A Unilinguist: As if I don't talk enough in real life..

Momentary suspension

2006-07-30T21:33:00.000+10:00

It’s a winter’s night in Melbourne, cold but not icy, just biting, inside’s heater-warm though it’s a drizzly world outside. Can’t hear the raindrops; jazz is in the air, floating through the window, slipping through the closed blinds like honey, thick and gold. Some cars pass, a couple or two people step quickly around the puddles, heels clacking down, umbrellas flicking up. Can’t see the band playing, but I can hear them, and that’s all anyone really needs. Boyfriend’s warm too, and clean-smelling from one of his hour-long showers. Kettle’s boiled, I’ve got myself my pink fuzz of a hot-water bottle in my lap, and the slight sticky sweetness of mandarins on my lips.

I type in the dark, and sneak a peek outside to this.

The melodies, rising, falling tones and semitones swimming together and apart, slide through the night and the darkness wraps with intoxicating comfort.

Rare are nights when I’m blissfully content with where I am; this is one of them.

For BC

2006-07-28T07:04:00.000+10:00

Five years ago you knew if you said to “think about it” I’d say “yes” even quicker.

Four years and 11 months ago you told me so, smugly.

And I promptly smacked the smirkiness out of you.

I do believe it’s been going on ever since, and nothing much has changed.

Strange happiness indeed…but happiness nonetheless.

:o)

*smack*!

Butterfly Dreams

2006-07-18T23:49:00.000+10:00

I wake up, most days, not knowing where, or when, or even who I am. This is not a disorientation of alarm-jangled nerves, but rather the slow, stuporous haze of switching from one state of being to another.

Truth: As long as I am asleep, I will dream. I have had five-minute snoozes in lecture halls that result in my utter conviction that, midway through the economics of an oligopoly, my lecturer decided to expound on the virtues of Baywatch (and notes, mind you, to that effect). Nod-offs on the train are soaked in visions of home, or Enid Blyton biscuit trees, and arrival at my station is more often than not a doubled slap of cold air and reality.

But the worst, the worst are the dreams that wrap me, hold me in the night. The ones where the people I know I’ve known for years. We have a past, but our future doomed to end in Nokia’s beeps. My friends are childhood, friends-forever-keep-kept-in-touch-always friends, and I know them better than anyone. I have boyfriends, lovers, husbands even, children I watched grow up. I have memories.

And then I wake up, and it’s a struggle every morning to drain these false memories, shades of loved ones, shadows of lives. I cannot mourn them, because they didn’t die. I am puzzled, then heartbroken, and then puzzled again; in too-rapid seconds I go from imcomprehension, to realisation, to the inevitable forgetting of a history that never was.

I’ve lived thousands of lives by now, lost thousands of loves, wanted to say goodbye thousands of times, but have not had a single chance to say it.

It’s scary that it’s so easy to slip into these pockets of unlived moments, and that this life, this real one, is so easy to leave behind. Wonder if one day, it’d be for good. Wonder which would be preferable, death, or an eternity of dreams. Wonder if there’s a difference.

De Nile Is Not De Lethe

2006-07-07T00:12:00.000+10:00

Cramps (and you know the type I’m talking about) are odd, and awful, when they’re so bad you can’t tell if you’re hurting because you’re full or because you’re, you know, emptying. And so you eat more, because you wouldn’t want gastric pains on top of it all, and anyway you’re bleeding so normal calorie-counting doesn’t, haha, count because you actually need to replenish, and it’s not just giving in to cravings. And of course your pants won’t fit, you’re retaining water, it’s normal (as is the extreme use of italics, both written and spoken).

Haven’t written lately because mum’s here, and she’s leaving too soon (“too soon” being anytime after she arrives, really) so I’ve been spending all time possible with her because, because I can’t stop thinking, I've tried, I've tried and I can't, that one day (too soon) she’ll leave, and she won’t be coming back.

A Post-it for my brain

2006-05-23T23:52:00.000+10:00

I don’t think a day goes by, maybe two, when I don’t wonder why.

Conversations and casual mentions would have reminded me of the past, if it had ever been forgotten.

The boy who wanted me, but not the way I wanted to be wanted.

The girl he could’ve had, he should’ve had, but didn’t.

The boy who liked me, but simply not enough.

So the questions, question, really, is never really answered, not to satisfaction. I want (have, need) to believe it’s possible – that Boyfriend really loves for all the right reasons, and for none at all; that there is no settling, or resignation, no taking in his stride, no what-ifs, no if-onlys, no buts or maybes or oh-well-sighs.

Time and time and time again faith fails and questions asked again, with patient, unwearied answers, which alone is half the reply I need to hear (again). The now is littered with cracks into the then which I slip between, returning with renewed doubt, fuelling the incessancy.

But today, today I looked out the window at a foggy, mist-softened morning, sunrise more glow than light, and smoke that rolled lazily across trees and buildings, hesitant to rise. It reminded me, then, of a similarly clouded sunrise that peeked around a building wall, that a boy and girl watched together for the very first time, and I smiled.

I need more moments like this; if not for my sanity, then for his.

One of my favourite things about winter..

2006-05-21T01:13:00.000+10:00

...is not having to shave.

[I'm pretty sure that posting something written while high on champagne, sleeplessness, and one of the best nights out in a long, long time is probably not the best idea, but there you go. Happy birthday to the beautiful Angel and my favouritest Chocolate Orange..:o)]

Ridiculous, really

2006-05-18T23:53:00.000+10:00

“Don’t stay with a boy, and never stay with your boyfriend,” my mother said. Words like ‘reputation’, like ‘face’, like ‘what people will think’ were spoken, over and over again, insistent tones of an un-hung up phone, but words like ‘what you should, and should not do, you know this’ were slid in between the loudness, like tiny stones dropped from the window of a train, her version of subliminal.

But Boyfriend is the quintessential Good Boy, his ‘what you should and should not do’ hacked in stone, and so what she should have told me instead was this; that staying is really living, that the us forgets the I, that a house is always the emptier for having once been filled. And that when you start to miss one person, you end up missing all the rest, and an insomniac, silent night results.

There is, though, in all honesty, a small surprising joy, no, glee, in the solitude. I can change in the living room, avail myself of certain…facilities…with the door wide open so as not to miss a word of House; I can (and did) indulge in all manner of disgusting habits anywhere I pleased, and conduct culinary experiments with fascinatingly revolting results, and no one would complain of starved neglect; I can write.

Finding the I again was unexpectedly scrumptious, and the hour-long just-before-bed phone calls sweetly nostalgic. Boyfriend’s absence is orange peel; not all bitter pith, but also sharply fresh skin, tangy.

Besides, it’s just for two nights, and I am obviously much too prone to self-indulgent melodrama for my own good.

Saying nothing

2006-05-18T00:19:00.000+10:00

[one week ago]

She died today. I barely knew her, hadn’t learned to love her, but I love someone who did, does; that doesn’t help. I feel helpless, and useless, and a lie; what good is a love which cannot make you smile, and sheds silent tears you never know about, a love that leaves you lonely because it’s easier to do nothing, afraid to make it worse.

I want to say I’m sorry, but I can’t because I didn’t do this to her, although it might be easier for you if I did, or if someone did, because then you’d have someone to be angry with, someone to blame, instead of endless whys. I want to say I understand, but I don’t, I can only imagine; shades of dull aching to your emptiness that hurts, so bad. I want to say I’ll be there, but I’m not. I want to hold you, but I can’t. I want to say life goes on, but that’s the whole point; it doesn’t, not for her.

Your pain squeezes regret from me. That every step isn’t a step home. That every anecdote forgot is a piece of life unshared. That every word unheard, unremembered, dies its own little death. That every second passing, passes into an irretrievable neverwhere. I know, even before it’s happened, even before the “it might happen”, that I’d want to run backwards through the past, snatching up all the idle minutes and weaving them into time, more time for what, who, really matters.

I can’t say that, either.

I love you, is all I can or want to say, really.

But it’s not me you want to hear it from.

……

I’m sorry for your loss. I understand. I’ll be there. I’ll hold you. Your life will go on. I love you. I love you. We love you.

That’ll have to do, for now.

What the coffee cup heard

2006-05-17T23:25:00.000+10:00

[three weeks ago; office pantry]

Partner A: (passing by the pantry door) And what do we say tonight, Susan?

Me: Ah. We say goodnight, A. *beams madly*

Partner A: Susan. Take a cab. It’s late. The firm will pay for it.

Me: Ah. Ah..ah. But it’s not that late…ahm..it’ll be fine!! It’ll be fine…no worries! *hurriedly tries to look preoccupied, hoping A will have somewhere important to be and have lots of large, important matters on his mind*

Partner A stands in doorway, clearly not going anywhere. Oh crap.

Me: Anyway I don’t have much cash on me, really, so it’s fine, it’s fine, I’ll catch a train.

Fifty dollars in the palm of my hand before I can figure out how to bolt without seeming rude.

Me: No no no NO nooooo…I’ll Eftpos, it’s fine, it’s fine…go, go, I’ll be fiiinneeeeee…

Partner A: *eyes narrowed* I’ll…just give you a ride to the taxi stand.

Crap.

Me: (now in car, and obviously bugged by said coffee cup) You know, A, I get carsick a lot..that’s why I don’t like taking cabs.

Partner A: Well you should’ve said something earlier. You’re taking a cab tonight.

*mentally yanks on hair*

Me: I’m not really used to taking cabs…I don’t know if I’d even manage to hail one. And oh, look, the train station’s right next to us!

Partner A parks by the side of the road and gets out of the car, hails a taxi

Partner A: (to me) You go in the back, and shut the door. (to taxi driver) Take this girl to Carlton. (to me) *glares*

Me: *humbly* Thanks, A.

Partner A: See you tomorrow. *shuts door*

So. In the space of 20 minutes I have managed to look like a) a tight-arse, b) one on the brink of destitution, c) someone with yet another complex (because I don’t seem neurotic enough as it is), and d) an idiot.

All this, of course, could be so easily explained if I could just admit that it’s all very simple, really; I really, really, hate being told what to do.

Some definitions

2006-04-22T08:04:00.000+10:00

Irony; is skipping breakfast to blow-dry your hair just so, only to step out into a steady drizzle, with a five-minute walk to the nearest tram stop. And no umbrella.

Cold; is putting on two layers of sunscreen on a depressingly overcast day, in the faint hopes of keeping your cheeks from feeling squeezed right off the bones.

Resentment; is twenty e-mails on Friday, celebrating the very fact that it is Friday, when you are, in (another) fact, working on Saturday.

Incongruous; is being the only girl in a train carriage, standing almost on the midpoint, breathing in (trying not to) the sweetish beery breath-warmed air, surrounded by wife-beatered, be-football-scarfed-and-jumpered hordes of very large, very loud men, and re-reading (heart re-breaking) The Lord of the Rings.

Panic; is realising you are still, inexplicably, typing when you have less than five minutes to leave for work, and

Stopping.

Ode to follicles, and other bodily parts

2006-04-20T23:21:00.000+10:00

I am, so tired that my hair literally hurts. A gusty gutsy wind, and the strands seemingly twist in their roots as I imagine rusted rods in ill-fitting holes would – the stinging suddenness of the cold does not help either.

I have been robbed of my autumn, and demand compensation – give me the sun, if only to look at; even sunlight is icy on a ten-degree morning. Chilled clarity, however, is as surprising as a newly-cleaned pair of glasses, long neglected.

As always, working days melt into each other in long, gooey strands of tedium, late nights of shivery waiting on train platforms, and a (shockingly) noticeable lack of any activity other than the fevered punching of a calculator. Some days, however, the figures are figured out, and everything simply flows; days like these fill me with an intolerable self-satisfaction, which, though, never lasts longer than the inevitable tallying of Hours Worked as opposed to Hours Budgeted For.

On less smugly satisfying days, I wish I’d done something eminently more useful to the world, or better yet, much, much more useless. I can dream, and so can you, but it takes a special kind of someone to do it for a living.

Not to mention a very, very large set of cajones – how apt, Fernando!

Lazy hazy daze of Easter

2006-04-16T15:27:00.000+10:00

An e-mail I wrote to a friend recently should sum it all up quite nicely:

Last night I dreamt about synchronised travel, a red balloon (where everything else was in shades of gray and sepia), and laughing like I'd never cried before.

And you were there!

I suspect idlethink is giving me idle dreams, in great contrast to working life.

To put it in perspective, every other dream this week has been of numbers tumbling madly over, up, and under, falling off the pages into slithery heaps that slid between files and refused to, haha, stand up and be counted.

I am obviously, very tired.

How art thou?

But not this weekend, because this is the Easter weekend; last Thursday is long forgotten, Tuesday as yet inconceivable, and the Saturday I will be working is to be completely disregarded.

No, four-day weekends should be enjoyed, in the spirit of which Boyfriend and I have lazed away the day doing nothing, with the notable exception of the last half-hour spent squirming around on the floor trying to lick our own elbows.

I suspect I may come to regret the wasted time – I could have shopped! Or danced! Or done laundry! – but then again, probably not.

Happy Easter..:o)

Black scratchy daydreams, wound through with song

2006-04-04T20:10:00.000+10:00

I wore an outfit to work today, though not so much outfit as “outfit”, not so much “power suit” as “costume”; black, near-opaque tights under a knee-length gray-black skirt, a gray scratchy-looking cardigan, and a sleeveless charcoal vest, all this and my most sensiblest of shoes (which is saying much indeed, given all my footwear are either flat and covered, or sandals, or the occasional boots to be worn only when no standing is required). Black, of course.

I tripped my way to work feeling like Maria from the Sound of Music, my awkward-lengthed fringe pinned just so that my shadow painted a deceptive wimple on the pavement’s sunny spots, momentary glimpses in which I revelled.

I could not keep stiller, or primmer, on the train; sitting with knees pushed together, hands clasped, and my slip-smooth carryall now carpet in my mind, my lunch bag a well-strummed guitar. I worked with an air of cheery earnestness, and literally felt my face glow; beatifically.

Raindrops on kittens and wild geese with mittens floated through scattered thoughts as I rushed to buy new shoes at Target ($20 – intoxicating frugality!), black (and sensible), with pleasantly sturdy heels, made for skittered limbs and deliciously no-nonsense clicks.

I type this, even now, in said “outfit”, reluctant to let go the dream; I’d burn a candle by me if I had one, and call it a taper; I’d scribble this on my favourite yellowed paper, $1 for a pad at uni. I’d turn off the Simpsons in the living room, and have my window open to catch a night-filled breeze; I’d be beautiful, and wouldn’t know it; I’d sing, sing my heart out and no one would hear me but sheep.

Daydreams are so much more pleasant in twilight, when the night isn’t late enough yet to remind you that there’s a tomorrow which is more crushing than my favourite redhead thinks.

Sounds of unsilence

2006-04-01T19:23:00.000+11:00

We are an onomatopoeic people, my friends and I. Living in what sometimes seems like different worlds, with the Australians in the day, and my Malaysian friends in the night, only makes this more apparent.

My colleagues’ stories:

“I woke up last night, because I heard this really loud banging sound..”

“Her dress was pretty, wasn’t it? Slinky..”

“I swear, the dripping kept me up all night..”

And their night-weekend-counterparts:

“Last night, right, wah, there was this bhang bhang bhang on the door..”

“I really like that material mans..so shhhshhrhhrrhh when you walk..”

“WHOLE NIGHT LONG TUPTUPTUPTUPTUP I TELL YOU!!!!!”

It’s funny, and economical – who needs words when you can show people exactly what you mean?

At least I tried

2006-03-09T07:43:00.000+11:00

It's really quite counter-productive, I think, to come to work this early. Starting off when the world's still dark, squint and you'd think it was still night, squint longer and you just might fall asleep.

Then, watching a long-forgotten sun rise, the grayness blushing into a myriad colours - how can you not stop to watch, to pull out a camera and click away as cars zoom by on the highway, as the clicking shutter and the changing ticks of the road-crossing signals mingle into a beat no one else hears but you?

Half an hour is much too short; and much too long because deadlines are as morbid as they sound.

I hate my landlady

2006-03-03T00:01:00.000+11:00

I say “I hate” all the time, but I don’t really mean it, because no one does, but it’s easier to say than “I really dislike” and much, much funner too.

But.

I mean, really, lady, the apartment? It’s over a decade old. It’s possible that maybe NOT EVERYTHING WRONG WITH IT IS MY FAULT.

And you do, of course, realise, that every other apartment here has a grille between the main walkways and their balconies? And that the balcony doors are unbarred and made of glass? You know, the stuff that breaks?

Right now I wish someone would break in and vandalise everything, but leave my stuff alone.

All I want are lights that work, unbroken blinds, and some small sense of security.

*kicks wall over and over again*

*nurses injured foot*

I _really_ “dislike” her. To itty-bitty bits.

[45 minutes of Scrubs later and I’m convinced that all the world (dum) needs now (dadum) is Zach, (dum), Zach Braff.]

No place like, not even close

2006-03-01T00:34:00.000+11:00

There’s something about all this which somehow makes me sad.

The lamplight glowing, hearth-orange under a dusky, darkening sky. The cars in rows, the same yet not the same, reflecting all degrees of brightness, covered in all degrees of dust. The quiet shops, quieter homes, each fluorescing, some in neon, too, yet blending one and all into an innocuous suburbia.

In the restaurant where we were, the people were alternately raucous and silent in the comfort of their familiarity. The tables, the chairs, the small red altar above the kitchen doorway were all theirs, like land to squatters who squat long enough. The children ran in and out and all about, as the parents’ orders streamed from memory, not menus.

I’ve done all that before, sat in those cars, owned the room, laughed aloud, sighed contented, been that child who shrieked as she ran and somehow lost her knee-high stockings too.

It’s just that…I’ve never done it here, and there’s really nothing that makes you feel quite so far away from home as people who are plainly not.

Back-y, sort of

2006-02-27T23:42:00.000+11:00

It is quite cruel, really, to give a Net-starved girl a fleeting glimpse of her much-longed-for Paradise of (all)sorts, only to tether her at its gates. Broadband is beauteous and bountiful, or is supposed to be – I briefly rejoiced at my reconnection to what sometimes feels more real than the “real world” on Saturday, only to find that I couldn’t log on to anything, not e-mail, or MSN; all I could do was flit in silence through chattering, crowded columns, pools of words, sweet-thick like water when you’re really, really thirsty.

But it’s back now, and we shall say no more because *hushed whisper* it may sulk.

On a smaller, more personally petulant note – Boyfriend will not let me paint all the furniture orange. Black depresses me, but it is apparently “practical” and doesn’t “clash”, and of course that makes it fine.

I shall (have, in fact, already begun to) sulk.

My excuse

2006-02-22T08:35:00.000+11:00

Life without the Internet constricts me in ways I didn’t know it could – I find I’ve forgotten how to determine what to wear without my daily weather forecast, not trusting my tingled toes as I stand, shivering drippily in a towel on the balcony of my apartment. Newspapers were thick, finger-staining chunks of beloved words, now inconvenient in their bulkiness and the way they fall apart when carelessly grasped at the spines.

I find myself suspended now above the shifting water-vapour-bits-and-bytes of cyberspace, shoals of silvered data streaming past without me even realizing. My thoughts fall through the wide bars of my memory, like plankton, unwritten, and quickly lost.

