vergangenheitsbewältigung (II)

Writing is a muscle, and mine has atrophied into a quivering, amorphous mass of industrial petroleum jelly, freshly spilled on hot tarmac from a rusty northbound truck to Selangor. Currently, I self-identify with deep-sea blobfish. 

Recently Ace of Base's "The Sign" appeared on my Spotify playlist like an answered prayer: it describes, accurately, an epistemic journey from ignorance to experience and knowledge. "Under the pale moon/ where I see lots of stars." Images depicting the cosmos—by law of antinomy—prefigure terrestrial, banal, human concerns. We return to the past, re-interpreting events with a profoundly impoverished sense of their complexities, assigning them a semiology in fruitless attempts to match memory with meaning. What is The Sign but a fractured and unstable semiotic object in an interpretative paradigm that enslaves us? We are alone in our thoughts.

vergangenheitsbewältigung

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degree zero

This year, I have learnt:

1) Flossing is so important. 

2) Everything tastes better with chipotle sauce, unless you're talking about whipped peanut butter and cream.

3) Google Maps will save your vacation.

4) I don't really need an analog camera.

5) If happiness and heartbreak are two different sides of the same coin, I wouldn't want to place any of my bets on a coin toss. 

6) I watch films completely uncritically in my dreams and wake up moved to tears.

7) Dread is only real if it's completely unnamable.

8) I appreciate people who are deeply flawed and who recognise this without resorting to constructing elaborate lies.

9) You are the ultimate construct.

10) My dad makes an amazing boeuf bourguignon.

A Bitchy Theory of the Grotesque

OK, so, Grotesque = grotto-esque, ok? And a grotto is, like, a cave, right? So this theory of the Grotesque, is, like, rooted deeply in all that is cavernous. Get it? So when I'm like, Ur totally Grotesque, I'm really saying that you totally crawled out from a cave, like totally primordially, ok? Like, I don't mean this as an insult or anything, I mean, there's something very endearing about simple life forms, but I'm also, like, Hello?? Like, excuseme, regression isn't something we intersubjectively constructed!! It's totally forrealz For Realz. I mean you need to just take a look in the mirror to see the deep regression into the Grotesque, like, my definition of the Grotesque not urs. Whatever. The word "gross" has, like, etymological roots in the Grotesque? So maybe take a hint? 

Our Whole Life

Our whole life a translation
the permissible fibs

and now a knot of lies
eating at itself to get undone

Words bitten thru words

meanings burnt-off like paint
under the blowtorch

All those dead letters
rendered into the oppressor's language

Trying to tell the doctor where it hurts

like the Algerian
who has walked from his village, burning

his whole body a cloud of pain
and there are no words for this

except himself

— Adrienne Rich

otherly

From At Home in Unhomeliness: An Anthology of Philippine Postcolonial Poetry in English (2007) ed. J. Neil C. Garcia: 

Let us pursue the domiciliary analogy in its conventional form: postcolonial poets writing in the language of colonization may be seen as guests residing in the house of English, which obviously isn't their original home. Their situation is therefore—as we have already noted—one of unhomeliness. And yet, it's clear that, by the tragic irony of colonial history, they now have to live in this new house, which admittedly exercises its own powerful claims on their imaginations, on their affections, even as it continues to remind them of their loss of original innocence, their "existential" displacement. They write in English, and yet do so not as residents but as "guests," behaving as Others in the house of the English Self. They deform, fragment or sabotage the traditions of English poetry, infuse it with alien rhythms, twist its structures, disrupt its sense and sensibility, adulterate its music, refract its optics, register, in each and every utterance, the fact of their double alienation from both their old and new identities. In other words, by writing in English, they may be said to insist on the fact that they exist pendulously in the chasm between the antipodes of the "purity" of a precolonial past and the "contaminations" of a colonial present. Readers of this kind of poetry will most likely never mistake it for anything other than creolized, mestizo, ethnic, minority, and yes—in the conventionally political sense that many Western or Western-trained critics understand it—most unmistakably "postcolonial."

wisdom is overrated

There is so much on my mind that I can only reach for rings of donuts and load Buzzfeed, that bane of at-home productivity.

