in the morning you will have faded, little more than a wrinkle in my sheets

In the last hours of 08, I realize I have come a distance further than ever. As I’m falling asleep tumbling through the door, suddenly exhausted, I don’t regret or need anything else: it was a beautiful, beautiful year. So perfectly formed in its choice of flaws and flourishes that I can’t put together a list of best-ofs or summaries. The memories are overwhelming– James opening his instant sol nong tang outside Family Mart, Julienne’s mascara-ed green eyes, the sweet hot smell of the tarred road and rhythmic Bangladeshis in neon vests– but I can’t develop them from my mind.

 

If I didn’t get what I wanted, I got what I needed. To the best of my knowledge, I gave whenever you asked, ask more, more often, I don’t know how else to say it but friends and lovers I am yours. 

 

In less than an hour and a half 09 will push out, changeling without a face. I’m excited and lonely and satisfied and afraid to expect anything in clean lines. But looking at this year’s swerves and soars and the rush it’s left me with, I say hit me with another one.

 

A toast to the absent, this is how I feel right now:

Hoard

Sometimes I am deeply distressed by how much clutter I’ve amassed.

 

The clutter in no way resembles an earthquake aftershock; dust bunnies have yet to fornicate between my 1678 paperbags and 2173 cables. Much of the clutter, quite like my passive aggression, is a boxlid or closet door away. Those enjoying the fresh air lean over balconies of tetris tower Ikea boxes and organizers. There is a loose demarcation of whatgoeswhere– south of the door is a marketplace of robot earrings and handcuff necklaces, west beneath the oval antique mirror are potions and powders, the bookcase is a settlement for anything with a spine and pages (up till this year it had a plaster replica of my upper and lower jaws circa 2001; I don’t remember who got it as a gift). My desk is overrun with battlements of needles and unpickers. For a packrat, I’ve laid down some district laws.

 

The problem? This room is increasingly schizoid. I can’t breathe in it, visitors give up trying to navigate the channels of any single identity and succumb to the siren of a waterbed  (soft and embracing and the enemy of productivity). When I do manage to draw a couple of breaths, I can’t work or draw or even make out (everything ends in sleep. Upon sleep. In Briar Rose proportions). The great confusion of this room may be written as

 

Multiple images: Why do I have 5 umbrellas, 30 visible boxes, 50 bottles, 6 pairs of scissors, a bursting wardrobe of which I wear 10%, and 3 wickless candles??

 

Unrelenting detail:  My own room bombards me with mantras and exhortations, such as WARNING CHOKING HAZARD, WE OWN S M U, SLEEPING IS GIVING IN NO MATTER WHAT THE TIME IS, ALONG THE LINES. As someone who abhors the constant visual sell sell sell of advertising (yet I am a marketing student…) I am aghast. Beyond text overload I am also assaulted by lime greens, yellows, flourescent numbers, glittering beads, montages of texture and undulation. Like Steven Miesel minus the beauty and leggy women.

 

NOSTALGIA 101: Not even the sepia kind of a golden age. Fanny packs and ElectroWizard Invention kits from when I was 9. Blotchy mildew slimes the ceiling of my bookshelf, above such gems as The Bluffer’s Guide to Computers (“You should therefore start any conversation with the computer illiterate with a lengthy discussion on binary”) and 1997 Superdiary. These literally oust my lurching, dog earred copies of Leadership and Teambuilding and Strategic Management of Technological Innovation– monuments of the terror I have lived through in college and am set to endure till 2010.

 

Brand New Colony: of creams and gels with faded labels and innards that deepen to astonishing amber and ochre, hardening in the chagrin of neglect. Like I said, no dust bunnies, but Mr Heineken and Miss Teacup-never-given-to-first-boyfriend have reached an understanding over the years and are literally inseparable.