The ‘Net is my net, my catch is the world, and I am missing it, terribly.

A Chinese New Year's worth of firsts..

2006-01-29T10:21:00.000+11:00

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

2006-01-23T23:26:00.000+11:00

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

2006-01-22T12:14:00.000+11:00

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

2006-01-11T22:21:00.000+11:00

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

2006-01-06T03:48:00.000+11:00

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

2006-01-05T18:28:00.000+11:00

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)!

Something new, then

2005-12-29T05:18:00.000+11:00

I have a sitemeter, which I have found to be, up till now, redundant. The number of people I know who read me I can count on one hand, and I don’t really need some generic counter to tell me that I average perhaps five people on a good day, and close to none (if five isn’t close enough) on the others. Still, I have one, if only to make me feel perhaps more legitimate in this tech-trendy world, and it amuses me mildly.

But it’s been a while since I have written, and an equally long time since I’ve checked to see if anyone still, you know, cares, and so it was pretty startling, really, when I did and found these:

An eleven-visitor day (the 23^rd, if you must know)
A substantial list of Google/Yahoo referrals
A relatively long list of keywords – well, four, actually, which is long relative to zero. As is anything.

Perhaps it is the cyber-cheap-equivalent of van Gogh, and it is only in its premature, apparent death that it can flourish.

You may think of this, then, as a panicked attempt to reduce it to its former obscurity, because all this “attention” is just freaky.

But anyway.

Merry Christmas, belatedly, and a Happy New Year to all.

And a very, “VERY Happy Birthday!!!” to my skinny, string-beany, funny friend – you always were my favourite prefect. ;o)

Being...

2005-12-03T05:20:00.000+11:00

There is a rule against sleeping in clubs, apparently. No drunken passing-out allowed – the club gets fined, and this makes them just a wee bit unhappy.

So what happens then, to the girl with sore feet who needs to sit, and dehydrated contact lenses that hurt when she opens her eyes?

Well she tapped her feet, swayed her body, bobbed her head, and sang along to the music that came crashing out of the speakers nearby, just so bouncers would know she was awake and stop, you know, poking her in the knee and making ridiculously un-bouncery “twinkle twinkle little star” motions with their hands when she cracked open an aching eye.

All this movement, mind you, eyes closed to the world.

I felt like..Stevie Wonder.

Confessions One

2005-11-29T23:33:00.000+11:00

If every name has a meaning, and every meaning a shell, molding a formless personality, so that Hope wishes eternal, Faith believes it will happen, and Dolores simply weeps, then mine should have been Stalky Stalkerina, or perhaps Pippa Tommygirl.

I am an incurable stalker of the grainy yet miasmic, disjointed world of bits and bytes in cyberspace. Friendster is my happy hunting ground, and anonymous browsing my veil of woven twigs. I can and will track down many, many people, and can spend great indigestible globules of time clicking, clicking, clicking, hovering like ghosts above the unsuspecting.

I am not picky – I will sight, through my dusty screen and hand-marked keyboard, just about anyone at all. I will winkle out that boy I liked in primary school, and the girl that he liked, just to see if she is still as pretty as she used to be. (Yes.) I will swim through profiles upon profiles, each a little slice of person that they want others to imagine is the whole. I will glut on the acres of cheesiness, sown with “i love u 4eva eva eva eva my darlingest piggyboo”s and many many many pictures of “my hunniebunnie and mE~!!”. I will, occasionally, be caught up in tangled elation and envy when I find someone much, much more interesting than I will ever be.

This, too, is possibly why I will, despite having a monthly tram/train/bus ticket, walk whenever and wherever possible. Otherwise it’s hard, you see, to slyly slide a sidelong glance to peek through windows and doorways, to throw out nets of hasty looks, catching puzzle pieces of different lives, yet fitting together, somehow.

There was the girl with coppered curls that turned brown under the Subway lights who ordered, without fail, two salads every day. One set of cutlery, two napkins, thanks. There was the small group I glimpsed, a wandering inkblot in the city in their long black clothes, gothic eye liner, drooping dark spikes of hair, and a startling smudge of black for lips.

There was once I walked down a road alone, and I saw a couple walking, sweetly hand in hand, when suddenly he lunged at her jacket zipper, yelling, (I lie not at all) “They need to be FREE!! FREE!! Set them FREE!!”

I’m not insane. Not really, anyway. It’s more like this: I have always had an insatiable, gnawing curiosity to know, to really, really know what it’s like to be someone else. To be that salad girl, or that lanky, smoking goth guy, to know how it is to have lived forever in a dimly-lit apartment, on a second-hand couch, faintly beery, to know how it’s like to have grown up wanting, wanting so much you don’t know what it’s like to have, to be that happy, carefree person who really doesn’t care, to be that man who meditates every day in the park, lying on the cold damp grass, to be that guy who walked, naked, into the sea in winter, to be that woman, crumpled with age, who still wears her hat and pearls when she hobbles out in faded satin heels, to think what that girl is thinking, the quiet schoolgirl on the train whose uniform looks like it doesn’t quite fit, like her skin, like the trendiness of her ipod against the untrendiness of her.

In other words, to be anyone but me.

I wonder, sometimes, just where curiosity ends and desire begins.

Three letters, nothing more

2005-11-19T23:45:00.000+11:00

Sodden, damp, and sickly warm, all squash and squish in a crowded tram; sharp, cold, stinging clean of crumpled grass and fresh-washed air.

Vague discordant whining, slipping in and out of hearing, leaking from a hundred different pairs of earphones, of a hundred different playlists passed; an oldish man with wispy hair, gently strumming melancholy chords under a greying sky.

Rocking, swaying, head-hurting uncontrolled moving, bumping, nudging, edging through endless elbows and sticky-out feet; light feet stepping, skipping, tripping on pavements, paths, the solid earth and fragile grass, no one pushing me but me.

The noise of voices raised, and the infinity of inane conversation, ringing phones and muffled curses, the honks, the growls, the jangles of transportation; a single solitary couple, lying under a slowly-dewing tree, he sleeps on the warmth of her, forming a ‘T’ of sleepy silence, capped with an ageing brown fedora.

“Hello, miss” or “Have you heard of..?” or “This won’t take long”, or sullenly thrusted brochures and leaflets galore; a waiter, lazing in the dusty yellow of a lamp not a foot above him, a cigarette hanging from two fingers, seemingly-forgotten as the smoke twirls upward, disappearing in the misted air.

The city crawling up an ever-tightening spiral staircase, twisting to giddy, dizzy, unwelcoming heights; the people unwinding, like carelessly dropped yo-yos, left to rest.

M-o-n and F-r-i differs little, really, and yet could not be more the opposite.

[Especially when it comes to walking in the rain.]

How Lee Harding almost became an Australian Idol

2005-11-15T19:41:00.000+11:00

I cannot watch television. To be completely accurate, I cannot just watch television. No, I must eat, or read, or sew, or knit, because I simply cannot sit down with empty hands and open eyes and do nothing.

But on Sunday night, I was too late, and caught unprepared, and because Australian Idol was on and music trumps almost all, I had no choice but to sit and watch with undivided attention.

And then Lee walked onto stage with a song of beyond caring and slammed-door leaving; of Tainted Love, and…

It was as if the room, the audience, the sofabed, the everything was gone and I was in a thumping, heat-slick club, like a beating, beating heart, and out of the people and the music and the crush of noise and rhythm he slid in front of me, leaned me against the wall so close I could smell an incongruous warm freshness, and…

Then he laughed, but not unkindly, and melted away into tinny, television applause - and I was back.

Now. If he had this effect on me, a twenty-two year old accountant…

One can only imagine what he did to the millions of hormone-crazed teenage girls around the country…

[A gripe, though: He just had to get knocked out the very next day, didn’t he?? Bloody telly.]

Loathing, but who?

2005-11-12T06:06:00.000+11:00

I live in a quiet, guilty kind of fear – the kind that makes me hold my breath ever so slightly, tense a little, cringe a little, shut my eyes tightly in a childish belief that this will keep them (and me) safe, or at least ignorant until it’s too late.

But it’s quiet, and secret, and no one quite knows about it. My breathing doesn’t quicken, nor do my jaws clench, and I try to look like I’m simply dozing and not shutting out the world.

All this, because of random news pieces and an e-mail I received (who believes in e-mails nowadays? Who doesn’t?), cool words and disassociated tones that starkly meant my route to work every morning makes me a potential target thanks to an unavoidable station skirting the heart of town.

And so every day I cringe a little more and wonder a little longer if I’d see or hear it coming, if I’d feel it, and how much, but then nothing happens and I can breathe again. Yet the day seems a little bleaker for the fear.

It makes me a little angrier, too, and snappish. I read comments in the paper saying we shouldn’t let the fears control our lives, that we should go on as we always have and show them we’re not afraid – and then I feel a curling sneer when just below it says “Ballarat”, or somewhere similarly far away from it all. I want to yell, then, “What do you know?” and “You have no right”.

I now nudge my way through crowds, ever moving ever slipping in between the cracks; all I want to do is get out of here, and I couldn’t care less about you.

Anyone swarthily foreign is instantly suspicious, and rapidly avoided. I now find a new abhorrence towards anything religious; the frequent borderline fanaticism and the potential for perversion to neatly fit human insanity is ever now forefront in my mind.

At times I wish the government hadn’t done anything, had just stepped back and left the rest of the world alone.

And I know, I know, oh God I know, just how irrational and stupid I’m being. I spend so little real time at that station that my fears are basically groundless. People are not callous, but concerned. Racism is ugly, even in the smallest forms. Religion is a tree, a rock, a mountain that anchors most of the world and keeps us sane and gives us hope; it is but a tiny few who wield broken branches and throw sharpened stones. Doing what needs to be done, even flawed, is necessary and far better than doing nothing to help at all.

And so this, this is why I hate terrorists.

Because they, and the things they do or say they will have made me into this…coward, selfish and despicable. What is worse is that perhaps I always was one, but simply never knew.

See, some days it seems all I care about now is me, but it’s a me I don’t recognize, a me I don’t even like.

And so perhaps, in some small way, they’ve killed me already.

How...appropriate

2005-11-08T01:48:00.000+11:00

The morning sky was sulky and the air a tepid heaviness that hung as I stepped outdoors.

The escalators in the stations had cunningly switched themselves, and the tracks now ran, not a comfortable escalator’s width away, but gaped instead; a closed emptiness just over the side of my slowly descending steps.

The buckle popped off my pants as I got up to board the train, and I spent the day wearing a bulldog clip at my waist, scratchy and conspicuous.

I stepped out of the office to find continued petulance had descended into large drippy tears which soaked my shoes, rendered my freshly-washed clothes cold and clingy and left a steamy, musty smell of damp wherever people were.

I was starving when I reached home, and had forgotten half the things I was meant to buy on the way, which made me pout (no one noticed).

Clammy, gloomy, brooding Monday – so typical it was uncanny.

Six feet from the edge and thinking

2005-11-06T15:10:00.000+11:00

It’s a story I’ve heard before.

Same silly girl who loved a lying boy. Same happy beginning, same bitter end. Same torn-up families, children like snapshot pieces scattered on the floor; used to hurt each other, but ending up the most hurt themselves.

Same friends who comfort, console, condemn. Same words falling like burning pitch from an overflowing mouth – too painful to swallow, but the hurt already done.

“I trusted him.”

“He lied to me, all these years.”

“After all I’ve done.”

“I don’t care, I’ll get him, I’ll take the children and he’ll never see them again.”

Steady words with rising anger and a slowly building cynical edge.

Sometimes even a little bewildered in the pain, “He said he loved me.”

Clichés that don’t mean any less for their having been said a thousand times before.

And so they live again, and again and again as new “bedtime stories” – but only for the daughters.

“Never trust a man.”

“He lied to her, all those years.”

“After all she’d done.”

“Now she’s going to leave him and take the children, now her life will be so much harder.”

The most cynical of tones, “He said he loved her.”

Round and round and round it goes, tales of tales told, only the names are different; the lies and lives the same.

And every well-meant fable is one too many, because it’s getting easier to listen to, and worse, easier to believe.

To believe that this could happen to me is not the problem; I’m afraid that one day I’ll believe it will.

Surely going around believing that, given the opportunity, Boyfriend will become just another in a list of oft-sung songs is not the way to live. It matters not that he has never given me cause to believe he will, because, hey, all those girls said they hadn’t seen it coming either!

It used to be effortless, once, to take the high road and declare that I would not be one of them – the watchful, wary, wily women who slyly trapped their men in nets of careful guarding that they didn’t even notice. No, I would trust in mine, I would treat him as I wanted to be treated – with openness and honesty and respect.

But the spiky fables will not cease their nagging, prodding me to depths of insecurity, and heights of distrust I’d never known.

Is this the way it should be, then? Love no longer blind, but hawk-eyed? Trust not a feeling, but a piece of signed paper with ugly words, but pretty numbers? Forever not for ever, just as long as I can make it so?

Don’t mistake me; it’s not arrogance. I don’t think myself, or Boyfriend, better or worse than any other person out there, I don’t think what we have is “divine” or that it “transcends the ordinary”. I don’t think that “no one else has ever felt this way”.

In fact, I’m positive almost everyone has felt this way. The quiet comfort of not hiding who you are. The happy thoughts about the future. The proverbial rose-tinted glasses you cannot help but wear.

But to have a future at all, a happy one, it seems that it is all this I must give up. I must be clear-sighted, hard-hearted, and calculative. Love is just the beginning of a protracted secret war fought only on one side.

‘Tis better to have loved and lost?

‘Tis better to never lose than to love with all of you.

Is this worth it?

Bitten tongue

2005-11-01T21:23:00.000+11:00

It wasn’t too long ago (June, actually, but seems like forever right now) that I would have gladly smacked anyone upside their head for saying things like, “Oh, I miss studying”, as one graduated friend moaned one day as I sat, pulling my hair out, trying desperately (in the same way someone caught in quicksand struggles, with much the same results) to understand (remembering was something I couldn’t even think about, for fear of degenerating into a gibbering mess) twelve weeks of lectures and tutorials, two textbooks, and many, many past year papers, gloriously white and untouched.

And then I graduated (sort of) too, and rejoiced that I’d never have to feel it again, the streaks of ice that shoot up and down you when you turn a page to realise that there’s a majorly important, morbidly obese, chapters-long topic you’d completely forgotten about, which means your ETA of four a.m. is now, oh, fifteen minutes before the exam begins.

(I joke, I joke? I kid, I kid? Not in the slightest bit.)

I welcomed working life, despite the mind- and bottom-numbing hours, and the long commute. I could read on my way to work and from, or stare out of the window, or listen to the radio, or simply nap, and had no cares other than what to cook for dinner, and which show to watch that night.

Work stayed at work, and never came home with me, and this was wonderful.

Then Saturday night found me walking a familiar walk to the computer lab on an errand for one exam-embroiled. Every step slipped me further into the past, and soon the report I was carrying was not a report, but one of my many lecture files, the jacket on my arm not a jacket but my faithful book bag, crammed with everything I’d need for an all-nighter (books, obviously, an extra sweater, stationery, snacks, and once, memorably, a head of lettuce). I still had the same mad hair and wonky glasses, dirt-stained sneakers that crunched on the same muddy pavement.

And so I went in through the same wrought-iron gates into a world ghostly-lit by large white globes of lampposts, and went up the stairs to look for my busy, busy friend. And it was all the same inside as well. The scuffed-smooth tiles, the smell of caffeine (and adrenaline too, I’ll bet), the endless clicking of keyboards and the smooth-sounding scratch of pens and pencils.

‘It all came back to me then’ would be a cliché, and erroneous, because there was nothing to come back. It was simply there. Everything I’d loved about uni – the buildings, the air, the feeling of the tens of thousands who had passed through the very same hallways, possibly thinking the very same thoughts, the late nights in the library, surrounded by a mix of frantic students and laid-back chillers, and cups and cups and cups of hot chocolate, coffee and tea.

Everything seemed so eternal, and it was – only the people changed.

Maybe that’s what I missed about it, the solidarity of being just another in a steady stream that poured through the corridors and in and out of classrooms, yet somehow uniquely all your own. You had a tiny, tiny bit part in a never-ending play, but you got to say your very own lines. Everyone around you, give or take a couple of years, was at the same level you were. Everything you worried about they worried about too. Grades and assignments and exams and balls were conversational staples; we spoke about the same things, if not always in the same language.

Now I’m on my own, and go where I choose, or feel compelled to choose. We’re all working, but in different places and in different fields, for different sums. Everything’s different now, and it’s lonely sometimes, knowing no one else around you feels quite the same.

I want to go back, sometimes, and yes, I think, I miss studying, too.

But don’t, like, tell anyone.

Wouldn’t want to get smacked now, would I?

[Is it just me, or do I seem overly-fond of hyphens?]

Like, duh.

2005-10-29T00:24:00.000+10:00

While watching “House” one day..

Boyfriend: Eh, how come doctors have to work at night ah?

Me: Because people don’t, you know, conveniently die during working hours?

Vunderbar

2005-10-26T22:41:00.000+10:00

This is how I spend my mornings – mentally cursing each and every person who dares hail the tram I am on, and may plagues upon plagues befall you if it results in an unnecessary delay at a red light.

My inability to catch the tram on time is chronic, and apparently incurable; it matters not at all what time I choose to wake up, in fact, I regularly ignore my alarm, which rings at 6, for anywhere between 10 and 60 minutes. This seems to have no effect whatsoever on the inevitable; a helter-skelter dash down the road, bag and lunchbox under one arm, and a much-abused suit jacket under the other, stubbing toes and missing keys, hairpins a-falling and a feeling of utter exhaustion before the day has even properly begun (as it does, you know, at lunchtime).

NO MORE, I said today. Away with the indignity, begone! I will be punctual, and calm and composed – a harmonious ensemble of the very spirit of sophistication and the personification of professionalism.

No more sprinting down the road in fast-laddering stockings, or never-ending gasping. No more scampering down train station escalators, and suicidal leaps for almost-moving trains.

No, today I will be EARLY. I will stride or stroll or amble, I will board the tram with grace, I will catch the train with poise. Today I will arrive at the station at 7:25, and will have a calming 5 minutes to peruse my book, rearrange my hair, and do up the buttons on my jacket (the right way).

And so I did.

The 7:30 train was cancelled.

The 7:42 never showed.

The 7:46 was delayed and finally arrived at 7:52.

…………

I am so sleeping in tomorrow.

A sign(?)

2005-10-23T10:47:00.000+10:00

I can no longer conceive of anything new.

Not, at least, without visual aids like smart home expos, peopled with cheery youths enthusiastically explaining to the crowd just why someone would want the Internet on their fridge, or to be able to turn on the lights and oven and heater from their office.

Or glossy-paged catalogues with saucer-eyes-inducing pictures upon pictures, accompanied with raving reviews I can barely understand, and prices which look like typos of the sort where someone leaned a little too heavily on the ‘0’ key.

Music, literature, and art have solidly planted themselves in the modern world, leaving me feeling increasingly lost amongst stranger-friends.

But even, then, these are of things either already been or to come, shortly. The real “new” that eludes me is the kind that now eludes my parents, or theirs, or theirs, or theirs.

I cannot imagine that that will be to computers, what computers are now to abacuses. Planes to kites, F1 cars to horse-drawn carriages, Eminem to the Beatles, Chopin, Strauss, and Bach, miniskirts to hoops and the pantalets beneath, blended goldfish to the Mona Lisa.

