WHO ARE YOU?

look into your history. that is you, defined.

WHAT DO YOU WANT?

look into your heart. that is you, definitively.

WHAT WILL YOU DO?

look into your mind. that is you, unfortunately.

Forecast for 2010: Limited and limitless.

9.17am. serangoon road. broadway hotel bus-stop. the world rejuvenates in 10 days. the baby cat paws up and down the pavement by the main road again, dancing alongside strangers alighting from the bus stop (the first time i saw her she was mocking the tourists), keeping up, giving up, sometimes earning a smile or two with some effort (a smile which properly wakes up stranger). shes (why not?) so skinny, body of grey and white. i may look grey and garbagey, but i do not sit and wait for your disposal, it seems she says. she eyeballs something that interests her, grovels her way under the fence, which doesn’t seem to fence anything but grass- and wet cockroach gapes from the puddle!- her lithe body makes it through. beyond the fenced up grass is a kindergarten school for baby humans, so it seems apt as apples for kitten to hang around here, restless and benign as the others. ah, the age when you mock the world, and not the other way around.

if all of us got a coin each time we said it like it was, my friend’s chest would be aburst; a right treasure trove, heck- an underground cave with labyrinths paved in yellow. if all of us earned a flower each time we helped someone out, my friend’s backyard would be a 1800s public garden fit for visiting royalty.

but today, because of such a friend, i splutter and choke, am purple and then green, i wringe in despair. honesty is like salt, keep it in good amounts, and give it to those who ask for it. help isn’t always available, one man’s meat is another man’s poison.

and really, if you intend to be honest to benefit someone, to go out of your way to help someone beyond yourself, you step back, see this person, accept this person wholly, before you even lift a finger. that, or i’m beyond your help.

can they see that my house is built from a stack of cards? can I build a house from a stack of cards? can I live in a house built from a stack of cards?  If my house of cards is indeed a house, how do i make life in it, how do i live, how do i sleep and awake- with the a daily eagerness and a daily horror arriving side by side each night?

i lost my phone over the weekend. insufferable naked feelings abound. then…

stephanie: got a weird text message from some dude who wanted to get back together with his gf — who had the same name as i did. thought i would do him a favor and say sorry wrong person. but he kept bugging me! how weird that his ex-gf has the same name as i do… i wonder if he stole one of my friend’s phones. did he steal your phone?!?!

me: hmm!?!?! thats the weirdest story ive heard in a while. it makes me scared cos there are so many msgs in that phone! Sent at 6:01 PM on Tuesday

stephanie: shit! it is isn’t it. Sent at 6:03 PM on Tuesday

me: so what are you doing? abt the messages how does he keep buggin u after u tell him ure the wrong person!?

stephanie: nothing he called and i yelled at him

me: LOL

stephanie: he called and wanted to ask me who i am — he was like who are you? i’m like errrr no who are you?! and i really yelled at the dude and hung up on him

me: thats so strange. but er if its my phone- i dont know…. that person is harassing my contacts? Sent at 6:08 PM on Tuesday

stephanie: no could be my other friend who just lost his mobile too hmmmm

me: HAHA. sorry. thats too hilarious. your conclusion.

stephanie is busy. You may be interrupting.

What do the numbers in your room say about you?

$300 swivel chair.

50 red roses.

500 piece jigsaw.

18 tourist snaps.

36 novels – 12 childrens’ books.

3 door wardrobe.

5 drawers, unlocked.

2 diaries, bedside.

1 alarm clock.

i see the blank screen and i falter.

these past weeks i’ve had plenty to say. but carthasis hasnt arrived easy. many things happened in my life this year. 1205am. maybe i’ll make it quick. as if i were paying a buck a minute to cleanse my soul of the datedness of this all.

i got behind the wheel this year. i’ve stop learning to drive for three months already. i guess i was dishearted with failing three times. i need to get it back quick or else the money i’ve spent on it will be lost.

i got a job this year. its been challenging, and stressful. i thought working in a non-profit, for a cause, would be easy- everything i do will be justified. its a bit more complicated. welcome to reality. i hate saying that. i really do.

i got to know some interesting people this year. interesting is a broad category, within it, i’d narrow my definition to different. interesting because they are different from me.

i got to discover more of my flaws this year. my faults weigh me down more than anything. for if i were as blameless and good as i imagined, i wouldn’t be in such state of affairs.

