Pen*s p*nic Singapore

Pppp what? Pens panic? Pen is picnic? Before you raise the alarm that a porn bot has usurped my blog– or my mind in general– relax. 

 

I’ve just found another quirk to this little island I’ve grown up in. It doesn’t concern gum, caning, fines, littering or spitting. We were once afflicted with penis panic and it wasn’t even to do with the roses of Singapore writhing in the gutters of Bugis Street. Though I did research that four weeks ago and all the bawdy colour it did delight me with!

 

“In October 1967, rumours that local pork was impregnated with female hormones led to at least 446 men (and 23 women) turning up at hospitals insisting that their genitals had shrunk. One hospital had 97 patients on a single day and saw several men who had clamped their private parts with various objects so as to halt the perceived shrinkage; others arrived with friends and neighbours hanging onto them.”

 

From the Fortean Times, emphasis mine.

answers

“… And I, who claim to know so much more, isn’t it possible that even I have missed the very spring within the spring? 

Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.”

Thorton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

 

Does it matter? Between polar possibilities, individual truths lie on a continuum. 

 

Resting my head on your body, I dream of the pulse beneath your muscles and imperceptible cities beneath your pulse. Beyond the bushes orange beams swerve urgently, motors berate, the highway is too busy to notice the little road slumbering. It is hard to see and be seen in this something darker some place dark, but all the attention I need is your hand grasping mine unconsciously.

 

If I didn’t understand before, all the clarity I need is a scent between your hairline and ear. Sense rounds out into satisfaction. It’s a sudden flurry of peace, waking up one morning to find you are mad happy after two weeks of burden.

 

The lights are snuffed in the playground but I don’t need them to find you as you’re sleepily trudging to the car. My arms trap you, you keep walking, but where I would have assumed indifference in past weeks today I find an indulgent acceptance of me in all my erratic, silly, hungry ways.

 

“You’re eating this at home?”

“You look very sad. Ok we’ll go somewhere.”

:) “Ok I shall steal your fries.”

 

I had been hoping for itineraries, headlines. They are irrelevant, too dictative. And so too that because there is no stated beginning, I’m not going to state an end. 

 

In front of other people, we don’t hold hands, I thought maybe this was a sign of incompleteness. No, simply that we are not each other’s leashes. 

 

I had been looking for myself in your behaviour, the answer to the question, are you as fond of me as I am of you?  I didn’t realise you had answered me already. “Look,” you pointed out an extra hand in the photo, a detail I hadn’t noticed. It released the composition from banal symmetry, replaced the trite with a wry and gentle humour, caught the moment wholly unaware and stuck on it a wordless glory. 

 

The other dilemma? It’s resolved too. :3

this is supposed to be any old Saturday

Who ever knows what someone else is thinking? Life has a funny way of disemboweling certainties.

 

I should be more confused than ever, some would say I should be blissful, but pooh bah now is not the time.

 

Review of cat and mouse game:

• I’ve been absailing merrily down the heights that could have been an unhealthy attachment to a detached boy, enjoying what’s left of the view.
• I’ve come to terms with the wonderful man meeting a wonderful girl who wasn’t me.
• I’ve taken off the crash helmet and retired indoors, in a room vacuumed of your skin cells and fallen hairs; I don’t cry when we talk, or at least I didn’t till yesterday.
• I’ve decided that company should be obtained the slow and old-fashioned way, with lots of mulling and shy glances, so I’ve taken to sitting in the library and waiting for serendipity to plop the mousekin in front of me. If it should materialize, I’ll do an honest job of it: iron my best dress, take him out to a polite dinner, send him home at a respectable hour. If nothing happens, I whistle away and bake consolatory cookies.

 

It is high time I pulled this emo shizz together. Up to me to put everything in its place. Except I forgot that you make surprising decisions too.