The thing with working from home is that I am within walking distance to actual food that I can prepare myself for free, but would rather open a pack of keropok and eat mango-and-cream sorbet (fantastic dessert, by the way) directly from a tub. Why.

Am reading Northanger Abbey and can identify with the ironist Henry, but I also feel that I am projecting too much of prior social experience onto Catherine — her use of The Mysteries of Udolpho as an interpretive tool to understand the events taking place in Northanger Abbey, for example. I can relate to her tendency to mediate real life with textual life, and this takes place on two frontiers: in books and in film/TV. (Unfortunately Catherine's refictionalisation of her world, after defictionalising gothic tropes from reality, only reaffirms the uncomfortable truths derived from textual life. That sucks.)

I felt like the Barefoot Contessa because I tiptoed to my potted rosemary plant without footwear, intending to snip off some stalks for a gin and tonic with meyer lemons, please forgive my pretensions. Also, this is probably where the similarities between Ina Garten and me end. She does not have to return to public housing.

I need to ease myself back into writing full sentences, because no one speaks with punctuation in daily conversations anymore. It is unfortunate that whenever I hear someone below 25 speak with semicolons in their sentences, the only thing on my mind is how class-conscious they sound. My own self-aggrandising follow-up to this is that we are all at a certain age where our minds are structured by a sublimated form of class anxiety, so it doesn't matter: we are all proletarian whenever it's convenient.

Recently I have been thinking about how complex amorous relations are, and how they occasionally manifest the appearance of being complete and utter bullshit. Of course I stand corrected. This is not a popular worldview because it's obviously detrimental to the human race, assuming there is anything worth perpetuating. Also if relations take the shape of something trite (and consequently, vulgar and repulsive) there surely has to be some minutest grain of reason that might justify its existence? What validates a relationship anyway? Zizek's all like, "if you have reasons to love someone, you don't love them" which is true. It's a supra-rational activity. Let's all have fun with that.

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intertextuality is "a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic languages is read as at least double."

– Julia Kristeva, Semeiotikè (1969/1980)

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Recently I started naming things that are dead to me, and this is a source of control. For me, at least. It helps to categorise things meditatively, remembering the lines and angles that demarcate the past from the present. Words create angles. 'Whoosh' is a word, and so is 'rocket'. What isn't a word? We cannot escape words. We can, however, use words suspiciously because they are vectors for something transcendental — a connection, a relation — and are therefore amenable to deceit. We can also use words with the faith that they summon the same meaning for others as they do for us. We can also use words to safeguard our subjectivity, to protect ourselves being lost to abstraction. At times a word is a lens, a prism, a mirror, a pool of water. Sometimes a word is a stone. I use words to represent, to hide, to reveal, to weaponise, to make violent. You can take my words and put them on a shelf, or keep them in your pocket. You can forget about them in the laundry, and shake your head in deprecation of your absentmindedness when the words bloom all over your shirt, and when, weeks later, you find their pulp still sticky and mad with abortiveness.

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I have a vsco grid, accessible here:

threnody.vsco.co

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subject as deep void, predicate as action x sentiment x time

Today: "traipsed" around Bugis/Little India nibbling things, followed by more nibbling in Isetan. Sank into Tempur mattress. Infinite, eternal bliss. Cleaned up room. Wondering where to proceed from specific point in time. 

Yesterday: re-read Geertz and the Balinese cockfight, read something by Mary Douglas, ran in the dark. Ate toasted walnut bread and cheap ice cream. Blood orange and springs of rosemary dancing in the water.

Tomorrow: a mysterious haze that smells like pizza and old pencils. First thing in the morning: will perhaps wish for the uninvention of time-stamped instant messaging systems, while sleepy-eyed and forgetful.

Thinking of material towards a paper titled (provisionally) Abject S[h]elves. Not quite knowing where line of thinking will bring me — to some "starlit conclusion" (Wong) or some kind of dead end fleshed with image of dead Rosenburgs (Plath). 