This is one of the most compelling reasons for my desire to remain immortal, or, failing which, to assume an unsubstantial form on (physical) death, just to see how different things can get.

Although I can see myself, 50 years from now, being as lost in a world moved on without me as undoubtedly my parents’ parents are now, and being laughed at by thoughtless youths (or whatever word they will be known as) is possibly not the best way to spend all of eternity and therefore possibly the second option is perhaps preferable, albeit far less interactive.

No, I really cannot conceive of anything very new at all.

Must be getting old, eh?

On a darkly lighter note

2005-10-21T06:53:00.000+10:00

Have, on extended observation of Boyfriend’s distinctly addict-like love for TV shows, discerned the following to be the most likely to elicit extreme favour on his part.

(Basically, he loves anything, or anyone, like this. Like REALLY loves them.)

Small round (or rounded) things that have legs and move – think Ribenaberries, or Smurfs, or the Wheaties from this advertisement on Aussie TV.

Extremely dysfunctional people, bitingly sarcastic, incapable of getting along with people and is equally scathing of friends and enemies alike – think House.

Spoilt girls with a penchant for occasional dumb blonde behaviour – think Brooke from One Tree Hill or Jessica Simpson (who needs absolutely no explanation, nor the word “occasional”.)

Does this worry anyone as much as it worries me?

Nothing more than

2005-10-20T19:29:00.000+10:00

Mental flashbacks may be bad enough, but emotional ones are simply frustrating in their utter lack of substance. Feelings hit me out of the blue, sourceless and fleeting. Stabs of sudden longing, but for what? Momentary elation, twinges of fragments of feelings I can’t even begin to describe. (One was something like how [not what] you feel when running fingers over wet plates, and that’s just the start.)

It’s like when you get snippets of tunes in your head, but can’t quite remember the song, and before you can try, you’ve forgotten the melody, and you spend the rest of the day humming tonelessly to yourself.

They aren’t memories; there are no accompanying visions, and it isn’t even déjà vu.

No, they are little prods to the heart, spontaneous flickers of “Now why did I feel that? Hang on, feel what? Oh shit”.

And they’re driving me MAD.

My World

2005-10-13T23:27:00.000+10:00

*msn: melancholiaismyfriend

I taught you words as pictures, my mother tells me, happily, mystifyingly.

I used flashcards, you know? Cards got words, but no pictures! Not like the other parents!

No, not like the other parents.

I remember those flashcards; plain black handwritten letters on faded white cardboard she got cheap because it was old. No, I had no pretty coloured pictures, where cars were round-roofed and red, and cats were fat with beaming smiles and squiggly whiskers that almost twirled as you watched.

No, not at all – to me a cat was a cat not a doodled orange blob and it looked like this:

CAT.

And that was that and nothing would ever be the same again. Scrawling letters and walls of print were my first and greatest loves. I was my mother’s daughter – no pictures for MY books, I said – I resented the space they took up that words and more words could have filled, words that painted far prettier pictures in my head than any other could.

This is, perhaps, why I’d rather read TV transcripts than watch the shows. Why I’m content to read of far-off lands and stay placidly at home. Why my favourite songs are still the ones with words that I can sing to. (How uncultured! Shudder, you.)

There are even people I have loved (and some that I still do) for their conversation alone, regardless of how they looked or acted.

[It’s only words, but words are all you need to take my heart away.]

And so I live in a world of words, and if each picture is worth a thousand, and every word a picture to me, then I am rapt, wrapped in a swirling sea of thousands upon thousands of tumbling letters, strung into the best of sentence-songs.

This, then, is the root of the great sorrow I feel at being a unilinguist. That I am blind to the million worlds that dance their way through a literary universe.

I grieve, I really do, that I will never see the pictures these foreign wordsmiths paint. I will never hear the music in the singing of their words. Translations are but mocking rippled window panes, and the beauty is forever lost.

This, this is why I read all I can (and more) – to make the most of all within my reach, and to help me forget the stars I’ll never see.

[all suggestions for much-needed fixes welcome.]

In Case of Silliness

2005-10-08T01:56:00.000+10:00

You know how you’re supposed to put a contact number into your phone and label it I C E, you know, In Case of Emergencies? So people know which number to call if they find you (and your phone, obviously) passed out or dead or in pieces (and dead)?

I remembered this long enough today to put in Boyfriend’s number and had to resist the extremely powerful urge to add “(ice baby)”.

NO. No. Must...resist...emergencies are SERIOUS matters.

Not to mention people might just let me die for being revoltingly lame.

Twitchy fingers are silly (and potentially deadly) tools.

Discovery

2005-10-06T23:05:00.000+10:00

We were…talking one night (gossip is an ugly, ugly word. I mean really. Look at it.) and mildly indulging in the “what-if” game – “What if…then what would you do?” etc., except about other people. (“What if so so did that that, d’you think so so so would do this and that?”)

Because, you know, there is only so many times I can ask Boyfriend what he’d do if my breasts fell off. (“Or just one side! Or if I lost my feet! Or an eye! Or *gasp* my voice! Like permanently!”)

I had to stop after the last one because he said it’s just not nice to give people false hopes.

Pah.

Anyway.

In the midst of conversation, Boyfriend made a statement so biting it shocked me.

Me: That was…mean.

Boyfriend: Yeah, but it was true.

And it was.

Those who do not know him may not understand the magnitude of this revelation: Boyfriend can be mean.

How…delicious.

It’s like biting into a bland oatmeal cookie, and finding a thick, gooey fudgey centre.

Oozing.

Yummy.

Friday hurts

2005-10-02T22:44:00.000+10:00

Fridays hurt. Not just the bursting feeling in my chest as I watch the seconds slowly drip away, or the counting-yet-not-counting down to the beginning of Friday Night and The Rest Of The Weekend, or even the urge to simply yell when the numbers in the bottom right-hand corner just don’t change fast enough.

No. It’s that every twinge, every ache, every secret inward gleeful grin at the appearance of that magical number “5” in the hour is, really, nothing much more than a cacophonous counterpoint to the small and sadly serious voice, speaking softly;

Surely, surely, there is more to life than waiting for it to begin.

[I’m a whiner, really. It’s not all bad, especially when you think about it – I spent 3 hours last Friday after lunch bouncing on a giant Pilates ball, and had colleagues who not only laughed and disapproved not one whit, but one in particular who bounced right along with me.

It’s just that, you know, it’s Sunday night, and next weekend is ever so far away.]

Faith is

2005-10-01T23:21:00.000+10:00

No one believes me when I tell them this, except for Boyfriend but that’s because he knows I don’t lie about my weirdness – it’s a principle. (There’s also no point, because people find out eventually.)

When I was young, one of the shows I actually watched regularly was Scooby Doo. And never, not once, did I ever realize that it was ALWAYS going to be the bad guys pretending to be ghosts to scare people off as part of some master plan that “would’ve worked, if it hadn’t been for those pesky kids”.

Every single episode I watched, I watched with bated breath and cold, forgotten food on my lap, as I believed, over and over, that the ghosts this time were real, and the villains simply incidental.

Some (cynical) days I wonder if my believing in the basic good in people, my tightly-held conviction that decency is not extinct, is but a grown-up version of those feelings.

But, like that kid who refused to give up on her show, who refused to accept the unoriginality of it all, I refuse to renounce my faith. There IS good in everyone. There IS universal “milk of human kindness”. There IS chivalry, dammit.

But most of all, I believe there is a point in anyone, once reached, where they will do the Right Thing simply because they cannot bring themselves to do anything but.

I have to believe, that even in the most despicable of monsters, there is some spark yet uncorrupted. That they were young once, and innocent. That no one is born to evil, and that there is always hope for the fallen.

Call me weird (some have) or stupid (many more), but there. I could not believe otherwise if I tried – it would be much too painful, and to live with that belief…wouldn’t want to. At all.

Happy Birthday!!

2005-09-27T19:54:00.000+10:00

BC-DE. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA...

[backdated]

A few observations

2005-09-26T21:42:00.000+10:00

Tempting Fate

is, apparently, a startlingly viable and hazardous pastime. I opened the newspaper on the train last Friday and chanced upon an article detailing the many delays of public transport due to numerous passenger ailments. Another one told tales of violent and aggressive passengers being manhandled by even more trigger-nerved tram drivers and the like.

“Pah!” I said loudly, causing another passenger to edge away warily. Excuses! I thought, and then the fateful sentence slipped, like wet unnoticed glass, through my mind:

“If I haven’t seen it, it can’t be that common lah.”

*cue thunder and ominous-sounding noises, like a non-verbal “Mum and Dad want to see you. Now.”*

At the station on arrival, I noticed, absently, a nondescript youth surrounded by black-coated Figures Of Authority, raised voices and hackles obvious even across two sets of train tracks.

On the way home, in the tram, a girl fainted due to an asthma attack, and a row of halted trams quickly formed behind our necessarily stationary one, awaiting the arrival of an ambulance.

On Sunday, Boyfriend, his friends, and I watched with a keen and slightly horrified interest as our tram driver stopped the tram, marched up to a passenger and dragged him off said vehicle. They proceeded to have a lengthy and abusive argument, degenerating into a dreadfully one-sided bout of fisticuffs (our driver was built like a footy player, and the passenger like a third of one), ending only when the Driver (as he shall henceforth be known) flung a small, indeterminate object, presumably the Passenger’s (ditto), as far away as he could into a road of oncoming traffic.

What was just slightly worrying was that on returning, he turned to another passenger and said, “That was him, yeah?”. The answer was, if the word can be used, fortunately in the affirmative, but it does seem, to me at least, that perhaps this is the sort of question that should be asked before undertaking such action.

Anyway. At the onset of the last incident, I rolled my eyes heavenward and said “FINE! I BELIEVE YOU!”, and fervently hope that the message has gotten through.

The next and only time I exclaim about something in the newspaper, it will be about a lottery winner, and will be something along the lines of “Pah! This never happens to *emphasis* ME…”

Teenage dramas

Countless episodes of The O.C. and One Tree Hill, both dearly beloveds of the dearly beloved Boyfriend, have led me to the conclusion that to the makers of these shows, the absolute height, nay, the pinnacle of character development rests in the gradual evolution of vile villains and bitchy airheads into simply misunderstood good people with previously undiscovered hearts of gold. Sworn enemies become united by a common goal, and the revelation of insecurities and secret traumas (childhood or otherwise) become the ultimate in “surprising twists”, resulting in “unlikely bonds” of love and friendship.

The only truly bad people who stay bad despite all reasonableness usually turn out to be psychotic and are therefore not really, you know, normal.

There is one in every class

Like, really. The obnoxious one who asks tons of questions, most of which are irrelevant and the rest about matters that were covered just two seconds before.

I went for MYOB (an accounting-type software) training today and was heartily amused (my colleague was heartily annoyed, so I felt the need to right the karmic balance) by a girl in the front row who came in late, proceeded to ask the trainer about other training programs available (before, mind you, he could even begin with this one), and interjected almost every lesson chapter with the following statement: “Yeah, I’ve done that, I taught myself how”.

She is not the first. For some reason, in 90% of the classes I have been in, there is always the one person who manages to annoy everyone else with irrelevant questions and painfully inane comments.

I would go on, except for the remaining 10% of classes in which I found no one annoying at all, and the niggling thought repeating itself in the back of my head – “There is always one…”

[I do realize that high school classmates occasionally read this, so stop rolling your eyes, you.]

A conversation

While watching television one day:

Boyfriend: You’re tiny.

Me: No I’m not.

Boyfriend: Yes you are! I can fit your fist in mine. Look!

Me: (struggling unsuccessfully to open hand) STOPPIT!! I AM NOT TINY!

Boyfriend: *laughs patronizingly*

Me: I AM NOT ALL TINY!!! I HAVE BIGGER BRAINS!!

Boyfriend: *continues laughing and pats head condescendingly*

Me: WELL I HAVE BOOBS!! Oh hang on. *looks thoughtful* So do you.

Boyfriend: *stops abruptly*

Me: *laughs maniacally and falls off sofa*

For Mum

2005-09-22T19:51:00.000+10:00

Whose birthday is today, yet never seems to age.

Whom I always thought the most beautiful person in the world - and still do.

Who always thought me beautiful too, especially when I felt ugliest.

Who tried so hard to hold on to me, when I tried to pull away.

Who lets me hold on hard now, never letting go.

Who laughs three times at every joke, haha.

Who cannot cook, but tries her best for us.

Who cannot sing, yet sang to me.

Who read to me when I couldn’t, and filled my world with the books that became my life.

There are many, many things I remember, but the first and clearest memory is this:

Of how, when I was very young, I used to wake up before she’d leave for work, just to watch her go, and then I’d roll myself up in her discarded clothes and breathe her in to stop from missing her so much.

This is the fourth year that I’m away from her on this day.

I’d give anything for a shirt.

Happy birthday mum, wishing I was there.

A stroll beyond infinity, and a postscript

2005-09-22T19:27:00.000+10:00

Two nights ago I got up from my bed, opened my eyes, and saw stars. Pricking flashes like darting balls of mercury, slipping away from focus, dancing around the edges of my sight. Other times all else turns black, and for a few quick-long seconds I see nothing but bursts and twinkling points of silver-white, enveloping me in a dizzy starry spell.

It’s like floating, for those precious moments, in a galaxy of my very own.

……………………………………

In response to a question someone asked Sylvia, either in jest (haha, not), or in all seriousness (which is, actually, funnier):

a) I am not pregnant. *rolls eyes*; and

b) Apparently my uterus reads me - now how’s THAT for reader penetration?

:oP

Not For Cuppycakes

2005-09-15T21:56:00.000+10:00

*msn: A worm is living inside me, I swear

A disclaimer (which is quite silly, since if I’m about to do something that requires a disclaimer, it can only mean I’m about to do something which will contradict, or seem to, said disclaimer, therefore possibly rendering said disclaimer false, but your opinion is entirely your own, as is my right to write a disclaimer so there):

1. I don’t cry. Well, not easily anyway.

2. I don’t like ranting in writing.

Because, you know, yelling at Boyfriend is so much more satisfying.

But all bets are off, when hormones are in the house.

(Oh, and:

3. I don’t like using clichés.)

It’s simply not normal to keep being affected by these insidious molecules. Hardened junkies are as titled, and I demand the same right. Chemicals are chemicals are things not to be quibbled about especially. Not. Now.

The problem is not in the actual “time” itself, but of the days before. Suddenly the mildest of stories pricks at my eyes and threatens to ruin my cool. (OH STOP SNIGGERING.) Suddenly the littlest of words, or looks, or acts become stone-carved reasons for a quiet self-inflicted death. Suddenly I want to eat everything in sight.

Yesterday I almost bawled over Little Men, by Louisa M. Alcott. And a beggar. And a busker. And a cat. And a magazine cover. It’s safe to say that had I spilled milk I would have cried. (Oh, the clichés! My lack of originality is painful. Tearfully so.)

Yesterday for lunch, my colleague watched, round-eyed and open-mouthed, as I proceeded to devour a cake of yee mee, plus a handful of tanghoon, plus nine meatballs and two eggs. Washed down with a glass of milk, followed by several handfuls of almonds, and a breakfast bar.

She, mind you, had one (ONE!!) cup of instant noodles.

I reached home that day trembling with hunger.

Today, I became quietly and deeply convinced that my eventual termination for utter incompetence was inevitable for the inarguable fault of simply being me.

No matter. All this, and the accompanying bloating, is perhaps to be endured with patience and chocolate as being reproductively necessary.

But this month, this month, THIS MONTH, the unavoidable is simply just not there.

And so the normal three-day limbo of teary paranoia has lasted a week (and counting).

This cannot go on. I may eat Boyfriend.

And so you see, this is not a rant, but a desperate plea.

Please. Bleed already.

Short-circuits

2005-09-13T00:00:00.000+10:00

*msn: A friend of Pinky the Punk

I swear sometimes my body is totally independent of sense.

There is no other explanation for the way I trip over curbs I have already seen, or knock over glasses of water I put out of reach just moments before, or spill food (and this, more than anything really really annoys me) ONLY when I’m wearing something new. (What’s more, having ordered something boring and unspillable in anticipation of this very eventuality.)

But I think that I would be fully justified in saying that, of all the different parts of my body that get up to all sorts of hi-jinks when I’m not paying attention, my face really takes the cake. (Eats it too, come to think of it.)

It seems I am incapable of thinking, reading, or recalling anything without making the appropriate facial expression.

I am well aware that everyone laughs at books sometimes, or smile when thinking back on some happy, blue-skied times, this is perfectly normal. (So you can stop worrying now.)

But (and I am quite sure about this, because people-watching is now a hobby of mine), possibly no one else will recall, say, a certain waiter, or perhaps a particularly condescending Student Administration worker, and proceed to not only scowl most gloweringly, but also to mutter, peevishly, all the things that could have been said but were not, in an increasingly loud and vehement voice, ending with a little triumphant smirk at the imagined outcome – gloriously vengeful, and very, very satisfying.

This is very bad. Not only because I will inevitably develop the reputation of being ‘that crazy lady on the train’, or that I may someday (soon, no doubt) be apprehended by gentle but firm men in white, or even that I may eventually lose control over my face entirely (at which point it will most probably proceed to eat nothing but cake, and a lot of it) but mainly because of the sad and sorry fact that I will never, ever, win $10,000,000 playing poker.

Morning (and evening) train(s)

2005-09-08T23:05:00.000+10:00

It's my fourth day of work and I still don't know the train timetable, and so often find myself sitting on a bench in the station, scribbling.

[Side note: I love saying I ‘commute’ to work. The word somehow imbues me with a sense of all-purposefulness and dedication to my career (car-less and broke); casts the image of a busy young professional, briefcase-laden (large handbag), coffee (tea) in one hand and a rolled-up paper (Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent) in another.]

I am unimaginative and easily inspired, and therefore most of what I write about is trains. (Bet you didn't see that one coming.)

Like how heady it is in the morning, surrounded by and invisible to school-age children. The air is thick with unconscious potential, like swirly, oozy soup from which anything may spring.

Like how I want to follow every single person on board, as he or she is swallowed and then regurgitated. I want to walk their roads, live their lives, think their thoughts. It will, I am sure, be like watching a slowly spilling splash of liquid gems.

Like how sometimes, I feel like gently stepping off the platform as a train hurtles by, out of plain and simple curiosity – I wonder how it feels like to be a splat.

Like how once, while waiting, I saw a crescent moon, beaming, with a smallish star just above one horn; a tiny wink from one working traveler to another.

But most of all, like how the anti-social in me, brought out by the incessant human contact in an office, where work is a never-ending tepid pool, finds comfort in the alone-ness of it all. I crave the emptiness of the carriages, the comfortingly solid cranks and clanks, the slight yet soothing sways and jolts, the sight of the city’s many-windowed fingers reaching towards a sunset sky.

All this is all mine, mine, mine, with no one to spoil the wondrousness of solitude.

This is an under-appreciated Heaven.

I may be, but I wish I wasn't

2005-09-06T00:01:00.000+10:00

Tonight I heard nothing new.

Laughter jarring in familiarity, same old same old tales.

I’d heard these jokes before, these thoughts, these words.