 

A boomerang whack of confessed tenderness on one hand, blank cheque of worry on the other. I’m not ready to make these petty choices right now. Cat and mouse game folded back into its box. The week’s been a series of explosions in the skerries and I’m feeling the ripples, insignificant in making some dear people happier. I guess all we can do is wait the storm out.

relative sight

I don’t know what you see when you look at me. Maybe the great pink and green lights flared in my eyes and taught them to lie but you were looking a little longer, a little bolder. If not at me then at the interesting brown tiles and these dazzling people barfing for their promotion-price Heinekens. I am a softening shape of girl with bedhead and sheep-print skirt and I am not one of your pageant queens all tanned thighs and silky hair but I’m happy with myself. Does that make you happy?

 

I don’t know what you see when you look at me, through me, at the idea of me, little bits of me I leave in your phone and MSN window. I only know you’ve got a good eye for details. The last time I admired somebody’s figurative eye, an eye to trace uncommon beauty in common things, I took his hand, kissed his knuckles and grew accustomed to his smell on my towels. That would be very very bad today.

 

I don’t know if you ever take out your memory of me, turn it over, or if it’s thrown clean out of your mind like a  spring-cleaned refridgerator (I really like your refridgerator, it is efficient). But for now you’re a green dot on my screen that I can’t bring myself to click because you’re becoming a symbol of restraint and sighs, a question mark that doesn’t even have a question.

so that’s what it is

Tomas came to this conclusion: making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite.  Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera, via Kex.

 

That’s where the danger is for me. Less the uninhibited selves wordlessly swapping pleasure, more the accidental seepage of hidden selves when we’re here dreaming together. I can never decide if it’s wiser to turn on my side as soon as possible, or to blink and blink till your breath slows into the seasons of sleep. 

 

That’s how you caught me, little porcupine, when I woke up in the 8pm dark, I imagined I knew you for you. A wonder I didn’t realise it before. Not a sacrifice of habits or beliefs, just the gifting of a plot of internal landscape you never knew you received. That’s why I still ask you for dinners, movies, purring words. Without realising, I’ve been asking for a title deed, a cottage to sup in and warm my frosty words. Why can’t I leave it be? I’ve been meaning to keep roving, live out a luggage full of future.

 

Actually, he had always preferred the unreal to the real.  Just as he felt better at demonstrations (which, as I have pointed out, are all play-acting and dreams) than in a lecture hall full of students, so he was happier with Sabina the invisible goddess than the Sabina who had accompanied him throughout the world, and whose love he constantly feared losing.

 

Just become a shade, furniture, why don’t you. I want to be my own measure of happiness or else to leave it to God.

pause and reconsider

“Try not to fall in love.”

“I don’t know if that’s the kindest advice you’ve offered me. (For now it’s possibly the worst). You’re trying to keep me on the safe and boring side of happiness.”

But for some reason I find myself agreeing with you. Though I have nothing to lose, I don’t have anything to offer (Round 2! I am still at the bottom of the glass wall).

 

-surprised and disappointed- “Why do you say that? Why do you say you have nothing to offer?”

-flattered that she thinks well of me, but thinking of the realistic perspective instead of the motivating one-

“Because I really don’t.”  

 

———–

Ethnography mega long don’t know how to cut down don’t know what the hell I’m writing but it’s about cosmopolitanism and museumization and money and I want it to be genius without the pretension!

Handholding

So I used to know the exact papery texture on the back on his knuckles, calluses where the fingers stem, angle at which his index finger curled degrees off from the others. One mole on the side of the thumb, to neaten the flourish of his j’s and k’s.

 

Tsk he clicks, marches me across the road, marches to put some sustenance in me, marches us to the safehaven in a cave of blanket. But the grasp is gone. I don’t know the firmness of his or his or his hand telling me we didn’t know each other but were about to. An introduction, a promise, dealing a deal. I don’t know your hand, x, though I like it; it binds with mine yet remains impassively mute.