Can only think in fragments and in sentences without a clear subject. How pretentious can a person get/be/become?? 

Coherence is so overrated.

common burn

College is weird. Weird that I call whatever this is "college". It's not. How is it that every day —without fail — someone new jostles to challenge the limits of stupidity? How is it that every time he speaks an abyss opens up and fills the room with a profound vacuity that seems to pre-empt the apocalypse? I'm also tired of: being stuck in this position of global skepticism, losing time, the dumb sunshine. I am happy about: pretentious excursions, that material culture exists as a concept, sleeping well. 

undergraduating / notes towards a deterioration

I'm beginning to think of this blog as less of a safe space for writing, and more of a white elephant with an eight year burden on its back. I have my hunches that the death of this beautiful endless canvas will only occur alongside the birth of an alternative space, but this remains to be seen. Recently I have seen the graven images of a dead person's imagination being dismantled by the imagined needs of the living, haunted by exhumation notices around the old cemetery. Yet I am compelled to believe that time will surely render all things lifeless, that nature will bury the living under her accretions. I'm beginning to think of speech as unfounded incoherent babble, something vestigial that sprouted out of necessity. I am thinking of empty homes, fully furnished, peopled with faint vessels containing various levels of consciousness. I'm holding a cheap mug and standing by the kitchen doorway looking at you search the television for the exit worrying for the people who spend their days inside. You drag the walking frame behind you like hauling a dead dog to its grave.

Oh Mercy

Only the billionth person
to glance up at the moon tonight
which looks bald, high-browed and professorial
  to me,

the kind of face I always shook my fist at
when I was seventeen
and every stopsign was a figure of authority

that had it in for me
and every bottle of cold beer
had a little picture of my father on the label

for smashing down in parking lots
at 2 AM, when things devolved
into the dance of who was craziest.

That year, if we could have reached the moon,
if we could have shoplifted the paint and
  telescoping ladders,
we would have scribbled FUCK YOU

on its massive yellow cheek,
thrilled about the opportunity
to offend three billion people

in a single night.
But the moon stayed out of reach.
imperturbable, polite.

It kept on varnishing the seas,
overseeing the development of grapes in Italy,
putting the midwest to bed

in white pajamas.
It's seen my kind
a million times before

upon this parapet of loneliness and fear
and how we come around in time
to lifting our heads,

looking for the kindness
that would make revenge unnecessary.

— Tony Hoagland

"erroneous intellectual substructure"

Thoughts thought while scrolling through the Newsfeed:

Thought Catalog is like that friend who used to be smart and cool but something happened and now he just looks good on Instagram, end of story.

Amen to that screen grab from Fresh Prince of B-A.

I CAN read this because I know Chinese, but I am too lazy to go through the cognitive process of language-switching.

If you've only been appearing in group photos of more than 12 people, something isn't right.

My shorts are visible in that newspaper clipping.

Marina Abramovic peers through the screen to gaze into my being.

Blah blah blah writing

Someone wrote a long poem and posted it on a Confessions page; poem received 189 Likes.

I need a Weekend Getaway to another dimension where I am constrained by something other than space and time.

pictures of people at a hotel function room, because I have reached that age

pageants are an aberration to the dignity of any individual with a shred of self-respect, and maybe I'm just bitter about everything in general (including the new vegetarian burger at mcdonald's)

No, Kelly Clarkson did not write that line.

pictures of people running: they communicate something intensely private as well

more pictures of people at a hotel function room

something of vague interest to me happened in France

people expressing anger re: cat video

I could have been on a plane to NYU now

I need a larger workstation

I hope you never experience a freak human pyramid accident for as long as you cheerlead.

I do not want to cross paths with Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

head bacon

I have no words to right the imbalance between hard, empirical facts and the insatiable thirst for a deeper metaphysical truth, so perhaps this might serve as an adequate placeholder for now. 

eighties music for a healthy work ethic

scholasticism

Is it sad that the only real highlight of the day was a piece of intelligence re: issue x (I cannot discuss this on public domain) that I received from someone I had only met for less than an hour? In any case, and I'm speaking generally here, it's not OK to sensationalise your own romance narrative and remove it from the context of its inherent destructiveness. But back to the original point: it is doubly sad because I want this destruction to persist and reach a dramatic conclusion, because I'm that much done with supporting the problematic choices of other people. 