 

My Heart Will Go On and On oh shut up already: Who are these 10 year olds I have never seen in my life (clearly that one with the cheeks must be me)?! Why do I have proud and obvious photos of not one but two ex boyfriends, with one photo dated 2004 and another a full set of neoprints?! Sometime in 2006 I threw away my mummified museum of every flower I ever received but the smug condom wrapper in my Coach purse suggests I do not have a talent for clearing. 

 

Blue is the colour of: stagnation, lobster blood and all the walls in my room. Natural light loses the battle, always. I’d repaint the walls but would have to move stubborn furniture x 9 mammoths plus all clutter plotting within. 

 

I need a vending machine, there must be a fetish in certain East Asian societies for junk belonging to 21 year olds. Gads we could even begin in my underwear drawer  cupboard. Behold the bra T looked down my uniform to while I was blushingly analyzing every brush of our hands, and clutter had not yet matured into Blue Whale.

indulgent much

I miss rolling Andrew’s socks so that they smile at him, the hilarious way he stalks about as though his long body could ever hope to hide in 12 sq ft of tiny knicknacks, the uncut look of his nails even after my nailclipper has bitten them to the roots. But I don’t miss him, at least not wrenchingly. It’s comfortable, knowing him as a little green icon I badger with recipes, wishlists and errant missives. Uncomplicated male company. I look up at my empty bed, picture him in it like he used to be, and though I miss the way he’d mumble, “whut, whut you doing babe” the memory doesn’t effect longing for a moment besides now.

 

Sometimes I miss– let’s call him K– with a feeling like a clean drop, lemming over a cliff, slipping grasp, you name the imagery. It can be anything, a facebook link, a blue tee, the insufficience of other empirical reminders (on his end: perhaps a crumpled credit card bill, an unclicked inbox). It can be anything and for a couple of hours I rewind, still the girl who smiled in her pretend-sleep and stolen bed as she heard every quiet care K took with the doors and drawers in dressing for work.

 

Somehow I’m profoundly affected by our interaction. Not because of dramatic memorability (I have forgotten names worthier of a fireside tale) or tragic brevity (shouldn’t I pine for the boy who smiled like he couldn’t help it and held my hand before fading into a car backseat 5 songs later). It wasn’t that I’ve never met his like or never will again, that sort of tucked-in gentle demeanour with its balance of openness and exaction, I’ve seen variations in the downturned eyelashes of friends and ready fingers of pianists. It isn’t even his beautiful voice, beautiful opinions. I can’t describe it, it’s partly how he took my trust without me needing to give it, partly the precision of magic in units of yocto.

 

A while back I wanted to wring myself for having not said anything other than “I miss you” and “How are you doing”. I think now that even if I returned to my wily impetuous self, that self would still have been impotent around him. There just wasn’t anything I could do for him. Not now, probably not even when I make it to being a woman if ever I get there. 

 

You might be wondering if I’m so hung up over K what the past couple of months have been about. I was wondering too. But if K is a special yet terminated incident, so is Specific Boy, though hopefully “terminated” is not to be applied (I don’t think it is, can’t explain this either, he defies labelling and expiry dates, quite like the naked tin of survival provision you find in the storeroom one hungry midnight; you must think me very hopeless at ever relaying anything– good grief, it’s true ye merry gentiles. Everyone told me to have THE TALK and I didn’t). 

 

commercial break: WHY NOT start afresh and try a Mousekin? Mousekin is a hoot and a slobbery kisser, I’m not going near him with the length of Singapore even if he adorned himself with chunks of baby beef.

 

Specific Boy, I am terribly terrifyingly fond of you, I just don’t like leashing anyone. Probably because of you I am not a moping soursop. You make me happy, erratic and occasionally frosty. Sorry about that, I really like you. I said it! Up here for all to find! Intercourse the penguin.

 

Tonight everyone’s out at parties at Oosh or York Hotel but I like bundling up with pheasant-tail-hair and e-books, though the best thing would have been a couple bottles of Duvel (scotch would do, too) and your open, open expression on my spare pillow.

