this is life in the big house

I'm filling up my system with junk faster than I can clear the gunk away. Seriously. I had a 3 food items from the cafe which is unhealthy enough, and then I had Reese's peanut butter cups at home (but the moment of rapture was so definitely worth it).

My EoM is not dumb enough for him. I have to bold keywords and spoon feed more. Maybe I should grade myself instead.
Why hasn't anyone done anything to unscrew-up the system? Surely the day will come when I'll storm out of the school, hail a cab, head towards the Smart Guy who decided to make PW an important part of the JC curriculum, and slap him silly with my group's working file. I will scream into his face - What were you thinking? Were you not born with a conscience? Can't you figure anything out? Can't you not see that we're wading in steaming turds while trying to receive an education but you're throwing more muck at us? - and then I will walk out with a renewed sense of peace beyond the handcuffs and certain expulsion, content to have exacted some much-needed justice.

I love Friday nights and dinners with the choristers.
Choristers. The word makes us sound Viennese.

There's also kayaking tomorrow! I'm not counting on drowning yet but I'll wait and see what happens. If getting hit by a car's not gonna earn me sympathy marks maybe I'll have to start pushing it.

Anyway I've been getting flashbacks from the accident. But I haven't had the mandatory Hollywood-type nightmare yet when I'll awake from my dream to sit up immediately, panting, wide-eyed with tousled hair. I thought getting hit by a car would be a harbinger for a turning point in my life - like while in hospital I would gaze out at the window and commit the rest of my life to "grabbing opportunities that come my way" as a rainbow forms over the hills. This has been far from the reality of road accidents, however. I can't seem to find a deeper and underlying lesson that would give meaning to the pain. All I have received is knowledge of that moment of impact and how loud car horns sound before a collision, all the horror and the surprise.

image: Sacha Hilton

today's hipster aesthetic

That moment at 0:55 kills me.

I've finished dumbing-down my EoM

and this is a horrible time to be alive.

image - lina scheynius

dreaming of cerulean bliss

I got hit by a car yesterday - one of the strangest things that has happened to me, by far. The other strange thing was sending over 60 messages today but this is largely peripheral to the issue of getting knocked down by a car.

Anyway I really thank God that I'm still alive, albeit still a little shaken. But for the record, my life did not flash in front of my eyes during the impact; it was oddly that of horror which turned to embarrassment which turned to dread when I was flung down the road. I was horrified and can distinctly recall thinking that I've never thought this would ever happen to me, and then after realizing I could still stand and walk about, I felt almost embarrassed because there were people staring and asking me if I was alright, and the biggest thing on my mind wasn't my condition but reassuring everyone that I was fine and obviously alive and lucid. The dread came when I realized that I had to break the news to people, and I felt like telling a lie and informing my parents that I just tripped and fell down when I reached home, but after the driver (in her shaken and shocked state) handed me her phone (actually, iPhone), I broke the news to my dad and started with "this may seem surreal, but..." awaiting, but kind of relishing, the cry of astonishment and shock on the other side of the line.

The A&E experience was not an eventful one as I imagined it to be filled with ER/Scrubs/Grey's Anatomy-type images and simultaneously unfolding dramas accompanied by scenes of massive carnage and people writhing in pain on stretchers. The people waiting there were mostly old and sneezing, and there was a miasma of damp blankets and soiled tissue paper that hung in the air. The real fun began only when I was wheeled around by medical staff in those mobile beds to the ops room (incidentally filled with funny old coots at that time) and I familiarized myself with the South Korean rocket launch and the lawsuit against Emirates for alleged price-fixing on CNA while waiting for something to happen.

After my CAT scan, I half-expected to acquire superpowers from the radiation, but my reflection in the windows suggested mostly normalcy and I realised that this was disappointingly not to be. I had to go for an X-ray at a really unearthly hour, and all the time I was wheeled around in a blearily myopic early morning stupor with a doctor that kept going "poor boy, I know how you feel". On that note, female doctors are by far much nicer than male ones. Maybe there's a maternal reason for this.

I really liked the ward, because it was high up and overlooked Novena and the green hills, and I could see my favorite buildings from the floor-to-ceiling bay windows. It was cold but not freezing, and in the morning I could have breakfast in bed (which was an artfully decorated platter of soon kueh with a surprisingly complex flavour from the fragrant garlic). Apart from this, I was thoroughly sated with the boredom of having nothing to do but sleep. My dad visited me in time for lunch, and I had a black pepper chicken pie from The Royals cafe nearby, the only time I would care to eat filo pastry.

Yet on a deeper level, I do realise how close I came to losing my life. The jokes we sometimes make about being grateful just to be alive (while battling a monster workload) suddenly took on a chillingly literal meaning, and the fact that I survived seems to hint at a greater plan out there. In the ward, I was joined in the morning by a young Chinese foreign worker who was knocked down by a car, and the severity of his injuries far exceeded mine - I was alarmed at how things could have turned out. If the car that ran into me was going a higher speed, I would definitely not be able to laugh a little at my condition, send tweets about my stay or even speak, for that matter. But for now, I'm just vacillating between joy and this another feeling that I know will lose its meaning when expressed in words.

scooters, vacation, fall

The clouds right now remind me of that Pixar short before the screening of Up, Partly Cloudy.

I've realised that my desperation to take a break from being in Singapore is inversely related to my ability to find time. PW and OP be damned, I'm flying off to Hong Kong at year-end no matter what. Even if there's a global pneumonic plague pandemic, I am totally getting my ass out of here and into an airplane cabin.

My sister and I have decided to get back by proposing to go to Hong Kong once my parents are back from their vacation. It's not at all difficult to tell that I'm sick of Singapore like how Rochester is sick of Jamaica. Hence, I shall move to Paris and be heroically poor.