“Ah? Lost near those kind of people ah? Sure gone adi lah!”

“You know lah, they everything also steal lah! Bloody ******s!!”

Cue the broken bottled hilarity, the cracked and knowing smiles.

And once upon a time I might have laughed along, and, worst of all, I might again some day.

But tonight all I could think about was the times when people spoke to me in simple words (for simple minds, you see). When they were mean, and rude, and ignorant, and didn’t even care. When someone cursed and hated me for simply being what I am.

And I could barely keep from yelling, both at the raucous laughers and at myself.

New Orleans

2005-09-04T19:42:00.000+10:00

I cannot remember when or how I first read about this place; hazy, sultry pictures in a dusty National Geographic, with glossy sticky-smooth pages of feelings made words, books upon books whose plots are long-forgotten, but not the rich impression of the world they lived in, jazzy catches of song, gently snatching my soul.

The magical foreign music of words like ‘bayou’ and ‘jambalaya’ and ‘cajun’ sunk hooks into me, leaving painful barbs of yearning. I craved crayfish long before I knew what they were. Even the hooded suffocating darkness of voodoo and whispered curses held me, bound and helpless, in their thrall.

But I have never been there (for fevered imaginations don’t count, I’m sure), and so the wreckage wreaked in Katrina’s wake is painful, as now there is much I will never see.

But, much much worse, is this:

That my vague dreams were someone’s reality.

That my regretful longing is someone’s anguished loss.

That what I have never seen, they will never see again.

What pain, what pangs, what slight and pricking aches I feel are nothing in the face of such gaping, naked, sorrow.

May their bleeding gashes crust and heal, their homes restored, their hopes fulfilled, may New Orleans live and thrive once more.

Her people need to dream again..and so do I.

Disgruntled-ness

2005-09-04T01:39:00.000+10:00

*msn: Cabbage

Is there a word for a waiter who doesn’t smile back at customers who smile at him, to whom, apparently, “Thank you” is a phrase that requires absolutely no acknowledgement or response, whose idea of serving is to throw the plates at the table from as far away as possible, who treats customers as though they were wholly unreasonable for being there at all, who brings a bill of $47.50, promptly disappears with $50.50 and then proceeds to ignore the customer completely, who then, on inquiry, first informs the customer patronizingly that there was an unwritten $2 charge for the pot of very weak tea, and then proceeds to look highly affronted at the request for the remaining $1 change, saying haughtily that he thought it “was a tip” loudly enough for the entire restaurant to hear, and then throws a handful of coins on the table in apparent loud disgust at the customer’s lack of generosity?

Because, you know, ‘audacious’, or ‘rude’ or ‘appalling’, or even a combination of the three (italicized versions included) just doesn’t quite cut it.

Independence

2005-08-31T00:03:00.000+10:00

*msn: 31st August, 48 years later.

[While it may be more appropriate perhaps to write this in Bahasa Malaysia, I am after all a unilinguist…writing in the only way I know how.]

There are many dreams I have for my country, most of which many may have voiced. But a dream is a dream is a hope and it doesn’t matter how many times you wish it.

I dream of a Malaysia, where the words “Proud to be Malaysian” really means proud to be Malaysian.

Where racial harmony really just means harmony, without the necessity for the “racial” qualification.

Where the government really is “of the people, by the people, for the people”.

Where the people is the people not one kind of people and another.

Where fines = fines not bribes.

Where Malaysian doesn’t just mean “from Malaysia”.

Where we don’t need the Petronas/Telekom/MAS ads to remind us of how it should be, because it already is.

Where public property means our property, not “not-mine-don’t-care” property.

Where people don’t just come to visit, but to stay.

Where people don’t dream of leaving, but of living here forever.

Where we can say what we want when we want, but also know what to say and when to say it.

Where dreams really do come true.

I could go on forever, but I guess what I really mean to say is this:

That I dream of a day when I can say to any Malaysian anywhere in the world, “I love my country”, and have them reply, not “Why?” but “Me too”.

Me too, everyone. Selamat Hari Merdeka.

Today

2005-08-30T17:58:00.000+10:00

*msn: The Unbearable Lameness of You

Today was a day of blusteriness, and a bad day to go out without a windproof jacket.

Today I leaned on thick air.

Today I felt almost Gorgon, as my hair turned into millions of tiny, stinging whips.

Today I cursed eye-length bangs.

Today I tried to walk while closing my eyes against the mote-filled gusts.

Today I failed and kept them open to watch errant wisps of cloud, like the floaty offspring of cotton bundles, whirl and whee(!!) their way across the sky.

Today flags and banners smacked and thwacked in their snapping bid for freedom, or in faint and ancient longing for masts and the highest seas.

Today my eyes felt pitted and roughened raw, with corners grit-stuffed and smarting.

Today was quite possibly the worst of days to carry large, stretched plastic bags, unwieldy yet un-weighty.

Today was a brightly-sunny, fiercely-windy day.

And it was fun.

Phobias Two

2005-08-26T22:57:00.000+10:00

*msn: Everything’s eventual

Some days I worry, I really really worry, that I’m really just insane, that nothing I see, that no one I know, or “know”, is really there.

Crazy people, they say, live in a world of their own, peopled with strange ghosts from their past, or fantastical wisps of their imagination. Travel the world in a bed with crispy taut white sheets. Dance away the time in straps, in a dream-soft white room, within hard-white greying walls, in a forgetting and forgotten bubble of time and place.

They’re living a life that isn’t really one at all, but they don’t know it.

Some days I can almost, in a on-the-tip-of-your-tongue kind of way, feel myself sitting in a corner of all that whiteness, laughing, smirking, crying, singing, talking, feeling, all alone.

Madness, it seems, is seeing the world in a way that others don’t.

But then, if you think about it, we all see the world in a way that others don’t. Even the smallest and simplest of things isn’t safe – if I asked you to think of the colour purple, if I asked a thousand other people, and if I could see them all, I might get a thousand and one different shades. If I was happy and you were happy and everyone else was happy it doesn’t mean we all feel the same.

Crazy people, they say, live in a world of their own, but so do all of us. Perhaps it’s just that our worlds are smaller, maybe, less different, perhaps.

But where, then, does individuality end and insanity begin? And how many million lines between the two would I have to draw before the world agreed?

It is disheartening to think that, to someone out there, I might be the very definition of certifiably insane.

Then again, it is decidedly heartening to know I’m probably not alone.

Old dogs

2005-08-25T01:39:00.000+10:00

*msn: Sinning is swimmingly sinfulicious.

Just now, at dinner:

Television: (advertisement)…this functional car…

Boyfriend: Hahahaha..dysfunctional car..hahahahaha..

Me: Oh my God, did you notice??

Boyfriend: What?? What??

Me: (hushed, deadly serious tone) You…made your first word joke.

Boyfriend: *pauses* Oh shit.

Glee and new tricks are wonderful things.

Brief blurbs on brevity

2005-08-23T01:47:00.000+10:00

*msn: Shooting up the melancholia – overdosing on the pain

Some days I miss the books I read when I was young – Dickens, Bronte (all of them), Doyle and Poe; especially when I read the books I read now that I’m not all that young anymore.

It seems to me that there are a whole lot less words nowadays, with prose so short and terse it seems the whole point is to get the point across, and nothing more. With words once ugly and discordant now written for the newness and the jarringly trendiness of them all.

Which is not to say that clean and simple words can’t be beautiful, but simply that they not always are these days.

Language written like sung silk slipping off leaves and sheaves of paper become rarer by the day.

Stories spun of old and tired plots, of Guy Meets Girl and Girl Meets Guy, of cliched angst and chic chick lit are common as carbon, with diamonds few and thinly spread.

Why the brevity? Why the coarseness of instant literary gratification? Why the hurriedness of e-mails and the complete reluctance to type out words in full?

Science and medicine have made our lives all the longer, but the words with which we fill it seem to diminish both in size and quality by the day.

Some people don’t fill it with words at all, more’s the pity.

Book-based movies and summaries abound, and the original print-captured songs die a silent death. (Of silence. Haha.)

This makes me sad, and mad, but, mostly, I regret forgetting such old friends in favour of the quick and snappy acquaintances I forget soon after parting.

This also scares me, especially when I think of how it will be a hundred years from now.

What words will we lose next? What little ways in which to say the things we want to say would go? And then how would we say them?

Orwell’s frightening premonition of Newspeak rings a distant, hollow, war drum song.

Words on plays on words and other words

2005-08-21T02:28:00.000+10:00

*msn: Verbal diarrhea is a GOOD THING, damnit.

Have you ever stared so much at a word, for so long, that suddenly it ceases to make an sense and starts to look like nothing more than jumbled-up letters?

Try it:

WORD

WORDWORDWORDWORDWORDWORDWORDWORDWORDWORD

WORD

And it is infinitely annoying to, for a second, think you’ve finally discovered your very first Googlewhack, only to realize you’ve actually just made the same typo as just one other person in the world.

I also find it kinda icky to see sculptures of snowmen skiing, since they are made OF snow and hence it is much like people sledding on hills of blood and bones.

Ugh.

Sleep beckons. The failure of “kaleidoscopical precclampsia” to break the monotony of constantly unfruitful googlewhacking attempts may haunt me forever.

Just a note: I read in a blog some time ago that a professor of linguistics (or some similarly-qualified being) said that a love for the use of parentheses and adverbs was always symptomatic of an undeniably, and ultimately, bad writer.

Is it ironic that I had both in that sentence and didn’t realize it till I’d finished typing it?

I don’t suppose the fact that I like to simply make up words helps either.

Oh boo. :o(

Another note (and then I’m done, I promise): Is it odd that I feel better that my mum has stopped nagging me to find a “real” job than about, you know, the job itself?

Hmm.

I wonder just how many of these questions are actually going to be answered.

[post is back-posted due to technical difficulties. :oP]

Biased favourites

2005-08-18T01:27:00.000+10:00

*msn: Kindred = ‘Kin’ + wrongly spelt ‘dread’? hmm.

I think the question “What is your favourite vegetable?” is biased as it (usually) only takes into account the sense of taste and nothing else.

This, I believe, is decidedly unfair of me, especially in the case of capsicums.

There is much to love about capsicums. The crispy crunchy sound they make when cut, the fresh, peppery smell they leave, momentarily, in the air, their delightfully clean-looking spongy insides, their myriad, rattly seeds like tiny seed pearls in a shell, their loudly-coloured, waxen bulbous outsides, smoothly gnarled, their dried and twisty stems…

But I hate their taste, and therefore “capsicums” are never an answer to the question posed above, and are denied a tiny chance for immortality.

Well hopefully this makes up for it.

The things that come to mind when slicing Subway peppers…

Spreading even more joy

2005-08-16T12:55:00.000+10:00

*msn: (see below)

In a much more light-hearted frame of mind (heart and mind? interesting);

http://web.pitas.com/ficbitches/woodandstone.html

It's a review of a Lord of the Rings fan fiction story, which is good because all the juicy bits have been extracted so you don't have to read the whole thing, and you get snappy comments to boot!

Enjoy, people, enjoy.

Of friends and friendships

2005-08-16T12:51:00.000+10:00

*msn: It is, I think, conceptually impossible to think about nothing

Confession – I was a very sad little girl.

(I say was, and you shall agree, or I will be even sadder.)

I vaguely remember an incident which took place at one of those parents’ friends’ parties, the kind where everyone brings their children and puts them all around the same table and expects them to “bond” just because they’re children.

(Incidentally, I wonder what my mum would do if I brought her along to my friends’ parties and chucked her at their parents saying “Go! Have fun with Karen’s mum! Don’t come and disturb Daughter okay? Good girl!”.

Even more incidentally, I wonder what my friends would do.)

Anyway.

We were playing Follow The Leader, when suddenly the bossiest girl in the group (well she was 5 years older than the rest of us) decided I would be said Leader.

I was only 4, I think, or 5, and leadership was a foreign, and frankly terrifying prospect. Not to mention the feeling of 7 pairs of eyes staring at you, with hard bright-eyed stares, mimicking (seemingly mocking) your every move.

I (and this is quite shameful, really) cried and ran to Mummy. Obviously this was the pinnacle of Things Just Not Done, as it resulted in everyone else getting told off for “scaring the poor little girl”. (Don’t you snicker, you.)

Unfortunately, the party was only halfway through, and so I spent the remaining hour completely ostracized by the other children for being a Baby.

Nothing else has ever been quite so lonely.

In desperation I tried to weasel my way back into the group, but received nothing but pointed back-turnings and complete and utter disregard.

And then, (and this, more than anything, gives me that shuddery, go-away feeling you get when you remember something particularly bad) I spotted in the flowerbeds, hundreds of tiny multi-coloured bead-like particles, at which I triumphantly declared,

“If you all don’t friend me, I won’t give you any colourful stones!!!”

and then settled back to bask in my newfound glory.

Bossy Girl then gave me the most crushingly disdainful look I’d ever seen, adult or child, and said, scathingly,

“Stones? Why would we want YOUR stones? And anyway, they’re not even stones, they’re (wait for it) fertilizer.”

Everyone then turned away, never to look back again.

And that was it. I believe all my self-confidence issues and my desperate need to be liked stemmed from that very day.

And then along the way, I realized; I’m not alone.

Children try to ‘buy’ friends all the time. Giving stickers, gifts, showing off toys, cars (for the rich), and (for the truly vulgar) simply flashing the cash they carry around with them.

All very reprehensible, I’m sure, but then, when you come right down to it, isn’t any form of making friends a version of the above?

We make jokes -> people laugh -> people like.

We listen to problems -> people happy -> people like.

We give birthday gifts -> people get -> people like.

I wonder if it’s possible to make friends without trying to. To have conversations and not say all the things you know you’re obliged to say, like “How are you?”, to talk and not talk as and when you feel like it. To have people care about you because they want to, and yet not care if they do, but also care about them because you want to, and have them not care if you do.

Ugh.

I’m quite lost now, really. All I was trying to say was; are our crude attempts to ‘purchase friends’ in youth all that different from our sophisticated methods of ‘making friends’ now?

To my friends, should they be doubting now, I care about you, really. But I confess, I DO care about whether you care too. Yes, I’m needy. Love me!! Or you just might find a tub of fertilizer on your doorstep…

Phobias One

2005-08-12T13:27:00.000+10:00

*msn: Call me Ishmael.

There are times when I am afraid to continue reading, be it novels, stories, columns, articles, blogs, or random jottings on notepaper, quickly discarded and unexpectedly discovered.

This is because of the people who write either with such mind-bending clarity, the kind who put, so easily, into words the little (or large) feelings that up till now only manifested themselves in certain chills or tingles of the person, or whose words spill off the page and slosh and swirl around like corporeal music, language to be enjoyed for the sake of itself, or, and this is the frightening-est of all, both.

You see, I am afraid, that buoyed on the twin seas of such Rhyme and Reason, I will never be able to write ever again with a truly original thought or turn of phrase, because such beauty never really leaves the realm of memory, and in all possibility will permeate throughout my brain, finally manifesting itself on paper (or screen) in response to clamorous pleadings of my woefully uninspired imagination.

So the choice is this: to remain brackish water of an isolated, unknown swamp, or a sweet and sparkling beverage mass-produced and mass-appealed, designed to imitate the finest, lightest, rarest of champagnes?

Days Of My Life

2005-08-08T01:16:00.000+10:00

*msn: SNAFUs and the art of sandwich-making

A Day in the World of Subway with Pay

Yes. Yes it has. The day has come. I have entered the working and earning world.

And that, tragically, is the one and only positive thing I have to say about it.

It all began on a sunny Thursday morning when I was awakened by a particularly insistent (yet tuneful!) beeping. In my sleep-addled state of mind, I inexplicably took it to be my washing machine and stumbled, sticky-eyed, to the toilet to pat it soothingly and press whatever buttons it wanted pushed.

Only it wasn’t on, and the beeping was. Still on, I mean.

Oh! The phone! (This thought-sequence may project a somewhat bleak picture of my life, with all sorts of conclusions draw-able from the fact that being awakened by a mobile ringtone sends me to the washing machine.)

Oh! My housemate!

OH [insert your favourite expletives here, because I certainly did] IT’S 11:30!!

My shift, you see, began at 11.

My sense of timing, in addition to my memory, has never failed to astound me. Not only was it the first day on the job, but the evening before I had marched up to my boss to show off my new black shoes purchased specially for working purposes and to request, nay, demand, additional hours be put on my schedule as I desperately needed the money.

I cringe even now.

Five minutes and a mad dash down the street later, visor and apron askew, bereft of house keys (“I’ll think about it tomorrow!” Or at the end of my shift, whichever.) and insane unwashed hair waving about in all its glory, I arrived at Subway.

Where, if your credulity is still intact, the following occurred:

Not more than ten minutes after profuse apologizing and various attempts to develop a ‘responsible-dependable’ look, I got a customer’s order wrong.

In an effort to look, you know, pro-active and efficient, I decided to collect ALL the rubbish and trays at the same time. Including the ones outside. Where it is very windy. While carrying mounds of crumpled paper from the inside. Which were very light and easily blown away. Which *were* blown away. Which I then had to run after in a most ungainly manner. Which meant that it took me twice the amount of time it would have had I just done first the inside then the outside. My boss, of course, saw the whole thing.

I looked up from making a sub only to realize that Dream Italian God (also known as Previous Business Finance PASS Session Leader) had walked through the door. For an entire semester, my friend and I had swooned over him in our hour-long, weekly classes. At the (very, very sad) end of the semester, I recall filling in, under ‘Comments’, on a tutor evaluation form, remarks to the effect of the following:

“[Dream Italian God’s name] is extremely good-looking and a wonderful tutor. If more like him were pressed into service, I believe it is safe to say that tutorial attendance would cease to be a problem forever.”

It is with great sadness that I must admit that, in spite of my determined attempts to catch his eye, while attempting to look aloof and unattainably attractive at the same time, he paid no more attention to me than to give me increasingly wary glances out of the corner of his eye, and a firm statement of “Takeaway!” at the end of the entire process.

I almost impaled a customer on the end of a mop. I believe “Enough said” more than covers it.

The following day I set the alarm for 9 a.m. for an 11 a.m. shift. Better sleep-deprived than sorry.

Words of the Day

‘Revolting’ – is a word that, to me, looks and sounds exactly like its meaning.

‘Grotesque’ – is another.

‘Pulchritude’ – is not.

Market Day!

(Sounds like the title of an Enid Blyton chapter.)

Today, after numerous so-called ‘hints’ (“I WANT a Tamagotchi and you can get one in Victoria Market for seven dollars!”) and fuelled by the desire for peace, Boyfriend bought me an imitation Tamagotchi.

Which I loved, up till the point when I pulled the tab to bring it to life and opened the manual.

The first paragraph of the latter reads (all capitals and spelling entirely the original author’s own):

“a. open to stir to insulate the slice before machine, and be the Bonding Option to show the person with the pet, can press Select The pet of the feeding that choice need: Person or dinosaur, press the Decide Key the confirmation the empress to enter respectively Into the feeding mode for pick outing of, be the Bonding Option to show someone, then and directly press the Decide Key Enter the game mode.”

Fascinatingly enough, a few paragraphs later, this line jumps out at me:

“The pet’s childhood Child bearingAfter choice need pet that keep, press the Delide Key to enter the feeding mode the meeting according to Pet for choosing of its breed the way but decision its is still viviparous for egg.”

