This is the way the cookie crumbles

How do you know when you're in the wrong place? I still feel that I am far from thriving. My writing's getting terrible, I can't find the right words to use, and my phrasing feels imprecise and clumsy all the time. I am surrounded daily by this cloud of Eh and it does not depart me, neither does this sense of Not Belonging Anywhere, but I can cope with that because I was never quite bothered by it anyway.

The realisation that you have little motivation to carry on living is a very scary thought. It's just that periodically, one goes Oh well here I am, I can't change the fact that I persist in my existence, but whatever for, and decides to take a day off to spend some time being quiet and to simply pause.

Weirdly, something struck me while typing that previous sentence. I think I need some form of retreat, because everything's Promo-centric now and I just need to stop and spend an entire day reading God's word and being close to the single definite constant in my life.

When all else is crazy, my favourite band steps in to save the day.

Yo La tengo - A Take Away Show - Part 1 from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

Treacherous Tuesdays

It started during Economics tutorial in the morning.

While my tutor explained to a class squirming with the agony of mid-morning lethargy, once again, the Keynesian liquidity theory, Rachelle started to hear music playing in the distance. It seemed to originate from the running track, and the martian landscape of construction work with its dust mounds and grey debris.

"Did you hear that?" she said, glancing back at us from the front row with mild irritation. "Who would play music so loudly in the morning?"

While I did hear the muffled crackling of marching band music in the background, the disjunction of place and sound become unnervingly apparent. My tutor, sensing a ripple in an otherwise serene and gentle bobbing of heads perhaps signifying agreement, moved on to aggregate demand with a stoic flick of the projector switch.

"It could be Japanese marching band music," I sneered. Popular lore claimed the school was a massacre site during the Japanese Occupation — our history teachers seemed to take a ghoulish delight in perpetrating this to rumour-weary teenagers. The classroom became unsettlingly chillier.

Ignoring the fresh frangipani on the ground en route to the toilet, we went about with our usual Tuesday routine: we stumbled in and out of lecture theatres and hung around with the expected world-weariness of seventeen year olds. The signs were everywhere, if you bothered to read into them. As if a show of pathetic fallacy, grey clouds rolled in and promised stormy weather. The birds spoke to each other with an urgency in their guttural squawking; the trees shook and waved their branches like adolescents in the Awkward Phase; the wind sent history notes flying across Good News Café, and nearby, a stall assistant burnt her fourth chocolate croissant of the day while dreaming of a year-end holiday to Tioman.

While listening to a Literature lecture, our flow of thought was interrupted by ominous knocking coming from a wooden wall panel in the lecture theatre. Thump, thump, thump.

There was a sharp, collective intake of breath, but we continued after the knocking ceased.

Someone, in passing, observed: "That knocking has always annoyed me."

The period bells tolled with the sterility of electronic music, and I was standing outside the Literature room with Andrea waiting for the rest of the class to catch up.

"Andrea," I said, "do you hear that – that odd sibilant sound coming from inside the room?"

There was a poster on the door – "Walk into the Poem's Room", it said. "Lit Night 2009". The sounds started, and stopped again.

"Yeah, what was that?" she wondered, knitting her brows.

A miasma of sleepiness pervaded the classroom once again while we struggled staying awake to discuss topic sentences.

During the history lecture, we scribbled notes furiously as the lecturer dictated a recap of the Cold War for us. While he proceeded with his erudition with the microphone left alone on the teacher's desk, there was a buzzing that came from the speakers.

"If this was still the Seventh Month, all this would be very eerie," the lecturer joked.

And then — thump, thump, thump — that frantic, purposeful knocking reverberated once more through the frozen air. Thump, thump, thump. It continued well into our KI lesson, where the projector failed us in the middle of a video screening. We tried to use an older projector, but the new one kept reviving, refused to die on us. Kill it, we thought, unplug the switch, cut the cords, turn off the power. It painted the screen with blue, and would not stop until we pasted a post-it over the lens.

But the thumping never stopped.

Is it odd to get misty-eyed when watching a commercial?

The Week of Mediocre Grades

I'm at Bishan CC now with my sister, Rachelle, the complete Satie on CD and my new MacBook Pro which has a battery life to die for.

How will I ever get my work done??

'K gonna daydream about HK now before starting on my Econs assignment.

And to imbue usefulness on this post, here's what I'm listening to now:

The Five Stages of Grief

The night I lost you
someone pointed me towards
the Five Stages of Grief
Go that way, they said,
it's easy, like learning to climb
stairs after the amputation.
And so I climbed.
Denial was first.
I sat down at breakfast
carefully setting the table
for two. I passed you the toast---
you sat there. I passed
you the paper---you hid
behind it.
Anger seemed so familiar.
I burned the toast, snatched
the paper and read the headlines myself.
But they mentioned your departure,
and so I moved on to
Bargaining. What could I exchange
for you? The silence
after storms? My typing fingers?
Before I could decide, Depression
came puffing up, a poor relation
its suitcase tied together
with string. In the suitcase
were bandages for the eyes
and bottles sleep. I slid
all the way down the stairs
feeling nothing.
And all the time Hope
flashed on and off
in detective neon.
Hope was a signpost pointing
straight in the air.
Hope was my uncle's middle name,
he died of it.
After a year I am still climbing, though my feet slip
on your stone face.
The treeline
has long since disappeared;
green is a color
I have forgotten.
But now I see what I am climbing
towards: Acceptance
written in capital letters,
a special headline:
Acceptance
its name is in lights.
I struggle on,
waving and shouting.
Below, my whole life spreads its surf,
all the landscapes I've ever known
or dreamed of. Below
a fish jumps: the pulse
in your neck.
Acceptance. I finally
reach it.
But something is wrong.
Grief is a circular staircse.
I have lost you.

