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.

Please cuddle me if you see me my ears are drooping in stress

Murphy’s Law in full technological force ( I don’t even want to talk about it. It could be far worse but my. lost. data!!! SCREAM SCREAM) and on top of that I am broke. Can the government pay me my $600 already please!!

 

Let’s not be all hate hate whine whine while we’re in possession of our limbs and still living under a roof and perfectly able to have healing stress negating sex and pig out sessions no less. Breathe. Porkchops.

 

So I’ll just say GROWL GROWL WHIMPER HONK and crawl back into the funeral pyre of the land of Smoo. Baptism by fire. All the while I am reminding myself that this will build my resilience even if for now it’s just larding the inches onto my ass.

 

 

Full text FAIL. Twitch.

 

Many hours later I have finally succeeded (in finding something better)! PENGUIN CLAP of victory! PAPAPAPAPAPAPP!!

Flit.

One week into deadline quagmire, but we find time to laugh and love.

 

Psychology text: The JOY of STRESS.

 

Man prays over his steak: “We give special thanks for the life of the cow.”

 

As pointed out by Siran, this is the best name ever: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Which according to our textbook is pronounced “ME-high CHICK-sent-me-high-ee”.

 

“Massive class planning. [spouts off list of classes] And maybe Professor P’s classes because he is the man I wish to marry.”

“I don’t want to marry P, but I want to be in his class!!!”

“I want to be in P’s class… And his apartment. *_* I almost said pants but he is too pure for such thoughts.”

Hungry

Monday evening, I haven’t had lunch and the acid wakes up growling inside me. The professor’s forgotten to give us a break, and Darshini’s so impatient she begins to dance while sitting down (off fly the footwear, down thump her genteel heels on the carpet).

 

I dream of:

The puckering skin of creamy soup.

“Fried goat cheese. With lavender-infused honey.”

Clams shrinking in a shining wok, all fat and fire.

 

The hale hearty rasp of your neck, gently furred with stiffening hairs, which I can only imagine because I haven’t seen you for 3 weeks and have never lain you on this plate, anyway.

 

—edit—

Some nights I couldn’t be happier, some nights the thought of you fills a dent that isn’t yours.

 

“I know you’re busy but find the time to laugh if you can. I really liked those two seconds when you laughed just now.”

“Ha… I’ll definitely try.” tiredly “You’re such a hopeless romantic, you know.”

fumbles ”Am I? I mean… Don’t take what I say as romantic. It’s not meant to be romantic. I don’t want to get in your way. Unless you do think it’s romantic then feel free to do so. Because I do love you.”

“Then it’s like pretending it’s flowers if somebody throws shit at you.”

“But I didn’t throw shit at you!”

“I know, but you can’t just…”

“Yeah ok I know it probably sounds romantic but I mean, you can relax, I don’t have any designs on you…” falters

“Be my friend, babe.”

“Yeah, I’ll be your friend.”

 

I’ll get over this. I did before.

 

Moving along rapidly.

 

–edit–

Moving along rapidly indeed!

 

I wept a bit in a fit of hormones and Korea-sentimentality then lazily checked my grade for a paper.

 

I got an A+ for the paper on two-headed hydras, uh, social bookmarking. Gratification much.

SNAFU is an acronym meaning roughly…

Sometimes I get wordy and snarkily pretentious in my essays, which appalls me to no end. There I go again. The abuse of words that curl the tongue and upturn the nose when really I could linguistically bob a humble curtsey. You can be sure that’s what’s happening whenever I bomb this place with three trivial posts in one day, all fribble and no finesse. Yeah you can tell someone’s been writing a 3000 word essay, I get possessed by the semiotic spirit of a confounding and pernicious Victorian schoolmarm. Yah! I just need to Personify some Concepts now. Oh Lady Sleep why do you bashfully turn your cheek from my Exhaustion. 

 

Did you know another word for ‘trivial’ is ‘yeasty’? As is ‘hoity toity’ so says the free thesaurus. Man this bread is trivial. Ants in your pants or a hoity toity infection.