1214am, i write really slow. this is turning out to be an expensive post. but here’s where it starts to get intensive.

i found purpose this year. an everyday purpose. something so essential for a human being , something i take for granted some times. the purpose, it to become good at my job. to balance creativity, practicality, personal growth and efficiency.to match abundance with need.

i found love this year. a veritable love, something deserving of the years i’ve waited and scorned and sighed. what love brings on a carthorse: the departure of mundanity, heart parachutes whooosh, the most insane missings, the desires you never knew you possessed but now grip you like you’re an incurable fool. the trouble with these love narratives- i suspect they always make one feel like they’ve stepped into a piece of melodrama. and the moment i did, i couldnt stop talking about it. to friends, strangers, family.

to family… as a result of this new and seemingly perfect love.

i found chaos this year. my crawling rueful independence is questioned, my family support base took a beating and still hasnt recovered, i held the one patriarch of my life, sobbing to my shoulder,  distressed. i bear the guilt of my mother’s fears and reprise her cycle of worries. and i am selfish selfish selfish. never felt more selfish in my life.never felt more justified either.

in a seeming end, i made an irreversible promise.

how should i set the scene from now? how will this year end, and with what resolve can i steel myself with?

25 more days to 2010.

I usually try to write to an interested audience, I’d explain and introduce the whims and sullies of my day, footnote the lived experience with blooming thoughts from a limited worldview. I don’t know what the point of this entry is, it certainly isn’t the summary of 11th of November, nor are these sparks that keep flying- those that you have to immediately record or will disapppear into the horizons of a harried mind. This entry is layered word after word, sentence piling upon sentence all in a wish, to find and express an undiscovered thought, one that will only appear after a reasonable body of text accumulates.  To write is to become. IThese are my pleasures- the undeclared meaning in the written word. Ocassionally I’d indulge in these. These entries are perhaps least attractive to any interested audience seeking digestable takeaways. These entries are intensely personal, yet they are recorded here, in the public eye, for good reason. I’d never say they were entirely for you to read. No, they fulfil my need for you to read. Any of you. Everyone of you. Read what? All of this. You read to pass the time. Today is a passable day.  A day for reviewing memories, not making memories. A day where work doesn’t threaten to engulf, but doesn’t leave you enough. A day where loved ones are near, but not heard, nor spoken to. A day I’ve missed and let miss. Signing out. Period.

Here’s a sneeze. Someone’s random wish–or a bothersome allergy? If someone’s random wish- who would it be, and for what reason, the pricze of a sneeze?

To this I ponder the ABCs.

A- I left (them:himher) a not too memory- not unpleasant: a warm glow in the recent drawers of the front-row cupboard -unpleasant: a stray thought first, and then a burgeoning corn I become.

B- My image is evoked amongst other thoughtful associations in the long eventful hours of a day, note: I am nothing much, nothing less, I could be functional utility.

C- I am the curator of awaited admiration, affection, obsession, the pirate’s plank of reasonable restraint, or?

A bothersome allergy. Born of me, and born by me.

I’ll have to wait for another sneeze.

…

..

.

And still not know.

We live in a world no short of crisis, tragedy, misfortune, and mishap. I have never doubted that. Then again, I have no key to its comprehensive entirety. Like anyone else riding with me in this public bus today, I have some observable morsel of clue to their lives, as they probably would mine, but beyond that, I have no reasonable idea.

I’ve met people. These are stories I have never imagined before stepping foot into the Action for AIDS office- the stories of the affected and the infected, of those who live with three letters that have no known cure. HIV. AIDs. I have overheard, met, listened, peeped- the last time I heard, it was a boy no more than 17. It’s more complex than losing a limb, much darker than living through a stroke. The irretrievable lots they have been assigned to, for life. Chained, to themselves, to the growing demands of their bodies, burdened on a secondly basis to the material costs of keeping themselves alive. This is a disease that strikes hard- it captures a vulnerable human, it proceeds to not only disarm a body’s natural immunity, it mutates proteins, it mutates the images of which the human has worked to acquire. It causes you to question your social support system; it tests your ability to tolerate living in a community. This is a condition that eats away at a person’s sense of self-worth. We will be hard-pressed to find another medical condition that will necessitate such an alarming level of blame, shame and hate in this century.

What does it mean to work for a cause? Does it blind rationality? Does it make me champion the minority- a view of the hackneyed – compelling but ultimately one that runs separate and parallel to the mainstream consciousness? Do I lose when I seek to find, accumulate and catalogue, live with –all probable reasons to give- and then can islanded in my grand canyon of purpose, with a bunch who declare no beneficial similarities to me?

I cannot afford to grow insular in growing my own passions for the cause. Just as there are typhoons and floods, wars and broken families, this cause exists as a particular unit of plight amidst the others. There must be a way to make one’s help to all these, non-exclusive. If everyone gave to the world’s problems, surely the problems would not only be solved at its best efforts, but diluted? Sure, granted this is impossible because we all live in individual realities as opposed to collective communal consensus- than surely the next best step is to find a way for people to quantify the efforts they contribute to live in this world?

