meekfreak by lee ju-lyn

Another Old Man and the Sea

2011-08-28T18:38:00.002+08:00

By the way: Bad Composition

2011-08-06T23:44:00.006+08:00

I do apologise for the bad composition of this picture:

My excuse is, I took it in a hurry.
But, there is something interesting about it, you'll find,
if you'll bear, a little bit, with me.

At the bottom of the picture, you see some wooden planks,
and then some slabs of stone,
and two bigger stones, green with algae,
and then some pots on top of them, and at the back, some plants.

Just in front of the bigger stones, green with algae,
there's a kind of chain of blackish things on the ground;
and if you were there, to breathe the air,
you won't be surprised to find, the blackish things to be a pile of dog shit.

And before you think, "This silly spoilt person thinks that dog shit is interesting? Why?"
It's not the dog shit I find amusing,
But how, look closely now,
on the dog shit, there rests a rather large orange-black-brown-winged butterfly.

It was there for quite a while -
long enough for me to have had hesitated then hurried to take the picture -
flapping its wings slowly, like how butterflies sometimes do,
when they rest to feed on nectar.

Okay. Then, take a look around you, at the dainty butterflies with pretty wings,
Adorning your own or your wife's, daughter's, niece's girly things,
Curtains, blankets, clothes, bags, hair clips, necklaces, rings,
And imagine them to be resting, and maybe feeding, on dog shit.

Come on, you've gotta agree with me, at least a little bit, that it is entertaining.

Alternate Reality TV

2011-05-16T23:36:00.002+08:00

Once upon a time, in a world far away, surveying committees were formed with representatives from Heavens and Hell to collect data on the Human realm for assessment of future residency demands. The cosmic laws dictated that this would be done every now and then. The data reports would be submitted to a council of Heaven and Hell Gods' and Demons.

One time, a powerful spirit medium of the Human realm learned that one such committee was about to survey his county, so he went to inform the local magistrate. The medium was so resourceful that he even knew that the committee would make their assessments from watching an hour of local news programme.

The county magistrate rewarded the medium with a lot of money and quickly commissioned a fabricated news programme. He hoped that the committee would think that his beloved people were rich and happy, and save all of them places in Heaven. The News reported about additions of beautiful buildings and parks, new hospitals that treated for free, and a rich vibrant Arts scene. It reported bad weather ahead with a reminder for people to bring extra umbrellas when they go out so that they could lend it to people who forgot to bring umbrellas.

The surveying committee members were impressed by the state of events in the county and were inclined to assess that these people were likely to go to Heaven, as they must have been leading good and honest lives to deserve such a peaceful and prosperous place.

But one of the members, a ghost, who was banished to hell for mistreating poor people, stood up and said, "Wait! Didn't you all notice what was playing during the advertisement break?"

Someone replied that he missed it becuase he went to the toilet. The others were chatting and weren't paying attention, so the ghost rewinded the video tape and pointed out,

"Three commercials were aired during the break. One was on a slimming product. The other two were from competiting pawn shops broadcasting their services. How could this county and society really be doing well when the pawn shops are prospering (at least enough to advertise over television)?"

The magistrate had forgotten to tell the television station to suspend their commercial breaks.

The committee changed their assessment and applauded the vigilant ghost. They said that to his credit, the people in the county would have a place to stay when they eventually end up in Hell.

When they submitted the report, however, the Heaven and Hell Gods' and Demons reprimmanded the committee for their biased data collection. They were supposed to make independent observations, and not recommend if the people should be routed to Heaven or Hell.

The Gods and Demons said that in times of prosperity, there might be a high chance for greed and corruption to proliferate, so a lot of people might be sent to Hell. In times of poverty, there might be a lot of opportunities for people to show compassion and kindness, so a lot of people might go to Heaven.

The committee was sent back to collect data, and they were forbidden to do so from watching television, so they read newspapers instead.

Politics and Policies

2011-04-29T22:30:00.013+08:00

Once upon a time, there were four parallel universes and one not so parallel universe. In these universes, there each lived a School of fish of many different types and colours. There were green, blue, red, yellow, purple, pink, white, black, big, small, fat, thin, handsome, ugly, kind, greedy, clever, stupid, etc.

These Schools developed along their own paths. They had some differences, like their political environment and decisions. The fish in Universe A chose predominantly Green fish to lead their School. The fish in Universe B chose fish who were Green or Handsome. The fish in Universe C, like Universe A, chose Green fish, but amongst them, there were a bunch of Green and Clever fish who loved the School very much. The fish in Universe D chose Green, Ugly, Purple Clever, Yellow Greedy, and Pink Cool fish to lead the School. The fish in Universe E didn't really have leaders that decided everything by default that's why it was not so parallel with the rest.

These universes also shared some similarities, one of these similarities was that the Schools of fish were sometimes presented with the same decisions to be made. They sometimes conclude with similar or different decisions, for varying reasons. One day, it was time to decide whether or not they should open an opium den. An underwater opium den, imagine how attractive that would be!

Universe A. Where the Green fish ruled.

In the history of Universe A, the Green fish united all the fish in the School, despite their various differences, by one common love: that of money. They knew that of power, wisdom, and wealth, wealth was measurable and objective, and all the other communities that just started out, like the Birds and Amphibians, needed money to get anything done. And all the other fish were simple and smitten by the lure of wealth, they were eager to learn how to love money better and make more money. All the fish learnt to love money and those who were rich were envied and despised. And those who were poor were ignored and despised, even by themselves.

When it was time to choose their leaders, the fish chose those who were most capable of helping them keep their wealth and luxuries, despite resenting having to pay them so much to do so. But that was ironic because the only fish who were willing to rule and lead would do so only because they, like the rest of the community, loved money too. The Green fish were capable and had a good track record of keeping the School rich, so they were always chosen to lead again and again, and allowed to make all the decisions.

When the rest of the fish felt like lamenting (a luxurious past-time of the rich, so it was very fashionable), they'd complain about the Green leaders, and criticise the rich Green leaders on being elitist, and whatever.

When it was time to decide on the opium den, the Green fish leaders decided to open it for the sake of money, because of the revenue that it would generate. If it were not done, the School of fish might risk becoming poorer and nobody wanted that.

Universe B. Where Green fish and Handsome fish ruled.

In the history of Universe B, the Green fish used to rule predominantly, and when they did, they also united all the fish in the School, despite their various differences, by one common love: that of money. Money was measurable and objective unlike too many other things, like sanity.

Universe B used to be like Universe A, but somewhere along the line, they also voted for Handsome fish to be leaders, so the community came to be ruled by the Green fish and the Handsome fish, who made all the decisions.

They chose the Handsome fish, who were the bravest and loudest "lamenters" against the exclusive Green leaders, and who voiced their sentiments articulately, preferably in good English. Some of the Handsome fish volunteered because they had wanted to share the elitism and high salaries enjoyed by the Green fish. Some of the Handsome fish volunteered for love of the attention or the opportunity to lead. Some of the Handsome fish volunteered because they genuinely loved the common fish and wanted to do their parts for the community.

Some fish decided to support the Handsome fish because they were bored of complaining about the Green fish being elitist and whatever, and wanted new faces to complain about. They liked the idea that, no matter what colour they were, as long as they were born Handsome, or pretty, they stood a chance to be chosen as leaders, too one day. Besides, ceteris paribus, the Handsome fish were much nicer to look at.

When it was time to decide on the opium den, the Green fish leaders and the Handsome fish leaders called each other names for a while before deciding to open it for the sake of money, because of the revenue that it would generate. If it were not done, the School of fish might risk becoming poorer and nobody wanted that.

And nobody, neither the Green fish leaders, the Handsome fish leaders, nor even the other non-leading fish who freed up some time from lamenting about the Green fish being elitist, thought of any alternatives to the opium den. Most of the non-leading fish became busier, having to lament about the Green fish, the Handsome fish, and how they were similar and different.

Universe C: Where there were Green and Clever Fish who ruled with love

In Universe C, the School of fish were all united by one common love: that of money.

However, amongst the Green fish, there were some Green Clever fish, who loved the common fish very much and wanted to do their bits for the community. They were very smart and intelligent. So, they decided to join the Green leaders, because they thought joining the Green leaders was the most efficient way to allow themselves to do some good work for the School. Some Green Clever fish even loved the common fish more than money itself. But they continued to earn a lot of money so that they would not be ostracised by the other Green fish. Ostracism would only waste time that could be better spent serving the School.

Even though the complaints against the Green fish leaders being elitist and whatever hurt the Green Clever fish leaders' heart, they still loved the School very much and wanted to protect the common fish from harm.

When it was time to decide on the opium den, the Green fish leaders decided to open it for the sake of money, because of the revenue that it would generate. If it were not done, the School of fish might risk becoming poorer and nobody wanted that.

But for the harm the opium den was going to cause the School? The families it would break up? The Green Clever fish couldn't sleep for many nights due to the moral dilemma. Some of them wanted to leave the community and live as recluses, but they thought, hey, if they stayed, they could help to prevent the second or third or forth opium den from opening. So, they stayed and tried to save the School from itself.

Universe D: Where the Green, Ugly, Purple Clever, Yellow Greedy, and Pink Cool fish ruled.

In Universe D, the School of fish were all united by one common love: that of money.

Along the way, Green, Ugly, Purple Clever, Yellow Greedy, and Pink Cool fish were voted into positions of leadership.

When they were done arguing over their differences, and disliking each other's faces, the different leaders made decisions together. And got along quite fine because everyone were quite different anyway. The Green fish and Ugly or pretty or handsome fish taught each other their experiences and shared with each other generously. They reminded each other of that they were supposed to love the community and pretended not to love money.

The non-leading fish did not expect that the leaders would have gotten along. Actually, they kept voting for arbitrary new groups of fish to become leaders so that they had new drama to lament about and different sides to take, but that did not happen.

After a while, the common fish finally decided to lament about policies and alternatives. They talked about rights, about campaigns, about the environment, and fashion and paintings.

When it was time to decide on the opium den, the Green, Ugly, Purple Clever, Yellow Greedy, and Pink Cool fish leaders decided to open it for the sake of money, because of the revenue that it would generate. If it were not done, the school of fish might risk becoming poorer and nobody wanted that. They loved the community who loved money after all.

Some alternatives were suggested: the Purple Clever fish suggested that fish could produce more eggs that could be sold off as slaves or food to the Community of Birds, Yellow Greedy fish suggested to have gambling dens instead of opium dens, the Pink Cool fish suggested to encourage all the fish to start their own businesses so that they could earn more money, some other fish (non-leaders who hoped to become new leaders) suggested cutting the existing leaders' pay (though everybody knew that that wasn't really help going to help save that much money and didn't pay much attention to them).

Ultimately, having ran out of good ideas, the leaders agreed that the opium den was the most efficient and sure way to bring in money. So, despite knowing the harm it was going to cause to the School, the families it was going to break up, the opium den was okay-ed.

Besides, if it was going to cause any harm, it would most likely harm those who were poor, who were ignored and despised, even by themselves, anyway. And if they all crossed their fish fingers, the lives of good and innocent fish would not be harmed.

Universe E: That which was not very parallel.

There was another universe that existed, Universe E. It was not very parallel.

The most fundamental difference, was that the community was not united by their love for money. They agreed that money was measurable, and objective, but it was also boring.

They loved their neighbours and friends and good food and simple pleasures, like good jokes, more than money. The rich was sometimes envied for this and that, and pitied for their this and that; the poor was sometimes envied for this and that, and pitied for their this and that. Nobody was really despised or ashamed of themselves. If there was any one love that united them, it was their love for their children, and their neighbours children. They want their children to be happy, not rich, and to have good friends and food and sense of humour. They even have formal education that gathered the children to learn jokes, and how to laugh healthily, and how to do silly dances, and how to make other people laugh. They were also taught how to make money but it wasn't the emphasis.

Another difference in the School of fish of many different types and colours, nobody really ruled, but were only put in their positions to administer the paperwork and filing, and they didn't get to make all the decisions.

Any suggestions that would impact the School, would have to be mooted, discussed and voted by the common fish who were persuaded by the arguments to vote. In other words, all the fish who cared enough about the decisions would cast a vote on whether to do something or not. Those that didn't, didn't. Selling of votes was punished severely. The arguments for and against different decisions were sensibly and carefully thought through. Everybody had the time to carefully think through any suggestions or decisions because they weren't in a hurry to make money.

The arguments would be clearly articulated in the newspapers that were printed on the corals and the little pebbles for the small fish to read, or scrawled in big letters on the giant underwater cliffs for the big fish to read. Those who could read would explain what they read, with limited personal bias to those who couldn't read. They would think for each other, and the impact of the decisions on each other's children. The common fish discussed these issues with each other passionately, intelligently, and developed their opinions actively. They had the time to do these things because they did not love money that much, and thus, saved time from not working so hard for money. They had time to think about how to build an environment for their children to grow up and become happy in. They want their children to be happy, not rich, not beautiful, not clever, not fat, but happy.

Happiness was difficult to measure, and super subjective, but it was okay because everybody had time.

When the time came to decide on the opium den, the School was asked to choose between money and the luxury of riches, such as better hospitals and roads, or the social stability, such as less suicides and simpler family problems. (They put it in more convincing and cohesive terms, of course, having more time than me.) A record breaking number of fish turned up to vote.

Some alternatives were suggested, but since they were unsuitable, the School finally decide to open the opium den. The Common fish, however, only approved it on the following additional conditions:

a) The only fish allowed in the opium den are those whose:

i) Total family income met a decent minimum sum that was equal to
$4,000 (beyond which each fish need not mandatory save 20% of that income for their retirement) X number of adults in the household; AND
ii) Family members (all living) gave their written consent; AND
iii) Quota for opium den entry (once a week) hadn't been used up.

The leading fish would administer these criteria more diligently and more carefully than how the fish divided and managed their public housing incentives.

b) The revenue that the opium den generated was to be used solely for researching a cure for cancer.

The fish eventually found the cure for cancer and even several other previously terminal diseases. They mass produced the cure and subsidised it generously to even the neighbouring Community of Birds and the Community of Amphibians and anyone else who needed it such that, finally, they wiped out cancers altogether (like how the smallpox is an extinct virus in our world).

The thinking fish of Universe E realised their problem: they had longer lives, and so had more time to ruin them in the opium den. Their fellow fish were more and more obsessed about money so that they could squander it in the opium den or buying opium den quota. Their children were less funny because they looked to joking less, and opium and intoxicants more, for pleasure.

Every year somebody, perhaps one who came from the generation of fish who witnessed how opium poisoning ruined their parents' or their parents' friends', or their friends' parents' lives, would moot to outlaw the opium den.

Finally, in the year when cancer was wiped out from the face of Universe E, a record breaking number of fish turned up to vote again.

Against the tempting suggestions to keep the opium den open, so as to put the extra revenue into researching underwater fireworks, which would be ultra grand to watch and would make many fish very happy to watch, or put up trendy designer litter bins for use in the trendy shopping district, which would make many fish proud of the School, the School of fish decided to close down the opium den.

One of the popular messages against the underwater fireworks research was: underwater smoke from setting the underwater fireworks would be symbollic of that rising from the ashes of lives and families ruined by the opium den.

Universes F, G, H, I J...?

Actually, Universes F, G, H, I, J... also existed. In these universes, there each lived a School of fish of many different types and colours......

行得通不通?

2011-04-21T10:48:00.007+08:00

The Invisible Headache

2011-04-08T07:00:00.000+08:00

A girl had a bad headache which got worse every night.

She felt like something inside her head was pulling her two temples together, being wound tighter, and tighter.

It turned out that it wasn't just a feeling, but that her head was really being clamped tight by an invisible clamp put in place by an invisible troll, who came to her to tightened it every now and then.

Ho, until her head was so tightly pressed together that her eyes popped out of her sockets one day. That was when they found out about the invisible troll, when they heard him say,

"Hey,
There they go!
Finalley!
Hello!"

He liked rhymes.

Opium Wars

2011-03-11T11:36:00.005+08:00

One evening, as my father fell asleep in front of the television he pretended to watch, I overheard a news report on how revenues from the casinos "exceeded expectations".

Not having written anything in a long time, I thought of putting something about the casinos together.

So, for a few days after that, I went out of my way to read the newspapers, as a kind of research. I don't usually read the newspapers, you see. I'd do it if I were expecting to be tested on current affairs, like at an interview, and when it would be too complicated to explain why I don't read newspapers. I don't read the news because I find it quite uncomfortable to know so much about what happens in other people's lives. It gives me a headache to imagine. It makes me apathetic.

Anyway, I came across this article about someone being caught for breaking the law in order to finance his gambling debts. His wife had left him, taking his kids with her. His parents did not show up when he stood for trial, and were cited to have given up on him. He was jailed.

I wondered if this guy would have messed up through some other means, if not for having gambled too much. Perhaps he would have messed up anyway. But since he already messed up and his life was changed for ever... we shall not know what would have happened if he didn't gamble too much.

The casinos bring money to our economy. They help to sustain our economic prosperity and progress, which will in turn enable us to live better lives, have better teachers in better schools for our children, have better banks for us to put our money in, appreciate and create better art, read and write better writing. We would have better medical things, longer life-expectancy, re-employed to work until I don't know when... And more fireworks to watch every now and then.

Fireworks are always nice. They are pretty and generally... celebratory.

That's a whole lot of good, for a bit of bad, isn't it?

Tell that to someone who had messed up his life at the casinos?

But it was his own fault? He had a choice not to go? He could have spent his spare time volunteering as a Director of Traffic at his children's school instead of gambling? He was adequately informed of the ills of gambling?