 

I have a huge distaste for words like ’snafu’ (sounds like a snack with Chinese dairy content) and phrases like ‘double edged sword’. I tried paraphrasing the latter but the first thing that came to mind was ‘two headed hydra’, not really what I was looking for. So I turned it to polycephaly, bicephaly, dicephaly and diprosopus but none of these were going to add value (‘add value’– another phrase I hate except in set meal menus) to my technology report:

… an ideal working model for freedom of speech, the ebb and flow of information left to the devices of demand and supply. But one must remember that Web 2.0 can be a congenital cephalic disorder/two headed hydra/while we’re on this mythical thread let’s talk three headed dogs and two faced deities…” 

Concluding things is hard unless you’ve got a stick-in-your-tummy-like-a-chicken-pot-pie type awesome phrase or perhaps a crate of beer, whereupon everything ends with an exclamation mark, a song, or a neat plop into bed.

 

NOTE: I really did go with two headed hydra in the end. It’s 3am! I’m tired! This is why I’m not a journalist!

23rd October Deadline

To submit my first runway design! Baby steps. 

 

My blood is pumping. Must make clothes this weekend and assemble portfolio.

 

The belle of the class just smiled at me in the middle of a lecture.  

The Professor Speaks

Reason to faithfully attend all her classes. 

“For example if I say Woman, with a capital W, I mean Woman as a social concept. You say, ‘Alamak! You open your pants, pull down and can see if you’re a woman already.’ But you don’t call a lionness walking around a woman lion do you? “

 

“I took you to the cemetery, you went ‘WHOA WHOA WHOA’ all around it and at the end of the day we had done an ethnography.” Actually that is really what we students did.

 

“If you went to a culture and they were not wearing clothes, they were wearing bits of bark and whatever around the what’s-it-and-the-what’s-it … The primitive fellows give a good example of what happened to you before.”

 

About Margaret Mead’s anthropological findings, in which her Samoan informants had lied to her about casual sex: “These ang mohs wanted to know about sexy things.”

 

“Don’t take my lectures for my lectures. Wrap your mind around it and form an opinion. An opinion is what I want in your exams. Give me one and you’ll never fail. Don’t just yes, no, yes, no, so hard to talk to you, you know. If you say ‘no’ I want to know why. Wilfred if you want to jump in with a tip, just jump in k.”

 

In imitation of a shallow observer: “The womb-shaped tombs– damn stupid man! Women’s wombs don’t look like that!”

 

Student offers food. “No thank you I’m on a diet. Been eating all day all night.” Pouts cutely.

 

Notices that the ribbon on her skirt is undone halfway through talking about presentations.

“I can’t knot it… Then I look like I have a belly in front” Demonstrates.

“Why don’t you tie it at the side?”

“Then I look like I have a wart on my side. Dede the Tree Man.”

 

A black and white shot of Malinowski. “Social scientists are sexy!” I second that.

 

Imjad asks how romance is conducted between the Trobriands.

Prof: “I think Imjad is asking… If they are not wearing clothes how then do they entice!”

Imjad: -panic- No no no no no! 

 

Love at work. I don’t talk in her class because I love hearing what she says.

1300 hrs in GSR 3.14

Dialogues with Dar*h

The D: “I think Confucius is very respectable… I don’t know, maybe because of his beard.”

 

Dar*sh returns disappointed from Mr Bean: “Mr Bean soya milk is very… creamy.”

 

Nisa: Your dress is very nice Dawn.

Me: Thanks, it’s good for buffets. I’m trying to make all my clothes buffet clothes.

Nisa: Buffet clothes?

Me: Yeah you can eat all you want and it’s fine.

Sue: No bulge.

Dar*h: No you shouldn’t have buffet clothes. Then you’ll get too complacent.

 

Everyday we Celebrate our Differences

In Chinese custom, paper effigies are burned as a sort of postal service to the dead. Xihao wrote in our Google doc:

“Apparently the afterlife has a booming red-light district. In April 2006, China’s deputy secretary of the Ministry of Civil Affairs prohibited the burning of ‘adult’ items such as paper condoms, karaoke hostesses and Viagra.”

Me: Why do the dead need paper condoms? Are they going to produce dead babies? Or get dead STDs that will kill them a second time?

 

Me: Where do animals go in Islam?

Nisa: All animals go to heaven. Even pigs. Pigs are halal in Heaven. Can eat pigs in heaven. -smack smack- Can’t wait for that.

 

Nisa: If I eat it and I feel bad about it, then it’s wrong. If I don’t feel bad then it’s not wrong.

 

In Islam it is forbidden (haram) to eat pigs.

Nisa: It’s what’s in the pig. Cause they wallow in their own crap and eat it. 

Dar*h: So you can’t eat any scavengers? Like prawns?

Nisa: Crabs are scavengers, I can eat crab. It’s not scavengers, just animals that are not exactly clean… Like insects. But crickets are ok.