 

It’s your cool, soft, girlish hands I miss. Hands that make me warm and coltish– over and over your boyfriend marvelling at trust as an economy of touch, clearer and deeper than shedded clothes and traded fluids. On a Saturday in NTU, Pei’s slim clasp was what a bird’s would have been if a bird had wanted to love me. In the summer Krys’ clutch was a compass slicing the dark of the club: this way out of the shaded eyes and nameless bodies. Rachel’s touch can’t make its mind up, skittery thing thinly damp from palm to finger pad, it rises to me in a spontaneous snip of laughter. I think I have it good cause the list proceeds forever.

 

I want to say come here/come back but that’s changing. Not stay with me but hello, here I am, sliding the travel off my shoulders so that our intimacy blurs out the strangers in this strange street.

 

PS. Krystal and Brotherkrystal’s new song makes excellent Sunday night music. :)

like printing expiry dates.

This is the point where I dissolve.

 

Surprise me, won’t you.

 

2 hours later Andrew reminds me not to become someone who can’t be alone. Indeed, x joins the list of people to anticipate in the summer, but it’s true I don’t need anyone to take me for walks, nor wag my tail for treats and pets.

 

3 hours later work frustrates me and hurls the emo kid off the cliff.

 

10 hours later I run my mind through our equal discomfort at the Saturday night B&J’s Dempsey crowd, the clutch of your fingers round mine, the way you ask “What?” when I peer at you while someone’s wife dies in a container yard in a 1990s Cantonese drama. Out to annoy, you jerk the car like it’s a rickety funfair ride in a heartland plot. Out to be clueless, I mangle the end of my cigar and you end up biting it off for me with all the sighing patience of a teacher. This night too will never come again but I imagine you are a little softer, truer, a shape pulling into recognition while I’m blinking here in myopia. So I don’t hesitate to stroke the roots of your hair while you’re driving, so I don’t watch for a flicker when we kiss goodnight. Come January, it will never be your enviable lime-dashed shoes propped on the seat I scuttle up to at the library driveway. But nothing ever comes again does it. Never the same crossing of legs at the bus stop, never identical gobblets of lard in my bak chor mee. There’s only one shot at everything. 

 

“B___” you decide eventually after we’ve tried to christian your publication baby with cinch, crinkly, geylang and rambutan (I leave it blank because I don’t want someone stealing your genius). Somewhere in the cold north your publication partner stirs, bolts upright in the startling revival of staid English names. I like that you are making plans, germination in the spring. My 09 is a sweet expanse of blank and random ambition. Who knows where you’ll feature.

 

Technology does a hit-and-run on Nida, Sue and myself (for the second time… albeit minor compared to the others) but the horror ends in 7 days. Then I learn to fit facts between my fingers, ace some exams, and move on with my life. 

 

27.12.2008, to toss the weepy goodbyes and pulpy hearts.

this.

Not a tree but the tree

we saw, it will never exist, split by the wind and bending down

like that again. What will push out of the earth

 

later, making it summer, will not be

grass, leaves, repetition, there will

have to be other words. When my

 

eyes close language vanishes. The cat

with the divided face, half black half orange

nests in my scruffy fur coat, I drink tea,

 

fingers curved around the cup, impossible

to duplicate these flavours. The table

and freak plates glow softly, consuming themselves,

 

I look out at you and you occur

in this winter kitchen, random as trees or sentences,

entering me, fading like them, in time you will disappear

 

but the way you dance by yourself

on the tile floor to a worn song, flat and mournful,

so delighted, spoon waved in one hand, wisps of roughened hair

 

sticking up from your head, it’s your surprised

body, pleasure I like. I can even say it,

though only once and it won’t

 

last: I want this. I want

this.

 

There is Only One of Everything Margaret Atwood

Creature comforts

In my bachelorette pad, I gotta have:

A thick comforter

Bath towels that pull the water off you

Cacti (one furry; one with cactus flower)

 

Yoghurt

Miso

Pasta cutter

Bread maker

Perpetual Beer (Singha for a regular day and Duvel for irregular days)

 

A projector (even an OHP will do)

Cintiq or better yet– DIY Wiimote whiteboard thingamajig

Decent sound system

Soldering iron

 

And something to warm to when it’s chilly. Like a dryer. Mmm warm clothes from dryer.