This reminds me of the recent SARS epidemic, when everyone was told to wash their hands properly. And the elderly were especially cautioned to exercise extra care as they were more susceptible to the virus. When the elderly, or anyone else, did fall sick, we had heros who helped them get better. The victims did not have fingers pointed at them. Neither were they told that it was their fault for not locking themselves up in a ziplock bag.

Were those who were more susceptible to the gambling addiction adequately warned? And even if they were, is it entirely their fault if they get addicted? If it's not their fault, then is it ours?

Who is responsible anyway?

Who's responsible for the future SARS victims if we don't have better healthcare ready for them? Who's responsible if we have a shorter life-expectancy? Who's responsible for lesser fireworks?
And then, who is responsible for a higher suicide rate?

This is like asking who or what was responsible for the opium wars.

Where do we draw the line?

I have a headache imagining all this. Here I am, on a weekday, sitting up in my bed, writing on a laptop resting on a pink nine dollar plastic breakfast tray. I am writing about what happens in other people's lives - people I don't even know. If not for the sacrifices and difficult decisions they made, would I be enjoying this luxurious leisure at all? Or would I be enjoying this everyday?

I resumed my avoidance of reading the newspapers.

Hierarchy

2011-01-20T22:52:00.007+08:00

The hair on the left leg of a human being did not get along well with the hair on the right leg. The two groups of hair would compete to get ahead of the each other, and in doing so, try to make their opponent fall behind. In other words, there was sabotaging, espionage, war, strife.

Things got especially exciting when the human being went dancing. The competition was fierce. The human being took two steps forward, one step back. Things got especially rowdy when the human being sat on the swing - it would be windy and the legs would be swung around rather violently.

They didn't know that their competition was futile, since they were destined to never get that far ahead of each other. They were just obsessed with the competition. It was all they lived for.

They did not know that the pubic hair, residing between the legs, observed their strife for sport, and laughed at their foolishness.

The pubic hair, however, too, took their perspective for granted.

As the groups of left and right armpit hair watched the pubic hair watch the leg hair's unrest - they thought about the meaning of life and philosophised on what they were meant to understand. They thought about whether there were any other groups of hair up there watching them watching them. Sometimes they would think they were close to understanding everything, until they remember it was impossible for them to ever know for sure. Both groups of left and right armpit hair would never know of the other's existence.

The hair on the human being's head couldn't be bothered with all the gossip and politics with the groups of hair below, being too busy with getting dyed, groomed, cut, done-up for off-showing to other human beings and whatever. The hair on the head was too busy with being concerned about being watched by other human beings to do any watching.

The Chilli sauce and Ketchup at Jack's Place

2010-12-26T14:38:00.001+08:00

The chilli sauce and ketchup met on Table 29 in Jack's place.

Standing side-by-side,
day-in-and-out,
in the dimly-lit restaurant,
with slightly too-cold air-conditioning...

It was hard for them to not to fall in love

Against the checked
green-and-white plastic table cloth,
they made an attractive
couple.

They longed for the next time
to be poured on or beside each other
on the same corner of a plate
or a dedicated saucer,
so that
they could swirl
into
one
another
and
make
hot
sweet
love.

On Art and Writing

2010-10-22T16:12:00.004+08:00

(My Studies)

I have been a rather serious student about art in the recent few years. My “serious” efforts include putting myself through related courses and undertaking other forms of research.

My interest in the arts started with my chance discovery of the Surrealists. I was surprised to find how they articulated what I was intuitively doing with my stories then. For example, Rene Magritte was explaining his concept of mystery: “The mind loves the unknown. It loves images whose meaning is unknown, since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown.” I could relate to this with my story about a bear with a biscuit face (close to Magritte's painting of men with apples blocking their features from the viewer). A bear with a biscuit face was also a curious juxtaposition of elements, which is a surrealist theme. I was already practising automatic writing, a technique which I later came to learn was Surrealist as well.

Learning what they were consciously doing helped me realise better what I was unconsciously doing with my writing. For example, I was interested with how in different readers’ mind, the phrase “bear with a biscuit face” conjured up in some the image of an oreo biscuit, or chocolate biscuit, as opposed to my image of a “ritz bitz” biscuit. The minimalist writers were writing with sparse descriptions so that the audience's imagination would fill in the gap (e.g. they would articulate these things in an article or interview). The critiques of the Surrealist movement would also point out limitations of the way I was writing in (e.g. it was likely to be obscure and taken as random arbitrariness). In this way, I was able to quickly develop and evaluate my approach or concepts.

Wanting to know more about other art theories, I attended Dr Sian Jay's appreciating western art course (at NUS extension) thinking it would be a crash course to “download” the knowledge into my head – as opposed to reading 300 books myself. Through this course, I gained confidence in my way of interpreting art and art theories, and learnt how to think about art more systematically and effectively – in other words, I learnt how to learn better.

(On Art and Writing)

As writing becomes more important to me, and developing my writing gains higher priority, I try to learn more about art and explore new concepts.

Prior to this attempt, I have never tried to explain how art influences my writing in words – not even my private journals, not even in my conscious thought. It had been a very organic process, which I hope it would still largely remain to be.

I take in what I learn, I absorb what I can, and it becomes a part of my brain. It's like how I eat a plate of char kway teow and it becomes a part of my body (as in the nutrients and fats would fuse with my cells and become a part of my body forever after). In the same way all the char kway teow I’ve ever eaten in my life will come to affect the way my heart beats – my art education (or any other experience) will fuse into my thoughts and state of mind, affecting the way I produce anything and what I produce.

Honestly, I'm not sure if putting this process into words would ruin it. If the words are ill-chosen, the idea would be “set” in the wrong way. If ideas were gems, then words that articulate these ideas would be the gold or silver that encases and frames ideas to highlight their brilliance. Passages and poems are crafted jewelleries, then. My role as the writer is akin to the jeweller – we’re both craftsmen, and we both have to search for materials – ideas and words or gems and metal – that we can be inspired by and will (here, i want to use "will" like "wield" because I think it's a better verb to mean "wield").

Rather ironically, the above two analogies in my “disclaimer” already hint at how art affects my writing. When I study the arts (like the art of char kway teow or the art of jewellery making), I study the philosophies or states of mind of the artists (who are also like the cooks and jewellers) that may distinguish them and affect their paintings or sculptures (like their char kway teow or jewelleries).

When I look at a painting from an artist, I try to imagine what he's thinking, appreciate his sense of aesthetics, and decide where I agree or disagree with him. From these processes, I develop ideas and my aesthetic sense. In addition, having “consumed” the painting, it will affect my thoughts and state of mind, which will in turn affect what I produce.

(On Ideas, Reality, Images and Words)

Another concept that I have is in part influenced by Michel Foucault’s This is not a pipe where he discussed some theories on the relationships between reality, images, and words, with reference to Magritte’s paintings; that is, words (being just words) and images (being just images) only refer to the idea of what that is real; the idea is also distinct from that which is real. The word “pipe” refer to the idea of a pipe which refers to a real tangible pipe.

It brings us to the question then, what is it that a painting is trying to conjure? And how that compares to what is it that a written story is trying to conjure?

In my haste, I could over-simplify and say a painting and a written story are similar in both trying to conjure ideas in the audiences’ mind. The idea in the audiences’ mind – becomes new and different altogether – being neither the reality, the image, nor the written story, nor my idea in the first place. And this process is another very important factor of a story – not that which is described explicitly with words – but the ideas it intends and manages to conjure in the audience’s mind.

(On state of Mind, Soul, Heart)

And how effectively the art work (story or picture) conjures up an idea in the audience’s mind and heart can also be affected by the quality of the art work’s soul or heart – which is in turn, affected by the state of mind, soul, or heart of the artist.

I know I’m being confusing, suddenly introducing more elusive things like “heart” and “soul” here. But “state of mind” seems to only refer to the intellect and reason, which is somewhat lacking. I am really referring to the heart and soul, which besides the mind, are faculties capable of creating ideas, albeit of a different nature, property, and cultivation.

This is where the char kway teow analogy is effective. Have you tasted the char kway teow of a master who fry his kway teow with heart, with concentration and sincerity? Compare his kway teow to another that’s fried by his son while chatting to his friend about going to the casino? The difference in the taste between both plates of noodles is just the stuff of how state of mind and heart of the artist affects the soul of his work.

(On Chinese Art)

In a way, tasting char kway teow cooked with heart (referring to how we say in Chinese, to use one’s heart to do something, and not how Westerners say “I heart New York”), would help to cultivate my sensibilities and discernment. In a similar way, studying the arts and contemplating how artists paint with their heart, helps the cultivation of my heart. I hope you know what I mean, these matters are very difficult to explain.

In the process of cultivating myself, I also turn to Japanese, Chinese and Southeast Asian art. To me, the artist’s heart is especially prominent in Chinese ink paintings, perhaps due to how they’re created. Usually a painting would begin with spontaneity and completed in a single sitting. Because of the properties of the paper, every stroke or dash is irreversible. When things are created spontaneously, implying that it comes instinctively, there is less room for planning ahead, and the heart takes over. Because there is no room to retract any move, the heart must be skilful, not to make mistakes and will (wield) the ink skilfully.

Moreover, my Chinese lifestyle and environment predisposes my ideas, aesthetic sense, and my general state of mind, to be similar to those of Chinese artists. Despite using English as my writing and reading language and consuming a lot of American and European culture and education, I realised that there was a large part of me who can’t empathise with Western culture. I really have an Asian soul, you know. If I die and become a ghost, I will be a Chinese ghost (who can speak in English), but I will have the properties of a Chinese ghost (which seem to differ quite a bit in properties of being from that of an Ang mor ghost). Of course, there is still much to learn from the Surrealists and the other Angmors, but say Chinese ink painting really relates to the part of me that has been fed by the soya sauce that I’ve eaten all my life (and really, there’s soya sauce in everything in our diet, including char kway teow). Surrealism is really like French food, or mayonnaise, which, frankly, I still don’t quite understand because my grandma doesn't know how to use it in her cooking. It’s interesting, but cannot take the place of soya sauce in my life.

Being in caught in the mundane East-West conundrum of modern Asia, I need to amalgamate East-West ideas. But what that is more important than how East-West are conflicting and complementary, is that after I’ve consumed them, they’re a part of me, and they’re no longer just East or West – they’re my left or right brain, right or left lung, and I only have one heart.

(In summary)

So, I write, then I learn things, I change, and then I write about different things differently. Being aware of how this process works helps me grasp the concepts and learn and change faster. For example, being aware of how art affects my writing enables me to use art better. For another example, thinking about how ideas, reality, and images differ helps me understand how ideas, reality, and words differ. My stories conjure ideas in the readers’ mind which are different from my idea. How effectively my stories (or essays) conjure these ideas in my readers’ minds also depend on the cultivation of my state of mind, heart, and soul. (This summary, for example, does not conjure the same ideas as what was explained above with analogies and details.) Studying Eastern and Western art cultivates my perspective and my heart from which I write.

By the way: Pornography

2010-10-03T13:25:00.002+08:00

Buffalos at the Botanic Gardens

2010-09-25T10:36:00.009+08:00

Lately, I've been reminded of weird things I did when I was a child. I find it weird now because I can no longer imagine where the time came from, especially if I compare to how children nowadays have to scurry around and don't do the things I had to do.

For instance, I spent considerable time with a bunch of stone buffalo sculptures at the Singapore Botanic Gardens. My father had some sort of official business with some committee at the Gardens, and he would bring my mother, brother, and myself along, to "wait a little while". I suspect the business was not so official, in that he wanted to go and say hi to friends and with fellow orchid hobbyists. In any case, we didn't question how else our time could be spent more constructively, and like good Confucian kids, dutifully entertained ourselves with whatever there was to do.

The meeting place was held at some corner of the Gardens, where there was a bungalow of sorts. In front of the bungalow, there was a field, which was often very muddy, much to the dismay of my mother as it caused damage to my pink patent mary-janes and sometimes the lacy white socks, which was fine because I really disliked those lacy white socks anyway because they were ticklish and uncool.

On the field, there were some great stone sculptures of water buffalos. Maybe like eight statues, or five? Some depicted buffalos standing, grazing, some lazing, some depicted mother-and-calf being together. They were black. And idyllic. And maybe not as big as real buffalos, but big enough for me to climb and sit on their backs.

I must have been three to four years old? Or it was at least before I began kindergarten, or it was at least before I learnt to complain that we would rather be watching TV at home or shopping or something.

There were no other kids there. It was tucked away. My mother would sit at the bungalow patio to watch us. My brother would show off how he's big enough to climb on one that was difficult to climb up on and that I could only climb on the safe "squatting" or "lying down" buffalos. Maybe at my pleads, he would then show me where to step and what to hold on to so to get myself up on something. But honestly, I can't quite recall what made it even fun for the first few visits.

But it was boring afterwards.

We would spend stretches of hours there. From the after lunch time to dinner time. A few times, we played until we couldn't anymore because it was late and we couldn't see. Maybe I exaggerate, because I didn't know how to tell the time anyway. I remember I couldn't tell the time because my family left it to the teachers from school to teach me that. And when school started, we didn't have weekend time to squander like that anymore, there was homework and tuition and blah blah constructive ways of spending time.

It must have been the repetition or the routine or the dread that etched the scene in my mind. It must be quite something, it has since been twenty years, after all! So I remember, like from a dream, the expanse of the field - or so it seems to a child at the age - and the stone buffalos.

And that was just one of the ways we squandered time, following my parents around where they wanted to go. My father also had a friend who sold dried goods (ikan bilis and other fishy smelling things) and we would go and visit the store so that he could chat with him for hours and hours...

Now, I see my friends, parents themselves, following their children around for their classes and so on. And I wonder if it was because I didn't have those classes to attend, or it was because... I don't know.

It's a weird memory - those water buffalos - quite out of place or time. But it is a precious and interesting memory. Thinking back, those water buffalos, and the boredom, probably meaningfully influenced my imagination and interest in the arts. Yet, my parents certainly didn't deliberately intend for it to become a part of my education.

Liger

2010-09-06T23:04:00.007+08:00

You might have seen this creature before, perhaps having been on a package tour to Korea, like I have, and even having captured a better picture than this one.

If you haven't seen it, surely you must have had heard of it before.

It's a liger - an offspring from a parent who is a lion and another, a tiger.

I make it sound so trivial - when I discuss it like that.

But really, take a good look at it, and tune out the cheap voices and act-smart perspectives that ring in the shallower parts of our minds... and realise that the world is a beautiful place for ligers to exist.

Maybe out there are fish made of sea-cucumbers, or parrots shaped like donkeys...

Gravekerbs

2010-08-11T22:41:00.006+08:00

In the past, they used to bury the dead in either churches' yards or cemeteries located in outskirts of town.

Nowadays, the dead are usually cremated, and even if we want to bury them, we don't have enough space for everyone in our graveyards or cemeteries. This is not yet catering for the population boom and the aging population etc. etc. factors pointing to an impending demand increase.

Do you think they will ever consider putting up the dead in those patches of grass by the roads, as in, those little plots bounded by road kerbs, lying between the pavements and the roads?

This idea came to me when I contemplated how the frangipani plants are grown on road traffic islands and the above mentioned little plots of kerb-grass. You know, frangipanis used to be associated with graveyards, where they, well, grew. This led to me thinking about how graves are constantly being exhumed to give way to development, and then, why not let their existence integrate with ours and move them into our living spaces too?

In a way, this will help our community to integrate better. Oh you live in Jurong East St X, Block YYY? Wow. Cool! My grandpa's grandpa lives there too, near Block YYZ, by the road!

Being surrounded by the dead would also help remind us on the fragility of life and appreciate our limited time left.

It'd be interesting how the graves would be marked. I think headstones are necessary, out of respect, and so people know not to let their dogs poop over the remains of other people's grandpa's grandpa. Then some of the less fortunate may choose to rent out the back of those stones as advertising space.

Somehow, when my time comes, I think I'd rather be buried than cremated. There's something more comforting about decaying messily and returning to nature, than getting torched, powdered, and encased in a marble, or ceramic, jar to be kept on a shelf. Even if it means I'd get dog pooping on my remains every now and then, or that the back of my headstone would feature an ad, which I hope to be for Tiger Beer or something nice but not bras or slimming centres. Bra ads are kinda strange to look at, in my opinion.

Little Red Riding Hood went to visit the witch

2010-08-07T08:43:00.008+08:00

"Go eat a little piece of shit," said the witch to Little Red Riding Hood, who asked back,

"But why?" in her act-innocent manner.

"You said you wanted to bewitch the wolf, right? Since you are in love with him?"

"Well, I wouldn't say I'm in love with him, but yes... I want him to fall for me."

"Then go and eat a little piece of shit. I mean his shit. It's actually a fairly economic spell, you know."

"That's disgusting! I asked you for a love potion!"

"Gee," said the witch as she lit up another cigarette and thought about how it didn't pay to be kind, "As if you'd know more than me. You must have been reading too much stupid teenage novels or what. Anyway, if you really want it in potion form, then pay me about a thousand bucks or so, and I'd give it to you in potion form. Liquid, right? In your little world, all potions have to be in liquid form, right?"

"They tend to be... It's something for me to put in his food, right?" Little Red wanted to start devising a plan.

"No, you'd have to take it yourself. Why would you think the problem is with him? For not being in love with you? Of course you are the one who needs the potion, to make you better, so that he'd fall for you."