Dar*h: What’s the difference between crickets and ants??

Nisa: Basically I can’t eat anything that lives in two worlds.

Dar*h: ?!

Nisa: I can’t eat amphibians. I can’t eat turtles. Basically I can’t eat reptiles. Or anything that’s clawed.

Dar*h: But that’s crabs!

 

Sue: There was a period where my friend was going to convert to Islam, because of a boy lah. … When she told me she broke up I was like, “Can we go eat xiaolongbao now??”

 

Dar*h: Can you take me one day to the mosque?

Nisa: Can! But you gotta dress properly lah.

Dar*h: Can you sneak me into Mecca one day??

Nisa: Yes. But we need male escorts.

Dar*h: We need male escorts!

 

Also, I learnt alot about Patron Saints:

Adrian of Nicomedia is the patron saint of arms dealers and butchers.

Lawrence is the patron saint of cooks, as he was roasted alive by the Romans on a gridiron.

And the same guy who looks after shepherds looks after murderers.

Overheard in the BE Studio

Because I am a chump who comes to school on Sunday and steals the school radio studio to have a project meeting in (kind members of BE, thanks for not clubbing me to death), you get today’s post:

 

Singlish at its finest in the spirit of learning:

A: “That time I was very stressed… Studied business law until I cried because I didn’t understand.”

B: “Why you cry, business law not meant to be understooded one! … My prof just needs [me] to regurgitate.”

 

“You know that it won’t happen but you still need to talk about it.”

 

“I give up! I shall not do… Doeth! This! Stuff.” 

 

Girl A: “It’s not hard to be smitten with X… “

Guy J looks doubtful.

Girl A: -proudly- “The girls I hang out with, if guys don’t chase after them there must be something seriously wrong with them.”

 

One afternoon in The Treehouse…

Five twittery little birds gathered, and as The Treehouse had nothing but tom yam soup and mee siam, we gorged ourselves on productive conversation. Which is to say we did discuss the significance of burial sites for our project, only after questioning the practice of sex in the afterlife.  

 

Men who are virtuous and make it to heaven may pass eternity with ”companions pure, most beautiful of eye”, which sounds paradisal even to me. Who doesn’t want company, “pure”, “splendid”, “of equal age”? If you’re a stickler, these heavenly wives come “with hymen unbroken”, “eternally young”, “with large, round breasts which are not inclined to hang”. Even better! “Non-menstruating, urinating, defecating and childfree”– because children can be so bratty and you no longer have to buy air freshener for the bathroom or marvel the freakiness of a creature bleeding 5 days nonstop without dying. Like the waxed ingenues of modern day porn, these babes are “hairless except the eye brows and the head” for nothing turns a man off like bristly armpits (Houri, Wikipedia, 2008). Which is funny because back in the 70s hirsute was all the rage.

 

Methinks though that a virtuous man might not be too excited about this sort of thing, dead or alive. Maybe all he’ll want to do is eat Philadephia Cream Cheese. Spend the day golfing. Stick with the woman he loved for 50 years. After a lifetime of women I think he will agree that only one requirement reigns supreme: ”I don’t care about the swollen breasts and hairlessness and whatever, as long as she doesn’t come with PMS”. (Xihao, 2008).

 

If I were saintly virtuous I know I’d like a heavenly sewing machine, angelic bales of shining fabric, and one $2000 intelligent iron but such materialistic desires damn me. Okay okay, I’d want to smite the meanness out of evil people from all the way up in heaven, turn their hatred into Poifull which is a type of Japanese jelly bean that satisfied my longing for gum in a gumless nation. I’ll have timsum with inspiring fellow dead people, go to the moon with my dogs, family and friends and discover a harmony of religions because hopefully we all share the same plot of stratospheric real estate. This is why as a Christian I’ve never told any Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, homosexuals and so on that they’ll burn in the dunnies of hell. Pish tosh. I believe that atheists and agnostics, too, can enjoy life after death as motivated microbes and cosmic dust. Segue into new life forms! Like pokemon. “Darwin! Daaarwin. Darrr.”

 

Back to the concept of a heavenly woman. Like all good things there is a catch. Gorgeous, gravity-defying and clean in her crevices as she may be, your little dreamboat will be ”60 cubits [27.5 meters] tall”, “7 cubits [3.2 meters] in width”, and “transparent to the marrow of [her] bones”. True beauty lies within. You will see for yourself what is truly in her heart, as well as what her kidney and intestines do to pass their days of joblessness.