 

That’s it; next week we’re throwing a party, smudged lipstick and rooftops, banter like fountains, no one left alive at 7am. Mmph.

 

My favourite bit of wisdom this season is from Jin: hamsters don’t run rat races. Incidentally, Jin writes Christmas cards so precious I smiled to myself all through lunch, and not because of the xiaolongbao.

The Other Direction

It was supposed to be 10^23 not -23.

I goofed

Haha

Yeah I know

I dont think there are negative powers

There are

There are! How interesting

When you do 10^23

It means you move one way

For decimals

The positive

But 10^-23 would mean you move the opposite way

To make it smaller

Haha

*_* That’s astounding

I really like the idea of that

 

Math is inspiring. Take it seriously if you’ve still got it.

Enough now,

a lack of color says:

you are a beautiful person

a lack of color says:

sometimes

a lack of color says:

coming from me thats quite a bit i think

 

It is. Thank you.

 

Like I was saying, I go on a baking spree when everything else is going slow.  Tangible results of my time, a way to watch loved ones react to a piece of me. 

 

It’s also a reminder that there are no substitutes for the real thing (maple syrup not maple flavour), no shortcuts (three hours with the oven till we are all pores and humidity), no easy way out (handheld grater not food processor). Getting back the concentration to do things alone.

 

No stand-ins, no quick fixes, no lazy solutions. Working with myself again. Sounds like a plan for 2009.

 

If you were wondering, he’s leaving, it will be a year till we meet again, but this is as good as it gets without calling in the miracles.

 

It wouldn’t have done to have had him any other way, I wasn’t sure before but now I think the other road might have continued into gouged windows, gutted stalls selling a more jagged dose of loneliness. I like for now your unpredictable gentleness, as though for a jiffy you see something lovely about me, then another and another, and it seems I make you happy, maybe even as happy as you make me.

Babel Fish

‘Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this:

 

“I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”

 

“But,” says Man, “the fish is a dead giveaway isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. Q.E.D.”

 

“Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

 

“Oh, that was easy,” says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

 

Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo’s kidneys, but that didn’t stop Oolon Colluphid from making a fortune with his book Well That About Wraps It Up For God.’

 

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

 

(You didn’t need me to tell you that, did you).

impatient as ever

How is it that all I long for is the summer when I should be awaiting spring? In a city where the only seasons are sale and off-peak, most people are happy to think about Christmas and its many spoils. Turkey and ribbons are dandy but I’m waiting for fireworks, high noon, laughter sweet and low.

 

Some plans I lay at the mercy of circumstance. For others I pick up scythes, anvils, chlorofoam. I want to rush into 2009 but first I’d have to cross a goodbye (to the Specific Boy).

 

Come home in summer my perfectly normal beasts, your pikka bird is staring down anonymous atoms. Or else come closer good fortune, till I feel the hum of an airplane in my chest and even the cobblestones are a dialect unknown to my shoes.

oracle of the playlist

As siphoned off Jithra–

 

Put your MP3 player on shuffle, and write down the first line of the first twenty songs. Post the poem that results. The first line of the twenty-first is the title.

 

whut

So I was enjoying the laughable anticks of a certain miss C (or L or X… it was never very clear) and an intruder got into my house. Wailing, yelling and furious pounding ensues. 

 

Now there are 4 police officers tromping on my carpets with their shoes on. Admittedly they took so long to get here that if people were desperate I’d have been killed 6 times. I don’t think this is a good time to get into the shower.

“the promise of the next dream”

Whenever you like, whatever you please.

 

I realise I was a lot happier when I wasn’t fine with everything, when I looked at a person or ideal and they became the utter fundament of all my motivations. But we make do, and wait for the next downpour to run through.

 

This year I learnt the value of silence, but I’ve also learnt it doesn’t suit me. Lock it in a chest in a hole under a mountain populated with fat goats and stubborn boulders, did I really think I could pull off a secret? It is 1.07am; part of me thinks of trying one more time, but that part falters and waits to tell you in person.