"Tsk," The Little Red pulled up her riding hood over her head. She did not like the idea that she was not good enough for the wolf. She was also disappointed at how straight forward the affair would be, and she wouldn't have to devise of any schemes to show off her deviousness. Yet she couldn't forget how the wolf snubbed her. Who was he to give her the cold shoulder, right? What the fuck? She must make him love her.

"So?" the witch exhaled her smoke into Little Red's face, "Will it be the potion for you, or not? It usually cost a thousand and six hundred and sixty-six. But since you're so cute as to wanna do it with a wolf, I'd let you have it for a discount."

"How much?"

"Maybe ten percent? You'd have to pay sixty percent as deposit first though. If you're okay with it, then just fill out this form, and sign here. You gotta give me his correct name and address so I don't get the wrong wolf, yeah? And any descriptors or whatever. You wouldn't want the wrong wolf falling for you."

"Don't worry I'd show you his photo. How much would it cost for having two wolves fall for me then?"

"Woah! Woah!" The witch widened her eyes, "You're kind of a sick little girl eh. You really didn't look like it."

"Tsk. Just answer the question."

"As separate potions or combined into one? You want them to fall for you at the same time, or..."

"At the same time."

The witch inhaled deeply and looked towards the ceiling, "It'd cost twice as more."

"No discount?"

"Same. Ten percent."

"Lend me your calculator," Little Red asked. She thought it would be nice to let the wolf have some competition and experience some jealously. She had roll-out a clever scheme somehow. The total came up to be 4,500 after discount, but instead she proposed: "How about three wolves for 4,000?"

"Woah. Little Red... Three? At the same time? Now, now, don't be hasty..."

"Tsk. I'm not being hasty. How about it?"

"Okay. Okay. I'm not one to judge," the witch took over the calculator and pretended to do some maths. "Nope, it'd have to be at least 4,500. It's complicated now that it's 3 wolves. And at the same time! I might get found out. 4,500 is already the discounted price."

"Fine, whatever then," Little Red started to fill out the form, "I have no specific preference which 2 other wolves it should be, but just make sure they are handsome, eligible, and preferably sought after. Can I trust you to do that for me?"

"Do you like them old or young? Big or small sized?"

"As long as they're handsome, then it's fine. At least, they should be as good looking as the first one. Here's his picture," Little Red showed the picture of the wolf on her phone to the witch, who agreed that he was quite a handsome wolf.

As she was making her payment, Little Red was plotting a cheesy, Korean-drama-style, love story between the three wolves and her. Little did she know that the witch's potion would make them want to have sex with her so much that they would eventually rape her, because that was just what all love potions were meant for - to let the other party want to make love to the potion consumer. In her case, the other parties would come after her. Lesser did she know that the potion was really going to be made of three little pieces of shit from the three wolves.

And perhaps some chocolate syrup. The witch thought. And some Ribena. To musk the taste. And tequila. To musk the smell. And to give it the 'kick'. Little Red would probably think that potions should have a kick...

Going around to collect and melt the three pieces of shit would be horrid, but 4,500 is good money. The witch briefly wondered if Little Red, being so open-minded, would make a good apprentice (she was thinking of hiring one), but nah, Little Red was probably too romantic to get anything done properly. The witch made a mental note to save any extra ingredients, since Little Red seemed like the type to come back for seconds.

You've called?

2010-07-31T08:15:00.006+08:00

You've called?

I was away
From my phone,
By the time I reached it,
You had hung up.

I did not return your call.

Since it's about time anyway,
That I should pretend that
It's about time
To have had deleted your number away.

So for the record,
I don't know
You've called that day.

Actually on that day,
I was in quite a disarray -
My boss spoke to me in a bad way,
I was not feeling well
And hearing from you...
Hearing you say... anything...
Might have made me give away

How I would have needed a while
to get over that you have finally called,
Especially since
It's been a while since
I've gone.

Wood-blocked

2010-07-25T08:58:00.004+08:00

Simon would drag his feet along the corridor, trying to peep through her window, with secret hopes of seeing her changing, or the silouhette of her changing; he usually only saw at her desk, reading, or, at best, drying her long curly hair with a towel.

It has been over half a year since he noticed her. Mum said they were there all along, having moved in over 10 years ago; it embarrassed him that he hadn't notice her earlier, but perhaps, it was because she caught his eyes now that she didn't wear school uniforms and was more attractive. More likely though, it was because he had recently reached puberty.

He wanted to know her and thought that the age gap could be a barrier to their potential relationship. Thus, he had to present his maturity to her.

He decided to pursue an interest of hers and impress her with his in-depth knowledge of the subject. He noticed that she mostly read on fluid mechanics, programming, and once, she was with a book on japanese wood-block prints. He decided that the craft of wood-block printing would be most easy to pick-up compared to the other two subjects. He didn't even know where to start with the mechanics and programmes but he knew that his school's bookshop sold materials required for wood-block printing - so at least he had a headstart in that direction.

He then studied very hard on wood-block prints: watching instructive videos on youtube and whatever, reading books and websites on the great masters, studying the wood-block art of bijinga (or portraits of beautiful women) especially those by Kunichika, and studying contemporary art of pornography.

When he thought he was ready, he set out to make a portrait of her, designing it from his imagination and his intimate knowledge of her that he gathered through his voyeuring. She and her portrait were by then, the stuff of his prayers and dreams. He would, of course, masturbate thinking about her, as well as the composition of her portrait, as he wanted to capture the spirit of his lust and admiration. He imagined her in ways that he had to vowed not to ever confess, even to her, even if they got married and had twelve grandchildren, and become bored out of their souls watching sakura wither when they are having their 50th honeymoon in Japan at seventy-ish years old - they say women's sexual peak came later.

When he was just about to start carving the wood, he realised that her relationship status on facebook went from "single" to "being in a relationship" with this bulky, new-urban-male, canoeist who looked stupid as a stump.

Simon was heart-broken especially when he realised she didn't always come home every night after getting into a relationship - she was staying over at her boyfriend's hostel - that idiot even plastered photos of their hugging and kissing on a blog of bad English. The idiot was training to be an engineer too, apparently.

Simon was so frustrated and sad that he put off his art for a long while, until he decided that taking a lover would only better prepare her body for himself. He carved her name onto his thigh and collected his bits of flesh and blood with a bottle - he suddenly thought that it would be the perfect colour of her lips for the portrait, and if diluted adequately with his cum, the perfect colour for her nipples. Then he started to collect his other bodily excrements... He would bring the portrait to her when it's completed, no doubt she would be touched by the sincerity expressed in it and agree to be with him forever. Yes, the portrait must be perfect.

The portrait must be perfect, even if it took years to complete and do-overs were necessary. It had to be absolutely perfect. Even if she moved away from his corridor, he shouldn't rush it. Anyway, he never lost sight of her - and it'd be great to pretend to be finally reunited with her - he would bump into her or something and bring her to movies and dinners, before confessing the admiration he had since he was thirteen years old. She would be touched, it would be a hollywood-romance moment - maybe Jack Neo would want to make their love story into a movie - and no it wouldn't matter that Jack Neo was involved in the sex scandals - "Simon and Lilian" would be too perfect together to let any scandal taint them, their love would be so bright that all shadows would be illuminated from everything else. No, it would be called "Lilian and Simon". Yes, she would like to have her name come first.

The Tragedy of the Siberian Tiger

2010-06-05T12:18:00.002+08:00

There was a Siberian tiger who developed an unfortunate case of odor of the feet. It was not known how he came to contract odor of the feet, but the doctor said he should keep his feet dry, which was to his tough luck having to live in, well, snowy Siberia and to be slogging around in at least ankle-deep snow pretty much most of the time.

It grew so bad that it threatened his very livelihood. Potential prey would smell him approaching and run far away before he even got close enough to think of approaching them. He only knew that they got away when he came across the taunts they wrote in the snow (e.g. "To S. T.: your feet fucking stinks") with their pee, which also stank, but not as much as his feet did.

They were deers, mostly.

He tried to turn vegetarian and discovered an allergy to soy protein, resulting in a case of severe rash he’d rather not talk about.

He would have died of starvation, if not having first killed himself, from the stress and depression, by banging his head repeatedly against a tree until the skull broke and cut his brain, resulting in intracranial haemorrhage, which actually wouldn't have killed him if he had received prompt medical attention, which of course, he didn't receive.

Of a Lion and a Siren (Part II)

2010-05-29T15:46:00.003+08:00

This went on for some time and the air was filled with sentiments of love and sadness that permeated the animal kingdom. After being taken aback by their beloved son's weird fetish for a fish, and getting over it, the royal lion family tried to source for solutions to bring the lovers together. Through some recommendations, they got to know a powerful witch, also known as Ponyo from the cliff, who came from the land of the rising sun.

Ponyo was touched by the love story between the Simba the lion prince and Ariel the giant arapaima fish, and it reminded her of when she was young and foolish in love. She asked the couple to choose whether she should turn Simba into an arapaima - an offer to which Ariel and the royal family strongly objected, or to turn Ariel into a lioness - an offer to which Simba strongly objected and Ariel quietly objected. They loved each other in their present forms, and while their love and beauty was beyond skin deep, it was also hard to deny how their appearances were an integral part of who they were and loved.

Ponyo teasingly offered to give Simba a tail and Arial, feet. The couple rejected this idea arguing that this would only unite them with both being freaks of nature as they would still be unable to consummate their love, which was really the crux of the issue.

Eventually, Ponyo, the benevolent, allowed them to have the magic to be lions one day and arapaimas the next, whatever was their choices. She warned them, however, that they should never make experimental love when one was a lion and the other a fish, no matter how kinky they might feel, and made them promise her with their favourite swear words. They shrugged and agreed quickly; at that point, they were not yet able to imagine why they would ever want to do that, since they were precisely begging for the ability to transform themselves to become a matching couple.

Thus, they lived happily ever after... until they gave birth to a son, who was a merlion, and who also had bad problems with his bowel movements and motion sickness and had to swim around but would vomit for hours on end when he came to land.

Simba and Ariel tried to approach Ponyo for help, instead they were reprimanded by Ponyo sternly, "I warned you! And you promised that you would not have done that! No, I shall not reverse it, you both should know better to love him for who he is." Simba tried to turn on his charm, but Ponyo slammed the door in his aged majestic face, almost trapping his drooping whiskers.

It was ironic that while the baby was still in his mother's womb, his parents had already announced that he was to be named him "Sireneo" - a combination of the word "Leo" that represented his paternal heritage and "Siren" that represented his mother. They felt doubly guilty that their son's name was mawkishly apt.

Sireneo was sensible and didn't blame his parents for his freakish looks, poor health, and complicated name that he had to almost always repeat twice whenever he was asked for it. He was okay with being a merlion really. He had a few good friends from school and work (he was the second son and not in line to inherit the throne) and generally lived meaningfully - going about his businesses and doing the things he wanted to do despite his poor health condition.

A few arapaimas and lionesses had crushes on him, but he expressed that he would rather be alone. His parents would secretly hope that he would one day fall in love so true that the love would too, move Ponyo to grant him the magic of transformation, but he never fell in love. When asked by them, he would shrug and reply, "some beings are like that" or "not everyone is like you two, always going on about love, blah, blah". Truthfully, he did not see the big deal about relationships, and was sick of being told of his parents' love stories; he usually thought to remain as a bachelor except for the rare occasions when he wondered if he just hadn't met the right person yet.

(sneak.)

Of a Lion and a Siren (Part I)

2010-05-22T01:02:00.015+08:00

Once a upon a time, in a land ruled by lions and lionesses, there was a prince. His parents wanted to give him a simple name, as they believed that a common name would help make their child easier to raise - like a commoner's child, so he was named Simba.

Simba had a spoilt childhood, with mothers who spoilt him, and a chauvinistic father, who believed in giving him a Confucian upbringing. He was rather stout and cumbersome as a cub, but grew up with a strong manly chest (did a lot of push ups in his teen) and a proud brownish-golden mane. Simba was so handsome that the flies, that typically hung around lion's snouts to feed on the leftovers from their mouths not wiped clean after every meal, did not dare to go near his unclean snout, for fear of being poisoned by his majestic, royal beauty.

One warm evening, Simba decided to take a stroll by a river he seldom visited. It was then when he heard an attractive song of a low seductive growling that he had never before heard of. Like that of a siren, the song drew Simba to followed it to the source - at a river bend, there was a group of giant arapaima fish - all almost as long as himself or longer still - surrounding a female arapaima, who glowed with a pearly, green-and-reddish gleam in the moonlight, who was singing the seductive song. The group of arapaimas were so enchanted with the performance that they did not notice Simba's approach.

Simba had heard of other lions speaking of the giant arapaimas living in the river, but had seldom seen them for himself, let alone to witness such a large gathering of these giant fishes. Seeing the way, their gigantic bodies float near the surface with the ebbing water calmed Simba, and the scene accompanied the soothing song of the female arapaima well. The more he listened to the song, the more he was convinced that it was the most beautiful music in his father's kingdom.

Simba crouched down and remained silent, not wanting to disrupt the performance; only when the song was complete, he let out a gentle roar of appreciation for the mystical arapaima's song.

Startled, the gathered arapaimas submerged and scattered quickly, except for the singer, however, who was scared stiff and simply remained where she was.

Simba got up and apologise for disrupting the party; at the same time, when his eyes met o those of the singing arapaima, he realised he was glad to have the time alone.

"Lord Simba," the arapaima said humbly, paying her respects.

"Good evening, fish. I was intending to introduce myself, but I suppose you already know who I am," said Simba with a smile, turning on his charm.

"That is but of course, you are our Lord. Your parents' picture hangs in our classrooms and school hall where we recite the national pledge in school every Monday," said the arapaima in a flurry before stopping with embarrassment by her seeming incoherence. "I mean... and you look like your father."

"Relax. Don't worry. I'm not uptight like him. Please introduce yourself?" urged Simba. He approached the water.

"I am Ariel, Daughter of Arapaima III of the Eastern River," she said as she swam backwards away from him.

"Show me your face, come closer to the bank."

"Are you intending to eat me, Sire?" Ariel said, apprehensively.

Simba laughed at her innocence before reassuring her that he was not, and he did not like to eat bony fish.

Ariel hesitated and realised that she should not defy the will of the prince. She propelled herself towards him, and swam at a shallower part of the river, where her shimmering scales caught more of the moonlight, and revealed a tiny lunar rainbow on almost every scale.

This was the moment when Simba fell in love with Ariel.

"I like your song, Ariel. Would you sing for me every night?" Not wishing to be rejected, he added, "I command it?"

"If you so wish, my lord, it would be my pleasure. But wouldn't you be bored with the same song? I would be bored singing it every night. How about I teach the song to your royal performers and perhaps they could sing it to you in the comforts of your palace."

"Excuse me," blushed Simba, "I meant, I like your singing, Ariel. You could sing any song you wish."

This made Ariel blushed too.

Simba returned to the river bend every night to the river to listen to Ariel sing. Sometimes she sang lively songs that were typically sang to araipaman children to teach them some lessons about being araipama; sometimes she sang slow songs, telling the stories to the ancestors. Simba listened with relish as the songs taught Simba much about Ariel's life.

He learned the different colours on her scales that changed with the phase of the moon. By looking at the scales, he learnt to tell which day of the month it was. Sometimes, he was so enchanted by Ariel that he would approach the river, and stand in the river, so much as being knee deep in the water. Whenever he wet his mane, he would rather regret it as he would have to comb his hair back, and that would worry him about looking like an ah-beng.

Over time, Ariel too began to take a liking to Simba and saw past his attempts to act cool and was moved by his pathetic and sincere attempts to impress her by bringing her rare game meat - like lamb chops and hot dogs. She was more practical, knowing that they would never be able to be together. Slowly, she began to sing love songs about star-crossed lovers or unrequited relationships. Simba, delighted to know that his love was finally being reciprocated by Ariel, yet at the same time, he was sad that she would keep reminding him of how they would not be together.

Pigeon

2010-05-01T23:43:00.005+08:00

There was a pigeon who preferred walking over flying. It was not that he was a bad flyer. He merely preferred walking.

"Eh, there's food over there!" His friends would say and point to a kopitiam across the road where food was possibly shrewn on the ground.

"Ah, you guys go ahead, I'll meet you there," the pigeon would say back and began to walk in the said direction, as his friends flew off towards wherever.

That was what happened one day, when the pigeon was crossing the road, to catch up with his friends... Left foot. Right foot. Left foot. Right foot... when a car drove by and ran him over.

Untitled

2010-04-15T23:01:00.006+08:00

Sometimes, when I drink too much coffee, I can listen to my thoughts as they start bickering with themselves and my to-do lists in my head, to be specific they are around the pre-frontal cortex area... I can find a nice place about two-thought-steps (if thoughts could take steps) back from behind my eye-brows and nestle between two gyri (i.e. between a fold of the brain), as if to sit on a bean-bag, and start wondering why my thoughts bother to replay themselves with things I can't really be bothered with; until, I start wondering about the name of the part of my brain I would be sitting at, and realise I cannot recall the brain's anatomy I pretended to study at school, then the space between the imagined distinct consciousnesses will gradually fade, and it will be noisy all over my head, and I will get lost again.

The Auntie who sold fish cakes and other-fish-related-processed-food-products

2010-04-04T22:46:00.008+08:00

There was a woman, in her early forties, who sold fish cakes and other-fish-related-processed-foodstuff at a snack store that she owned. She was gradually turning into a fish. Well, sort of.