In happier news, I'm in school again and it feels amazing to be sitting in a lecture and be asked to watch an hour-long video about Jackson Pollock, thinking about exciting events lined up until the end of August and new responsibilities that I will hopefully succeed in. (Though not in a chauvinistic way.) With more to come in September. And the following months. The act of living is weird and philosophically unsettling because we contrive a projection of our future without even being certain of our present reality in space and time.

Some premises that will anticipate a more coherent rant: 

(1) If it claims to be, at its heart, an interdisciplinary programme, let's just call it that. Carve out your own curriculum. Your own intellectual interests do not need to be validated by an annex to your degree certificate.

(2) It supports the thesis that epistemic communities are merely exclusive groups premised on the perceived superiority of its members' intellects.  

(3) It seems just to exert control over resources that have been acquired in exchange for money, but it's problematic to lay claim these resources while being blind to your own socioeconomic privilege. 

ideas re: channeling irritation into performance art projects

Title: The Douchebag Who Smokes In The Lift While Wearing Avant-Garde Fashion

Description: 20-something male with goatee, wearing Mickey Mouse-monogramed harem pants and gym shoes, is suspended in a vertiginous shaft with little light other than a matrix of LED numbers displaying numbers corresponding to the number of floors in the building. He slowly descends into a burning pyre to risk asphyxiation by tobacco fumes.

Title: You Need To Make That Decision Yourself

Description: This is a dramatised reenactment of a motivational talk. The artist, as Speaker, presents handwritten slides using an old overhead projector. Slides include questions such as "What should I get—from this ridiculous souvenir shop stocked with items made in another country—for my sister/soulmate/auntie/gardener/chinchilla?", "Should I order the same thing as you, and spend 10 minutes complaining about this dilemma?", "Do you think I should buy this hideous suit that I will never wear and will probably regret?", and "Which college should I go to, knowing full well that I am the only person who can make a meaningful decision?" The artist will talk, in an expressive medieval German tongue, about the topic before dousing the slide in lighter fluid and setting it on fire.

Title: You're Fucking Type A 

Description: The artist wilfully suspends initial skepticism of the Type A-Type B theory of personality in pop psychology and dons a pair of severe-looking glasses, while berating himself constantly about his poor life choices. He then produces a clipboard and places it on the floor. Meditatively but decisively, he stamps on it for ten minutes before sending an angry email to a random person in the audience.

sometimes you win

Screw essay marking—I'm going DANCIN'!

Last week has been all sorts of amazing: Sunday I found myself marking scripts at the Cider Pit + late night dimsum; most of Monday was spent at the Mango Dollies' Artistry gig followed by yuzu martinis at Bar Stories; I took Tuesday and Wednesday off to lead a relatively more subdued life; Thursday found me at a farewell tea party cooing over a red velvet cake frosted with coconut, nursing a tiny macchiato, and stealing lemon poppyseed cake and cheesecake from J and D, which was followed by sweatpants-hunting, and then another gig at BooksActually before hopping from Coq and Balls to Maison Ikkoku, another pretentious watering hole, where I had a rosemary yuzu thing (again) and gazed longingly at the salted caramel drink beside me; on Friday I went to YH's and had a vegetarian paella that wanted to be a risotto; I ended off Saturday nursing a headache and chewing on pieces of wonderfully salty-cheesy spinach-ricotta ravioli alla pastora and tucking into a gula melaka ice cream after rehearsal. Today I am dreading the final week of term because it harkens my slow descent into essay marking hell, and unsentimental goodbyes (mitigated by brownies, that I have to bake now) to my classes. 