Viviparous? Incomprehensible instructions, to be sure, but how very scientific. Also note that Decide Key has now morphed into Delide Key. (Further on it becomes DECIDE key – as if the author suddenly realized he’d been wrong for quite a while and tried to cover it up by shouting the correct one really loudly and hoping people wouldn’t remember.)

Also imagine my surprise (nasty) when, after a few random stabs at the buttons, this appeared:

I am sorely disappointed. As a friend remarked, if I had wanted a human to take care of, I had Boyfriend.

(This really struck home later when I realized that my wonderful new pet refused to do anything but eat or sleep and only liked eating snacks. And when I turned around to show Boyfriend how she looked when she was sleeping only to find him curled up in bed as well.)

I am most displeased. (To Boyfriend: But still very grateful!!)

Word-watching

Sauntering down Gertrude Street one day, I spotted the only true source of glee I’ve had all week.

And chuckled to myself all the way home.

End of Days

To bed! To bed!

Perspective is simply just another point of view

2005-08-01T10:05:00.000+10:00

*msn: Reason shall prevail? Perhaps, but whose…?

Deep impact (from Deep Impact)

Last night (or was it the night before?) Tommyknockers…

Right.

Last night, I was watching Deep Impact and this occurred to me. That I am this tiny, minute speck on a relatively minuscule planet in the middle of a not extraordinary galaxy, playing a somewhat unimportant role in The Universe. (whose vastness renders it both extremely essential and yet somehow unusually forgettable – it is easy to take something for granted when it’s always been there and is likely to always be. At least in my lifetime anyway, I mean, I know it’s shrinking and all…but I digress.)

And for a while I just sat there, wallowing in my sudden sense of infinite insignificance.

Oh, the unbearable littleness of being!

Then I realized something else, and began to bask in the glow of newfound irresponsibility.

I am tiny, I am infinitesimal, and everything I do makes practically no impact on a greater scale.

In fact, the only thing really affected by what I do is me. (myself and I.)

So if I try and succeed, I am happy, if I try and fail, I am sad, if I never try at all, I am regretful. And throughout it all, Life (and The Universe) Goes On.

Therefore ‘try’ is, by logic, the only step which has the possibility of resulting in a positive outcome, and hence the only way to go.

This…intrigues me. Greatly.

Just around the corner

On Saturday, Boyfriend and I, inspired by Latourex, went on a Left-Right Tour of our own.

Basically we stepped out of our apartments, walked to the nearest intersection, turned left, walked till we reached the next and turned right, and then left again at the intersection after that…you get my drift.

And snap-happy me took pictures of the right-angled road signs at each intersection we crossed, and of interesting things along the way.

Now. I would post the pictures up, but 95 shots takes just a little too much time. Maybe I’ll go start an album or something.

Interestingly, as we started out at about 4 and only got back after sundown, the gradual darkening of the sky can be observed from the pictures taken.

Unfortunately, there is a gap between a still slightly-bright evening and a decidedly dark sky; I had stopped at a shop and tested a particularly strong-smelling hand cream, and didn’t want to touch my camera until it had worn off. (It probably didn’t help that around the same time, Boyfriend and I went into this oldish-looking supermarket and stayed there for about an hour simply because the atmosphere reminded us of “the old Giant”.)

Strange what unexpected nostalgia can do to you, especially when far from home and feeling it.

(It must be noted here that we cheated slightly, and did not stop the tour when we encountered a large, uncrossable obstacle – such as an ocean, or a particularly large drain – but when we, after traversing mostly suburban areas, reached a large main road, lined with shops and paved with tram-tracks. Boyfriend then sternly informed me that there would be no more turnings from then on as we had “reached civilization”, obviously the only proper goal for explorers. Pooh.

Oh, and we took a tram home. Ha.)

Next weekend

The *gasp* Right-Left Tour begins! (although this is in the direction of the city, and will likely last about all of 15 minutes before we, again, “reach civilization”. Ah well.)

I never cease to amaze me

2005-07-29T16:01:00.000+10:00

I never cease to amaze me

*msn: Senility is my new friend...at least I *think* it's new...

If ever I question again the usefulness of blogging, remind me of this:

That had I not idly read through my past entries to see where I’d left off (yes I realize I wouldn’t have to if I wrote more often but this is not, currently, a matter for discussion) and come across my particularly memorable (oh the irony of this phrase) passing of final exams, I would not now be seized with a horrible cringing feeling and acute discomfort;

It is Friday, and 45 minutes ago I had an appointment to view my International Finance exam paper.

Emphasis: AGO.

Words fail me, as undoubtedly my memory already has.

(As an aside, and to satisfy your curiosity and my insatiable need to, you know, talk, I wanted to view my paper due to the slightly startling fact that, for once in a very very long time, I’d expected to do better than I actually did.

Of course, now that we know just how well my powers of recollection are, perhaps it’s best to let things be and assume that the apparent ease and stellar responses with which I completed the paper were simply that – apparent, and nothing more.)

It’s also quite telling, I think, that I have allowed something quite so momentuous as becoming a graduate to slip my mind. Not to be a record here, scratched and broken, needle-jumps galore, but it may, just may, have something to do with my lack of gainful employment.

Which is not to say I do not have a job.

I do. It’s just that it is:

Not in any way related to my degree.

Not gainful as I have only just finished training, which is basically unpaid work.

Selling Subway sandwiches. (eat fresh!)

The only person that seems to have benefited so far from my recent appointment would be the waiter at that fancy-schmancy restaurant I was at last night, where I, with newfound respect for all in the service industry, left him a 20% tip. (Actually just 10%. I made Boyfriend leave the other 10%. After all, it’s not GAINFUL appointment.)

But what, I hear you wonder, about my employer?

In this case, the truth is plain and fairly simple.

Since I began work on Tuesday, I have:

Yet to learn where the buttons are on the cash register screen, and hence spend more time searching for the right items to key in (all the while muttering maniacally: “Foot-long ranch…foot-long ranch…foot-long ranch…*desperately loud and cheerily* WON’T BE A MOMENT SIR!! *mutters again* foot-long ranch…foot-long ranch…AHA!!!...one small drink…one small drink…”) than it did to make the sub in the first place.

Been the cause of an awful back-up on the lunch production line because I shamefully cannot wrap a sub to save my life.

Resisted the urge to throw a sub at the customer who not only mumbled, swallowed her words, and had such a thick accent that was impossible to understand, but, on my (very polite, might I add) request for her to repeat her order, assumed that I was either retarded or lacking English language skills (since I look and sound foreign) and proceeded to speak with exaggeratedly pronounced words and quite deliberately pointed at everything she wanted from that point on, with the most condescending of looks.

In an attempt to be helpful and look self-motivated and proactive, I decided to get a cup of hot chocolate for a customer all on my own without bothering the more senior staff with trivial details such as, you know, how to work the hot drink dispenser. (Please use your imagination. It is literally too painful a memory for me to dredge up.)

Dropped countless items, with what seems like a positive penchant for doing so during the busiest of times.

The list goes on, but I shall not. Much much too depressing.

Also have just heard wonderful wonderful news (like just after I wrote that sentence) and therefore am not upset anymore.

No I haven’t found a “proper” job, but it’s much better I think.

No more details. (Especially since he won’t give me any, the meanie.)

Congrats, Breakkie.

A tribute

This should be for yesterday, but I was, you know, working.

To Boyfriend.

I know you wonder, and I wonder too, just how you’ve survived the past four years.

But I’m glad we did.

*coughs and looks at anywhere but you*

A change of subject

I want to do all of these:

Latourex

Anyone?

A picture’s worth a thousand words

2005-07-16T23:58:00.000+10:00

And the subject of this one:

makes me very, very happy indeed. (a thousand times so!)

*msn: Haaaaaary Potter, Harry Potter, Harry Potter, Haaaaaaary Potter, Harry Potter Potter YEAH!

I am trying to read it at a positively dribbly speed and not, you know, inhale it like I would normally do. Just so I can make it last as long as possible, and the gratification at the end of all that abstaining will be all the better.

A friend said it was like saving sex for after marriage, a notion I pooh-poohed. Books are obviously better. They last for hours.

(And are always up for seconds…or even thirds.)

On the subject of pictures, however, while transferring images from my digital camera to my woefully overstuffed laptop (480 MB remaining is quite dire, I think), I realized I had taken eighty-four pictures in three days.

Considering I only went out twice in those three days, and then only to a lunch and a dinner with no sight-seeing whatsoever, this worries me.

I have a sneaky suspicion that I have subconsciously taken to taking as many pictures as possible in desperate hopes that a few of them, at least, will be worth the effort, time, and hard drive space.

Well an ‘A’ is always good, even if it’s just for trying!

‘Like’ is an overused but somehow generally appropriate word

2005-07-15T01:15:00.000+10:00

*msn: There are days when the intangibles of reality seem somehow more lasting that the kind you can see and touch.

I like words

It’s funny how, if I don’t write for a day, two days, and suddenly it becomes so long ago I don’t even remember what I last wrote about, the little narrator in my head (she’s little, yes, and has large glasses and even larger hopeful eyes and watches everything) just…stops.

It’s as though she gets tired and goes off to find someone a little more willing to make her words solid before they disappear.

And disappear they do, the way bubbles on a soapy-smooth surface do, when you stare at them, holding your breath, watching the colours swirl and abruptly twist and bend, getting ever so faintly fader until there is only a vague bluish webbing skimming across the surface, then – nothing.

I have a memory the consistency of molecules loosely bound by surface tension, and hence no stories. I am on holiday, and by the time I get to my computer, I have forgotten most of what I’ve done.

Funnily enough though, I do remember this: every day for the past week or so, I have been greeted by Boyfriend thus: “So…do I look like Andy Roddick?”

He was growing his beard you see. Chinese sparse-haired (facial, anyway) genes be damned.

He shaved today. (A daily decided “No” sufficed.)

I like writing words

There are occasions when I wish I couldn’t speak, if only because then I would have the excuse to communicate entirely in writing.

Then I wouldn’t have to listen to myself make all kinds of grammatical mistakes aloud, simply because I’m used to speaking that way.

Then I wouldn’t then cringe and stutter and stammer because I am so distracted by the way I speak that I forget what I am talking about.

Then I wouldn’t take a disproportionately long amount of time to reply because I’m trying to remember.

Then I wouldn’t have to see the disdainful looks I get from people who assume, simply because I have a foreign accent, that I can’t speak English well.

Then I wouldn’t get things like “Do…you...understand…?” and pityingly patronizing looks.

Then I wouldn’t hate myself for not being able to talk to people properly simply because we are not the same.

Then I wouldn’t hate myself for hating myself and end up all tense and irritable.

It’s all a matter of confidence, I think, and the fact that I have none.

Darnits.

I like pictures

I am still wholly and completely immersed in ‘new-camera-owner’ state of mind.

Picture phobic people now avoid me like the plague. (I also like alliteration.)

Lately I’ve taken to taking pictures of light, reflections, shadows, and caught myself one night attempting to capture the sudden incongruous good music suspended in the wintry air outside the Geology building.

(I now have the picture of a nondescript window behind some even more nondescript bushes sitting in a folder on my laptop, laughing, I am sure, at me, because I can no longer recall that elusive tune.)

I think it’s the idea of realizing the unreal that appeals to me.

Anyway, in the spirit of picture-taking and the Fantastic Four movie I watched Tuesday night, (*sort of spoiler ahead*);

What happens when you rapidly run cool air over a dangerously overheated glass-surfaced stove?

In the spirit of Shaggy, it wasn’t me. Really.

I do not like

A lot of things, but most of all, people who think that killing innocent people is ever justified.

It is not.

Even if you lack basic human emotion, morals, or a sense of the sanctity of life, for the love of whatever it is you love, please realize that it is stupid.

And pointless.

Because it will only make things worse.

Worst of all is when you die doing it, because then you will never know the utter futility and insanity of your actions.

You will never understand.

You will never learn.

Worst of all, you will never be sorry.

Dying, believing you have done something great, is a death you do not deserve.

It is infuriating and I hate it.

I don’t mean to be preachy…it’s just that…sometimes…things happen…which make me wonder just how someone, anyone, could bring themselves to do what they did.

What made them hate so much that they could do this?

What made them love so little?

Aha

2005-07-09T02:18:00.000+10:00

*msn: Happy birthday Lizzie, the Milis fish.

I passed.

No, not spectacularly (not even close), but let’s not quibble.

(I actually said this to my mum, who, after years of putting up with me and my chronic underachieving, has finally learnt that to expect nothing means to be pleasantly surprised each and every time, and therefore was suitably impressed.)

Of course all this means is that instead of being merely a student awaiting her results, I am now officially an unemployed bum in search of the nearest Centrelink office.

I think that calls for a celebration, don’t you? *failed-attempt-at-sardonic-wink*

(On you, of course. After all, I AM broke and jobless. Hahahahahaha.)

Yes of course I’m really pleased. After all, I am now a graduate. A graduate. And Boyfriend is not. Finally, I outrank him. Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha……

(Almost) Dead Girl Typing

2005-07-06T23:39:00.000+10:00

*msn: Prowly vegetarian jungle cat – where is my potato……

(don’t ask)

Jittered up higher than I’ve ever been, feel like I’m on extra-strength caffeine, and dull rods of prickled pins are poking at my feet.

My back is all creepy-crawly and my heart is going bumpity-bump-bump-bump; a thousand bumps (or more) a minute.

Results tomorrow.

Can’t write – fingerbones a-queasy.

Do me a favour; if I don’t mention I passed everything, don’t ask if I did.

Scrambled Thoughts (on Toast)

2005-07-03T18:24:00.000+10:00

*msn: In the land of Tennis – Federer. Is. King.

It’s all in the conditioning

The other day, Boyfriend submerged himself in a newspaper, finding himself a little oasis of normality (although news is never normal, since normal is definitely not newsworthy) in the scrappy, messy, silly world that I bring with me wherever I go.

Obviously, this was just not acceptable.

So I (dexterous as always) sprang onto the piles of print, beamed up at his mildly perturbed face, with eyes all aglow, and bushy-tailed to boot.

Me: Did you know that if you want to commit suicide by slitting your wrists you shouldn’t cut across them, but instead lengthways down your arm?

Boyfriend: *blinks*

……………………………………

A few weeks later, on our way home from Safeway, I, inexplicably (even to me), fancied myself a cymbal-bearing toy monkey.

And so I walked stiff-legged the whole way home, banging my over-sized jacket sleeves together, yelling “Ding Ding Ding!!!” as loudly as I could.

Boyfriend never walked so fast in his life I’ll bet.

……………………………………

This morning I:

Was an hour late to leave for Victoria Market, as I was chatting with my sister online and mindlessly surfing when I should have been showering, etc. etc.
Declared that I was still in pain from a badminton session two days ago and steadfastly refused to do anything but stand around complaining as Boyfriend both maneuvered the trolley around awkward corners and legs and made our weekly purchases.
Spent 15 minutes staring at a selection of nuts and grains before making up my mind to have none.

……………………………………

Half an hour ago, Boyfriend insisted I leave him alone for 1 ½ hours so that he could prepare a surprise dinner for me.

Me: Ooh, what occasion??

Boyfriend: Anything for you…

Me: *melts*

Boyfriend: *looking slightly crazed* …to go away for a while…

Yes. Yes.

All goes according to plan.

(forget the means when you’ve got the ends says I)

Extreme Contradictions

Sometimes, I think, I don’t make sense at all.

I play no sports, nor do anything more strenuous than walk to Rowdy (my darling Rowdy), but two days ago we went to play badminton (Boyfriend, Lizzie, Miriam, and I) and I jumped, slid, ran, hopped, and fell so much that I am now in almost-constant pain. (Yes, that’s right, I’m still not done complaining.)

I like it when people think of me in a certain way; someone who always has something to say, or someone who likes home-y stuff, like knitting and baking and such. But I hate it when people refer to me as “the girl who can’t keep a secret” (I can too. *glares*), or as “housewife material”, as if that’s all I can do.

I like it when people think I’m stupid (or at least stupider than I am) so they’re easier to impress (hah!), but I hate it when people make fun of me for being dumb.

I hate the cold, have two heaters on at all times, and bathe in scalding-hot water, but I will go out to 7-11 at 3 a.m. on a winter morning to get myself an ice-cream.

A few years ago I went through a near-anorexia phase, followed by a near-bulimic phase, and hoped-wished-prayed to look like Ally McBeal. I got over it (now I want to look like Mischa Barton) and now I over-eat on a regular basis because I am trying so hard not to become That Diet Girl again. Of course since I don’t exercise, this means I will soon outgrow everything I own and will have to stay at home and wear bathrobes forever.

I used to kick and scream (this is, sadly, no joke at all) whenever my mum brought me to the hairdresser, and would go through the entire process with tears streaming down my face. The year she finally gave up, I refused to cut it for over 3 years, and it grew past my bra strap on my back. However, I finally pushed myself to get a haircut in the middle of 2004, and have had about 6 haircuts since, culminating in the shortest hairstyle I’ve had since I was 15.

It takes me a day to read one of my lectures, but the same amount of time to finish a 700-page novel. (although I suspect this is not a condition unique to me.)

I am very proud; but I have low self-esteem. This basically means I will hit you if you doubt me, or put me down, but I will take what you say very, very seriously and obsess about it for weeks.

I like it if people read what I write, but I cringe at the idea that they read it in the first place.

I want to be thought of as intellectual, but I love Shin Chan.

I claim I am not self-absorbed, but have set up a blog all about Myself.

Well.

Variety.

Is.

The.

Spice.

Of.

Life.

So.

There.

News of the Week

Old news, yes, probably not even the same week, yes, but important just the same:

Canada has legalized gay marriage.

This makes me happy.

If it makes you unhappy, frankly, I don’t really care. Just as you shouldn’t care how I feel about it.

(Please don’t try to change my mind, and I won’t try to change yours.)

(on Toast)

I like making it. Hot fry-pan, stacks of bread, crumby-buttery-singed fingers. Real butter. Aah.

Right right, shower now. I have a dinner to attend, remember?

Short respite from a long hiatus, and a lesson learned

2005-06-29T18:36:00.000+10:00

*msn: In need of self-esteem.

Is it not strange, that we (or most of us at least) are never happy with ourselves?

That it is inherent in us, to see only the bad about ourselves, the good discounted?

That we can and do see the little flaws, the imperfections, the little, minute scars that only we know, letting them build, grow, and overrun us with insecurities, horror, and utter self-loathing. That it simply becomes so, monstrously overwhelming, that all we can do is cower and shrink and try to hide away, muttering, in masochistic reinforcement, hushed and crazed – I-am-not-worthy-I-am-not-worthy.

That we say, so easily, so glibly, so light-heartedly “Oh, she’s beautiful, I hate her” and secretly mean it.

That I say, to myself, without even thinking (and then you wonder how I say things to myself without thinking them, aha), “Oh, I am not beautiful, I hate me”.

It’s not just me. Right?

Anyway, lesson learned (I hope.):

Not to cut off half my hair in hopes of Cinderella-like transformation despite various (and I do mean various) past experiences as evidence that the utmost and extreme contrary will instead occur.

Grow, damnit!

Yes, yes, I will write more soon. Job-hunting is a dismal, and decidedly uninspiring process I only go through because the prospect of being penniless is much, much worse.

