at Muji and flitted about looking for notebooks at Artbox. We swooned around in the supermarket while sampling grapes and salads. We became breathless after learning that Valrhona! Is! Opening! There! We then crumpled up, exhausted, at home.

In other news, for the people who have asked, I have performed sufficiently okay in the JCTs. My grades are ACCB and I'm thankful and happy to be in the hundredth percentile for literature. Subjects that were good or have seen improvement: Lit, Maths, KI and Chinese (!); subjects that were not good/experienced regression/were abysmal: history paper 1, economics, KI essay.
I'm a little miffed that I got a B for H1 Maths after moderation (suspicious because I'm still in the 92nd percentile but whatever), D for Chinese despite falling within the usual B grade range, and that economics was fundamentally in all respects a disaster. But I shan't complain though because I'm more or less fine. So far. (This is where ominous-sounding music will play as a foreshadowing device.)

Also, this being the week of nightmarish deadlines and activities, THE PRESENTATION IS SO NEAR AND WE'RE SO FAR (THOUGH MUCH NEARER THAN BEFORE) BUT WE CAN STILL BE AMAZING. It's also weird that I'm donning the sickly green TJ garb now instead of the cream shirt of my happier memories, and don't have to wave down interjecting opponents now. It's great working with Angeline and Warda and listening to Rachelle's comments! I think I'll somehow really miss crazy times with them in the future.

Anyway yesterday we finally managed to get a classroom of our own to rehearse in (about time I reckon. And deride.) and I found this feeling of being able to find a place to settle in very emancipating. I've become so used to being pushed around school by my timetable without the feeling of having a constant in my life. Day in and day out, classrooms around the school prostitute themselves to me. I have carried sorrow like disease from room to room. Life has been generally moribund thus far. Maybe I should start believing in tomorrows once again although they have lost the allure of promise and sunshine after some use.

long withering out a young man's revenue

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.

RUOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGHKJHSGUWYGWOIUGDKJHGOSHUGALKAJHLAUG!O*&#%*)!&%#)*&%P&#%P_!(*& E*(Y !IOU#H!PIUEGHÚAKJDHŒ€·‚‹‡⁄‚€#&(()‚··‚RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGHJLK.

K goodnight.

chairlift

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

4th of July: Bearing Fruit

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cracking jokes that no one laughs at

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.

why I cook

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.

best half birthday everrrrrrr

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. :)

20 things I would do now had I not treated myself with respect:

1. Sucker-punch offenders
2. Projectile-vomit onto a blank canvas, smearing the muck around for added texture
3. Go back to Bedok at 9 PM
4. Disembowel myself with a blunt and rusty letter opener from '73
5. Go out pimpin' myself under the guise of choir practice
6. Take out my life savings to purchase expensive and shiny Jay Chou memorabilia
7. Chew on warm raw pork belly
8. Douse myself in peanut oil and mock-gleefully run outside to invite strangers back home
9. Crash the LV opening at Ion Orchard today, addressing myself as the young Count Üzseklinneman-Hartvønstürfgên from the Eastern European micronation of Hjalichtensteinavania.
10. Paint my nails, my toenails, my neck and my cornea purple.
11. Walk into a wall
12. Bungee jump with a rope strung by rubberband
13. Tattoo a dragon all over my back
14. Defrost frozen chicken wings in my mouth one-by-one
15. Swim in an abandoned quarry at 4 am
16. Bike against the traffic along the expressway
17. Microwave my head
18. Eat a whole century egg
19. Mass-dance in a landfill
20. Perform Lasik using a laser pointer and a penknife

AAAAAAAAGHJLLK THERE'S CHINESE TOMORROW!!!!!!!

the Healthy Living doctrines

I am such a health-nut hippie.

I had a portobello mushroom multigrain sandwich for breakfast, which made me feel like a an über-gourmand as I brisk walked to the train station in the morning. I listened to a podcast about ecology.

After the maths paper, I had a slice of honeydew as a mid-morning snack.

For lunch at home, I grilled portobello mushrooms in the toaster. I ate it with unpolished brown rice and pine nuts, alongside steamed corn, tofu and lady's finger that my grandma made. For dessert, I heated up a homemade raisin muffin from a friend and later on, snacked on a sweet and somewhat-crisp persimmon. I washed and recycled my vitagen bottle.

(Then I tried to revise chinese and had to stop to prevent the negative feelings of despair and hopelessness from leading me to the cream cheese frosting and chocolate stash.)

It rained and I sat on the couch and chilled out for a while, and then went out running. Only this time, my iPod shuffle for some peculiar reason couldn't connect to my computer, so I'll either (a) send it for servicing at my friendly apple retail store (yay macs), or (b) get a new iPod nano, pronto.

Then for dinner, I had more brown rice, steamed vegetables and salmon (I had no choice, my mum thinks I should be a pescetarian instead, and seeing how salmon is a good source of naturally occurring omega-3 fatty acids, I think it'll be an exception) with some kind of strange Indonesian/Peranakan spicy carrot soup.

At this rate, I should be living to a ripe old age of 132.
And speaking of life and death, I've seriously had it with the Michael Jackson tributes. Devoting millions of newspaper pages, news broadcasts, blog posts and facebook profile pages to the coverage of his death is one thing, but broadcasting tribute concerts, having his face all over the iTunes music store and continuing to talk about his death for the entire week really takes the cake.

I mean, MJ died. It's very sad. Boo hoo, we cry and mourn, it's a loss of a mega pop icon and the world will never be the same again. But sheesh - it's like the deluge of 9/11 sob stories. The media's trying to capitalise on this and wring our emotions dry; don't even get me started on the amount of hypocrisy that's thrown at me every time I see the same people who denounced him as a whacko weeping buckets over a memorial site.

Anyway, this is my favourite article now at the moment - King of Pop Dead At 12 - The Onion

----

In other news, JCTs have been fairly alright. If I don't pass H1 maths, something is very wrong. Econs, history and KI are in the grey zone of uncertainty and possible mediocrity. I'm so so so dead for chinese tomorrow.

Also, I finally passed a Lit assignment! *\O/* I was so happy, I wanted to ricochet violently and jubilantly off the walls of the TA block while walking to the KI exam venue. I got an "Excellent Work!" so I guess it made me tear a bit after realising that things do come to fruition after all. (This, however, seems like a distant possibility re: SEA history)