I am looking forward to: hate-watching The Great Gatsby, Star Trek, making hummus multiple times, and fussing over the trip to Sydney. I've learnt to create my own spaces for happiness because happiness isn't going to come to me like flies to a cesspit. It doesn't work that way. 

duomo

Confession—I have been rather underwhelmed by Mast Brothers' Stumptown Coffee Chocolate Bar. The flavours are complex enough: it opens with a hit of cherry and dark, dark muscovado, then melds into something pleasantly tarry, astringent, and rather green. However, its slightly granular texture bothered me with its reticence to commit to the crunch of whole beans or the velvet smoothness of a more refined chocolate. On the whole, I like this bar but would rather pick out Almonds & Sea Salt or Papua New Guinea next time.

Although we merely speak of chocolate bars we really are alluding to a different source/locus/medium of pleasure/pain.

----

If writing is a muscle then unfortunately it has atrophied and the remnants of connective tissue have been divided and cast into lots to be sold as raw materials for glue manufacturing.

the persistence of discredited beliefs

To what extent has growing up been a fucking retarded process thus far? Illustrate your answer with examples.

"You will never be truly happy unless you radically overhaul the conditions of your current existence." Do you agree with this statement?

Comment on the view that adulthood is merely the loss of imagination and commonsense.

How far are human relationships purely ephemeral objects of melancholy?

Discuss the view that you only have yourself to blame.

in praise of mary pinchot meyer

i. 

Mary Meyer was an enigmatic woman in life, and in death her real personality lurks just out of view. Her life was domestic and private, as were the lives of her female friends. As independent as she seemed to her female friends, it is unlikely any of the men in Mary's life ever thought of her as an equal. She and her friends were surely affected by the condescension of their men, an attitude that has survived the decades since her death. "Who wants to read about a bunch of unhappy women?" one of their ex-husbands, a prominent Washington attorney, said when told that any book about Mary Pinchot Meyer would also involve the lives of her friends.

A Very Private Woman - NYT

ii.

Life, University, etc.: The Story So Far

Having been rejected by Expensive Dream College in a a grimy crime-ridden city with stupendous levels of inequality, and finding no money in time to fund an education in the The Land of Opportunity, I have decided to keep things decidedly vanilla and stay in Singapore. I will count the hours spent staring blankly out of the window (sanitised), sighing and wondering what could have been and what will be. But this has been the story of my life time and time again—never quite getting what I want and blaming myself for it, but realising how everything turns out for the better.

iii.

Notes towards a deterioration iii:

Dinner: you ask: who is the girl

seated next to me:

uh: that's your granddaughter

time is endless

i was a small, hot, dot

Open letter to vague ideas in their most primordial, beautiful forms:

Thank you for showing me where my friends are at and where my friends aren't at and everything in-between.

Thank you for revealing deceit.

Thank you for I know that fabulosity exists and exists to be enacted in places that long for it daily.

Thank you for the idea of salvation.

Thank you for the pleasures of grief.

Thank you for chocolate.

Thank you for the idea of Yes and No.

Thank you for giving us objects of wrath.

Thank you for spatial coordinates.

Thank you for demons and lemons and Le Monde de Biscuit.

Thank you for making death consequential.

Thank you for consequences.

Thank you for making us unstable creatures groping in the darkness to latch on to unsuitable metaphors every single time, believing in the idea of truth, believing that our beliefs are ours and ours alone, being able to sit down and eat hummus in air-conditioned sadness.

Thank you for brokenness and thinness and their adjectival playmates.

Thank you for the skull that houses the mind and this garage-door mouth.

Thank you for the things we say to hear other things said to us in return.

Thank you for coins.

Thank you for pockets.

Thank you for street alleys and diaphragms.

Thank you for the language of flowers and the swelling of tides and the phases of the moon.

Thank you for wrists and toiletries.

Love,
S

gurl.

surely goodness and mercy

I have set a couple of trays of salted caramel in the freezer to write this on my ageing macbook, bought with prize money from Being Clever And Passing An Interview, that is now a symbol of deterioration/a vestige from happier times. 