So as not to keep you hanging..

2005-06-21T02:17:00.000+10:00

*msn: Trying to quiet the voice in my head, it

Speckles of yellow gold-leaf/yellow-gold leaves, translucent floating slivers in the glow of a sun-like street lamp.

I felt like falling…into a pinkish-purple softly cloudy sky.

There is really nothing like the feeling, nay, the absolute and certain knowledge that you have, yet again, wantonly squandered whatever luck the universe threw your way when it gave you near 14 days in which to read, swallow, basically breathe in your very worst subject, and you don’t.

Two real days of studying left – typing this is giving me that creepy-crawly-ticklishly gruesome feeling that starts just beneath the skin on the back of your hands, spreading upwards along the funny elbow bone, then the spine and tensing every hair to the point you’re sure they’re gonna just fall off and you wish you could do the same.

So I will stop now.

No blogging till after Thursday, at least.

Be good people.

For my dad.

2005-06-19T15:33:00.000+10:00

*msn: Slipping into mediocrity.. - Didn't know when I started, don't know how to stop, at first I screamed in silence, and then I just forgot.

I was going to write about religion and stuff (because this, along with racism, and homosexuality, is something which I always have a lot to say about) but I think that today is not the day.

No, today is Father’s Day, and family is, as it should be, above all else.

It’s funny how I spent the first 18 years of my life dying to get away, but now that I am, I wish I was home, and that I hadn’t wasted those 18 years.

Actually, no, it isn’t funny, it’s sad, but let’s not dwell.

So here it is, for my dad, who although will probably never read this, deserves the dubious immortality of print, the only kind I can give him besides my even more dubious memory.

This is just a simple thank you, dad;

For the music classes you forced me to attend, which took me 14 years to love.

For the Swiss rolls every Sunday after said classes to cheer me up.

For the cupboards full of stuffed toys – one for every time I fell sick. (I was a very unhealthy child.)

For the shoulder-rides at zoos – I never felt so tall. (and at this rate never will.)

For filling the house with songs from long-past years – they’re still my favourite kind.

For the lamest jokes I’ve ever heard which still make me laugh today.

For answering almost every question I ever had, patiently, without resorting to things like “Because God made it so.”

For helping me find the answers to the questions that you couldn’t.

For teaching me that crying doesn’t help, that being afraid of trying really only hurts myself, and to always, above all, be kind.

For showing me all the beauty in the world, and how to seek it out.

For every reprimand and punishment, not giving up on me, even when I wished you would. (I am stupid, yes.)

For reminding me everyday that I am loved, without saying a single word.

Perhaps one day I could do the same, but for now, simple words will have to do.

I could say thank you forever, and it would never be enough.

God bless you Dad (and Mum and Ee too).

Happy Father’s Day.

Amoeba Shan’s Musical Baton

2005-06-14T23:22:00.000+10:00

*msn: Depressing myself is fun! - Neil Gaiman is COMING TO MELBOURNE. Oh my God oh my God oh my God...*toes curl*

Would I be exaggerating if I said I could not live without music? No. Without it, there would be a whole world of emotions I would never know. So fittingly, the following is my very first-est meme. (if that’s what it’s called.)

Total Volume of Music files on my computer:

4.68 Gb. (would be more if I had broadband…*sigh*…)

The Last CD I bought was:

I…urm…don’t buy CDs. Not for myself anyway. Last one I bought was Jamie Cullum’s…something…for my brother.

However I CAN tell you the last song I downloaded (can yeah can yeah?): Smells Like Teen Spirit, the Tori Amos version.

Song playing right now:

The Servant - Cells

5 songs I listen to alot or that mean alot to me:

The ones I listen to a lot change often enough that the list should not be taken seriously for more than a week after publication. Means a lot, however, lasts years. Not going to make the distinction here though, so have fun figuring it out. :oP

Joseph Arthur – Honey And The Moon

Oasis – Don’t Look Back In Anger

Westlife – Queen Of My Heart

Bread – Aubrey

Dishwalla – Every Little Thing

AND MORE...

Sting – Fields Of Gold

David Gates – Goodbye Girl

Oasis – Stand By Me

Oasis – Don't Go Away

Simon & Garfunkel – Bridge Over Troubled Water

Roxette – Fading Like A Flower (and a lot more)

Keane – Somewhere Only We Know

R.E.M. – It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

Hootie and the Blowfish – Let Her Cry

Sam Phillips – If I Could Write (and if anyone has this in mp3 format I’d be eternally grateful if you’d send it my way)

Hoobastank – The Reason

Evermore – It’s Too Late

Rufus Wainwright - Hallelujah

Wyclef Jean – Wishing You Were Here

Missy Higgins – Ten Days

Paul McCartney – Maybe I'm Amazed [corrected]

Evanescence – My Immortal

Little Birdy – Beautiful To Me

Rusted Root – Send Me On My Way

Third Eye Blind – I'll Never Let You Go

Saliva – Rest In Pieces

Peter Gabriel – Book Of Love

Gin Blossoms – Hey Jealousy

Creeper Lagoon – Under The Tracks

John Denver – Annie's Song

Adam Sandler – I’ll Grow Old With You (from Wedding Singer)

Aqua – We Belong To The Sea

Beach Boys – California Dreaming

Beth Orton – Roll The Dice

Blessed Union Of Souls – I Believe That Love Will Find A Way

Counting Crows – Holiday In Spain

Creedence Clearwater Revival – Have You Ever Seen The Rain

Okay I have to stop here, because I’ve basically started going through my playlist (hence the sudden alphabetization) and trying my best to pick out a few songs here and there but I can’t!! I just can’t!! There are too many. Each song on my hard drive is there because I like/love it and most of them mean something to me to some degree or another.

Anyway I really doubt that looking at a list of songs I like is going to help you understand/compartmentalize me in any way (Nicky will attest to that I’m sure) so if you’re looking for song recommendations, just ask okay?

5 people I’m passing the baton to:

Vee Vien

Nicky

Kevin

Gemynd RP (because he has the most insane list of singers/bands in his Friendster profile)

Angel-la (because I’d like to see an update on her page, haha)

Ends and odds and ends

2005-06-13T16:42:00.000+10:00

*msn: Breathing, at times, seems a luxury, and doing nothing pure hedonism

A matter of opinion

And I think this one makes a lot of sense.

I suppose…there is a time and place for things like anthems, but there should never be restrictions for the feelings behind singing them.

Situation update

I have finished 2 out of 3 papers (yes, I managed to finish reading my metaphoric file from that previous post on potential) and, as I have been telling everyone who asked, this is pretty much how it was:

The construction of various new financial theories to support my answers which would not have made sense otherwise.

Frequent referring to formula sheet for likely-looking formulae to apply. (E.g., (thinking) Ah…Call valuations eh…must be this formula…it starts with “C =”…hahahahahahahaha…*stops short*…Coupons?? Sheeeeeee…)

I am convinced that sometime in the near future I will either be both bodily deported and permanently declared persona VERY non grata for lowering the average IQ of Australia, or I will be awarded a Nobel Prize in Finance. Or similar.

*crossed fingers*!

I have since retired to the library to study for my last and final subject, the entire duration of which was spent near-comatose due to the indecipherable Swedish accent of my lecturer who is, apparently, of genius-type proportions.

It is an interesting note, though, that the only time I managed to understand him was when he whipped out a small fluffy purple stuffed toy and made it move around the projector.

It was also, possibly, the only time I was fully awake.

The file is therefore now lying open in front of me, and I think that’s excellent progress for the day.

Little things amuse me…

Like catching sight of the girl who went up to my boyfriend about 6 months after we got together and declared that he had bad taste in girls.

No, I don’t know why that amused me but it does. I still laugh about it. Especially whenever I see her, which is often since she’s in the same university.

She must think I’m really weird. Boyfriend does anyway. :oP

Ode to a Mayfly

I think it would be quite difficult to find someone so unimaginative as to not be intrigued by the life of a mayfly.

Think about it:

“…The nymph stage may last from several months to as much as several years, with a number of molts along the way…[they then] live very briefly as adults, as little as a few hours but more typically a day or two…” – Wikipedia.com

Isn’t that just so freakishly amazing??

To spend years buried in mud at the bottom of a pond, finally emerging as a beautiful, delicate wisp of a thing, all gauze and frills and glints of wing-light, only to live for just one day.

A friend said it was like living just to die.

I disagree though; I think it’s like living just to live.

For the one single sublime moment – the first-last-only sunrise-sunset of their lives.

Maybe that’s why we keep living, waiting always waiting always hoping for something better to come along.

So do our dreams die when we do? Or the other way around?

I am proud to be Malaysian

2005-06-08T18:33:00.000+10:00

*msn: It’s not supposed to be conditional.

First off, I must confess, for a university student living in the much-hyped Information Age, I am sadly never up to date with *ugh* news and *double ugh* current events.

(I think it’s called ignorance is bliss…)

But on the rare occasion that I do venture into the dark and seedy side of the world, I never leave without a reminder of why I should never return.

And so this time was no exception.

I’m much too lazy to hunt down the links; they seem to have disappeared from where I originally found them - The Star - but don’t take my word for it and hunt them down yourself if you like.

But basically the gist of it was this:

The Malaysian government (I think it’s the government anyway. Well some big big person) has suggested singing the Negaraku prior to the showing of films in the cinema.
The government of China has made it compulsory for all (ALL) China-based webmasters and bloggers to register their websites and blogs respectively with the government to facilitate scrutiny and (almost-legendary, this) possible censorship of their contents.

Right, I know the first one has been discussed to death (check out Kevin’s blog for example) and is nowhere near as far-reaching or unreasonable as the second, but I will have my say! *shakes fist weakly (lack of sleep) at computer screen*

Although the first one seems to be just another in a series of odd suggestions from the people that we (frighteningly enough) elect to make such suggestions and the second seems to be on the verge of infringing on human rights, the fundamental message behind both is much the same.

LOVE THY COUNTRY.

(or in the case of the second, pretend to.)

What saddened me most, I guess, was that they thought it necessary for such measures to begin with.

Why the patriotic singsong?

Why the gags?

I cannot help but feel that this is akin to either last-stage marriage counseling, where the parties involved are told to just behave the way they did when they were in love in hopes of prompting the feelings that prompted the original behaviour to begin with.

Or a crazed stalker writing “You love me you love me you love me you love me” over and over again in his/her (you see, I don’t discriminate) own blood on letter after letter to his/her object of adoration, hoping, perhaps, in time, that they will be persuaded so.

For the government of China, my opinion stops here. I’ve only been there once. For a day. Which I spent shopping. And I have no idea what it’s like to live there, nor if I’d have had anything worth censoring to say. But you know and I know that although too much freedom can be a bad thing, too little is far, far worse.

For Malaysia however, I believe I have every right to say anything I like. (Within reason, of course. And you have every right not to read.)

And so this is what I say:

Is it perfect? No.

Are they trying to make it perfect? Not hard enough, I sometimes think.

But I love it anyway because it’s home. And if the government wants me to stand and sing the national anthem before settling myself in for a two-hour movie, I will.

Will I feel silly? Maybe.

But if singing it will somehow remind those around me that there was once a time when we had no country, no name, no leaders to care more about us than about themselves (and yes, I do believe that deep down, they do care, even if just a little); when we had no song to sing even if we wanted to, when we were…no one;

Then yes I’ll bloody sing it, the way I would have if I had been there the first time it was sung.

And then…I’ll sing it again.

A different point of view...

2005-06-03T14:09:00.000+10:00

*msn: - If your only message to me is going to be "GO STUDY" please don't bother.

You know how people often wax lyrical on the pain of being on the outside looking in?

Sometimes, I think...it's just as bad to be on the inside looking out:

A waste of space indeed

2005-06-03T05:20:00.000+10:00

*msn: do not disturb…i am studying…

(Before we begin I must point out that MSN nick was typed by Boyfriend, hence the unforgivable non-capitalization of ‘i’...)

Today Boyfriend and I were discussing the current situation of a mutual friend. Not to give away too many details, for fear of identification, and possible, well, “unhappiness”, on said party’s behalf. Suffice to say, this person is one of the most brilliant people (sometimes I think the devil is involved…and then I have to resist the urge to ask for his number) we have ever had the good fortune to befriend.

This is the kind of person you would vote “Most Likely To Succeed”, clichéd as that may sound, the kind you wish your children would someday marry. (After all, someone once told me that you should always pick someone smarter than you as your life partner to ensure your offspring be, consequently, smarter than you as well. Considering the very obvious flaw in that statement, I assume that this means roughly half the population should always be kept in ignorance of this statement. Please check to ensure you are not one of them.)

However, (and this is where the fear of negative repercussions set in), however, this does not seem to be the case as yet. To be sure, said friend is in a stable, suitable job, with above-average pay. (I would kill for a job like that.)

But it’s hardly change-the-world stuff now, is it? And I was in the midst of loudly proclaiming as such to Boyfriend, jabbering on (as usual) about the total waste of potential it was, when my dear friend Irony came up and (again, as usual) poked me in the eye.

I mean, literally, poked me in the eye – caught myself on the edge of my file in the midst of violent gesticulating while lying on the bed.

Ungraceful antics aside, this was my International Finance lecture notes file, which I’d been trying (I cannot emphasize this word enough) to read and finish before the 8^th, i.e. the exam.

Needless to say I hadn’t gotten very far. And I guess that statement could be applied to my entire academic career from the moment I entered university up till now and to the end of this time-wasting entry.

I don’t think I’m a stupid person. (Feel free to disagree, but I’d probably just ignore you.) There is no humble way to say this, but I’ll try – I could do so much better if I’d only stop trying and actually did something.

And then it occurred to me as well that for all that time, I’ve been blaming everybody and using anything as an excuse for failing to achieve, well, pretty much anything.

My parents wouldn’t let me pursue the degree I wanted to pursue. (Not that I even knew/know what I wanted/want to do.)

I don’t think academic results are as important as some people make them out to be. (Classic sour grapes.)

I crumble under the pressure of high expectations. (Pooh on me. Too lazy to rise to meet them is more like it.)

My dreams just aren’t academic-oriented. (To be perfectly honest, they aren’t anything-remotely-close-to-work oriented.)

And the list goes on.

Thinking about all this…I feel sick. The utter lack of gratitude to my parents, the non-existence of self-respect and the complete waste of my life is just appalling.

APPALLING.

The only person to blame for my gross underachieving is me.

Me for being too lazy to do anything that sounds remotely challenging.

Me for not having the self-discipline to stop reading bloody books and TV scripts and blogs and other pointless piles of words which will still be there when my exams end.

Me for not accepting the fact that I’ve grown up, dammit, and I should start acting my age.

I mean, look at what Boyfriend has to do to my MSN nick to get my attention (and stop others from paying attention to me).

I don’t have the right to say anyone hasn’t fulfilled their potential, because I’m so far gone I probably don’t have any left.

In fact, I don’t have the right to ignore people who think I AM stupid because let’s face it, I am.

Maybe today’s ‘epiphany’ of sorts won’t drastically make me into some ‘uber-nerd’ overnight. Maybe I’ll still slack off and probably I won’t do as well as I can in my upcoming exams.

But at least I had it. And I’m writing it down for all to see. So even if I forget, maybe someone will remind me.

Because today should be the beginning of the end, and I want this to be true so badly that it hurts.

I have to apologise for all the clichés because I hate them too. It’s just that…look at the time…

My New Role Model

2005-06-01T21:34:00.000+10:00

*msn: I want to be Sonya Thomas...

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2005/05/26/eat.DTL

La la la la la...life could be a dream, sh-boom!

NO BLOGGING!!!

2005-05-31T01:19:00.000+10:00

*msn: *hurgh* vomit blood

Where I want to be:

Instead...

Where I am:

*grumpus alert*

No mood, no time, no peace of mind to write.

SWOT VAC IS FOR STUDYING!!!

*hurgh*………

p/s: Got a digital camera though…hee hee. :o)

The end of an era

2005-05-26T16:13:00.000+10:00

*msn: Funny how it seems like nothing at all.

So this is it, then. Today I went for my last ever lecture as a Melbourne University undergraduate student. (For the sake of posterity, it was Investments by Qi Zeng re: floating bonds and swaps, and will stop now before you stop reading.)

I wanted to write down straight away just how it feels and not wait till later because how I remember feeling is probably never quite the same as how I really felt. (The mind is a frighteningly efficient filter.)

I don’t feel much, though. Maybe it’s because I haven’t sat for the exams yet. Maybe it hasn’t yet sunk in. Maybe it's the fact that most of my Commerce friends (and thus the people I see most often) graduated last year, and so there’s less to miss for me.

But today, and for the past few weeks, I’ve felt like two different people walking around campus; me, and the me who saw it all for the first time 3 ½ years ago.

The buildings I couldn’t find, though they were right in front of me.

The path I used to take from Ormond (where I would, every single day, continually attempt to walk the straightest of lines to avoid wasting energy. I was lazy.) past the athletics track *ogle ogle*.

The swimming pool which was dry when I first saw it and remained dry until the beginning of last year.

The road to the Engineering building – the only place in uni I could recognize during the entire Orientation week.

Student admin, where I, after an 8-hour flight (during which I threw up continually and was unable to sleep), at a Malaysian 6 a.m., took the hideously puffy-eyed photo for my student card which was to haunt me throughout my student life.

The bench outside Wilson Hall where I used to wait for Boyfriend. (In extreme cold, might I add.)

My first lecture ever – Mathematics A, 620-141, with a lecturer whose accent we imitate to this day.

O-week at Ormond; weird activities, and insane, drunk, people.

My room in Ormond, in Picken C, populated by insane, drunk, people.

The shared toilets with *euww* no locks on the shower doors. (I moved out after 6 months.)

Discovering Union House and only ever eating from the Chinese food stall for the first 2 months.

The first meal my friends and I cooked together. (This was nightmarish…8 of us, crowded into a tiny apartment, arguing over how best to cook oyster-black-sauce chicken…

“Cut the drumsticks!”

“No, no, just slice the flesh!”

“Eh, how do you know if there’s enough soya sauce in the marinade??”

“Taste it lah, ha ha ha”

………

“EUWWW DID YOU JUST TASTE THE SAUCE FROM THE RAW CHICKEN???”

“YOU SAID WAN WAT!!!”

“JOKING lah!!!”

“Ai yah, never mind, we’re Malaysian. Everything also can eat.”)

Using the public phone in the lobby of the Royal Children’s Hospital, because none of us had working phone lines for the first few days.

Getting chased out of the Royal Children’s Hospital for using their public phone.

My very first handphone!! (Nokia 3310 - don’t laugh, it was free.)

Even our arrival at the airport, with the small trolleys, adorable sniffer dogs, and unbelievably (like eye-popping unbelievable) long line of Asian students, each bearing carton after carton of instant noodles, seasonings, pots (I kid you not)…we love our food.

Are my memories regressing? Well *pbht* they’re my memories, and they can come in whatever order they like.

Or maybe, just maybe, it’s because I want to go backwards too, and do it all over again.

Okay, now I’m sad.

Memories…fill the corners of my mind…

Too many to remember,

Too easy to forget.

Thank God for the friends who will remind us when we do;

They would not be half as precious had they not been made with you.

You see how corny I am? Now you know how sad I really feel.

And now I know too.

