A Chinese New Year's worth of firsts..

This is the first year I’m not home for Chinese New Year. The first year without 2 weeks of hellish spring cleaning (I am the Polisher of All Things Wooden – my dad buys nothing but wooden furniture and collects wooden sculptures), of frantic shopping for the all-important new clothes, of stifling visits to smoky temples bearing mandarin upon mandarin upon bundles of joss sticks and red wax candles. The first year without strings of visits, to and fro in the afternoon heat and rustling discomfort of un-broken-in clothes, without the fielding of questions like, “Wahhh…how old are you now?” rapidly followed by “Can get married already!! Where is your boyfriend?? When are you getting married?” (both of which can be answered the same way – “I’m twenty-two”, albeit much firmer the second time around). The first year without drinking lukewarm chrysanthemum and soya bean milk out of waxy paper packets at each and every house, just to be polite, without being faced by bottles and jars of “My pineapple tarts, special-one, have to be ordered weeks beforehand! No no, eat..don’t be paiseh!” and the ubiquitous tin of love letters; crisp and tissue-thin, melting in your mouth.

The first year without that excited feeling at midnight, watching my brother and dad light firecrackers, and spinners, and rockets from inside the car (because you can’t wash your hair on the first day, and it would smell). The first year without waking up early, picking out an outfit that matches Sylvia’s, because, although it’s cheesy, it’s somehow really fun. The first year without the unavoidable pang I get from temples, as I step from burning heat, sun and altar, between the gables into a smoky, hazy shade that somehow isn’t any cooler, because this is something I’ve done since before I could remember, something everyone before me has, fathers of fathers and so on and so forth. Different temples, same day, a never-ending chain of prayer. Pang, because I’m not sure how never-ending it actually is, that I suspect it might end with me. Pang, because there seems to be a method in the chaos, first this god, then that one, to the right, now left, now centre, now out, now in again, and finally the great burning pit in the courtyard, like the mouth to a fiery underworld, or a large, fat fire-eater, laughing. Pang, because I don’t know the method, and I cannot order the madness, I can only follow.

I spent Chinese New Year Eve spring-cleaning anyway, because it just felt wrong to start the year with the 2 years’ worth of dust that’s settled on my photo frames and window blinds. Boyfriend bought me new pyjamas for $7.15, because it’s tradition. I felt tempted to buy CDs of loud, garish, clanging songs, and strings of red, lighted lanterns. Boyfriend, a friend, and I went down to Chinatown last night in hopes of seeing something (there was, but more pasar malam and Chinese-wedding-style stage and singers than Chinese New Year celebrations), and I looked hopefully for perhaps some hitherto unnoticed temple I could go to this morning (there wasn’t).

At midnight I wished my parents Gong Xi Fa Cai by SMS as we walked down the street, surrounded by people who simply didn’t know.

This is the first year I’ve felt so alone.

Humour yes

In the past three days, I have seen:

A sky, neatly divided by a line of clouds, above which was a stormy, lightning-potent grey, below the brightest, bluest sun-filled blue.

Clumping, heavy, smoky clouds, pierced by streaking icicles of purest white.

A sunset, not orange nor yellow, but a distinctly odd shade of peach, tingeing all a vibrant salmon blush; much like the closest I ever got to "skin colour" with my childhood box of paints.

I want to say, "How unnatural!", but.

Mirrors, mirrors, everywhere

Somewhere between the years 1995 and now, I turned into someone else. Someone who cared more about how she looked than how she thought, someone who talked more about the outside of humanity than the in. Someone who avoided politics with excuses like “It’s just too complicated, I always feel like I’m listening in on the later part of a conversation, and so I never know what’s going on so why bother?”. Someone who has given up on defending the things she used to argue on for hours about. Someone who knows much, much, too much more about the Jolie-Pitts than the war. Someone, it seems, as a tiny part of me observed with horrified fascination, who would pick a Cosmopolitan over Time while waiting for her food.

I think the actual moment that I began to realize that this was happening, that I was abandoning the mind for the body, was one night when I met a girl who laughed as she told the story of a friend who had done something incredibly ditzy..and I didn’t get it.