It was not as if she grew scales or fins or gills, but her lower lip became larger and protruded, as did her eye balls. Her jawline and cheeks sagged, and her nose grew flatter and the distancebetween the nose and mouth, grew wider. In the emoticon sense, her expression grew to be more like this -
8 (
- which, if one would stretch his imagination in the right direction, is an expression that would really make any woman look more like a fish, let alone a woman who was sort of gradually turning into one.

The last time she had sex, which was the first time after a long time since the previous time, with her husband, with whom she married for a reason she could no longer remember and who was 15 years older than her, something even more strange happened - her belly began to swelled up over the next few weeks days. A few months later, before she could concluded that she was pregnant, she gave birth, on the toilet bowl, to about four-dozen fish balls. After getting over the shock, she collected the fishballs, and rinsed it clean, and deep fried them, and put them on satay sticks, three-by-threes, and took stock, and deep fried them again just to be sure they were thoroughly cooked, and brought them to the store for sale - as the special item of the day.

Since the incident, she did not want to have sex anymore, and her sexual frustration made her sulk even more, which in turn, made her look like a fish lagi even more than ever.

Seven tau-gay legs

2010-03-31T22:50:00.008+08:00

There was a spider, that had seven legs, that were not proper spider legs - black and hairy. Instead, they were made of tau-gay, or green bean sprouts. She had lost her eighth leg in a fight.

Despite her handicap, the spider was with a lively spirit who enjoyed the occasional practical joke. Once, she was in a store, that was somewhat like Singapore's version of the Metropolitan Museum of Art store, pretending to be brooch. When she was caught, she laughed mischievously in such an infectious way that nobody could then fault her for trying.

She would have danced a little if she could have, but she could not, for her legs were soft and flimsy. She had accidentally stepped into somebody's warm bath water, and her tau-gay legs got scalded and became somewhat flimsy ever after. This was to her greatest regret, as she had loved dancing.

If she felt bad for herself, she would think of her friend, a spider who has cabbage leaves for his legs. Imagine, all eight legs! Cabbage leaves! All too big to fit on a little spider! And all slightly curved! He never walked a single step from birth. If he needed to get anywhere, he would roll his way there. Like a tumbleweed! Except he bruised more easily! Let alone dance!

Tau-gay legs are really not too bad! Or so the spider with tau-gay legs would remind herself comfortingly. She would sing or hum her favourite song to herself. It was ABBA's Dancing Queen. If she let anyone hear her, they could feel sorry for her and go on and on about how dancing was not a big deal. This would then make everything more difficult to bear.

Jazz and Recorders

2010-03-21T17:21:00.008+08:00

I am writing this from Starbucks at Liang Court. They are playing jazz on the speakers.

I always thought that hard-core jazz was difficult to understand. By "hard-core jazz", I mean the music created with a piano, drums or bass perhaps, and a saxaphone or trumpet or both; I mean the jazz without Ella Fitzgerald or the boys from Ipanema or anybody singing in general; I mean the music without songs.

I vaguely wish that instead of making me learn how to play "three blind mice" on the bloody plastic recorder, my music teachers from school taught me how to appreciate jazz, or baroque, for that matter. Then again, it is only because they did, that I can take it for granted that I once knew, and have since forgotten, how to play the recorder.

I must remember this the next time I hear the neighbours' kid practising the recorder - that dreaded-elongated-whistle-of-a-thing. And I should be glad that there will always be some neighbours' kid practising the recorder. (Hey, I was "that kid" before.) And that maybe they are just trying very hard to teach me how to appreciate jazz.

Farting Freely - A big plus point of Teleworking

2010-03-13T09:20:00.008+08:00

I've read many articles about the pros and cons of teleworking. Mostly, these articles discuss how working from home saves commuting time, but threatens the family life. I think they leave out the most important point that makes working from home worthwhile - teleworking allows one to fart freely.

When one is at the office, one cannot fart freely, for fear of being laughed at, discriminated against, or nicknamed the 'fart boy/girl'. Although this causes not so much distress (as it's been a bane since young - when we had to go to school - except that we do not seem to have so much gas when we were younger), it is still a luxury for one to be able to fart freely, as loud as whatever, when one works from home. It is especially great, when you let out a loud fart, and then you realise it's a smelly one, and that it's one of those farts that make your stomach feel instantaneously lighter. Every time I fart one of those farts, I think to myself, wow, this is what makes teleworking worthwhile.

I tend to think that this mostly affects people who work in air-conditioned-high-rise-offices more than any other type of work. This is because we have the tendency to pretend that we're very serious and clean and picture perfect, and therefore, feel the most fart-conscious at work. As we have to be in the office for most part of our waking hours, farting freely is a luxury. Maybe if we all change our attitude on farts, it would make us less uptight.

The doctors and nurses have to be serious and clean and perfect, but they're educated in the biological working of the bodies, and so, are obliged to accept that farting is natural and not a big deal. I also suspect that it would be difficult to disapprove every fart as their patients won't really care and would fart anyhow, and disapproving every fart would make them unnecessarily busier. Thus, farting freely is not a big deal.

It's gotta do with the air-conditioning, I think, as not all hospitals are air-conditioned. Also, I suspect people working in the service-line at air-conditioned departmental stores will also feel the pressure to fart carefully, but they can't really work from home anyway, so well, let's not rub in it.

To digress a bit, I suspect rice-farmers, of all professions, will be the most cool about farting, because they're always bending down, and it is quite impossible to stifle or muffle farts in that butt-sticking-in-the-air position.

I wonder if people are motivated to climb the corporate ladder so that they can get their private rooms (and not share offices with others at work) so that they can fart whenever. And that explains why those "high up" are not so keen on teleworking, because being in their private rooms, they would no longer deem the freedom to fart as luxurious. Maybe when I find my way there and get a room to myself, and I get to fart big farts freely, I would think to myself, wow, this is what makes being a "Director" worthwhile.

In the meantime, I shall be satisfied with maintaining that farting freely is a big plus point of teleworking, or shall I say, it's a big Pro(ooT!) of teleworking.

If your family is also disapproving on your loud farts, then this 'pro of working from home' doesn't apply for you. Sorry then, that it sucks to be you.

The above arguments should also apply to the freedom to dig one's nose.

Days of Thunder

2010-02-27T12:19:00.003+08:00

A couple of days ago, I bought a copy of Days of Thunder on VCD for only 1 dollar. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman starred in that movie. I watched it a few times when I was a kid - from tv-re-runs.

When I first saw the VCD and the screaming yellow gaudy price label, I thought to myself, wow, as lowly as VCDs are regarded nowadays with the threat of high-def DVDs and blue-ray DVDs that they say are not really DVDs... 1 dollar is really too cheap to sell such a classic movie's VCD, right? Surely it was worth a little bit more. Maybe 2 or 3 dollars more perhaps?

After all, the one bad thing about VCDs are just that one has to get up in the middle of a movie to change from Disk 1 to Disk 2. Sure, sure, they say that the DVD visual and audio quality is way better, but really, how much quality does one need? Like how many languages are you going to read the subtitles in? Anyway, I'd rather save some dollars from this expenditure and spend it on increasing the thread-count of my pillow case.

I decided to buy the vcd. I thought that it might be nice to re-run it on my laptop on a casual evening and fall asleep watching the pretty faces fall in love. I remember reading from a magazine article about how when Tom Cruise first met Nicole Kidman on the set of Days of Thunder, he was so smitten that he got his people to call up her people, and they dated, and fell in love, and got married, and attended many Hollywood gala-events together. It's a really great fairytale on-screen-couple becomes off-screen-couple kinda story.

Nevermind that her hair was all frizzy and he's actually shorter than her. Nevermind that they're both broken up, leaving us with that weird-but-not-weird-in-an-interesting-way-movie, Eyes Wide Shut, and are probably off sleeping with other people now. I figured that I could allow them to remain, in my impression, as in my childhood, and as in "Far and Away" (another movie starring them as a couple), in love and happily married to each other. It takes a little bit of denial, but it doesn't really hurt anybody and nobody cares, so I just indulged me.

When my computer couldn't read the VCD initially, I was understandably a little disappointed, even though it was just a dollar investment's - I had hyped myself up.

Yet (after re-starting my computer and successfully played the VCD), it was not as disappointing, as when I was watching the show mid-way into the Disk 2 when the disk suddenly jumped - from just when they were flirting to the part they were lying in bed together. My immediate thoughts were:

ALAMAK. No wonder (this VCDs) were sold for 1 dollar only. Nowadays still got censor out the sex scene one meh?

There weren't even the rolling around in bed. It just fast forwarded to the after-sex talk.

Precisely in realising that the censor standards were more stringent then than now, this incident then really drove home the point that the time now is different from before. The time has changed and so have I, for I am not just contented with romantic fairy-tales, and I am not accepting of abrupt censorship anymore. I am now an adult, and I want to watch unrealistically-beautiful people, whom I would never meet in real life, having hot passionate sex.

And I suppose this is part of growing up.

White hair and Pulp fiction

2010-02-20T13:17:00.007+08:00

Today, I changed my hair-parting a bit and discovered that I had new strands of white hair. I knew that they were growing on my head from around that spot, and I would like to believe that they were the ones I had plucked out, say maybe last month, but they're probably new, for mainly two reasons.

One, the ones that I had plucked out were about the same length as the ones I spotted today. I don't think my hair can grow so fast.

And two, I plucked out two strands of hair last month, now there seems to be more than two. I don't exactly know how many more there are, but there seems to be more than two. This, to my dismay, means that if we let the number of strands of white hair on my head presently be "X", then altogether, the strands white hair on my head = "X"+2.

I just rolled my eyes at myself. I know you couldn't see it, so I thought I would tell you I just rolled my eyes. You would think that one would need a mirror to roll one's eyes at oneself, but since the rolling of eyes doesn't require the receiving party to witness the eye-rolling, I didn't need to see myself to roll my eyes at myself.

Well, anyway, at a time when I was feeling less sensible, I formulated a theory that since it must be caused by something that my head was constantly being overexposed to (whoever heard of white armpit hairs?), and that I spend most of my time in the office or generally indoors... Fluorescent lighting might just be the cause of these things.

My parents, on the other hand, will recall with pride that when they were about my age - which is under 30 years old, they didn't have problems with white hair growing. And then, with concern, and instead of subscribing to my theory, they would say that white hair grows because life is generally more stressful now than before, and that I'm ageing, faster.

Come to think about it, that sounds rather strange too, actually. How could I possibly be ageing faster? It suggests that not only I can travel faster than they travelled, I can grow to a biological age in a shorter time than what they took to grow to the same biological age.

I haven't read Einstein's theory of time or relativity or magic enough to even know if it's remotely related to the topic at all or not, but... the idea that people are ageing faster than they were before, sounds like a spark of a plot for a futuristic movie starring Christopher Lloyd.

Christopher Lloyd, incidentally, also has a head full of white hair and thus, he would be perfect for the movie. Perhaps, it would feature how, into the distant future, babies might be born one minute and then pass away of old age in the next hour.

Maybe it would not be so much of a Physics-fiction movie but a Bio-fi type. (I'm also thinking they should start being more specific than just calling all of them "sci-fi" movies.) Perhaps, we could have one scientist, who's into stem-cell research or whatever else there is to research on, postulate that the fluorescent lights caused the super-ageing process; and there'd be another scientist, maybe a pretty psychiatrist, who would try to attribute it to stress. Then Christopher Lloyd's character could be yapping around and pretend to explain some scientific thing. Then, just to throw in some moral to the story, Master Pai Mei would come by and say that white hair is due to having too much pride. In the olden times, only old people would have white hair because it's a sign of being too filled with their own ideas, and that now even youngsters have white hair, and that's really too bad.

I know I could have saved us a lot of bullshit if I had just changed my parting again to hide all the white hair on my head, and honestly treasure my life better and spend it more wisely, before the time comes for me to be unable to hide white hairs by changing partings. It's just like how I know I could change my take on any experience and make it moralistic and learn from it and be wiser and develop myself better; say for example, in this case, I could learn to be less proud and self-obsessed about the white hair. But really, even if I saved up on the bullshit, I would spend it on other bullshit anyway. And then eventually, I'd just grow old and die. (White hair is an obvious symbol for the transience of life.)

Maybe Samuel L Jackson could cameo in the movie, sporting a black suit and a crown of brown hair in tight curls, reprising his role as Jules Winnfield from Pulp Fiction and kill everybody.

Himself included. Just for a dash of dramatic irony.

It sounds like a good B-rate movie already.

By the way : You light up my life

2010-02-14T02:00:00.001+08:00

Hedonistic Sunday (for Mr Akutagawa) Part 3 of 3 - "Gentle Ghosts"

2010-02-06T10:51:00.000+08:00

In Spinning Gears, Mr A drank whisky, and was on medication for insomnia (from which an overdose killed Akutagawa). I do not understand why though, he didn’t seem to drink some more. He didn’t seem to abuse alcohol. I’m saying this from my impression of him from the stories, and I have not yet researched on how he lived his life. While not advocating that alcohol use is for everyone, I think he could have given it a go before killing himself, even as a short-term solution of sorts.

For me usually just two pints of Kilkenny would do to silence the voices in my head. Voices? Alright. It’s not that I hallucinate hearing people talking, or anything serious like Mr A’s condition, but I do think too much about this and that, and I have my ghosts. Ghosts, for example, that help me think in my sleep about my mother after the alarm interruptions and decide for me to get up to change clothes. Ghosts that make me run around in my dreams and that don’t allow me rest enough to appreciate a good night’s rest. Ghosts, I would say that are gentle, and can be quietened with a bit of Killies or drinks drunk in the proper way.

I wonder if anybody had introduced Mr Akutagawa to the proper way of drinking.

Now, I am not an expert at drinking, really, really; but, even I note that there are roughly two ways to drink.

One way to drink is the “drowning-one’s-sorrow-way”. This is not the proper way. But, anyway... before drinking, one prepares by marinating one’s temperament with sense of self-righteousness and self-pity. Then, before drinking each drink, one must visualise that the drink is infused with the validation of self-righteousness. One may choose to season the drinks with a dash of spite or self-destructiveness. This may help to increase the sense of self-pity. Since drinking this way, would lead to more depressive and lonely feelings, letting one become a worse sourpuss and more dislikeable, it is recommended to only drink like this with people whose friendships one wants to put to the test.

The second way to drink is the “proper way”. This is the way I would want to recommend to Mr Akutagawa. One begins with planting a magic seed of the desire to escape from the real world in one’s heart before drinking; after which, one must allow the alcohol to nurture this little seed. When it begins to germinate, one may notice how things surrounding the little seedling become warped, illogical, and trivially amusing. That is the power of the magic seed. Shower the seedling with delight, smiles, and some more drinks. When it grows big enough for one to climb onto a branch and swing around when the wind blows, one should slow down on the drinks, but still drink enough to sustain the tree so that it doesn’t wither and die.

After drinking the proper way, one would likely find oneself drifting off to sleep, having been rocked like a baby on a tree top. Well, at least until the branch breaks, all is well. Maybe, Mr Akutagawa would have liked that for a while, and be less hard on himself.

I didn’t write the above for Mr Akutagawa to read, because I know that he is dead, and I’m not delusional like that. I do dedicate this to Mr Akutagawa, even though I’m not sure why, perhaps it is out of my respect for him, or perhaps, it’s some sort of thank you or hello. I may wonder if what I wrote is good enough to be dedicated to him, but I must stop myself from pursuing the matter, for it is inconsequential.

What is more consequential, is that I wrote the above for you to read, in case you have not been properly introduced to anything I had just elaborated upon, and you needed to be introduced. As usual, I hope that it was enjoyable to you to read.

What is most consequential, may be that I wrote it mainly for myself, in case I forget myself, for a lot of things can happen in seven years.

Hedonistic Sunday (for Mr Akutagawa) Part 2 of 3 - "Mr Akutagawa"

2010-02-02T22:48:00.000+08:00

I picked up a collection of Akutagawa’s stories. This is the first serious fiction book that I was finishing since a long time. I was down to the last story, which I read this morning, as my too-hot cup of coffee was cooling to the just-right temperature for me to drink big mouthfuls. I like very much to drink coffee like that.

The last story, Spinning Gears, apparently was an autobiographical account on Akutagawa’s neurosis and growing madness. This reminds me to confess that I used to spell neurosis as “neutrosis”. I think I was dyslexic, but many of my friends disagreed with this, which made me think that I had put in a commendable effort to pretend that I was not. No matter. This, too, I suppose, is inconsequential. I must remind myself that nobody is going to cut me any slack because I am a recovering dyslexic, or confused with being an ex-extrovert or whatever.

In the story, Mr A described the nature of his neurosis and paranoia. He described seeing translucent spinning gears, hence, the title of the piece. In real life, Akutagawa killed himself at the age of 35. That’s seven years away from how old I am now. When I first heard of Akutagawa and that he was a prodigious author who killed himself at the age of 35, I thought he was another one of those indulgent authors who had no responsibility towards their families and exhausted themselves with velvety chocolate melancholia, and who could not empathise with the rest of us, proletariats, who have to work for a living.

When I am through with the second story of the collection, though, I knew that I was wrong, and his melancholia had to be more sophisticated than I thought. He wrote about some endearing characters, among those who are horrifying. This shows that he must have recognised some very endearing aspects of life, just that it was not enough to sustain him. A man who could write with such precise and delicate sensitivity shouldn’t have been easily misled nor disillusioned by the mere superficial hypocrisy of his time. He must have tried very hard to find a philosophical way out of his hell.