Insanity, thy name is mine

2005-05-25T19:44:00.000+10:00

*msn: Sparkles Montana

Oh my God.

I just took a shower in ice-cold (I am not exaggerating) water.

Please remember I am in AUSTRALIA which is in the SOUTHERN hemisphere and it is thus now entering WINTER not SUMMER. (Because you see, apparently I forgot.)

How cold was it?

My hair is stiff. STIFF. And when I stepped out, the ambient temperature (8^oC) felt positively balmy.

Why did I do it?

Because I was dirty. Ironically (and I usually appreciate irony but NOT now) as a result of cleaning my toilet in nothing but pure HOT water resulting in sweaty, oily, grimy me.

NO I did not use up the hot water. The hot water comes from a huge boiler that supplies the entire apartment building, and so it is unlikely that I could have single-handedly wiped out the hot water supply.

Externally-induced brain freeze is so unfunny.

I think I’ll go put on a couple of quilts now and sit in the oven.

……………………

Melancholic musings

2005-05-23T19:30:00.000+10:00

*msn: Stress is a word used to describe people who only started studying a week ago. To describe me, you need many many more.

I liked the way you looked

at me;

Like you knew me,

inside-out,

without asking, or trying, or wanting to.

You left; I looked for you,

in strange faces,

and gazes,

because I was lonely;

without someone to look at me like you do.

And then today I knew:

I look for you less now,

(I’m sad,

are you?

I’ll say it again to make it more true)

I look for you less now.

You know the saying about how time heals all wounds?

I hate it. I hate the idea that you miss people less over time, that you don’t care so much that they’re gone, that you get used to an empty space which grows smaller everyday anyway.

If someone meant so much to me that losing them hurt so much, then when the hurt starts to go away, it’s like I’ve lost something; that, meaning, that they were once to me.

Perhaps when people say that time heals all wounds, they really mean that in time we learn to live with them, unhealed.

I lost my (paternal) grandfather before I was born, and my grandmother when I was very young, and I hardly remember her. Some years after I lost my other grandmother, and though this one hurt more, it didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would.

And in my naivety (for there is no other word) I believed that yes, indeed, in time hurt went away.

And then one day I asked my mother about her mother and what really happened to her, because I never really knew – I had been too young to ask, or be told.

And though she spoke with a smile on her face (it was painless, and she got to say goodbye), there was an aching in her voice and unshed tears in her eyes which she didn’t try to hide.

Then the next year we went to pray at my father’s parents’ grave, and as we placed the joss sticks in the holder, I turned to him and asked, “Do you miss them, dad?” and in an instant, without time for thought or reflection, without pausing even to turn his head towards me, he said,

“Every day.”

And though this time there was no tremble, no teary eyes (like me, my father does not cry), the pain was there, in the quick and simple answer, in the graveness of his tone.

That, I think, is what missing someone is really like. The pain doesn’t go away. It may stop screaming in your head, stop feeling like shattered glass in your throat, but the ache is always there, and an undying longing that, in the end, hurts just the same, or even more.

So be nice to the people you know you’ll miss, because grief is an arduous journey on its own, without having to bear the unbearable – regret – too.

No, nothing happened. Just in a musing, melancholic state of mind.

The Self-Indulgent Spare Human Speaks

2005-05-20T03:24:00.000+10:00

*msn: I am the Professional Pony Painter from the Pony People Party. (Vote for us NOW!)

Every now and then I stop and wonder: am I really necessary?

Sometimes I feel expendable.

You know the feeling? Like, there’s nothing I do particularly well, or that someone else couldn’t do better and in less time.

Sometimes I feel that nothing sets me apart from the general population. (Of which Boyfriend is NOT representative..haha..inside joke..)

A few weeks ago I was talking to a friend of mine (who knows my sister as well) about how artistic my brother was. (He made an ambigram! – good. Not for me! – bad.) Anyway:

Friend: Wow, your brother is so artistic!

Me: Yeah, he is!

Friend: Okay, so, don’t take this the wrong way, but, your brother is artistic.

Me: (stares at MSN window, wondering where this is going)

Friend: And your sister is good at public speaking, writing, etc.

Me: (still wondering)

Friend: *pause*…so what do YOU do?

To give him credit (and the benefit of anonymity) he really was asking out of pure curiosity and not to be sarcastic.

But I think it says something, doesn’t it, when people have to ask you what you’re good at? Obviously whatever it is cannot be very good or else it would either have been

a) self-evident; or

b) mentioned by someone else already, hence reducing the need for shameless self-promotion.

Perhaps even sadder is that I couldn’t come up with anything to say.

Maybe this explains my numerous half-baked attempts to involve myself in things.

Cases in point:

a) Oil painting – I’ve only been to 5 classes so far but already I cringe whenever I have to put up my half-finished painting on the easel. Doesn’t help that the girl next to me is probably one of the best artists I’ve ever seen. (Talk about demoralizing…and she’s pretty, too.)

b) Yoga – Yes, I was going to be the most flexible person ever. I figured I’d have an advantage, given my small size and short legs (less distance to stretch to touch my toes!). Of course, I forgot my stiff muscles and short arms. And it got expensive.

c) Pilates – I was going to be the next Jennifer Aniston lookalike. (At this I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.)

d) Hip Hop (dance) – (sometimes it is best to say nothing and let the imagination flow freely.)

e) Blogging – I like writing, so it’s good. But the idea that people read what I write is still somewhat unnerving at times. Maybe that explains my reluctance to really publicize it. I dread the day that someone tells me that I suck at this. Too.

Maybe it’s time I stopped giving up on things, yeah? And on myself.

*smiles a little at herself, and hopes to someday make it a big and confident grin*

I am not fishing for compliments yeah. *stares sternly*

By the way, re: the msn nick, thanks to a link I found on Joyce’s page, my sister and I have become hooked on colouring ponies. Ha ha ha.

My Little Pony!!

Enjoy!

To Spades! To Spades!

2005-05-17T16:43:00.000+10:00

*msn: I am not a maggot anymore. Now I am a hermit crab called MonetManetWannabe.

The following is a true story and was based on real people and real events.

Today I strode purposefully (and hurriedly - I was late) along the dusty road from Sunderland to Babel, thinking deep and meaningful thoughts and feeling hungry.

Subito, (‘suddenly’ in Latin. I used Latin because to start a sentence with ‘suddenly’ seemed so clichéd).

*ahem*

Subito, I was stopped in my tracks by a literal wall of sound. It was horrible. Loud, and piercing, a squally squeal that filled the air.

Looking around, at first, I saw nothing.

And then, out of the proverbial corner of my eye, I saw:

A window, half-ajar, in a nondescript, oldish building.

And beyond; pots of green, trembling with every ululation of the undying wail that filled the air.

*gasp*

Mandrakes!

I scuttled away as quick as I could with hands clapped over my ears.

I knew I should have bought those fluffy pink earmuffs I saw in Melbourne Central.

Again, this is a true story. Perhaps it is hard to believe that the Botany faculty is breeding Mandrakes. Perhaps, you say, that the sound was too electronic-y to be the Mandrake’s legendary cry. Perhaps, you say again, that it had something to do with the loudspeaker-shaped formations sticking out from a building within the vicinity.

Well, then, suit yourself. Thou hast been warned. I can do no more.

Random act of procrastination

2005-05-15T19:04:00.000+10:00

*msn: Don't ask me, I'm just a Commerce student.

This is a very very short post. (for the benefit of Boyfriend who might say I am wasting time. Pah. What does HE know?)

I was reading through Joyce’s blog and came across this:

-start-

The L Word

Taking a break, i watched the first episode of 'The L Word' i dl at 4 am.

Some lezzies and straights at a party:

"There's this study that says that if your ring finger is longer than your index finger, that means you're a lesbian."
Everyone then pauses to look at their fingers.
"Oh. I'm definitely gay."
"Look at that, her fingers are the same length. That's so weird..."
"So she's bi."
"Wait. *my* fingers are the same length. Does that mean i'm lesbian too?" - guy
"So you're gay."

I'm looking at my fingers now. Are you? I bet you are.

-end-

I remember watching that episode, but not the conversation. Anyway I wasn’t really paying attention. Was just keeping Boyfriend company as he eagerly awaited any sort of lesbian scene. (I will never understand guys’ obsession with lesbians.)

Anyway. I am procrastinating. So:

(yes, my hand can think. Can yours?)

Something tells me Boyfriend isn’t going to be too devastated…

By the way, the above image was “edited” using Microsoft Word. I don’t have Photoshop. So don’t laugh okay, I know it is very ‘amateur’. (Gene, this means YOU.)

Oh, and another picture. I used my webcam to take a picture of the screen showing me the picture I was taking.

This essentially means that the screen was showing the screen showing the screen showing the screen showing the…

Just look at the picture lah. *haiks*

Cool right cool right?

Okay okay I’m going!!!

Jorrs……

How much is that doggie in the window? (part 2)

2005-05-13T02:09:00.000+10:00

-part one-

*msn: The answer no longer matters.

Today I went to Melbourne Central again (for the 5^th or 6^th time). And like every other time, I half-expect to see him gone.

(The other half of me secretly hopes that the staff there will notice my devotion and simply gives him to me, because “they can see how much I love him.”)

But it never really seemed possible that he could be gone because he belongs to me.

……

Yeah, he’s gone.

I even went up to the counter and asked them if by any chance he was just being kept “someplace else”, and got two pitying looks in return.

(At this point, the secret half of me then hoped that, a la Enid Blyton, I would arrive home to find that Boyfriend had secretly purchased him as a surprise.)

He didn’t (didn’t really expect him to).

I did get a hug though, and not a single word of “Yeah well, of COURSE someone would have bought him” for which he gets a gazillion brownie points.

……

But dammit, I’m still sad.

* * * * *

p/s: on a brighter note though, today my blog reached 100 visitors. I know it’s small, but it’s a start.

p/s2: It’s Friday the 13^th.

p/s3: I’m not superstitious.

p/s4: Except about the number 4.

p/s5: Just noticed p/s4 was about the number 4. And 1 + 3 = 4.

p/s6: I need sleep.

On/off

2005-05-09T18:42:00.000+10:00

On childhood and the imagination

Children should never be bored. Nothing ever bored me when I was a child. I played for hours with nothing but baby powder and a blue coloured pencil. I built kingdoms of bubbles, and went to infinity and beyond on my trusty, cracked, grey leather couch. I fought in the trenches with my rocking chair, and haggled with Arab merchants swathed in knitted blankets. I called upon pagan gods with burnt offerings of the finest bougainvillea petals, and dispensed potions for all occasions in minibar-sized bottles of intriguingly-coloured liqueurs. I waited on fairies while perched on an ottoman-shaped toadstool, and ruled the world with a paper crown and spaghetti scepter.

Now I am old, and all I can do is rack my brains for such fodder to write down and sigh at in the remembrance of how it used to be.

On reading/writing

Reading, especially blogs, where it is easier to believe that there is a real person behind the lines, is throwing me into despair.

Some days it seems that there is no point to my writing, as everything I want to say has already been written down, and in better words.

But I cannot live without reading or writing and so I suppose I must subject myself to an eternity of feeling mediocre and repetitious, or worse, unoriginal.

On language and thoughts

I want to be a baby again, so I can experience emotions without words cluttering up the way I feel.

On memory

Do you ever think of all the memories ever lost?

Like your very first word. (My parents forgot mine.)

Or the crushes you forgot you had.

Or the brilliant insights that didn’t last long enough to be imprisoned in ink.

Or the moments in your life when you thought everything was perfect. Because if you think of them now, chances are you’ll also think of all the reasons it really wasn’t that you just hadn’t realized at the time.

And do you ever think…if they’re really, truly lost…that it’s somehow like they never really were?

On the man who lives on the corner in the cold

He is old, or I think he is, because I cannot see his face. It is too covered by his beard, and I dare not look too closely for I hate being stared at, and I am sure, so does he.

I am not alone; the multitudes of passers-by seem not to sense his presence, though perhaps he is too familiar to be out of place. Did they notice him when he first sat down, I wonder, and how long did it take them to forget?

Bending (perhaps a little self-conscious) to drop more change than I can afford into the always-almost-empty, conspicuously (but somehow not incongruously) pink cup is the hardest thing to do.

Because it reminds me that he is human, and also someone’s son.

And that I don’t want to do this, to throw coins his way and hope it makes a difference, knowing that it doesn’t.

No, what I really want to do is bring him home. I want to let him take a shower, have a shave, sleep the night away on a bed and not the pavement, cook him dinner, then breakfast, then lunch, to chase away the cold from the inside of his heart.

What I really, really want to do is love him, because no one else will.

But no one else needs loving quite so much.

But I can’t. And it hurts.

Off

you go now. I feel like being alone.

Spreading the joy…

2005-05-05T23:39:00.000+10:00

*msn: Morbid depressed airhead

Oh my God, you guys just have to check this out:

http://www.big-boys.com/articles/eow.html

If I cursed, I’d say it was damn f*cking funny.

Oops. :oP

*NOTE*: I’ve just been informed that apparently this has been around for a LONG time and that I’m slow. Well why didn’t YOUUUUU spread the joy then?? Huh. At least I’m not selfish.

*pbbbhtt*

Confessions of a 22-year-old Freakazoid.

2005-05-04T23:01:00.000+10:00

*msn: Just because I do freaky things doesn’t mean I’m a freak. (yes, interpret that however you like.)

Have you ever noticed that there are some people that we just refer to as freaks without thinking much about it?

It just occurred to me today that I’ve called almost everyone I know a freak at some point, but some only (shh) when they are not present. (Yes I know that means behind their backs but let’s not get caught up in the lingo.)

And for those some, most of the time, I don’t really know them. In fact, they’re probably just someone I met for a few seconds, or heard about from someone else. All it took was one action, or one incident for them to be branded as such.

And then I realized today that I do plenty of freaky things too. (STOP sniggering.) But does that make me a freak? I’d like to think it makes me an individual, nothing more. And if some are annoyed by my antics? Well, I’ve never met anyone who has never annoyed me on one occasion or another, given time.

So do these people really deserve the names we give them? Are they not just like everyone else, caught in a moment of madness?

Ah...’tis a heavy burden on my conscience, ‘tis.

Words of Wisdom

“…my college profs…seemed to feel they was the greatest experts on the most interestin’ subjects and that the students should feel lucky to pay substantial hunks of money for the privilege of worshippin’ at their feet.

What’s more, they tested the loyalty of said students on a regular basis by the simple process of makin’ the presentation dull enough to bore a stone and seein’ who managed to stay awake long enough to absorb sufficient data to pass their finals.”

- M.Y.T.H. Inc. in Action, Robert Asprin

Suddenly it’s all clear to me…

Tips to Zap Zits

1. Use separate towels for your face and for the rest of you.

2. After washing and cleansing thoroughly with warm water, splash face several times with icy-cold water. Apparently this tightens the pores and hinders dirt from getting stuck in ‘em.

Now, I know this isn’t very convincing if I don’t provide proof that it works. However, given that I refuse to reveal even my name here, I think it’s highly doubtful I’d put up a shot of my face, don’t you?

Anyway those of you who know me already know how I look like. :oP

So, caveat emptor, and happy trying!

Hmm…

Today the ice queen told me I was the only person she knew who could be light and dark all at the same time. Not skin colour, but more along the lines of morbid airhead.

I guess that somewhere inside me is a little gothic girl I have made many failed attempts to appease with the use of eyeliner stolen from my mum.

I kinda like her there...she keeps Barbie company.

*crinkled-nose smirk*

I need a brain transplant

2005-05-04T01:52:00.000+10:00

*msn: Happy birthday Sylvia..may many happy ones follow.

I must never ever do anything important within an hour of waking up.

I took a half hour nap at Boyfriend’s place just now, finally dragging myself up at the memory of two as yet untouched assignments.

As I was leaving his place, I put on my shoes, and then suddenly started patting myself all over.

Me: Eh? Where are my keys? Can you go check your room, did I leave my keys there? Lazy to take out shoes lah.

Boyfriend: *silence*

*jangle*jangle*

I looked down to see my very own right hand tossing my keys jauntily up and down.

Erh..

So paiseh yeah.

Friends of Shanz

Just noticed I get quite a number of referrals from Shanz’ blog. (See links.)

I can’t help but wonder what they are expecting, but given my dear amoeba’s much less bimbo-itic content, I strongly suspect they are disappointed.

Ah well..I have never claimed to be a deep and heavy thinker. (Come to think of it I’ve never claimed to be a thinker at all…hahahaha…)

And they say university and overseas travel broadens the mind.

The iron fist strikes again

Hahaha..thanks to Kev (again, see links) for the “iron fist” comment.

Anyway, I have been given strict instructions by Boyfriend to either refrain from blogging, or to blog at the very most twice a week till exams are over. Apparently he believes that if I spend less time on other things, I will study more.

Such faith…blind…but touching.

Yes yes I will study lah. (just remembered he reads this blog. *grumble*)

Toodles!

Hundreds and Thousands

2005-05-01T00:54:00.000+10:00

*msn: But Angie, I (l) you! :)

*ahem*

“Hundreds and thousands are tiny spherical candies, usually approximately 1mm in diameter, similar to cachous. They are coated in various colours and mixed as a popular topping for childrens' cakes. Hundreds and thousands sprinkled on buttered white bread is known as fairy bread.”

- Wikepedia, the free encyclopaedia.

So this is going to be a rambly, disconnected post with all sorts of unrelated subjects.

Warned ya. :oP

Love is in the air…

Okay, firstly, I am a confirmed blog-addict. For months before setting up my own (perhaps in sheer desperation to overcome this addiction, much like a nicotine patch for a smoker) I used to read blogs compulsively. Like, ANYONE’S blogs. Even total strangers. In fact, make that ESPECIALLY total strangers, since in my friends’ blogs half the things that happened I’d already heard about.

Anyway, I’ve noticed that sooner or later, everyone blogs about either;

The meaning of Life; or
The meaning of Love.

And whenever I come across those topics, I tend to skip them (unless I know the person in which case I find it fascinating) ‘cos I think these things are basically point-of-view type matters which won’t have any bearing on me.

Therefore I have decided to write a post on The Meaning Of Love To Me.

(Yeah yeah, like everything else I do makes sense.)

These are my basic beliefs when it comes to matters of the heart:

Love is not easy

It takes effort. From my (and many of my friends’) personal experience anyway. It takes effort to be considerate, and sensitive, and caring no matter how bad his/her/your mood. It takes effort to turn down invitations because you promised you’d have a “day in, just the two of us”. It takes effort not to act like you’re single when you see the most gorgeous person in the world. Most of all, it takes effort not to take the other person for granted, even though you probably could. (maybe not forever, but you get the drift.)

Love is not (always) exciting

I have lost count of the number of times someone has asked me whether I’ve gotten bored with Boyfriend yet the second they find out how long we’ve been together. (second question is usually, “SO…when’s the wedding?” followed by a self-satisfied smirk at making such an original statement. Question.)

Truth? It’s not boring, but it’s no sugar-high either. There is mundanity. There is routine. There are the days which seem to meld together without anything in particular that distinguishes them from each other.

It’s kinda like vanilla ice-cream. Good, in an ordinary sort of way.

Love does not (always) make sense

This, I know Boyfriend would agree with.