We live in a world no short of crisis, tragedy, misfortune, and mishap. This is un-true unless you inhabit all whose lives you deem needy, unfortunate – ‘charity cases’. Until you become one. But such foresight is impossible. So it’s my job to make you try.

swing across trees, from towering to feeble trunks, to branches and vines, the leaves quiver and awake, fast become greenery that quakes in the wake of the monkeys and their nimble sure-footedness. They approach my space in my morning wait for the bus. Hardly any of my bus-shelter companions blink an eye. They don’t see them.

Monkey approaches the green dividers- dividers that mark pedestrian from mammalian, constructed from divine, their way versus ours- and perches himself securely onto the railings. He’s eyeing the trash-vomitting public dustbin at our shelter. He accesses his potential finds. His family continues to quake in the greenery behind him, he has to do his work soon to show his leadership.

Monkey chooses Macca’s coffee over a bumper-can of Tiger beer, stuffs a quarter slice of toast into his mouth and pushes accompanying bread ends away, peers into emptied-out F&B packaging in disdain.

I recall my supper last night and my well-stocked fridge. It’s good to be human sometimes.

Identity.

Two nights ago, I found out that it was an 80 year old man who was crushed under the fully-clay-laden 15-tonne truck last Wednesday morning. It’s been a week since his passing. Eighty years old?

Fatality- confirmed.

There was even a picture of one forlorn bicycle wheel that remained visible beside the fully-tented body. He was crushed, and died on the spot.

Dispute.

Eye witness accounts say that the pedestrian lights were red when the cyclist proceeded. The ‘dazed’ driver said he saw no one when he turned.

Fustration.

I can’t locate the clipping online now.It was a 04 september report by TNP.

is ringing in my head.

This morning I rode into sunshine. The air conditioning in the bus was refreshingly cool, the sun was warming up the day outside. I messaged a friend whom I hadn’t had time to catch up with these past couple of months, he chirps back a cheery reply over sms- and I tell him,

I’m doing well too… Good to be alive! :)

I get off my bus. I have vague plans to help a friend today, and the intended errand takes me away from my usual route to work. I drop two bus-stops before my usual stop. I brisked walked once off the bus, each step I took was filled with purpose, it honestly was. Only the red lights at the pedestrian crossing had reason to slow me down in my tracks.

And then that sound. Like a clap of thunder. The two men standing beside me recoil and walk off in the direction we came from. They re-circled their steps- they still want to head the direction I was headed for – but something ahead was hindering their path. My eyes search ahead.

I thought it was a traffic cone. For some reason, the bright orange colour registered. Something on the gravelled road. No, the orange something was someone. Then I realised it was a man. It was a man who was flattened by a huge industrial truck that had tried to beat the lights. The man was lying not 1 metre away from the bulbous tyres.

His misshapened head kept my cold attention. I feel hot, and yet I feel cold. It was all black hair, and fresh dark red life dotted the gravel – the splatter makes a straight line, marking the crushing impact of lost life. I wanted to walk away, and yet the incident was far too bizaare for me to just shrug it off and turn away. Someone just died before me.

The bicycle he rode became him. Only one wheel portruded from his distressed form on the road- one wheel, not spinning, flush against him, pressing into him, and he’s pressed upon the road.

I don’t consider it a coincidence that I celebrated life literally moments ago, before witnessing a life put out in front of me in such a gruesome manner. I’m not sure yet though, what this is supposed to make me do, but it is a call for some kind of action.

I think he was a foreign man. He must have a family somewhere else, folks still not made aware of the freak accident that claimed him. The road, someone’s actions, his own haste and his abandoned mind when he biked across that crossing took his life.

And there is a reason why I was there and then.

If you are reading this now, I’d say good on you. I’m immensely glad we’re alive.

strictly speaking, i do not wish to travel back in time. but  i did feel tugs in my chest for the recent years that just slipped by, yes.

1. how its already wednesday

2. how its only wednesday

thought 1 wrestles with thought 2. it’s a mid-week crisis.

ftftftftftftfttftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftft

f and t makes the best two-letter fence.

106 calories/evening: a latch-key child grows up on cup-instant noodles with panda-faced fish-cakes.

‘how are you doing’ : hardest question to ask in shortest amount of time.

goose-egg activist: a person who fights visibly while all else around him or her remains in obscurity-  empty and stinky.

ftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftftft

“its a disappointing piece”.

Approaching truck. Moving vehicles all around. Lights. Truck is going to run me down.
The voice in my head slurs.

Today I find a bumpy envelope addressed to me.

“Birthday Girl!”

No name. Belated from the UK. My sister’s earnest handwriting.