I want to write this: that I am so excited and nervous and dreading the thought of leaving home to begin a new life (albeit with chains to organisation x) in liberal arts college y. I want to say, all my dreams are coming true and this scares me because I have nothing to look forward to now. I forget that the futures I construct for myself are couched in the language of melancholy; they stem from a loss that is so palpably felt in the present, with real physiological manifestations that frighten as much as they surprise me. 

Generally: I cannot relate to the reciprocity of love/affection, perhaps because I am constantly sickened by imagining myself the agent for this. I will deny things repeatedly, in an incantational way, unchangingly. I am unchanging and mired in stasis. Shorn of accretions, I am signified by a lack, a yawning abyss, a pointless aperture that says Please don't even attempt to love this. 

lispbon

I want to secure a place somewhere far away where Gayatri Spivak and Judith Butler hold up the cafeteria line regularly to order vegan quesadillas, so I may sit in an armchair and eat chips all day and dream. 

I want to hold a boarding pass that says "Novi Sad" and Instagram that.

I want to fry something in first-press avocado oil that I will buy while listening to a podcast about religious extremism.

I want to read a non-fiction book that will make me say "yes" audibly on a train to meet the future of my language abilities/the number of times I will say "the opacity of the text."

I want to tell someone what I read about the AP stylebook and the use of the phrase "illegal immigrant."

I want to be the kind of person who has an ironic wall calendar.

I want to watch pretentious films in a cool stranger's basement while the trees in the quad are bronzed and autumnal.

I want to be, like, "this work is about the complexity of human desire and the questioning of its structuring ontologies" while talking to a b-list celebrity.

xxi

memo to self:

Expect nothing: expect to be turned away, over and over again. Until you learn that you are entitled to nothing from the world, you will never know gratitude and kindness, how they break your heart in waves of seismic intensity.

Promise me that you will want to feel everything.

Promise me that the Earth will persist in its commitment to tormented revolutions.

Promise me that you will know how to love. Promise me that you will always believe that the act of living does not work within our framework of logic; we do not need reasons, we only want and crave them.

if not then

I am probably too old to "discover" Bob Dylan and feel a "strong affinity" to his music, listening to his albums "like whisky" late at night and waking up feeling like a freight train carrying the carcass of a whale had derailed and crashed into me while I was fast sleep and occupied in my undreaming of everything I had believed to be eternal and true. 

There are no suitable idioms. 

I want to take these sentences and crochet them into an afghan throw to wrap around this shrunken reality, to let the moonlight fall and seal my eyelids.

notes towards a deterioration II

grasping the doorknob
she inquires where the
elevators in my bedroom are located

notes towards a deterioration

wearing an old plain t-shirt

looking for her handbag in my file cabinets

finding it in a bookcase, lying on top of Plato's Republic

progress reports

If this sense of disenfranchisement is going to the dominant tonality of all experience in life, then bring it on and don't be reticent about throwing more salt on the wound. I don't know how or why, but the past week has just been senselessly terrible enough to warrant this deadened solipsism therapeutic and feasible. There were some OK moments but these were studded sparsely and stingily in that dense, unleavened, and tedious cake of experience and forgetting. I hate February and I hate March and all the days in-between and all the days that lead up to them. I alarm myself with the cyanide bitterness of the scattered hours spent grieving in unsound delusions, wasting time like the bougainvilleas wasting their purple bracts in the moonlight, saying that these things take time and we will eventually learn to live in the moment. No one is truly articulate enough to be happy with the words he has, but until we find our ways to archive our feelings with clinical objectivity, the stars will continue to record the pathos embedded in our every movement and motion. 

naïveté is our dominant mode of experience

"Ambition is the willingness to kill the things you love and eat them to survive. Haven't you read my throw pillow?" — Jack Donaghy. To what extent is this true in your society today?

I feel simultaneously very old and very young and very silly and never wise. 

When I grow old I will embellish my tales with nostalgia but until then I am certain of the circle of melancholy that I will always locate myself in.

I want my cat to scratch someone so I can be like, "oops"

I want to have an audience with a corgi.

I am certain of these: that I will have to leave the country at some point in time, that we enter into binding agreements unconsciously, that the ultimate point of linguistic expression is to discover its own limits.

