the reading at present

Disapprovingly. “You always think of the consequences. You’ve got 5 different escape routes before you’ve even started. Before getting into anything you’re all, ‘Oh if it goes well it goes well, and if it doesn’t I get hurt, fine I get hurt.’ You don’t let yourself go.”

 

Stunned by the accuracy. “Yes yes… I’m like that. Not that I don’t let go, you could ask Jin, I’m sure he’d tell you that out of our friends I’m quite a risk-taker and do take the plunge in relationships. And consequences, isn’t that good? I mean, I consider what could happen.”

 

“That’s the thing…In some things you can’t think about how it ends. You’ve just got to do it. You’ve got to stop trying to control things, let it go.”

 

So… What now? Force nothing, try nothing, give without thinking? Wake up everyday and think of you only by accident? Really now. I got unsteadily through the door, dropping my bag onto the floor that you’ve only walked once (like all who are seduced instantly by my water bed, your body made one long neat ripple upon it; briefly I got in beside you and for a second you considered the possibilities, which I would have taken you up on if we hadn’t only half an hour to get back down to town) and my first thought was, “Damn! I still miss you. It hasn’t been long, only long enough for the lines on my palm to realise they could be etched wrongly.”

 

You’re the same as me. You think of all the possible NO’s today, everything that could be a YES beyond the blinding light of tomorrow. 

 

I held myself together so I could look purposeful, moving on from you to rest of my life. But really, after your car pulled away from the bus stop any haughtiness disintegrated and I was just another of the dissatisfied figures I’ve never cared to be.

The lines on my palms worry fathers and all good men

When I said that all things good and bad must end, that everything regresses towards a mean, I forgot to say I hope this mean gets ever higher. Graphically this would look like a slope– oh yes, a steeper climb as the years pile up– but after each hailstorm, each blue eyed sky this I’d want: an ever cosier home to roost in, so that where we bought our first couch 20 years later there are glass figurines, cat hairs, baby food stains, Dylan memorabilia.

 

I forgot to say: though I have problems with possession, wanting neither to cage nor be caged, I too want someone to come home to. Not to have them waiting with soup on the stove and fluffy pyjamas, but to be a well-known shirt tail flopping off the bus in front, recumbent potato so sleepy he didn’t kick his shoes off, tickler of the cat and raiser of my toilet seat, which really I don’t care about as long as he doesn’t pee like a sprinkler.

experiment #2

Then I realized that the smallest things, that I took upon for fun, to experiment, to prove a point–

 

These almost always sprawled into importance.

 

Take everybody seriously. Sometimes you don’t know what your silence, your furrows, your truncated smile can do.

 

What am I doing? I know too well, I should remember to do only the things I can live with.

doors

open when you lean on them. Lean lean lean.

 

I have a job thanks to the valued opinions of Jin. :) Not any job either, I must say I fairly tingled hearing what I’d get to do.

 

Highly amused by some of the search terms to this blog:

 

special someone blogurl:wordpress.com

dawnisms you got that right.

chinese tiles mahjong?

hamster – be the death of me is that a song?

of love and other demons mosquitoes

big pen nic when rod, shaft, joystick and other euphemisms fail.

hipster seoul

worst things about seoul you won’t read about them here.

laundry mats in seoul

hymen w4m i feel so virginal!

nisa turtles games 

leo drescher !! stalker alert!

shaved armpits

“I checked under your pillow for you already.”

In the car I told your boyfriend I thought everything would be fine, none of my business, but he had a face animated by traces of you. I wasn’t trying to be kind or falsely reassuring, I’m not saying it won’t be difficult, the worst is yet to be if ever it should come. But I think you two are going to be together for a long while yet. You have something special. 

 

It still sounds to me like complacency, resignation, when someone asks me, especially with regard to P-Andrew, “Isn’t it enough that you met someone special? Why didn’t you stay with him?” With regard to Specificboy, “He was special, hold on to him/ He wasn’t that special, you’ll meet someone better.”

 

I’d like to clarify it further. It’s not the specialness of the person in and of themselves, because then we’d be looking at the beloved’s trophy value, a self-contained beauty frozen in the context of the showcase. More critically, it’s the specialness of their effect on you. Without any sound I sit up, starving with the need to better myself, not for him, but in his settling dust, the wake of his jittery ambition. Without irritation I find myself silent where previously I’d have complained. After him, I am entirely fearful but also valiant. He’s a fine thing to look at, unique unto himself, beautiful down to the ridges of his scars. But his value is not in how admirable or rare he is. It’s the effect he’s had on me, so that I’m buying a ticket, merchandise, and setting up my own act to rival his.

 

And I don’t care to own him, perhaps he will never kiss me again. It doesn’t matter. I’ve been compelled to move from here to a worthy future, and that is the holy grail I’m chasing, whose nomadic and turbulent map he marked upon me. And this feat, you silly boy, is quite profound and quite profound indeed is the extent of my affection for you.

if the world’s at large why should i remain

The measure of my affection for you lies in the willingness to brave technological catastrophe and hours of confuscating word tangles. For as long as you do not know how I feel, a more telling indicator might be that I don’t get mad when you’re not exactly nice (here I go making excuses, because you’re cold, ill, sleep deprived, in need of a private moment– valid states for grumpiness, and anyway you were never the warmest in words– am I spoilt because everyone else is unabashedly sweet to me?).

 

Some people say they’d never pick my path of risk but Kex knows I’m just coming to life again. I look at these plans not as prayers, because if anything a higher power is just standing aside and gesturing, “By all means, if you please! I’ll just potter behind.” It is my time to strive and if I don’t do it for you I do it to live with myself. If you’re unworthy, just another bruise or speeding ticket, at least I’m moving from where I whine to where I want to be, where undoubtedly I’ll find something precious, sunken and beautifully surprising– which actually, has only so little to do with you.

09

5 days in the new year and already! 50 paths in dendrites growing. Maybe this is the year of sacrifices, but I have no intention of sobbing into a wad of regrets. I just want this to be a year of entrances and motion.

 

Resolutions have especial value this year. Only because I’m determined to fence it off from last year’s shapeless epiphanies, which, though necessary as a sort of meandering pilgrimage in answer-finding, are no longer relevant to me.

 

RUN

Previously I always walked right through things, whether they were swamps or sprinklers. This is not to say I didn’t hesitate, but I calculated my risks and scuttled pellmell into the mess. This meant emerging from the other side either bearing gleaming spoils or muddy, bloody brambles.

 

The difference– cut out the thinking, just run. Run away, run towards. Run from the confusion and daydreams, run straight for the observable answers, the waiting doors. Run literally too– run off the lethargy from the many indulgent evenings. There are too many places to go so nevermind where, just go, keep going.

 

LOVE

As you did when you were 17: keeping expectations simple and calling assumptions hopes. The way he lingers at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for you when everyone else has gone, is enough to let you know that given the chance he’ll run his fingers down your spine, nervously, tremulously, gratefully, that he’ll tell you every joy and sorrow and about the pregnant cat he fed his waffles to, that he’s yours even though you’ve never asked and it’s only been 2 weeks.

 

And as you would do, were you a functional adult. It’s time I was a functional adult. Will not be irresponsible fuckwit or put up with fuckwittage.

 

BE HAPPY

Because there is so very, very much to have and hold and in the end this is all for the better.

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.