Hedonistic Sunday (for Mr Akutagawa) Part 1 of 3 - "Sunday"

2010-01-30T10:41:00.000+08:00

Last night, I drank about two pints of Kilkenny (or Killies) at an over-priced pub. I knew that the Killies were overpriced, they were not the extremely tastiest beer I could have gotten, and I should probably have saved that money to give to my god-mother for the Chinese New Year. (My family’s tradition has it that children should give parents money for necessary preparation of CNY.) But, after the first pint, being mid-way of a contemplative discussion and nowhere in sight of reaching a conclusive-enough-revelation to advance my world-view, I wanted to drink more to nurture my growing drunken stupor. So, I got my friend to agree to order one more pint to share, following which, at my implicit insistence, we ordered one more pint.

I said I drank about two pints of Killies, but I probably drank closer to three. That was because my friend did not like them as much as I did. I suspect it was not because he disliked its taste, but just a sign of protest against how I theorise that drinking ales is less fattening than drinking lagers (his first pint was a Heineken). It would, however, be more convenient for the both of us, if we just attribute his abstentions to his social responsibility for having to drive us home afterwards, thus, I did not, and shall not, pursue the matter.

When I reached home, I fumbled for my keys as quietly as possible. I did not want to wake up the dog, which would surely then rush excitedly towards me for a pat on its head, which would in turn encourage it to jump up, and possibly scratch me with its nails. I wanted to avoid it since that might then remind me of the errands I had to run in the real world, such as having to bring the dog for a pedicure or something like that.

Luckily, I was quick and quiet enough, and made it to my bedroom without alarming anyone.

I did not bother to switch on the lights nor change out of my uncomfortable going-out-clothes. I simply laid on my bed, on my left side, and fell asleep.

I did not dream, or perhaps, I did and do not recall my dreams. Either way, it was a pleasant night’s rest. I never understand why I always feel the need to clarify how I might have merely forgotten my dreams, when I just want to say I did not dream.

The radio alarm clock sounded from about 6 am until it gave up trying to wake me up at about 7 am. Just as I was about to lift my hand to hit the “snooze” button, I distinctly heard it going out by itself. At this point, having built up too much potential energy, I turned to lie on my other side. I was satisfied that my childish-lethargy won over the adult-intention to start work early. (I had brought some work home to do over the weekend, maybe I will do them later today.)

About one hour later, I got up to change into my home-clothes. I had been thinking in my sleep, since the alarm episode, about changing. I thought about how my mother would occasionally, usually on Sunday mornings, come to nag at me for sleeping in or about some other mundane thing. I decided not to let her to find me still wearing yesterday’s going-out-clothes, for she might think that I had gotten so drunk that I couldn’t change myself. She wouldn’t have understood, even if I had tried to explain, that it wasn’t so much that I couldn’t, but rather, it was because I didn’t want to change at all. Falling asleep in going-out clothes can be very comfortable sometimes. It may be as comfortable as going back to sleep after breakfast, or falling asleep in one’s school uniform after coming back from school, or sleeping-in despite the alarm-clock’s blah-blah.

After changing to my home-clothes, I slept again, until about 10.30 am, when I had enough sleep and got up properly. I could tell from the quietness in the house that my parents have gone out. I asked R (our domestic helper) to make me a cup of coffee.

When I wake up, I like to drink coffee immediately, and before I brush my teeth. When I wake up, I also don’t like to talk to people before my senses have warmed up. Then again, maybe I just don’t like to talk to people, regardless of my senses. Lately, I have been wondering if I was truly introverted, though I’ve thought of myself as being a typical extrovert. It is inconsequential, I suppose. As I am writing this on a Sunday morning, I can’t think of anybody who would care if I’m extroverted or introverted, myself included.

Observations (Jan 10)

2010-01-23T13:10:00.005+08:00

The bigger the leaves a particular species of bamboo has, the louder and slightly more bassy the rustling sound the bamboo makes when the wind passes by.
When one first hears the trees sway in a strong gust of wind, it will take a moment, or two, for one to feel the wind in one's hair. The time between, as I have decided, is the definitive span of how long "a moment's time", or two, should be.
The cicadas' songs sound like tinnituses - which are ringing or buzzing sounds in the ears that are not caused by external stimuli, such as the ringing sound one hears in bed after spending a night too long and near loud music speakers at a disco - except that they are more pleasant to listen to.
On a pleasant enough day, the smell of dog shit may be bearable, as is the smell of one's own smelly feet. The smell of smelly feet has a salty quality, similar to that of the smell of salted fish. The smell of dog shit has a musky quality.
The smell of one's own farts is usually bearable; when it is particularly smelly - then it may be even amusing. On the other hand, the smell of other people's farts is never ever bearable; and when it is particularly smelly, it may be amusing or annoying depending on whether one is in a good mood or if one enjoys the farter's company.
A person with big nostrils may have developed them from the habit of digging one's nose with the index fingers. I have once seen a man with one nostril twice the size of the other and wondered if he had dug the smaller nostril by putting his finger through the bigger one, reaching in the smaller one from behind (through the pass where naughty little boys sometimes try to stick a piece of spaghetti across).
They say people with "hooked-noses", or "parrot-noses" as the Chinese call them, tend to be devious and untrustworthy. I have, however, never once heard any one of them denying this. In this way, at least, they must be honest, if they are indeed devious and untrustworthy.
When it is breezy, birds tend not to fly straight. They may fly in horizontal or vertical zig-zags, or in spirals or circles, almost as if their paths have become loopy because of the wind. Perhaps, they are playing. This does not seem to apply to larger birds. Incidentally, larger birds give me the impression that they are more serious and less inclined towards playing anyway.

Purple Land of Golden Oats

2010-01-16T14:12:00.005+08:00

Once upon a time, there lived a group of elephants in a land of purple grasses and golden oats. These elephants loved to eat golden oats all day. They ate so much golden oats until they shat shits of golden oats, and their hides turned a little golden at some parts.

In the purple land, these elephants had no natural predators, except time and age. Occasionally, they would get into quarrels amongst themselves but they would never fight. They did not know how to fight, for there was no violence in the purple land.

At least, that was until one day, when a human boy, who loved to eat brinjals, ate so much brinjal for dinner that, at night, he entered the purple land in his dreams. He was so overwhelmed by the magnificence of the gold that stood out shining brightly from the purple in the land. The brilliance of the gold and purple land nourished the seeds of corruption that laid hidden in his human heart with greed... They germinated. The boy wanted some of the gold for himself.

The boy schemed to capture an elephant to bring back home so that he could harvest the elephant's shit. This was because, after drawing some irresponsible conclusions, he had decided that the oats were golden because they were nourished by the elephants' golden shit. He could sell the shit, or grow some golden oats for sale, and he would become rich and eat all the brinjal he wanted.

The boy laid a trap to capture a little elephant. It was an elaborate trap, but an ineffective one, as he was soon found out. The elephants asked him why he was trying to capture an elephant, and if he had any difficulty that they could help he with. This moved the distraught boy (imagine being confronted by a herd of talking elephants in a foreign purple land), and he told them his true intentions.

His honesty, however, only repaid their kindness with implanting notions of greed, envy, and violence into the elephant's culture.

The boy was sent back with an elephants' kick in the behind.

***

Sometime later, when the boy became an old man, he returned to the purple land. It seemed that things changed.

Golden oats were farmed in plots of land and did not shine as brilliantly as before. Perhaps, as purple grasses were hardly to be seen, there was no contrast for the gold to stand out from the land.

There was a bustling industrial area, where metal works and machineries were constructed and sold. Elephants were haggling with each other over lower prices and other matters of business concerns. There were also cages to contain huge and obese elephants held in captivity, apparently for the harvesting of their waste-matter for the farms.

When the old man witnessed the scene, he felt so displaced that he forgot to keep out of sight. He was caught by the elephant police for trespassing.

Upon establishing his identity, the old man who was once the boy caused another sensation amongst the elephants. Some of the elephants wanted to celebrate his return, as he was the benefactor and founder of the modern purple land society (as was taught in the elephant schools). Some of the elder elephants, particularly those who were children of the civil war, wanted to hang him for corrupting the elephant culture and the purple land of peace as they remembered it.

Finally, a rich elephant merchant bought him and kept him as part of a private collection of humans. During this time, he was fed with brinjals for his meals. These were the sweetest brinjals that the old man had ever tasted. When he later found out that these brinjals grew from the coarse purple grass of the land, which were basically the weeds in the oat-farms owned by the merchant, the old man fell into depression until his eventual death, upon which he was flushed down the elephant's toilet bowl.

Lenny's Video

2010-01-10T15:03:00.003+08:00

He set up the video-camera on the tripod, positioned his chair to the suitable distance and height, watched the play-back of his test-shot, and adjusted the white balance.

Lenny was wearing his company polo-tee shirt. He was proud of getting into the company that they did not think he could have gotten a job in. He liked to wear the polo-tee shirt, thinking it makes a good impression; and, it was blue - his favourite colour - and it matched his jeans and favourite sneakers.

He had his hair styled especially for the occasion. He gave away his usual side-parting when he went to the hair-stylist yesterday and asked for a fashionable haircut. It was fashionable indeed. Possibly worth the sixty dollars more than what he would have paid if he went to his usual barber.
He liked it. It looked like one of the hairstyles David Beckham wore. That was a good thing. Girls liked David Beckham, right? The new haircut made him feel younger and more confident.

"Hi, I'm Lenny Lim. I'm 29 years old. I graduated from the school of engineering from Nanyang Technological University - a.k.a. N-T-U. I am currently a systems engineer, with this company," he held up the logo embossed on his polo-tee and grinned sheepishly.

"I have been working there for 4 years now. In terms of career prospects, I am ahead of my peers. This is proven by how I was promoted last year to an engineer's position. Those who joined the company around my time are still junior engineers."

He lifted the hand-drill into the camera's view. It was a new heavy duty Bosch in
green and black. He depressed the trigger a bit. It gave the loud and intimidating whirl that a professional hand-drill should make. This seemed to assure Lenny. He had practiced using the drill on something else to familiarise himself with how it worked, and he had since cleaned it.
Lenny looked at the rotating drill bit now coated with a fresh film of oil which caught the light coming through the curtains.

As if having forgotten and then suddenly recalling the camera, he nervously re-composed himself,

"Today, I would like to say sorry to... I mean, apologise... sincerely, to the two most important women in my life.

"Firstly, to my dearest mother, whose death I caused by coming to the world, for my failure to make her proud... Mother, please forgive me," he recited, "Then, to my most beloved Jenny, for... my bad behavior... against your wishes. I am sorry for hurting you, and taken advantage of the kindness you showed me. If you should ever find it in your heart, please forgive me...because I really love you dearly."

He tilted his head to the left and put the hand-drill to his right temple, which he had decided was the softest part of his skull, drilled a hole in his head, and killed himself.

(sneak.)

Tick-talk

2009-12-27T09:54:00.002+08:00

I dreamt of being infested with my dog's ticks. In my dream, the ticks had evolved, and were no longer single red bulging dots with six legs; they were with three jointed parts, like ants, and had ferocious teeth - ferocious as in it looked like it'd hurt a lot if I were bitten - and looked blood thirsty.

I woke up being a little afraid.

The next day, I kept feeling ticklings on different parts of my body especially on my armpits, my private part, and the part of my back I can't reach enough to scratch properly.

Now, the paranoia has died off, and I don't quite still feel the tickles. I don't rule out the possibility, however, that a couple of ticks are living on me - there're quite a few places to hide - especially if they stay still so that I won't even detect their crawling motion. I mean, like afterall, I don't remember the last time I took a good look at my back.

When I do consider it, the idea of having a couple of ticks on my back is actually surprisingly alright. It's kinda freaky, but really, I should have enough blood going around to afford such "pets".

Maybe if I stay still enough they would breed and breed and one day, there would be ticks all over me. I'd be like I'm covered in red scales - except that they're actually ticks. It's kinda gross, but if I stop thinking that ticks are dirty and disgusting (which they're not inherently), it can be kinda cool. If I were all covered in ticks I'd probably get into guiness books of records in a new catagory and appear on reuters or something.

Ah Hoi on the Train

2009-12-12T22:54:00.004+08:00

Ah Hoi held on to the train handle tightly and stared out of the window. If he concentrated hard enough, he could see the walls of the tunnel and tell the cables apart. He should find it interesting, but it was just difficult... he couldn't help noticing that people were standing too far apart from him like there was a radius - an invisible shield or force-field - that was repelling people from him.

He looked at his own reflection and reminded himself that he did not care.

He did not care that people would not want to be close to a man with tangled long hair and a mangled beard. He was a man whose clothes from Kek Sng Kio bore a smell that could not be removed with repeated washing, and did not fit well enough such that he had to tighten his khaki cargo pants with a raffia-string-belt... His rugged Jansport purple and turqoise backpack that had been with him since his sailing days, that he had carried with him for the past twenty over years from port to port, smelt like rotten fish in the air-conditioning of the train and that other people would avoid rotten fish smelling things... To him, these people were just shallow.

And it was because of their shallowness that they would never know him and they would not get to know the secrets he keeps - secrets about the great sea - stories he picked up during his sailing days.

Once, his ship sailed past a small waterspout that was just beginning to form. He was close enough to stick his arm into it, and to feel the tug of the air that made all of his hair stand up. It was foolish and not to be recommended, so he didn't mention it to anyone. Sometimes, when they were sorting out the trawler catch, Ah Hoi would steal a starfish and put it into his pocket to bring back to his room to tickle the underside and be amused by himself. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, he would go to the deck by himself to lie down and find the moon so bright it was glaring to look at...

He should feel that his life was everything meaningful and beyond the materialistic pursuits of the average person. One day, he should meet a nice girl who would look pass the appearances and appreciate him for who he is - He is romantic, responsible, and wise. A girl whom he would not have to pay after sleeping with her.

Until then, there, on his way to Cathay Picturehouse to use the free internet point to play "Farmville" on Facebook, Ah Hoi felt lonely.

22 Nov 09 - Mostly Cloudy with NW Winds at 14.something kph

2009-12-05T21:06:00.001+08:00

When I was young, they would say, that Singapore had only two kinds of weather - it was always either sunny or rainy. "It's boring," they would say, and I would echo, "to only have Spring and Summer." So what if the birds would migrate to Sungei Buloh to hide from the cold? And our equatorial climate supported growth of the spices - precious commodities that the Ang Mors had to come here to trade for. I wished that I lived somewhere that had the four seasons - four seasons like what I saw on the TV, in movies, in books. If you also grew up reading Archie comics, I'm sure you'd empathise with how I felt left out reading about the snow sculpture competitions (Jughead would almost always be making a sculpture of a hamburger and Betty of Archie) and how Lil' Jinx might be making snow angels...

Having two kinds of weather was boring, because it meant that I didn't have the chance to put on more clothing or see the trees change colour or have a childhood with snow angels. If you also grew up reading Archie comics, I'm sure you'd empathise with how left out I felt - to be growing up in Singapore.

In Singapore, it might have been possible to lie down in the sand pit on the playground to make sand angels - but it's not quite tempting. The occasional beer bottle cap poking out of the sand was usually enough to set our imaginations on the defensive mode - that the sand is clean enough to run about barefooted and not to think about what else could be living in the sand. Besides, having grazed my knees on the sand deterred the idea of lying down and rubbing my limbs around on the ground... (Now, snow angels must seem even more remote because playgrounds are tiled with those sissy spongey cushions.)

Another common reason to wish for the four seasons was the imagined entitlement to a wider variety of clothes. Autumn and Winter clothing in fashion magazines always look great. They promise to hide body flaws and make everyone look more pensive and melancholic. With autumn, anyone could have the rights to sensibly own three dozen scarves and a blue coat just like Paddington Bear's. One could have twenty-seven cool sensible hats and seventy-two sensible sweaters in a variety of styles. One would even have a pair of sensible ice-skates...

Yet, today, I'm not sure if you noticed anything... but today, the weather was a little bit strange. It might have started last night, but in the morning, the winds were already blowing hard. It seemed, that the winds were from different directions - sometimes from the East and sometimes from the North or West. The trees, if you had the chance to look at them properly, were swirling. It's really interesting, you know! Swirling trees.

Sure, other countries might have swirling trees too, but would they have swirling bougainvilleas from overhead bridges next to swirling iron tree hedges next to swirling pong pong trees? Would they have trembling orchid plants and jasmine plants outside your neighbour's home in the common corridor?

It was all quite cute to take note.

And I realised that having only two seasons doesn't make any place any more boring than a place with one million seasons.

Then again, perhaps a million seasons are quite hard to beat... but what I mean is, happiness lies in the details, and we all just need to know what works for us so we know where to look.

Honestly, do I wish for Singapore to have autumn and winter? So that I could match a colourful South American woollen poncho with a black turtle neck top and my new Uniqlo jeans? No, and why not? Because I know how expensive it would be to maintain a wardrobe for four seasons and how much more wardrobe space I would need. What a hassle it would be to manage all that?

I'd much rather be spending my afternoons watching the wind.

Ernest Beauregard

2009-11-28T12:37:00.003+08:00

Ernest Beauregard was always taught not to stick sharp things into one's ears, lest they burst the ear-drums and become deaf. So, when he was twenty-five years old and was posted to Singapore by the auditing firm he worked for, and when his colleagues showed him around a pasar malam where he picked up a packet of three curious little metal scoops (found next to the nail cutters), he wasn't quite prepared to find out that they were ear-picks or ear-diggers used to clean one's ear wax.