Spot the hidden assumptions in every question and you will do fine for your exams.

i am tormented by the ghosts of a thousand pineapple sharecroppers

Reunion dinner, 2013: My grandmother has returned from a 1.5 month-long stay at various hospitals; I have returned to a life of civility and sanctimony, having leapt over the strange crevasse of a 22-month internment in Absurdistan, older and definitely none the wiser; the sky is decrepit and grey; in everything there is a dark opacity. 

Language forming the texture of everyday life: Points of Argument, Application Questions, invalid data, Bedok, White Paper, National Identity, Please log-in with your username and password, Tap to continue.

Items removed from the oven: pineapple tarts, roasted carrots, reheated lunches, charred aubergines, sugee cake, hot water.

I would trade-in the following for a better attention span: my eyebrows, 5 books, 12 magazines, a new wallet, a tray of cookies, the ability to crack my knuckles, Asiatic hair.

Zīles ziņa

Kas sit pie vārtiem šorīt gulēt gribu.
Aizraudāta acs lec saule mākoņos lai mazais brālis jāj
lai kumeļam nav grūti.
Nē smejas kara kungs.
Un tik vien paliek: mētelis to auzu skara tā cepture to
zirņu ziedu paiet gadu daudz.

slouching to the east

Call it a spot of bad luck, a crisis of the corporeal body, an emergent clumsiness erstwhile concealed in the obscure depths of my personhood and being — I have been involved in far too many minor accidents, of late. I spilt Korean tea all over my desk, had my shaving razor slip to slice my fingertip, scalded my hands with near-boiling water, and soon I shall expect to trip over a small student-child while teaching in school. They are tiny but consequential. 

Running parallel to these incidents of maladroitness is the strangely foul mood I have been in for the entire month. Well maybe not foul, just a general grumpy feeling that I will shrug off as symptoms of dehydration and mercury poisoning. 

Also: I want to use this space to congratulate everyone who's currently in Europe making snowballs while I am being rained upon by truly half-assed monsoons that only last for one weekend.

Also: I know my parents love me and etc. but they are going to spend two vacations in a row (to faraway lands that make accessorising with scarves a necessary part of everyday life) without me and this reveals how they trivialise my separation anxiety issues + desire to be free + desire to get a billion more desires granted.

Also: It has dawned on me that I made my own birthday cake and finished it all by myself and then felt bad about hogging it which is a clear indication of the direction my life is going (alcoholism). Should I distract myself with other bad habits? e.g. feigning Tourette's?

I need to write better. If writing is a muscle then I am currently an airy cupcake with silly frosting/dense gluten-free muffin with quinoa flour and popped amaranth. 

self esteem: a new haiku

FML FM
L FML FML
FML FM

technology

I am 21 and my maid* is back with delicious Pinoy snacks, and I am** in the kitchen inhaling Vietnamese coffee (a vanilla spiciness, the sticky-sweet milk pooling at the bottom of the glass) and reading** Henry Miller's essays, and my friends are dispersed around the globe, and I am at home, and all is well.***

* I wanted to say "domestic helper" but it's not politically correct to discredit the dignity that being a maid entails. It is an honorable profession that only the brave take up, I guess.

** Obviously I should be using "was" but in using the present-continuous tense I am trying to achieve the effect of being "in the moment," of that immediacy of feeling that I have just undermined by calling into artifice the notion of writing about experience.

*** Is all well? Most are well. Not everything is "well" but it's not fruitful to discuss the well-ness of everything. 

northern

I want to sit cross-legged in a room with a carpet and a cat, with stucco walls, listening to Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme in a wistful way not unlike a character in a Wes Anderson film — speaking of which, I remember forgetting to watch Moonrise Kingdom and this reminds me of every failure from the past ~8 months.

I want to be friends with Yoko Ono. I want to be like, "Hey Yoko could you get this for me" on Facebook chat, while sending her pictures of art.

I want to know how it feels like to have every dream come true, including the nightmares. 

I want to be, like, "blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth" every day while making Vietnamese coffee. 

I want to feel holidays, not just have them.