Linda Pastan

creme

It's hard to be thankful when despair shrouds one like a miasmatic cloud not unlike the sour haze that's seeping through my windows and into my life. While the PSI is entering the You've Got To Be Kidding range and visibility approaches zero, life drags on like a bad parody video on Youtube.

On the upside, I was reading my new favourite book in the reading room while waiting for Rachelle. The funny thing about the reading lounge is that every time someone enters the room, everybody stares and the more exhausted ones manage to gape slightly. It is all at once disconcerting and amusing. I sat on the hideous lounge chairs that came from the Eighties and read for 2 hours to protest the screwed up system.

I smell like halvah and vanilla ice cream and shea butter all at once... It feels nice.

De Humani Corporis Fabrica

after Vesalius

I know the names of almost
nothing

not the bone
between my elbow and my wrist
that sometimes aches
from breaking
years ago

and not
the plumb line
from the pelvis
to the knee

less ache than hum
where
in my nineteenth year
a blade slit through nerves
and nicked a vein

leaving the walls intact
the valves
still working
so the blood kept flooding out
till Elanor
a nurse on evening shift

opened the wound
and made me whole again

I have no words
for chambers in the heart
the smaller bones
the seat of gravity

or else I know the names
but not the function:
ganglia
the mental foramen
the hypothalamus
the duodenum

Once
in our old school library
I took
a book down from the shelf
and opened it to stripped flesh
and the cords
of muscles
ribbed and charred
like something barbecued

the colours wrong
the single eye exposed
a window into primal emptiness

I sat for hours
amazed
and horrified
as if I had been asked to paraphrase
this body with the body I possesed:
hydraulics for a soul
cheese-wire for nerves
a ruff of butcher's meat
in place of thought

I've read how Michaelangelo would buy
a stolen corpse
to study
in the dark
the movement of a joint
or how a face
articulates the workings of the heart

how Stubbs would peel
the cold hide from a horse
and peer into the dark machinery
of savage grace

but I have never learned
nor wished to learn
how bodies work
other than when they move
and breathe
corporis fabrica

is less to me than how a shudder starts
and runs along the arm
towards the wings
that flex and curl
between the shoulder blades

- so I will lie beside you here
unnamed
until my hands recover from your skin

a history of tides
a flock of birds
the love that answers love
when bodies meet

and map themselves anew
cell after cell
touch after glancing touch
the living flesh

revealing and erasing what it knows
on secret charts
of watermark
and vellum.

John Burnside, 2005

birds of america

Also, blank is to heartbreak as forest is to bench.

It's the end of the holidays. I have leapt through time again.

I thank God for the much-needed break from going to Bedok every day — I went out with friends, studied and did some work. It was a refreshing change of pace. Now having to go back to school sounds like an unnecessary ordeal.

For the sake of brevity and time, I'm listing the things I did this holiday that I am glad for:

- Study date with CTITW (minus Andrea)
- Crazy study session with 401 people
- Brazen Bishan Buddies' Mathematics Mugging Moment with Jamie
- BooksActually/Polymath & Crust/Casual Poet/Chinatown/Food for Thought outing with Judith
- Li-Shan's farewell party
- Sending Lucas off, with Andrea
- Fun with WR with PW comrades
- Making Ratatouille with my mum
- Learning to bake sugee cake with my grandmother
- Outing to the Night Safari
- Watching over caterpillars
- YF sports event at GBHQ and dinner after that
- Registering for the Nike Human Race
- The subtle changing of my hairstyle
- Watching Scary Movie 4 with my sister and mass-killing our brain cells
- Buying Moleskines
- Finding my new Favourite Book (by Laurie Moore)

Come escape with me.

blue straggler

Hong Kong is really noisy. But everyone goes home sometime. And at night, when I'm heading home, usually I hear the shutters rolling down the storefront, the constant beeping from the traffic lights, the trams going ding ding!, the mtr doors tooting shut, the whoosh of the train running along the tracks, that irritating sound for the blind from the escalators, the general hum of the streets, the chorus of greetings from the door people, Lily barking at the door, and finally finally, just the quiet whisper of the air conditioning, with the occasional tune of people messaging me on msn.

:)

That's how Hong Kong sounds at night.

-- Elizabeth, on her blog.

I wish I had this sense of place. Or perhaps it's also a sense of time. I'm desperately trying to extract a word from the air that can accurately describe how I'm feeling now, but nothing ever quite fits without distorting or oversimplifying all the joy and the pain.

I need some kind of renaissance; I can't churn out writing that I feel satisfied with, and I'm looking at the poems from the past with newfound deprecation. We try to think of what propels us to write, and maybe this is just a stage of finding a voice and whatnot.



This is when noise becomes music. (But music does not become noise; I am not that corny.)

I feel OK I feel alright.

Maybe.

There are times when I wish that I'd thought twice before saying Yes, and this is one of them. It is a very isolating feeling.

I miss you guys :(