Ernest was shocked and asked with concern if his colleagues and their people knew that they were not supposed to stick sharp things into one's ears. He was disappointed to find out that despite having gone through a well-developed health education syllabus that taught them the same textbook-answer of not sticking sharp things into one's ears, many sensible Singaporean adults were rebelliously skilful with the manipulation of the metal/bamboo/plastic ear-diggers. His colleagues tried to explain to him how the education was only purposeful in teaching the kids discretion such that they knew to they had to properly train themselves and master the ear-picks before use.

To Ernest, it was like finding out that half the population regularly hot-wire cars or break into houses for a living.

Ernest bought a packet of the ear-picks and showed it to his family over Skype to highlight how the absurd Asians were jeopardising their sense of hearing. All of the Beauregards, except Ernest's mother, laughed heartily at Ernest's rigid overreaction.

During his stay in Singapore, Ernest later went on to fall in love with a Singaporean girl.

Once, after they made love, the girl found the packet of ear-picks in the condom-drawer and volunteered to help Ernest clean his ears. He rejected the offer immediately, to which the girl coolly stuck the earpicks into her ears and called him a coward. She also taunted him with a emotionally blackmail of "if you trusted me, you won't be so afraid", to which he countered with a "if you loved me you wouldn't jeopardise my sense of hearing". His resistance crumbled when she threatened never to lick his ears again unless he let her pick it.

She made him lay down on his side and rested his head on her lap. She cleaned his left ear first because Ernest was right-handed and felt that the left ear was less important. Despite feeling intimidated that she might deafen him, and by the power she had over him, willing that little metal spade, he found himself aroused by the intimacy of the act. It could be due to some masochistic tendencies or a new found genuine appreciation he had for the cleanliness with every scoop of ear wax. As she insisted that looking at the removed wax was an important process of enjoying ear-digging, everytime she removed something, she would show the ear wax to him, and they would make a fuss about how gross his ears were. Although he did not admit it, he enjoyed the ear-digging immensely. He thought that it was almost cathartic.

After they broke up, Ernest tried to clean his ears himself, but he caused himself to bleed. To test if he was still able to hear with his injured ear, he called himself on his mobile phone and held against his injured ear. Fortunately, he did not damage his hearing, but he never dared to dig his ears ever again.

On the day he was packing up to go home, he saw the little plastic packet containing the two ear-picks that were left. Ernest thought it was a waste to toss them away, and that he should at least try to use the tiny scoops to scoop something else. He stood in front of his toilet mirror and stuck a metal scoop into his nose to scoop out snot. It didn't feel as good as ear cleaning - it was just a little ticklish and fairly ineffective. He concluded that nostrils were generally too big for the scoops to fit comfortably. He also concluded that fingers and fingernails were impressively well-adapted for nose-cleaning as they were well-shaped and better fit to scrape against the walls of the nostrils.

Ernest threw away the soiled ear-pick and picked up the last ear-pick and wondered what he could try to scoop next. He looked at himself in the mirror and thought that the metal pick would taste bad in his mouth so he tried to clean his eye instead. He started with his left eye. He pulled his lower eyelid downwards with his left hand and manuveured the pick to retrieve some eye wax - or so he thought, as it was actually just some whitish flesh that probably connected his eye. When he picked on it, the hurt surprised him, and Ernest panicked and unfortunately slipped and somehow jammed the earpick further into his eye socket. Thus, Ernest Beauregard blinded himself in one eye.

Years later, Ernest wished he tried to use the ear-pick to clean his belly button instead. He wondered if he could find a ear-pick from Chinatown to do just that.

(sneak.)

By the way: Sand-Biscuits

2009-11-24T23:19:00.002+08:00

Won't you buy a biscuit? Please?

Untitled

2009-11-21T18:23:00.004+08:00

Last Monday night, when I was watching tv as usual, I closed my eyes and almost fell asleep... then your mother came to me. I think we were brought back to the time when we were in the labour room. It was like how I remembered it. It was too cold, and the atmosphere was tense. When I saw her on Monday night, she was in labour again. Giving birth to you. She was halfway screaming from the labour pains when she suddenly stopped, and put on a serious expression and told me to tell you something - a secret. After that she smiled and I jolted awake.

Now, this had been a secret that has been kept from you. And I am not sure if I had indeed truly met your late mother that night, or that it wasn't just a figment of my imagination... but I don't want to disrespect her wishes, you know... She's my dearest sister, and I didn't do much for her when she was alive... So, that's why I called you here today.

Do you want me to tell you a secret about you?

And it might be a secret that you might do better if you did not know about. But you know, who is to know what is going to happen after you find out, right? So, think about it, and let me know...

No, no, you don't have to decide so immediately.

Are you sure?

Very well, then. If you're so sure of yourself, here I go.

First of all, I hope you won't take it personally. Because it was before you were born, that your mother wanted to remove you... as in, abort you... from her womb. I mean, you weren't even a person yet. I think they really didn't plan for your arrival. And abortion was a pretty common solution... for our generation of people who were not used to using birth control...

Well of course, you should already know about your father's habits right? Him and the women from around... That ass hole really got more bold over the years, didn't he? Not even the decency to be discrete...

Anyway, well, here goes... Your mother told me explicitly, that night, to tell you that your father was seeing another woman, while she was pregnant with you.

She found out about it from the girl's parents, who came to tell her about it, as apparently, and they didn't know who to go to.

Your mother didn't tell me all the details. She just came to me and told me what happened - that the woman's parents came to her. That your father didn’t know that she knew. She did mention that the other woman was under-aged, though. And that she felt sorry for the girl. She told me everything rather matter-of-factly... We didn't discuss on how she felt... only what she should do... and she asked me to accompany her to the doctor's to have you removed.

At the doctors, they doctor told her that she was already too big to be operated on. It would have been too dangerous. After some persuasion, she finally decided to give birth to you. And since she didn't want to have your father present in the labour room, she didn't tell him when she was going in labour. Instead, I was with her.

So... now, how do you feel?

Mr Bu

2009-11-14T23:12:00.003+08:00

Then one night, he gasped loudly, stood up, spun around and exclaimed "When the moon hits three-quarters for the five hundred and twenty third time, I shall be released!"

All the nurses were a shock, of course; after all, this elderly Mr Bu Min Jie had been in a catatonic state for about 40 years now. Watching Mr Bu dance around the ward, even those nurses who had been caring of Mr Bu felt like celebrating with him.

He was admitted to the hospital after being found unconscious in the middle of the road. When he woke up in the hospital, almost one year later, he was catatonic. They thought it might have been a traffic accident which caused him to suffer from some bad trauma to his head. Brain-specialists took turns to target their enthusiasm at him. It seemed like they scanned his brains almost every time the machine was available, but they discovered nothing.

He didn't have any identification, nor anybody missing him enough to identify him, so, they named him Mr B (after his ward). Over the years, the nurses, with the combination of their own inside jokes, extended his name to Mr Bu Min Jie.

Little did anybody know the truth was that he actually belonged to a world, that existed halfway between the ground to the sky, that could not be seen by the psychically-indisposed. He was cursed by a spell-binder, who cut a magic manhole in the ground of that world, from which Mr Bu was kicked out from, with a left foot, into this world. Mr Bu had tried to rob the spell-binder's wife. His real name was Dan (which meant "egg").

(sneak.)

Lavender Remedy

2009-11-10T22:59:00.003+08:00

Atera visited her auntie while having a cold and a blocked nose. Her auntie had heard from a friend of a friend that lavender was a good remedy for stuffy nose and made Atera some lavender tea.

It didn't work that well, but it was quite nice enough to drink for Atera to finish drinking her share - bottom-of-the-cup's up. In the process, Atera was unaware that some lavender seeds got stuck in her nose, and she went to sleep.

Overnight, they would grow into lavender bushes - one from each nostril - and she would wake up, sit up, and find two lavender bushes hanging from her face.

Traffic Allergic to Rain

2009-11-08T21:54:00.000+08:00

Recent studies suggests that the Singaporean traffic is allergic to rain.

The spokesperson from the relevant Department of Statistics described the phenomenon, saying, "It's almost like the Singaporean traffic is secretly solar powered, and when it rains, the express-ways will always be traffic-jammed up. Something - traffic accidents or fallen trees (peace be with all involved parties) - will inevitably cause traffic jams."

The public was advised to start their rainy days ahead of their usual times, especially to head out of their homes earlier than on non-rainy days. For people who tend to wake up late on rainy days, well, please refrain from doing that, as it is probably "bad for health". Also, the authorities remind people to wear suitable-rainy-day-clothes and drive steadily. It would be ideal, if the public could also try to keep out of my way, thanks.

Waterloo Street

2009-11-02T21:08:00.003+08:00

Her mind had been filled with replays of conversations she wanted to forget; yet, the harder she tried the louder they got.

She stood, in front of the temple's red gates, and cried, she fell on her knees.

The ground that was made of red bricks was dry and cool in an inexpressible and surprising way that was a relief to her.

She looked to the sky for a star to wish upon, but there was only the moon shining through the clouds.

The moonlight was gentle.
It felt almost sympathetic.
Or it could just be her imagination.
Or it could just be what she's looking for - pity.
Or something like that.

She noticed how the block of flats looked very different from how they did in the day. In the day, they bustled with activities and sold things that people bought for Chinese New Year. In the night, they looked mysterious, dependable, and good to jump off from.

In fact, everything looked different from how they did in the day. Like that old woman in the corner - snoozing by the now-folded-"new-moon-brand"-beach-umbrella that sheltered her flower and incense stall in the day?

Was she keeping watch for the temple?
Or just keeping watch for the stall.
Does she spend the night here?
Every night?
Or it just tonight?

Ah.
The wind.

The soft comforting wind - it consoles everything.

Well, if I have to go, I should at least give my thanks and say goodbye.

She wiped her cheeks with the back of her hands and held her palms together to her forehead. Without knowing why, she also said a prayer for the old woman in the corner.

Then with the next breath, all the other voices in her head quietened. All she heard was a voice that made her realise that there were a lot of people who really had it worse - like the old woman and the other people sleeping around along this street, whose bones and hearts were born just as brittle as anyone else's.

And she was aware of her heartbeat.

Sock puppet

2009-10-25T22:11:00.000+08:00

The boy put his hand into his sock that he just took off from his feet that he just took out of his shoes which he just got home from school in. Today, his teacher showed his class an educational video featuring sock puppet hosts，and he was really impressed with them and had been eager to go home to try it out.

His version of the sock puppet didn't look as nice as the ones on the video - it didn't have the fake button eyes and funky features made of felt cloth patches - it was plain and a bit greyish with dirt.

Suddenly, his sock spoke - as in, the voice was not in his head, but as in, a voice really came from his undecorated sock puppet (he knew it was real because the voice was louder when the sock was put closer to his ear and softer when pulled further away). The sock said to to the boy in a low voice,

"Kid, listen to me carefully. I have been waiting for this day for a long time. Look, I've transferred some of my taste buds to your hands. These are taste receptors that would send wireless signals back to me so that I know the taste of what you eat.

"I have been wanting very badly to taste food because the oven mittens told me - when we met in the laundry bin - that food here is great. And the oven mittens are so... hot. I mean...

"Ah, what the heck... to be honest, I have a crush on them. And I want to taste some food so that we would have something to talk about next time we meet. Your feet ain't quite the conversation point, you know.

"Anyway, all you've gotta do is to touch the food with your hands later. As in, use your hands to eat. My taste buds/receptors on your hands and fingers would transmit to me the taste signals of whatever you touch.

"The taste buds will probably make your hands smell slightly, and some suspect they're probably going to make you sick if you eat it... but no matter. Don't worry, we can take that risk together. So, regardless of what your mother says, YOU BETTER don't wash your hands before dinner.

"You also BETTER don't remove me - as in, the sock - until just before dinner time. And until then, in fact, until dinner time, you better don't dig your nose or scratch your backside. You can only go do all those funny things AFTER you wash your hands with dish-washing liquid (preferably mama lemon) AFTER dinner. That would deactivate the receptors.

"If you don't do as I say, I'm going to gnaw at your feet and give you one hundred and thirty blisters! I will torture you! GEDDIT, kid?"

The boy was really intimidated, because the sock puppet was talking, and had an low, creepy, authoritative voice, and was threatening him into do something his (hypochondriac and intimidating-in-her-own-right) mother is surely going to give him a good scolding for. And being really intimidated made him really, really regret choosing to play with the sock before going to pee.

想你21

2009-10-19T23:40:00.001+08:00

如果你知道我病了 -

你会倒一杯水给我喝吗？

你会耐心听
我无聊地告诉你
纸巾是怎么擦伤
我的鼻子吗？

你会不会陪我？

我不知道
如果你知道我病了，
你会不会
让药变比较好吃一些。

By the way: Safety Device

2009-10-13T23:46:00.000+08:00

Milk Thistle for the Liver

2009-10-12T23:14:00.005+08:00

Somebody gave somebody a bottle of milk thistle supplements, and that latter somebody, in turn, gave the entire bottle to me and said,

"Apparently, it's good for the liver."

"But my liver is not bad," I said.

"You can't ever have a good enough liver," he said.

"Then why don't you keep it for yourself?" I said, "It's not very nice, you know... it was a gift to you..."

"My liver's too damaged, you know, from all those years of drinking and cigarettes," he said. "This thing won't have any effect on me."

"Well, it could do some damage control," I said.

"It's too late, and I won't eat it, so it's wasted on me," he said.

"Why not? Since 'one can't ever have a good enough liver'."

"Because I think life is boring, and life has no meaning, and I have simply no will to live."

This convinced me to quickly accept his offer and to take the milk thistle supplements dutifully... for fear that my liver gets as damaged as his.

A Story Seldom Told

2009-10-05T21:15:00.005+08:00

I wanted to write a story today, but I had no idea.
Suddenly I heard a little voice, that was faint, but pretty clear.

"Then write a story about us, it's a story that's seldom told
About when the humans did not yet have feet included to its mold.

About when I was just a tortoise, minding my own sweet time,"
Said my left foot to me, in the following little rhyme,

"And about when an elephant came along, suddenly on my right.
You know, tortoises don't usually move so fast, so I got quite a fright,

Thinking that it would be the end of me if the elephant were to land
Too much of its weight on me that my shell wouldn't withstand.

But instead, the elephant picked me up, with its strong but gentle trunk,
With which I never really spoke, but for whom somehow I sunk

First into infatuation, and then it grew into love...
A tortoise with an elephant's trunk - it's unspeakably unheard of.

We went here and there and manywhere without the rest of the elephant knowing,
Until we were finally caught one day when we were out making

Excuses for us to go out to make excuses again...
Being caught dating a tortoise by your "parents" - how would you explain?

I suppose we didn't actually put forth a convincing case,
But we simply pledged our love, in front of the elephant's face.

Perhaps it was too surprised by our blatant disrespect
Of the obligatory embarrassment that it could reasonably expect...

Of a tortoise and its own trunk who wanted to be with one another,
Or perhaps it was moved by our sincerity altogether.

By the way, conveniently, the elephant was asked to finish the task
Of designing the humble human form that it would then unmask...

So, the elephant decided on the spot, to make me the left foot
And then it modelled a bit of its trunk to become the right foot..."

At this point I awoke to find my hands resting on the keyboard,
And this story that is on the screen as my only record,

Of how my left foot was a tortoise who was in love with an elephant's trunk,
Which is my right foot... I honestly don't at all recall being or getting drunk...

(sneak.)

Talcum moonwalk

2009-10-02T23:45:00.008+08:00

When my brother and I were children, one of our games involved pouring lots of talcum powder on the floor until it's slippery enough for us to skate around the room.

Our grandmother who took care of us, and who was entrusted with the general responsibility of inculcating common sense in us, would pretend to be upset if she were to catch us wasting talcum powder and another person's efforts to have to clean it up afterwards. So, if we were to have a "skating-fest", we would have to sneak a chance - for example, when she was just starting to prepare a meal in the kitchen, or when she was going out to the market. To create a reason to account for traces of powder on the floor, since we weren't prepared to clean up after ourselves in any circumstances, we might have dashed some powders at our neck, to pretend that we had indeed intended to apply the powder properly, but "oops. How clumsy of us to spill so much powder."

I suppose it was a lame excuse, but at that time, it seemed like she bought it, as long as our excuses were elaborated enough. On hindsight, she might have thought that an elaborate excuse was indicative enough of a common-sensical understanding that pouring powder on the floor was unacceptable.

At times, we might have improvised, for example, to play a challenging game of pepsi-cola on the slippery floor, or compete on who could slide the furthest with one stride. Sometimes, we would have practised the moonwalk.

It was a time when Michael Jackson was cool and we would try to stand on our toes and tip the hats around and look for one glove to wear. We would also try to lean forward as far as possible while standing on a spot and pour talcum powder on the floor to do the moonwalk...

Well, now, Michael Jackson is dead.

I read an article about how he underwent some radical medical treatment to extend his life expectancy to 500 years...

If even Michael Jackson is dead, then I suppose it must be time for us to grow up.

The Bayon

2009-09-30T22:17:00.005+08:00

You appeared out of nowhere and with a kind smile, you said,

"Come, follow me, I'll bring you to the most beautiful place in the world."

On my way there, in between thoughts about work and other mundane thoughts, I studied the intensity of your shadow as I put my feet deep in the tracks that you made. At first, I thought I should make full use of the silent trek to contemplate on what to do with my life, or at least, what I would do about all the things to do back in the office... you know, 'constructive' thoughts. My only revelations were, however, to realise that I was lucid dreaming again - from noticing how the shadows looked very serious despite it not being particularly sunny - and that I did not recognise you from anywhere I could remember.