Dear girl always makes me smile with her scrapbooking genius. Its a letter for me, written one part essay, one part instruction manual. “Super (wo) Man!!!”, it salutes, like a generous birthday greet. a superman cardboard cut-out falls out from the letter, except the cut-out is adorned with my face instead of o’ Kent (she even chose a picture she knows I favor).

And so I am greeted by a grinning ‘Super-Myself’ accompanied by four other strange looking parts of cardboard puzzle. What are those? The curiosity of a child approaching new toys fills me. What a treat. They are oddly shaped. They don’t look like they can fit together. For a moment, the fact that it could be a puzzle I was unable to piece mocked my recent musings for some jigsaw love. ( I am tired of coming home and being unconstructive in my free time, and decided jigsaws could be the missing cherry). I finally gave up her odd little cardboard bits, and read her manual on the flip side of the yellow foolscap letter.

“1 piece original cloak,” Ah. The red piece fitted neatly beneath ‘Super-Me’. Of course. Its Superman’s red cloak. “The original, the full-flavor, your cape is constantly introspective and self-improving, which can be a little tiring at times.” True.

“3 pieces special cloaks”. Genius. Interchangeable capes. For days when being red and shiny just isn’t enough. They’re exactly the same shape and size as Superman’s red cape, but these other ones are patterned, instead of plain graphic red. One of them- a street map. Another one, a mosiac of my scribbled name. The last one, she sketched Martin Luther King, Mahatma Ghandi, and Harvey Milk. The little buffet of male role models should be further analysed later. Meanwhile, the powers of these capes are named: Direction. Yourself. People. How well-thought out. Whenever I need divine intervention. What else can a person want?

The idea is winsome. She’s outdone herself again.

One thing that strikes me hard, how vulnerable i feel at the moment, and how my sister understands that I need strength and support. Thank you. Life doesn’t deal us with special capes. We have only bare flesh. Can people really own capes? perhaps. Capes sewn from experiences of hardship, capes borne out of love, capes modelled after iconic role models. We need capes. Because this journey called Life, I’m afraid sometimes we require superpowers.

Super-Me. She even included blue-tack so that I could attach the cape right away. But she stuck it right across my smiling mug. In my haste to remove the bluetack (for what? to confirm that the face was indeed mine?), the print from my mouth tears off slightly as well. So now Super-me is partially disfigured. I am missing some teeth and gum.

Even better, I hadn’t realize the significance of the blue-tack and tossed it aside for the colourful cardboard bits. Now I don’t have anything to fasten the cape onto Super-Me. And I have a disfigured grin. That is Everyday me. Flawed, and cape-less. Which isn’t so bad. What do you do if at age 24 you’re perfect and with perfect super-powers? What else would life have in store right?

No really, I’m not trying to put a nice spin to things. Naked and flawed Super-Me resonates with me. I am tired, tired, tired everyday from work. I wake up and I groan, I go to bed, and I wish i don’t wake up from my dreams. Optimism weaves in and out my consciousness, leaving me with yo-yo-ing spirits on a daily basis. I had thought this job was the best I could’ve scored after the months of searching. I don’t disagree yet. But yet the stress is getting the better of me. Sandwiched in this reality, I’m frantic and fidgety- am I stuck? Am I going to fail? Am I not going to be able to run away?

I’ll locate the blue tack.

P.s. how come the cardboard cut-outs smell like Play-doh?

What happened to the day- I bossed the younger kids into acting in my improvised play about Sang Nila Utama and the Red lava Mountain.

This is the day-I enjoy the fact that I am behaving like an adult, watching a proper play but in fact contributing a share to people who live on dreams and passion.

One fine day- I will write my own Peter Pan to life , when the Lost Boys return. When?

How has today been?

Today is the day I planned on doing only one thing , but proceeded to fail to do. Today is the day I can summon no credible excuses for my lack of concentration- just simply can’t focus. Today is the day my favourite pohpiah at lunch fails to live up to standards- the sour old lady who sold them to me for extra 30 cents per piece couldn’t even give me two more decent slices of lettuce. Today is the day when my neurotic hunger pangs interfered with my work. Today is the day when I felt like I could not outlive the rest of the week. Today is the day I can see up till Sunday- I usually don’t go there- way too far ahead. Today is the day I go to bed an hour earlier from yesterday- and know it won’t make a big difference to how I feel about tomorrow. Today is the sum total of-

9.30am. Office. Koffee with vaporated milk. siu dai. small-big? The sky is overcast, it already rained twice since I woke up this morning and rode the bus in. I went to the coffee stall, the Uncle knew my order. Small tiny smirk of satisfaction on my part- this is what routine is about. Except the small tiny smirk wasn’t really enough to lift my low spirits, dulled senses. I still feel like a block of wood.

“That just re-affirms the Buddhist belief that we are meant to suffer in life. We move from one suffering to another, everyone’s fate is different and the same- its all one suffering.”