Firstly, we have absolutely nothing in common, not even music. Secondly, he hates confrontation whereas I am LOUD and PROUD to be it. Thirdly, he actually disliked me on sight when we first met ‘cos I talked too much thus (and this is my favourite part) making it difficult for him to concentrate in class. (And I always wanted to run away with a gangster. Much like in Enrique Iglesias’ Hero music video.)

Oh, and boy am I demanding. Why in Heaven’s name else would I care that he doesn’t write me long and fervent letters declaring undying love, when he will gladly wake up at 3 a.m. although he has a 9 a.m. class the next morning just to change a lightbulb for me? (I AM NOT being unreasonable, I can’t reach the ceiling, even with a chair. Har har har dee har har.)

And, if it comes to that, why in Heaven’s name would he put up with it?

*French accent* Mmm…vairy interesting.

Finally…

*pam pa dush* [I have used this before, and apparently it’s not quite clear what it is (Boyfriend asked) so for the unimaginative (Boyfriend) it’s a short series of drum and cymbal hits which is meant to indicate the revelation of something new! Improved! And at a fraction of the price! (no more sugar for me).]

Love is freaking worth it

Man, I sound so Smug In A Relationship. (For non-Bridget Jones readers, read it.)

For those who say it should be effortless…well I think it isn’t. But the key point here is: I want to make the effort.

For those who say that it doesn’t make sense…well it doesn’t which is half the fun. Hee hee hee. Anyway someone once said that if two people in a relationship are exactly alike, one of them is unnecessary.

And for those who say it should be the most euphoric feeling of all time, all THE time…

Well to me, falling in love is the rollercoaster part. Being in love though…is like coming home after a really long journey. No matter where you’ve been, or where you want to go next, this is where you belong.

It’s no coincidence you know – “Home is where the heart is.”

How much is that doggie in the window?

I really DID go up to the cashier at Melbourne Central’s pet shop and say this okay…too bad, I think he didn’t know the song (do YOU?) so wasn’t as funny as I thought it would be.

Anyway, I have officially fallen in love with one of the Shih Tzu x Silky Terrier puppies they are selling. Where the rest are dark luscious brown, he (or she) is a dirty white with light brown patches. Where the rest are round balls of fur, he’s on the scrawny side and only half as fluffy. Where the rest gambol merrily around (as do Enid Blyton’s lambs), he is a little unsteady, perhaps because he’s the smallest of the lot.

But:

He has the perkiest ears, where the rest have theirs buried in their fur. He has the cutest nose; the rest look flattened. He may fall, or trip, but he always gets up again and joins the rest. He may be tiny, but he doesn’t care, he pushes his way in anyway.

Others may want the healthy chocolate balls of fur. I want the little one, who seems fated to be overlooked, but refuses to let it be.

Oh, and the answer to the question? A$750. Hence he is not here with me, and never will be.

Wah, sedihnya.

Miracles Galore!

Passed my Investments mid-sem!!! LA LA LA LA LA. Don’t ask for the marks okay? Spoilsport only.

Updated Definition

polysexual – n. Attracted to men, women, animals, plants, inanimate objects, and intangibles.

Credited to K (the clown, but NOT Krusty) for the term, me me me for the definition, and Lizzie for the update (in italics.)

Current Peeve

Any of the following happening before falling asleep:

Sudden mouth dryness, necessitating crawling out into the cold and stumbling into the unlit kitchen.
The opposite, i.e. the sudden need to visit the toilet.
Feet suddenly (yes it happens) feeling dusty.
Hair feeling oily.
Silly people who think speeding up Grattan St. in the middle of the night is absolutely cool.
Silly people who think SINGING in the street in the middle of the night is absolutely cool.

Current Complaint

Difficulty falling asleep.

Current Favourite Pastime

Reading scripts of The Simpsons. Trust me when I say I spend more time reading TV scripts than watching shows.

Addicted to reading? No.

Life-dependent.

Observation of the Week

A lot of blogs appear to have the word Ramble/Ramblings in their title. And definitely in their posts. Hmmmmmmmm………

Shout-out

Sylvia, who turns 17 on the 3^rd of May. I would be nothing without her.

Merry weekend to all (what’s left of it), and to all a good night.

Destiny fulfilled…

2005-04-29T01:15:00.000+10:00

*msn: Moody *Humph*asaurus

So corny right, the title? And it’s unoriginal too, ‘cos I stole it off…

THIS!

Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!

(I so hate people who gloat, but ah well…)

I actually only started to get excited about the whole thing on Tuesday itself. Boyfriend, however, had a running countdown – ‘I’m going to see Beyonce in 5 days…I’m going to see Beyonce in 4 days…’ – and actually started playing all kinds of Destiny Child songs the night before as “preparation”. (Sometimes I worry about that boy.)

Anyway, this momentous event has sparked off many revelations.

Revelation 1:

Destiny’s Child can sing live. I don’t only mean that they didn’t lip synch though they were dancing, etc. but that they can actually sing in tune.

I have to admit to some degree of scepticism when it comes to singers performing live. (Watch any MTV awards lately? Can you blame me?)

But this was REALLY good. (No, this has nothing to do with the occasional Johnny Depp clips they played while we were waiting for them to start.) Like, stupendously good. I am officially in awe.

Oh, though, sadly, being one who always plays by the rules (oh very well, I forgot) I didn’t bring along a camera. Felt momentarily justified by the huge sign outside saying “NO CAMERAS OR RECORDING EQUIPMENT OF ANY KIND ALLOWED”, but was almost blinded by the number of flashes in the audience when the concert started.

I’m SHOCKED I tell you, SHOCKED.

*grumble*

Revelation 2:

It’s quite possible that one day I will DIE from excessive vanity. Now, I’m not the skanky type, but it just so happens that all my dressy outfits are either sleeveless or strapless or off-shoulder or basically useless against the cold in one way or another. And obviously one cannot attend such a mega event NOT dressed to the nines.

But for the unseasonably warm-ish (I was still shivering by the end of the night) weather, I may not, dear reader, still reside amongst the living. Yes, we shall give thanks to the powers that be. There is still unfinished work for me on Earth.

Either that, or it really is true – “Only the good die young.”

Revelation 3:

I miss clubbing. Nearly put someone’s eye out while flailing around to ‘Crazy In Love’.

*sigh*

How it all began...

Right, it has to be said that prior to Tuesday night, I wasn’t exactly the biggest fan of DC. Observe:

(three quarters of a year ago)

Lizzie: Eh, want to go for the Destiny’s Child concert or not?

Me: Ah? When?

Lizzie: Next year April.

Me: NEXT YEAR?? Next year only say lah..

Lizzie: No no, if want to go must buy now.

Me: Tell you what, you go find out price and info and come back and tell me
okay? (standard evasive technique)

- next day-

Lizzie: Eh, bought your tix adis. $130 yeah. Boyfriend too.

Me: *speechless* (rare, but true.)

Yes, I concede everything turned out okay, and if anyone else is thinking of pulling a similar stunt, well, be my guest. AND MY FINANCIER.

The best laid plans…

2005-04-26T02:28:00.000+10:00

*msn: Did you think that I was gonna give it up to you??

La la la la la la la I have cleaned up my room. Even Boyfriend was impressed. Bagus kan? (SO WHAT if it was ‘cos I wanted to take a series of pictures of my apartment to show my parents?? Ulterior motives are still motives and the ends justify the means. So there.)

Anyway I would post up one of the pictures here (and I have finally learnt how to host pictures haha..now all I need a is a digicam..) but somehow..it doesn’t look as impressive in the picture as it does in real life so too bad. All Melbournians are welcome to check out this phenomenon before it disappears though. Only $2 per entry. Drinks (only the freshest water!! Boiled on request.) included.

Australians!

Ahah…had Monday off ‘cos of Anzac day, and as the weather was particularly sunny, decided to become more Australian-ised (was recently accused by family friend’s son of still looking FOB – fresh off the boat – after 3 ½ years in Melbourne) by doing as the Australians do and go out to the park to read. (They practically worship the sun..any sign of it and instantly they appear all over the ground..like mushrooms I tell you. There was even a couple sitting on a little piece of raised tarmac at an intersection.)

Feeling pangs of guilt, I sadly left behind my Sandman-inspired book of short stories and dragged *sigh* Investments instead.

Anyway. I left the house at 3:50 p.m. Took 15 minutes to get there. Another 5 to find a bench out of range of any Frisbees or other projectiles. Another 5 to sit down and spread out stuff accordingly. Read two chapters. At about 4:55 gave up due to freezing fingers and toes (sun in Australia is MISLEADING), called Boyfriend to come walk me home (so he could enjoy the sunlight too…and the file was heavy…hahaha), and ended up watching Simpsons and Neighbours instead.

WELL I TRIED.

Girl Power!!!

Right, this is related to Erin getting booted from Apprentice, and the girls from the first season as well. Yes, long overdue, but must be said.

I cannot cannot cannot CANNOT stand the people who accused the girls of using their “sexuality” and good looks to try to win the competition.

Note yeah, I didn’t say they don’t use them, I just didn’t like people making it sound like a bad thing. (hence the word “accuse”.)

I have two reasons for this:

Firstly, the only reason girls flirt, charm, “use their sexuality” etc. is because (most of the time) they get away with it. Look, guys, I’m not saying you all do, and I’m not saying those who do do it all the time, but confess: have you ever been swayed by a pretty face? And would you have been equally swayed by similar antics on a less attractive persona? It’s quite simple really, if it didn’t work, they wouldn’t do it.

Which leads me to the second point – why shouldn’t they do it since it works? Yes, I agree it is unfair. I’m not defending from within the ranks here; I am most certainly not anything near ‘hot chick’ material, but if I were, I think I probably would use my looks on occasion to get what I want.

I realize that this may be unfair on unattractive people (this is no longer limited to the female variety) but then, isn’t it silly not to use an advantage when you have it? Should people who can run fast naturally be banned from Olympics? Smart people be given extra-difficult exams? This is not golf, and anyway anyone can look decent if they try, and there are not that many beautiful people in the world so chances of them taking over the world are pretty close to nil.

Now, what makes this bad is when it goes too far. When people “sleep their way to the top”. When unqualified people make it over qualified ones simply because of their looks. When quality of work is sacrificed for quality of physicality.

Charming and flirting just to complement your skills and knowledge is one thing. Depending on your ability to do so to make your way in life is another.

The difference is respect.

Miscellanous quote (unrelated)

“‘How do you love someone for a lifetime? How do you make a marriage work for all that time?’

‘You have to keep falling in love,’ she said.

‘You just have to keep falling in love with the same person.’”

- Man and Wife, Tony Parsons.

Affirmations MY way.

2005-04-22T23:24:00.000+10:00

*msn: I want to lie on the floor, stare at the ceiling, cigarette in one hand, beer in another, let the music flow 'n the world go by..

I have spent my entire life wishing I was someone else.

Not a whole someone else, per se, but more like, bits and pieces of people.

Like sweetheart with her gorgeous hair and bohemian chic, or super-sophisticated amoeba (see links).

Or almost-Miriam and the way she doesn’t take Lizzie for granted, like I do Boyfriend sometimes.

Or Boyfriend, and how he always knows the right thing to do, and does it.

Or my irresistible honey tea and her undying charm.

Or the quick-tongued ice queen and how she doesn’t need to change to like herself.

Or, (and most of all) my wonderful, precious, Sylvia, who is possibly everything I want to be. The sad thing is that she feels she’s crap most of the time, which…is just sad.

Or the clichés:

Lean and lithe, tiny wisp, slender and tall; mass of curls, hair like a waterfall, pixie-cropped; eyes like the sky, twin-set emeralds, limpid pools of black; flame-haired, hair of gold, raven beauty; milk-white skin, peaches-and-cream, pale and blue-veined, apple-cheeked and freckled;

The heart of gold, the flawless mind, the gentle touch, the crooked smile; the kindest, cleverest, most devious, most honest, the fairest of them all.

…………………….

I’m not.

I’m just me.

And you know what? It’s time I actually wanted to just be the person that I am. Because that’s the only one who matters.

It has to end today. Today I will stop wishing for longer legs, or bigger eyes or fairer skin, or better brains.

Today, and forever, I will remember and I will try to and I will be happy.

Just, to be me.

The worst feeling in the world…

2005-04-21T16:05:00.000+10:00

*msn: It wasn’t meant to be like this.

I guess the worst feeling in the world changes when we do, and depends especially on whether we are feeling it at that particular point in time.

This is what I think is the worst: when life seems a slow, inexorable, barely-moving yet unstoppable slide to an end you never imagined. Feeling that your dreams will always be the nonentities they really are, and worst of all, forgetting them.

When the pointlessness of it all is no longer a sharp splash of cold water to a sleep-sticky face; but the waves at your feet when you lie by the sea with the tide coming in on a peaceful, cloudy day…lapping, ever creeping, till…

So you see, Nicky, I do have my dark days after all.

*p/s: Nothing happened. Just feeling blue.

So much to say, so little time..

2005-04-20T19:58:00.000+10:00

*msn: Downgrade Complete.

Oh God, have just spend 2 ½ hours doing countless online tests. I have an Investments mid-sem on Friday !! Curses. Must stop clicking on nice easy multiple-choice quizzes.

Yes. I shall blog instead. Ahahahahahahahah.

*doom*

* * * * * WARNING: Extremely long post ahead. Read at your own peril.* * * * *

Letters to the Editor

I have, as previously mentioned, finally told a number of people that I have entered the realm of blogging. First off, got a whole lot of banging due to my earlier staunch and very vocal (most things are, with me) stand against blogging in all forms.

*attempt to look sheepish and indignant at the same time*

Perhaps I should have said this was a social experiment of sorts, painted it with a nice purposeful aura. *practices purposeful look*

Mmmm…

One of them proceeded to give me a long lecture (much like Boyfriend did upon conception of this) about how he didn’t like the idea of blogs, publishing personal details, total strangers reading about you, etc. I believe he’s not reading my blog on principle, but I can’t go up to him and ask him ‘cos then I seem all badger-y so yes, this is a not-too-subtle hook to get him to speak up if he has.

Anyway everything I write here is anything I wouldn’t mind telling a total stranger face-to-face (provided I could get him to sit still and stay sane that long) so I suppose no harm done. Plus, I won’t get interrupted.

A few responded much like I would to a vaguely interesting news item; good to know, impact zero.

One more said I was a lovely writer (self-promotion ? Read on.) which put me on a high for all of 5 minutes before I came crashing down to earth under the weight of EXPECTATIONS.

The rest didn’t reply to my nicely-worded message informing them of the general release.

I am tempted to crawl away to my own cave, continue my blogging there on its walls, and leave it for people to discover millions of years later when they will not understand what I have written and will therefore mistake it to be something of worth.

Now there, is a dream.

Order ! Order I say !

Ahah. I have finally purchased adhesive-type hook (tenants have no rights, especially not to make holes in walls) so I can put up my beloved van Gogh calendar. Yes, I realize it is April, but you have to understand that anything before June is good given my gift at procrastination.

Anyway, I also bought that thing people hang over doors, you know, long bars with hooks on ? Now I no longer have to hang my towel over my chair, where it falls off after a while. (I am a very wriggly sitter.)

Aaahhh…*sigh of satisfaction*..all is going to plan with my determination to become Organized. Yes, Organized with a capital ‘O’ – I must be serious.

*firm, unyielding look*

Oh, though..my room now has plastic bags from Howard’s Storage World and Big W (source of hooks and door hooky thing) strewn on the floor, and there is a pile of dusty old Post-It® notes on my bed – cleared off my wall to make room for said calendar (plus some of them clashed with it; big no-no) and saved for sorting through..

But ‘tis a step ‘tis, and Rome herself was not built in a day !

Batwoman

Oh God, I’m turning nocturnal. (And slightly sacriligeous..just noticed this is the second time this entry I’ve taken His name in vain. Not that I’m a Christian.)

This fact was brought solidly home to me today during the International Finance lecture – not the easiest thing to get through on an ordinary day. Thankfully for my funky fringe, I can just look down, rest my head on my hand, and look like I’m concentrating really hard. Well-spent $40 I say.

Anyway, this condition of mine is not being helped in any way by Boyfriend’s 16-year-old-girl-type obsession with The O.C., or more like 16-year-old-GUY-type obsession with Rachel Bilson, who plays Summer. This means that he simply must have his regular doses of the show (1 every 2, or at most, 3 days), courtesy of his course mate’s broadband connection and DVD burner NO MATTER THE TIME.

Typical conversation:

Boyfriend : (appearing in my apartment, sounding very concerned) Eh, it’s 2:30 a.m. ! So late !

Me : (touched) No, no, it is okay, I am finishing soon.

Boyfriend : Can’t it wait ? Do you have to do it now ? It’s so late..not good to sleep so late.

Me : (even more touched) No, no, it is all right, I just need to finish up. Go sleep lah, I will be fine, talk to you tomorrow.

-After long pause complete with incredulous look, and in a “have-you-forgotten-very-important-occasion-on-par-with-tenth-
anniversary” voice.-

Boyfriend : HELLO ?? O.C. ???

*breathe calmly*

It is all right. I have my Lemon-Lime Soothers which I will chain-consume to keep me awake.

And I will burn those DVDs.

Final words

Are you still here ??? Reading ??? I commend thee. Anyway, just wanted to explain the MSN nick and then you are free to go.

I downloaded MSN 7.0 last week. Winks and nudges a-plenty, larger webcam images, and all sorts of cute smileys.

And then. The dreaded phrase:

"The following message could not be delivered to all recipients:"

At first it happened but a few times. Then more. And more. And more again. And soon I found I could only send messages in little bursts of time..like..for 5 minutes I’d be able to get my words across, and then..silence (on my end, anyway) for perhaps three times that length of time. I took to copying all my messages before I sent them, on the off-chance I’d have to paste and send them again, and resorted to changing my nick to reply any particularly pressing questions.

Speechlessness..sheer horror.

A friend blithely suggested that, what with my volubility in real life and this blog, I had used up my quota of talk time in the world.

…………….

I have since regressed to MSN Messenger 6.2 which is BEAUTIFUL (thanks amoeba darling) and lets me do what I do best (actually just most) without interruption.

The little things in life really do make a difference.

“ ‘Life,’ said Marvin dolefully, ‘loathe it or ignore it, you can’t like it.’ ”

- Marvin (a robot), The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams.

Love life. I do.

Open for business

2005-04-18T05:31:00.000+10:00

*msn: The Lady, she says - http://unilinguist.blogspot.com

Okay, so I’m cheating a bit, and that won’t be my MSN nick till I’m done posting this entry. Well this is supposed to be the welcome wagon and so it wouldn’t do to send out invites till I’m ready would it ?

I have decided that I shall let it be known far and wide across the land (actually just my friends) about the existence of this blog. I cannot cannot cannot spend so many hours downloading un-useable software and writing about downloading un-useable software for the reading pleasure of:

Boyfriend, who has to be first reminded that I even have a blog, and then be persuaded (he would say forced) to read it; and
Sister, who DOES read it, and even leaves PROPER comments, but is just one person after all (no matter the many personalities)

I’ll still remain anonymous etc. though till I feel comfortable enough with typing my name out on-screen.

Let me try: V…. no can’t do it, sorry. But you know who I am.

Anyway, to all of you, forgive my ramblings, and if you read nothing else, read just this line, ‘cos this one’s for you:

Welcome !!!

Peace out.