"Excuse me," I asked, "but where is the most beautiful place in the world?"

"You'd know where, when you get there," you said.

I tried to relax myself.

We walked by a dry pond, where a lot of headless dragonflies congregated - almost a swarm - but it was not very beautiful, just miraculous, perhaps, and somewhat creepy, so we didn't stop.

We walked by a ruined temple, about which gathered a group of ladies who had the upper body of humans and the lower body of snakes. They were singing and dancing - or that might have been the way they spoke normally - and they were really quite beautiful... with their graceful poise and dresses, and especially, with the way their snake scales glowed or shimmered... but I didn't think this was where, so we didn't stop.

As we went deeper into the forest, the ground became muddier until it didn't make sense for me to walk in your tracks any further, so I tried to find my own footing... I was engrossed in keeping balance and thoughts on how tedious it would be to clean my shoes until I made up my mind to throw them away when we were through.

When we came upon a clearing where the ground was hard again, I looked up and knew I was there.

I stood before the Bayon, stunned. All my silly thoughts and worries and wastes of mind dissipated into the glorious light that engulfed me - I was quiet. I carefully beheld the sight before me and dared not to breathe too hard lest I were to wake myself up.

From the silence, a whisper in my head secretly told me you had left, and that I was alone, and it asked me what to do next. I did not know. It asked me something else. I did not know. I did not know anything. And I did not care anymore. I could no longer.

I could only be quiet, in awe of the most beautiful place in the world.

By the way: Egg

2009-09-25T00:16:00.002+08:00

Ten years

2009-09-13T14:09:00.004+08:00

She alternates between wondering where she should go to buy plasters and trying to ignore the pain from the blisters on her feet from her high heeled shoes as she makes her way to the coffee shop to buy her coffee before going up to the office. She can't wait to kick off her shoes and she doesn't care that her office is "open concept" and it's too bad that they don't have cubicles in offices anymore.

As she's lining up, she tries not to think about what her colleague said to her, or what she thinks she should think about what her colleague said, because she should try not to think about work before she goes in to work. Maybe she could think about all the people ahead of her in the queue. She wonders if they enjoyed work.

Did she dream of growing up to work in an office? Being an executive executive?

No, she wanted to be a ballet dancer.

She was closest to becoming a ballet dancer when they were evaluating her options if her grades couldn't get her into any Junior College. She remembers her mother talking to her ballet teacher about the good ballet schools in Australia and how she could be recommended to gain entrance into one. But, she did get good enough grades to get herself into JC and eventually, to the local university where she got a degree in business administration.

She was sixteen then. Ten years after that, at twenty-six, she dreams of how happier she might be if she did worse in her O-levels, ten years ago.

I, its mealy bug

2009-09-08T23:33:00.004+08:00

I bought a potted plant recently. It's a humble peperomia acuminata that cost me $2 - plastic pot inclusive. Enthusiastic about the new addition to my routine, I searched online for plant-caring tips.

They said that this plant (or some other plants I got mixed up with) tended to get infested by mealy bugs - which are little white cottony bugs that suck the life out of the plants. And that one's gotta go and scout them out and wipe them off with a cotton bud (the irony) soaked with rubbing alcohol. And that one has to go and repeat this over a few days because they might have laid eggs that would hatch later.

I switched on my book-light and poked around. Indeed, I spotted 2 of them.

For the past few days, I've been wondering if I should remove the bugs - to kill by spraying alcoholic perfume or wipe the plant with an alcoholic wet wipe - but killing's too cruel, so, perhaps I could snip off the leaves they're on (they're not fast bugs) and throw them in a park or on someone else's plants - so that they won't kill off my plant eventually. Yet, I can't reconcile that actually, the mealy bugs are quite just minding their own business, and playing out their part of the food chain, and look, really, it's not that big enough a deal to smite the mealy bugs for.

I mean, to the universe, what's the difference between a mealy bug and I? There're probably more similarities - perhaps, I don't work or eat or live on a leaf, but I work and eat and live in this time and space? Like, the world is my peperomia, and I, its mealy bug.

Well, I guess, I could adopt the bugs as pets.

(sneak.)

The "O. H. P."

2009-09-02T22:14:00.005+08:00

When I was a child, I was very interested with overhead projectors. They were more commonly referred to as the "O. H. P."s.

Perhaps it was because OHPs cast such clean shadows against the pulled-down screens, or that the technology was so seemingly simple, but impressively versatile. Or how the mirror on top must always be kept so clean and perfect and that it could be lifted open by the neat little lever on the metal cap.

I also intensely liked the transparencies that teachers gave out during group discussions. I liked the sound they made when they were handled, and I liked how they (at least the new ones) were clean and flawless.

The special marker pens for the transparencies that could be erased with a water-wet-tissue were quite cool too. Too bad that the teachers usually handed out only one to each group and that they too easily ran out of ink and that the felt tips were also too easily blunted and soggy from use. I felt that the group with the classmates who whipped out their private set of those markers (all 4 colours - black, blue, green, and red) was lucky to have them.

One of my pastimes was to try to re-create all that at home - all that as in the transparencies, the projections, all that.

First, I would sneak clear plastic bags from my grandmother's kitchen. I had to sneak around, because if I were to be found out, I would be told not to waste good plastic bags that could be better put to proper and practical use, for example, to keep food. Then, I would carefully slice the bags open into plastic sheets (usually with a scissors, or a penknife if I were feeling brave), and I tried my best not to wrinkle them too much.

I would write on these flimsy plastic things with a permanent marker - which were usually much fatter and less elegant than the proper transparency markers. I had to be extra careful not to make any mistakes because I couldn't undo any with a water-wet-tissue.

Next, I held up these sheets in front of a hand-held torchlight shining into the cupboard under my elder brother's fiberboard study table that I emptied beforehand. In this way, I "projected" the materials onto the back of the cupboard. The cupboard was small and had a fake-beechwood kinda finish. The opened cupboard door helped to shield my things from some light and the eyes of potential curious or ridiculing adults.

Actually, the projections kinda sucked. They weren't clear at all. The plastic bags were flimsy and murky and not exactly transparent. The torchlight was not bright enough, or perhaps the room wasn't dark enough. It wasn't really worth the trouble.

I probably read from the plastic ex-bag to pretend that I was reading off the images on the back of the cupboard.

Still, I remember doing this quite often. Perhaps, it was to add fun to studying for spelling tests.

Hong Kong Movie

2009-08-26T23:32:00.002+08:00

They were watching a movie about gangster violence and drug trafficking. She was cringing and wringing in her seat. He noticed it and said,

"Haiyah, this is just a movie. Surely Hong Kong isn't so law-less? And even so, the scriptwriters wouldn't know the stories behind the drug dealers what? Unless these movies written by ex-cons, they must be quite fictional."

"Even if it isn't exactly common," she replied, "These crimes of violence are not entirely fictional - They really happen to real people in whatever corners of the world. And that's just hard unbearable to imagine already."

And he felt maligned.

The Bowler Hat

2009-08-24T20:13:00.004+08:00

I imagined that the bowler hat, that I bought a few months ago, and wore even fewer times, spoke to me, and I imagined how surprised I felt, and then I realised that all these were imagined, and then I continued to imagine that the bowler hat said these to me,

"I would like to go to Japan in the Spring time and watch the sakuras bloom and wither for an entire month. It would be ideal, if I could also attend the awa odori and get drunk and join in the parade for a while. And if given the chance, I would also want to spend an entire week watching snow fall in a Shinto temple's garden, sometimes while listening to the tanukis' snore.

"But, seriously, what are the chances for a black bowler hat with lofty aspirations to go on a cultural tour of the Orient. For if I were you," with 'you' meaning me, "and I were to be lucky enough to go for these colourful gay cultural events, I, too, won't feel like bringing me along. I'd remind me too much of dreading work, of the working class, of Sisyphus, of the boring etcetera, etcetera. The colours won't even match, imagine the picture of a black bowler hat against the bright blue skies and delicate pinks and white? How inappropriate is the irony of a black bowler hat to enjoy the jolly drunken celebration of living for the reckless moment? It would jeopardise spoiling the good mood of the party.

"Sigh! Nowadays, it seems that one of the most esteemed qualities of a bowler hat is to be reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin, and to make light of the mundane etcetera, etcetera."

I wondered if the bowler hat would feel better if I tie something silly to its puggaree.

I had bought the bowler hat in celebration of Magritte's paintings.

Jie Qi

2009-08-23T22:10:00.006+08:00

I bought a clock today. The winning feature of the clock is that, even though battery operated, the second hand ticks softly, much like an automatic watch's second hand. There isn't the reproachful "tick-tock" cry of time passing reprimanding me on how I might never recover every split consciousness I do not spend on progressing towards my life's goals, and instead, for example, on listening to a clock. In this way, I think this clock seems less Confucian, and somehow, more compassionate.

It's hanging on my wall now, in front of me. It's round, with a silver frame, black hands, and a white face - it looks almost serious - except its carelessly unevenly set black arial numbers let on on how casual it really is.

What nice qualities for a clock to have - compassionate and casual.

To think I bought it for 5 dollars only. The brand is "JIE QI" and it's made in China. It shall also serve to remind that the value of time is not measured by the price of the timepiece telling it.

And if it should malfunction anytime too soon, as is reasonable to suspect of anything costing only a quarter of what similar products cost, I would melt it over an open flame or in a microwave.

(sneak.)

Flippers

2009-08-19T23:36:00.000+08:00

One day, she woke up and found her ankles missing. Her feet merely stuck out at the end of her legs, like flippers.

At first she was worried thinking about how would she walk and how would she get to work and if she was going to get fired. Then she persuaded herself to be optimistic.

Sometime later, she eventually ended up as a circus act. She made a living by balancing a ball on her nose and pretending to be a seal.

Hm.

2009-08-18T20:43:00.004+08:00

Hm. He saw no moon in the sky.
Hm.

After some thought,
he remembered watching the moon wane over the past week.
He wondered if it had diminished
until it's not visible to the naked eye anymore.
Hm.

Red blinking lights - aeroplanes.
Hm. He wondered what it was like to be on a plane
and to be so awfully close to the stars.
Hm.

He couldn't imagine it.
Hm.

The wind herded the clouds South-wards.
Wait. South-wards?
Since when did the Northerly winds started to blow?
Hm.

The breeze persuaded
a little bit of swaying from the tree,
from which the bat flew away from,
and then,
returned.
His wings
fluttered
very softly.
Hm.

The rustling
of the leaves was soothing,
against the insects' songs
sung
night after night
after night.
Hm.

Come to think of it,
where do they hide themselves?
Hm.

Perhaps the songs do not come from insects at all,
but from the night itself.
Hm.

There were also the sounds from the television sets.
And cars, passing by.
Hm.

*

He closed his eyes to concentrate on what he heard,
and on what stirring of air he felt,
and on whether he might be sleepy enough to fall asleep.
Hm.

If he might be sleepy enough,
he would then retire to his kennel.
Hm.

Which was actually a modified iron cage.
Hm.

To wait for tomorrow to come.
Hm.

(sneak.)

想你20

2009-08-15T01:34:00.002+08:00

在我们放下电话的那个时刻
我后悔不和你多谈一些。

我想你了。

Funnel

2009-08-13T23:55:00.004+08:00

I dreamt I was in a forest, with the air chilly and still. It was just past sunset, so the forest was getting ready to sleep. Birds flew home hastily.

Then a sheep appeared from nowhere. He was big and humanoid in the way that he walked on his two hind legs. His wool was unshaven for a long time, and it was filthy. At first sight, he looked like a bear or a wolf or just some menacing figure. At sight, I was startled and fell over.

He walked towards me and reached towards my hand. Recognising that he was a sheep, and thus stereotypically harmless, I thought he was going to help me up. Instead, he grabbed me by my wrist roughly, and easily overpowered me, and tied my wrists together with a rope that was seemingly made from his wool. It was also rough and cut into my skin. Then, he tied my ankles together.

I laid on my back on the forest floor. He squatted next to my head and held it down by pressing on my forehead with one hoof. With another, he held out a funnel, and stuffed the narrow end into my mouth. I was frightened stiff and forgot to gag.

He then took out a book or a dictionary of some magical sort, from which he poured into the funnel and stuffed something into my mouth. When they started overflowing from the overwhelmed funnel, I saw what they were - words - black strings of letters put together - and they were alive - like fat maggots - which was a bad thing to notice because then I started to I feel them squirm and crawl in my mouth, on my tongue, and down my throat.

Then out of nowhere as well, I suddenly realised it could have been worse - he could have poured glass, or knives, or debit notes, or sins into my mouth. I think they would have been ripping my mouth into bits - since words crawled and squirmed. Sure, it could have been better, but chances are, in a nightmare like this, it would have been worse.

With that somewhat-reconciliation, I drifted away from the dream and went back to sleep.

(sneak.)

Watch out!

2009-08-11T21:32:00.006+08:00

There was a girl who was sitting on the toilet bowl one day and she shitted what she initially thought was shit. Then, before she flushed it away, something caught her eye - something that moved in the water. So she pulled her face closer to look.

Floating near the surface of the water, was a little brown hemisphere of something, and from it, fine ribbons hung - a little bit translucent, a little bit murky brown... it was a little brownish jellyfish...

In her mind, she immediately thought of all the marvellous things, wow, the news, the sensation, the fanfare about how she's the miraculous girl who gave birth to a jellyfish. (Through her anus.) Oh how the scientists would have a field day, it might hold the antidote to some strange illness. She had pretty healthy bowels, maybe the jelly fish kept it healthy, maybe it holds the antidote to cancer! Oh no, now that she's shitted it out would she be unhealthy from now? Nah, it'd be okay, it's for mankind, she'd save the world! Watch out, Illness! and Pre-mature Death-due-to-colon-cancer! (It should at least help cure colon cancer.) Here comes the shit jellyfish!

In her frenzy, her body, however, reacted quite differently. Her pupils dilated, and her heart beat faster, and her mouth opened and uncontrollably let out her voice that screamed, "MY SHIT IS ALIVE!" which triggered her arm to uncontrollably reach towards the flush handle which she flushed.

As she watched the jellyfish spiral in the toilet bowl uzumaki (whirlpool), she felt the flush from her face flushed away with her hopes for fame. She stood. Stunned. For a while. It was only until the water in the water tank stopped trickling and the water surface in the towel bowl stopped vibrating altogether then she came to her senses enough to wonder - hey, did I really just see a shit jellyfish in the toilet bowl, or not? and even if I did, did I really shit it out or not? Unless I should ever shit out another jellyfish, I would never know. And even if I shit out another jellyfish, how would I know that I did shit one before, and it was not due to how my mind was set on shitting out a jellyfish?

Confused, perturbed, and in an uncomfortable daze, she went out of the toilet and forgot to wash her hands.

(sneak.)

Sometimes, life is like that.

2009-07-29T23:07:00.004+08:00

Every now and then, when I come home at night, in the window in my room, I would see an old man. He usually sits on a green chair, in front of a green wooden door, surrounded by beautiful blue hydrangeas. He usually has one leg over the other, with his left arm on his lap, like he was waiting for me, with his right hand raised to say hello and a casual "hello" kind-of expression on his face.

Hello, old man. Good to see you again. I would sometimes say. But he never says anything back. And he fades away.

I didn't know him before he died. Those who did would often sing his praises and say he was funny and describe a couple of his odd habits. I always feel an affinity towards him, although I can't quite put a finger to it, but I suppose that's why he appears at my window anyway.

Perhaps anybody who have heard about him from anybody who knew him would feel an affinity towards him. Perhaps, he's just that kind of personality. I wonder if I'd like to be somebody like that - interesting, funny, clever, probably, and likeable - but I think a lot of these traits are inborn.

I suppose, sometimes, life is like that. What they may sometimes call "unfair"... which by the way, is a concept created by whom? Life is never fair, what. From the moment of birth, one may be funny or not, or a boy or a girl, or Asian or African... to the moment of death... by cancer, by premature birth, by tumbling down the stairs... since when was life ever fair?

If the old man would ever speak, maybe this could be something that I would seek his opinion on.

Until then, I'd just leave it as - sometimes, life is like that.

(sneak.)

Self-awareness

2009-07-28T22:30:00.003+08:00

I accidentally trespassed some red ants' territory on Saturday. Now, I have ant bites on my right second littlest toe. I've tried, but I can't count how many distinct bites there are. I also don't know how many distinct ants bit on it, because I must have brushed them off too quickly. It's very itchy. I scrunch my toes on the carpet or rough ground every chance I get just to scratch it every chance I get.

There are certain parts of the body where one could get the most irritating itchy insect bites. They are:

On a toe,
On a sole,
Behind a knee,
On a private part,
On any part of the body beneath the elastic band of one's underwear, especially at the pelvis,
On or around a nipple,
At an armpit,
On an elbow,
On a palm,
On a finger,
On or near a knuckle,
On a ear (front and back),
On and inside a nose, and
On an eyelid.

I don't think the above list is exhaustive, but I do think it's generally important to know such things, because it's really about being self-aware. As compared to knowing the details of the next American president's campaign speech, I believe that, at the individual level, it's more important for everyone, including the next American president, to know at least some intimate details about oneself.

Also, should one ever find oneself in a mosquito infested place, with only a little bit of insect repellent, one might know better where to apply it.