In other news, I have new socks from Uniqlo, a file from Muji, mango and orange lemonade, and an organic chili chocolate bar! Nothing's gonna stop me now.

P.S. - I noticed how evocative the words Blogger uses as examples of post labels are.

This shall be the song that will keep me going for the rest of the week. Or, rather, the idea and message behind it.

it feels immense

[rant]
You're (i) working totally behind schedule — but I can try to accept that, (ii) unable to handle criticism — but I can't blame you for it and (iii) in perpetual absentia and acting like you're stressed all the time — but maybe it's not your fault. But I don't appreciate your veiled anger, your passive-aggressive retorting, your self-righteous finger pointing and the fact that you paint yourself as the tortured victim all the time. The entire PW enterprise is already marred by overwhelming flaws, but this is turning things into yet another horrendous nightmare. Talk about a nightmare within a nightmare. Within a nightmare. But for now, I'm sorry for being part of "individualistic individuals" and for causing "much inconveniences, miseries and distruptions (sic, sic, sic and sic again)" to your big if not nebulous plans. (Love your choice of diction by the way.)

And I apologize if you have to find everything out this way, but I guess it's only a fair game if I play on these terms. After all, my future apparently hinges on you, although it also wouldn't matter not getting an A. Well, hope I don't stress you out. Have a good weekend.
[/rant]

Anyway on Thursday after Chinese, I stumbled out of the cesspit cursing and swearing to fight my way out of that mediocrity, but was reminded by a friend that it's like this everywhere. Besides, the only reason why I'm still hanging on is because of choir and my class and the tutors that I actually like (but refuse to associate with the school, thinking of them as people existing independently of any institution.) I'm also really interested in the inquiry into the Aesthetics and its link to epistemology that we're covering this week, which, despite the initial confusion, is fascinating. I'm still trying to see what God's plan for me is there, but then here I am, struggling to trust in a will bigger than what I can conceive with grossly imperfect knowledge and understanding.

I'm not sure if I like JC life at all. Every day, I walk past the hideous though endearingly ugly canteen not knowing what to expect. Sometimes the day starts off slowly, with the jamming of thermometers into our lips, thinning and losing their youthful pinks with the hours of sleep lost, and staring at each other above a symphony of beeps. We would then trudge out of the Lit room into the miasma fogging our spectacle lenses and minds.

Sometimes the mornings start off like a race, beginning with a huge bang and the ensuing flurry of airborne tutorials and essays, and ending in a the diminished wail of a turnstile in desperate need of an oiling after watching the hundreds of overburdened young things slipping through with the weight of the world on their shoulders.

A day seems like a microcosm of life itself. Our existence seems to be made out of an unending series of fractals. We threaten to drop out, but then decide to swing back in. We laugh, but mostly we cry. We cringe at the mistakes of higher authority, we experience oppression and suppression, and we attempt to bounce back. Some people grow up, but others merely change. The entire construct is composed out of individuals who struggle to retain their individuality amidst the blurring of definitions. If this was a play, then I guess I could appreciate the use of metaphor. But there are no walls to contain the unfolding drama — it just plays itself out over and over again, a continual pattern, a tessellation of varied shapes against the backdrop of eternity.

(Oh, I so do love the phrase "against the backdrop of eternity". It's too cheesy for poetry but it works like a charm when in prose.)

once upon a time near a stream

My parents are discussing their holiday plans to Tasmania, checking flight tickets online and blocking off dates, while I am travel-starved and furious at my desk, redoing my Southeast Asian history notes and plotting to run away to Reykjavik.

This is how I had to find out: my sister casually mentioning this to me over a flimsy paper plate to hold my badly-wrapped popiah; me in initial disbelief and reaching for a slice of watermelon; both of us beneath a cloud of gloom feeling strangely betrayed.

Coming after my daydreaming of vacations from the seemingly distant past, the finality of my non-participation in the happy icy mountain fun that is to come for my parents in December is the precursor to my eventual self destruction. Coupled with forgetting our initial plans to watch the fireworks on National Day, I feel as if the roles are being subverted between the self-alienating teenager and the long-suffering parents.

This is a horrible way to exacerbate the nightmare that is 2009.

But putting my angst and indignation aside for a while, I woke up yesterday to news that Elizabeth's going to APA = going to Hong Kong = going to have an infinitely more gratifying time! (After replying to her sms I fell asleep, turned over, and the phone flew out of my bed, landing underneath where mutant dustbunnies reside.)

The night before, my family went out to watch Up. I've never felt like wailing while watching a movie before.

Carnivorous — III

The cook said: 'Are there any here
who spent their lives in flight?'

The exiles stepped up then, and tore
the goose apart. They turned it upside-down
to pluck the soft meat from its breast
and found a salmon coiled inside,
sealed in a crust of salt.

Michael Symmons Roberts


I can't post any pictures/format my posts without having to manually type in the html tags (such crushing lows I tell you) and will thus post poetry that I've read recently and liked.

I've finished reading the Virgin Suicides today on the train. I'm gonna start on Flaubert's Madame Bovary (whose face is splayed and stretched across the cover and has been staring at me from the shelf which I consigned it to since months ago.)

Oh by the way, Kinokuniya's having a storewide sale. Note to self: shall casually mention this to my dad later.

National Day celebration in TJ was fine. "Special" civics was great fun though – we were waving our flags to the Dim Sum Dollies' Singapore Girl and we watched this hilarious ad for ANA trips to Singapore.

Where did you come from
You're no stranger
How I know
you will return
so I won't be sad


Lines from a heartbreaking song.
I need to start on KI.