Can I, as so many have, blame this on the world’s adulation for the beautiful, on the engorged aesthetes craving, demanding more? On the lavish cornucopia of brashly honest I’m-here-to-make-you-pretty-nothing-more beauty products that cunningly line the walls and floors of shops, glittered cushioned snares you willingly spring? On the snubbing of speaking one’s mind (because that’s just being a smartarse)? On Boyfriend’s love for Sophia Bush and Rachel Bilson?

No, no, if I must be truly honest (or as honest as I can be, anyway – my own brain lies to me sometimes), I am this way the reason I am so many other things; I am lazy.

It’s easier to be pretty than to be smart. Wearing funky threads and gorgeous shoes takes less time than, say, reading Nietzsche and actually understanding it. Cute smiles and tousled hair is more instantly endearing than a love for geology, and intriguing leaves. A flirty giggle (don’t cringe, I already did) gets me more than my stand on religion and/or homosexuality.

And so that little horrified part of me watches this, my graceful degradation (a phrase I love so much I wish I’d come up with it but I didn’t – Uncle did) to a shallow pool of stillness, reflecting the world, but ultimately empty..nothing more.

Mad dogs and madder girls

I am tanned, no, more like on the yellow side of brown. I am not the pale-faced, fragile flower, nor the golden Amazon, nor yet the rosy smile-wreathed milkmaid. No, I am that sallow, even shade of an ill-lit beige wall.

(And how do I know this? Because for a particular ball I went to, I wore a beige dress, hardly any make up, and when I stood in front of a beige wall in a conveniently dimmed room I was nothing but eyes and hair – my shoes were beige too.)

So it is hardly strange that they hesitate, my colleagues, before they ask me, “Um. Why do you carry an umbrella when it’s 30 degrees and cloudless?”

It isn’t strange then, either, when I tell one “Because the sun hurts my eyes” and another “I don’t like the heat”. When I explain that the glints off the glass and chrome of cars hit me with dizzying suddenness on my way home, when I scrunch up my face to show how uncomfortable I am, with the prickly, too-close feeling I get from unrestrained sunlight.

It isn’t even strange that I completely deny that I do this to maintain my complexion, and welcome, invite even the opinion that I am simply peculiar.

No, what is strange is I’d rather have people think I am over-sensitive, or overly paranoid, or even just plain weird, than have them call me vain.

I think it’s quite telling that of the four, I like the third option best…though what it tells…is something else altogether.

The post below

is a perfectly good example of why someone should never begin a post at a melancholy 10 a.m., feeling lonely while her siblings are at school and college, break for a hearty lunch and hours of House and Gilmore Girl script-reading, before finishing it off in a much, much lighter frame of mind.

I mean, it's so disjointed.

*urgh*

[A postscript: I haven't left yet, but I already miss home so much I'm seriously considering not sleeping AT ALL until I leave, because it's just a waste of time.]

For auld lang syne

My sister starts college, again, today, and it’s like the final, Post-It postscript to my list of How Things Have Changed.

And so here I am, closer to tears than I’ve been in a while, happy and sad, listening to songs that have trapped pieces of my past forever, like an auditory stroll in darkness, with sudden memories I’d forgotten that I forgot tripping me up over and over again, hurting more each time.

This, then, is my 2005. All the things I’d never done before, most of which I probably never will again.

• I cried at the airport when I left to go back to Australia for my final semester. Oh, and in the plane as well. And when I arrived. That I was carrying a stuffed, yellow hippo half my size all the way still makes Boyfriend cringe.
• I finished with university, closing on the last chapter of a book that began 15 ½ years ago.
• I worked in a fast food centre. Eat fresh, my friends.
• I got a job without any help at all, purely on the strength of my qualifications and, apparently, making the partners laugh.
• I became financially independent. (see third point.)
• I filled in ‘Accountant’ under ‘Occupation’ on the departure form I filled in when I came home for Christmas.
• I took a photo of the departure form I filled in when I came home for Christmas.
• I started jogging daily.
• I stopped jogging daily.
• I started walking daily.
• I started this.
• I read less.
• I learnt how to roast a turkey.
• My sister started college.

And I missed everything I’d ever been and never would be again.

And I looked forward to everything I’d never been and still yet could be.

See, I’m not always doom and gloom..haha.

Happy belated new year (again)!