想你19

2009-07-28T00:14:00.001+08:00

昨晚，在我回家的路上, 天下起雨来。
我停下脚步, 站在路灯下, 往上望。

被照亮的雨滴，从黑夜空中莫名其妙地掉了下来。
我的脸感到了雨的冷也感到了世界的奇妙。

你说你那里下雪了。
雪的感觉会很不一样吗？

By the way: The Guitar Player

2009-07-24T00:46:00.002+08:00

The Song of the Cradled

2009-07-19T23:46:00.004+08:00

There was a people who was poor and lived in drastic and harsh conditions. They lived in the high mountains where food was scarce and not tasty and it was cold. They don't think and invent tools to improve their lives because they don't have enough to eat and don't have enough energy to think. These people quite often gave birth to stillborns since marriages were usually between very close relatives. In fact, their children were weak and they often died before maturity.

After their passing, the dead body would be washed and cleaned and wrapped up in some hide or cloth. The parents, or if not, only the mother, would usually cradle the dead child and sing a song. This was known as "The Song of the Cradled". The song was about being born into this world and the harshness of the land and the beauty of the love that the child has never got to experience, and how fortunate it was to die young and having not to suffer hunger any more, and about how the living had to suffer their ill-fate for not being dead yet. When it should come to be their turn to die, they would not be held by their parents, but only be cradled by the merciless chill of the mountains... and they bade their goodbyes.

After the song was sung, the parents would cut the head off the carcass and de-gut the body. They, and whoever at the ceremony, would then eat the flesh of dead child.

I overheard the cats...

2009-07-16T21:57:00.005+08:00

I overheard that night, when the cats downstairs and below my window were talking about how there's a kind of crazy cat doctor. I don't know how it works and where these cats came from and why I understood what they were gossiping about I don't know. But they talked and I overheard about how there's a kind of crazy cat doctor from their kind of crazy cat world where they came from. The crazy cat doctor was a kind of cosmetic surgeon who was basically going around trying to multilate other cats. He was cutting off tails and ears and don't know what parts off cats and then transplanting them onto other cats.

What? The other one of the cats exclaimed. no, it was more like, WHAT? (In a way you must imagine a crazy cat would say it in.)

So the first cat went on and on about how those stranger than strange cats that would go and visit this doctor would all be granted these deviant secret wishes, to have 2 tails, to have 4 ears, to have 11 tits and all that. But the real question was, is, was, is? (They weren't particular about grammar and tenses.) Where did all these extra body parts came from?

Some rumours said it was from dead cats who recently died. Some said it was from like orphans that the mothers sold. Some said it was most likely from those cats who didn't speak and were normal and didn't have higher cognitive abilities... that would have been the most humane. like, dummy cats, farmed for this very purpose.

But the truth is, was, is, was, and I know because I know someone who knows someone who went to get an extra leg (apparently so that she could scratch herself better) and saw the doctor for herself, that it was done by some kind of blue magic, or black magic, or the ancient magic of the moon. You could ask for any body parts except for the eyes. There could be no mention of eyes. Because the doctor himself also has no eyes.

You see, the doctor was a subject of mutilation by some powerful magician - probably a human being who owned him as a pet or something - who gouged the eyes out of him and transplanted his testicles into his eye sockets. Makes sense, because only they could be bothered to do something like that. Then apparently, something strange must have snapped and happened such that not only could the doctor still see very well, he had a magical power for things like that.

If you ask me, I would say that the cat doctor probably was a powerful magician to begin with. And he might could might have performed the strange transplantation himself, because of some ancient magic or something, because it's really unlikely that any human being would have known better than his cat. The testicles thing must have only boosted his initial prowess exponentially.

And they went on to talk a little about the degenerate state of their cat-kind before they went away and I couldn't overhear them any more.

(sneak.)

Relieve

2009-07-08T22:13:00.004+08:00

There was once a girl who was at a meeting when she suddenly felt a big piece of snot falling apart from the roof of her nostrils. She found it hard to concentrate on what was discussed because the loose piece of snot flapped with her every out-breath and threatened to drop out of her nose.

It was a big one. It was a potentially gooey one as well - the hybrid kind of snot with the dry end and the gooey wet tail...

She really ought to excuse herself and go to the toilet and get it out before embarrassing herself - but being a junior executive, she was uncomfortable with having to get out of her chair in the middle of senior management's discussion and to possibly disrupt anyone by going across the room and opening and closing the big and heavy door.

Thus, she decided to take a deep breath - and to suck in the snot.

It was a big mistake. She sucked too hard, and it got pulled back too far into her nose and that was so uncomfortable that she wanted to dig it back out, but she still wanted to keep a low profile, so she struggled a bit and kept quiet. In a desperate fit, she thought to take another quick and hard breath to suck it further back in so that she could swallow it.

It was an even bigger mistake. She was right that the snot was sticky at one end, and it was stuck somewhere. She felt like gagging and wanted to cough, but again, she was shy and reluctant to attracting attention to herself, so she held it in and kept quiet, and she was did such a good job until she silently choked and died.

Soon after her death, they noticed her anyway because she relaxed and released her bowels.

(sneak.)

Withholder

2009-06-30T23:51:00.005+08:00

There was once a girl who was particularly adept at withholding her breath so much so that she fooled everybody into believing that she was dead. They held her wake and funeral and everything. She thought it was funny and marvellous that she should be able to pull off such a feat - until the sombre timbre of the resonance of her self-amusement startled her to realise that she was alone in a coffin buried five and a half feet underground.

So, she decided to crawl her way out of her grave.

After much effort and might, she managed to gasp a breath of fresh cool graveyard air.

After getting over congratulating herself on how capable she was, she thought of what to do next. She imagined that she would go home and scare the living wits out of the people who buried her, and have a good laugh. They might send her for counselling to find out what psychopathic condition might have induced such a funny behaviour before failing to diagnose her with anything specific. Then she'd be sent to school. If she's lucky, the kids at school might find her cool. Otherwise, she'd be ostracised - no big deal - because in a few years, she'd be out to work. Then she'd work - wake up earlier than she did for school - and get home later - she'd wear high heels or sandals and wrinkle-free office clothes. Then, she might start a family with somebody. Then, she might have some children - who might grow up - and start their own families. And by then, she'd realise how old she'd have grown - and then, she'd die of some terminal illness - then, they'd cremate her.

She looked up at the sky and forgot about the blood that was flowing from her nail-less fingers for a moment. Some of the stars shone clearly from behind the scattering of orangey clouds. The moon was new. There was the smell of some random flowers and other things from the offerings to a grave nearby. She thought briefly about looking for something to eat but decided that it would only be too troublesome.

She prayed silently and sincerely for peace to prevail and for all beings to relax and to eventually find salvation from suffering. Then, she anyhow re-buried herself before she suffocated.

Would write

2009-06-29T22:19:00.005+08:00

I remember her telling me about how she was feeling depressed and out of hope for life and tomorrow. When I suggested that perhaps writing could help to make her feel better, she said to me, "how can I bring myself to write about anything when all I want to do is to end my life?"

"Don't you have things to do? Things that you want to do and have not yet have the chance to do? Start a family? Go to Europe? Write a play?" I asked.

"Sure, I'll want to do them if I were alive, but if I die, I won't have to do any of them. Don't you get it?"

Even though I pretended not to get it, I did. I saw how her logic worked. I empathised with her and it scared me.

She told everyone that she was going to Europe, but she actually sealed herself into her cupboard, that she sealed inside her room - so that the smell of her rotting flesh wouldn't easily escape. In the cupboard, there were drawers, which was modified by her handiwork to become a planter which contained soil. In the soil, there were seeds of different kinds buried, the most absurd of which was a lotus seed. And she must have sat on top of the soil. She killed herself by blood letting. When they had discovered that she was gone, she was gone, there were traces of blood and other liquids and bits of her bones, but most of it had disintegrated into the earth. There was a little ikea light fixed in the cupboard, perhaps to help the seeds germinate, perhaps to let her write. The ikea lamp was kept on for quite some time because she had made giro arrangements for her utility bill payment and left enough money in the bank for that. Amongst the things she wrote, in a little blue notebook, as she was dying in the cupboard, she wrote this,

"...my greatest regret is not having brought a watch along. Not because I want to know how many days passed, but only to be even more conscious of how time is passing by slowly. Perhaps, the gold casio watch that somebody gave me - if it were digital and without the ticking - that would drive me crazy - it would be perfect. Or perhaps I could live with - no, die with - the ticking.

She had suggested that I could try writing to make myself feel better.

I remember once I was writing under the blue sky. The sky was so fine and brilliantly blue, that my white paper was blue in colour. The gentle breeze, the sound of the trees swaying... the blue sky was so blue... I remember the yellow curtains I had when I was very young. The curtains were very thin, and the blue sky would come through. On Sunday mornings when I woke myself up to watch cartoons, I would spend some lazy time to watch how the blueness of the sky shone through and complemented the pale yellow curtains so well.

Writing does make me feel better. If nothing else I'm leaving behind finds her, please let at least this find her - that she was right, and I was wrong. Writing does make me feel better.

I can't imagine if I didn't have paper and pen to write with now - how else could I make myself sit still here and wait for myself to die?..."

She was wearing shorts and tee-shirt, and bra and panties, and her specs. She was 32.

(sneak.)

The Racoon

2009-06-17T23:42:00.004+08:00

There was once a raccoon who rode a Harley Davidson bike. He wore chunky Harley Davidson biker boots and black Harley Davidson biker tee-shirts. He liked the way it matched his tail and dark eye circles.

One day, he got in an accident while riding his bike, his almost last thought was, "What the fuck?" Then, he thought, "Well, after all, it's a befitting way to die for a biker to die on the bike... like for a samurai to die in war. What more could I ask for?"

With that he muttered, "ah fuck it" and closed his eyes and let go of his life and passed away in a simple way shortly after.

The Case against Marble Cakes

2009-06-17T23:36:00.002+08:00

"There's one problem with marble cakes.

Okay, two. Two problems.

Firstly, if you have two marble cakes, and you eat some slices of each, then because of the swirls on the cake that don't match, you can't join the remaining slices together and pretend that you have one brand new cake, which would give the impression that the leftovers may not be really leftovers, which is generally a good impression for leftover cakes to give.

Secondly, as in the second problem, marble cakes are just not as popular as chocolate cakes."

By the way: Pink

2009-06-02T22:33:00.002+08:00

The Golden Beetle

2009-06-02T20:53:00.005+08:00

My mind smashes around like the golden beetle who is confused by the fluorescent lights whose dashing allure promised and baited it to enter into a room, a house, a building, a world that is cold and foreign and that it just can't seem to get out of - but surely there is a way! a way to defend its dreams its ideal its will to live! It must beat its wings as hard as it can as hard as it can and it tries to go a little crazy i fly towards the outside, but i slam against the window it's closed i don't know it's the window perhaps I should gain more speed, perhaps these walls are like the shadows of a dense tree, if I just zoom into it, it will give way it will give way so i ram myself against the wall but i fall i fall I fall on my back and never mind it's okay I will struggle to flip myself back i will not give up i don't know what it is to give up, i have landed on my back before, when I was young, and I can flip myself around then I will try again and I will take a deep breath and I will fly I will fly and beat my wings so hard and so fast and I will burst through the wall and that sense of triumph will surely make this all worth while I will go i will go i will go and tell this story to my wife my kids or the girl that I love or my father and he'd be proud of me and wish that he was the one who was telling me this story instead and it'll be worth while for that moment of glorious glory to see the look on their faces and so I go I go I go I go! but I fall I fall I fall I fall.

What's that i feel? is it pain? i did not fold my wings properly. did I injure myself? did i injure my wing? did I hurt my head? what's this heaviness I feel coming over me? I am tired it is late I am sleepy the corner here is comfortable and quite familiar I will rest for a while and soon I will forget what was life before because I am after all just a beetle - how much do you expect me to be able to remember? Was I born here? Soon I will believe I was born here. Soon, I will forget what I remember. What do I remember? I was born here. I not know despair.

Little dog chasing his own tail

2009-05-23T00:39:00.003+08:00

There was a little dog who was chasing his own tail - around and around in circles, he went.

A kind dog came by and saw and shook her head and thought, poor little dog, he is so busy chasing his tail that he has no chance to think about what he was doing. I remember, when I was a puppy, I was like that too.

A merciful dog came by and saw and shook her head and shouted, "Hey little dog, stop for a moment and think about what you're doing and if it is worth your while at all!" This distracted the little dog who stopped to see who was talking to him, he cocked his head to one side and looked like he was thinking, but he actually just wanted to scratch his balls, which he did, before chasing his tail again.

A third dog, who was lazing in a corner, amusing herself watching the little dog amuse himself, snorted a snort and thought, the very reason why the little dog is chasing his tail, is that he cannot think - that he doesn't have the cognitive ability to consider his actions - in the first place.

Emotional Blackmail

2009-05-17T22:39:00.004+08:00

There was a woman who emotionally blackmailed a man into having sex with her. After a few times, she was impregnated, and she emotionally blackmailed him into letting her keep the baby and to move in with her. When she was a few months from the due-delivery of her baby, she emotionally blackmailed the man into marrying her. Of course, all along the way, she would constantly emotionally blackmail the man to get her way in every little way.

When the baby was born, it turned out that he was a little monster.

He had six limbs and an upside down face - his eyes were nearest to his neck and his mouth nearer the top of his bald head that was made of blueberry cheese cake - as was the rest of his body - and to match, he was covered in blueberry jam and a fine film of water - like condensation from being taken out of refrigeration too long ago - except that the water was probably salty and more like the perspiration of a fat labourer at the end of the day - which was not how he smelled like, though - He smelled like clean rotten durian yogurt mixed in with a little of how babies' shit would smell like. He had claws like that of a parrot's instead of hands and fingers. He had a tail like that of a rat's. And he had a piece of steamed yam for his little stick of a dick.

When he came out of his mother, the delivery nurse screamed and cried and felt so guilty for dropping the baby that she jumped out of the window - they were at the 23rd storey of the building - and died from the fall.

The little monster stretched a little and yawned and danced a sneaky dance to his mother's side - it was a miracle because he could walk and knew his way about - and strangled her with the umbilical cord - still attached to the womb.

(sneak.)

The Overworked Girl

2009-05-17T22:07:00.002+08:00

There was a girl who graduated from somewhere on a bad economic year, so she had to take up a job offer which wasn't that great and had long hours, and she had to appreciate it.

So, she worked and worked, and gradually her hand and her legs and her lower back and her shoulders started aching. At first, she didn't think of much, perhaps it was just having to accustom to the long hours of computer usage. Then she wondered if it was carpal tunnel syndrome or something. Then she saw in the news that some other overworking girl died overworking, so on the third day of consecutive late nights at work, after she threw up in the office because of, she concluded, her disrupted circadian rhythm, she decided to quit her job. After all, come to think of it, it wasn't like her family was dependent on her income to sustain the livelihood at all. With the savings she saved up from the past year of over-working, she decided to go to the doctors to fix her ailments.

The doctor tested her blood, and found a large amount of aluminium in her blood, which was unusual, since aluminium wasn't usually found in the blood. From the x-rays in her arm and ailing physical parts, they found blood clots, and decided that it was bad blood circulation.

Until one day, she "accidentally" slit her wrists and was sent to the hospital, they found out that the accumulation at her ailing portions was not due to bad blood circulation but that aluminium was coating her veins a bit, and she was actually transforming into a machine. The transformation was permanent and it was irreversible. The doctors recommended her to this underground workshop, should she require any servicing. From their personal experiences, this particular workshop's servicing was reasonably priced and the repair crew was knowledgeable - as they figured out how the machinery works from their own personal experiences. They used to be biochemists.

Grandmother (4)

2009-05-09T08:32:00.002+08:00

外婆说，当我们遇到挫折的时候，我们不可以说: "惨了!" 或者 "死了!" 之类不吉利的话.
因为这些话会衰.
如果有需要, 应该说:"发了!" 或者 "恭喜了!" 之类的吉利话.

HR

2009-04-21T22:49:00.004+08:00

Once upon a time, a long long time ago, companies used to believed that "HR" stood for Human Relationships. They didn't see their employees as merely a resource that is quantifiable, and measurable, or dispensable, or "anyhow sell them a career proposition and make them work for as long as possible-able".

Then one day, some smart ass HR consultancy firm, in order to make their solutions and business scalable, decided to tell everyone that treating employees as merely as resources and impersonal- is the "in" thing in the market ("everyone's doing it!"). In order to build up their credibility, they named themselves after some quack guy from the USA, who was a friend of a friend who was a PHD, who allowed them to use the name for a price and some fame. And they made their reports rather expensive. And they treated their reports and information with a lot of secrecy and "hush hush" and discouraged further disclosure, even though the information was rather standard, and they just copy and pasted recommendations, and switch inputs to the "to-field" in their emails. And like how the tailor sold the emperor his new clothes, the companies bought it, one by one. In this way, companies started to treat their employees as a resource - Human Resource as opposed to natural or mechanical resource - except for one company.

They renamed their "Human Relationships department" to "HR department", and that was pretty much it. What people from HR did was to sit around with their employees, and replied to their queries, called them to chit chat, arranged gatherings, went drinking with them, entertained them, and went to visit them when they are in hospital, went to pay respects to their parents who just pass away, talked to them, and told them that the organisation valued them, listened to them bitch about their boss, in confidentiality, be their friend, told them that life is never ideal, take it easy, told them to leave the company if they were truly unhappy, remind them the advantages of staying, smsed them gong xi fa cai, and remember their children's birthday, and talked to their bosses if about how they were managed, bring them home when they're drunk from going out drinking together...

All the other companies who switched to Human Resources pointed their fingers at this Human Relationship company and laughed. Haha, they thought, human relationships can never be scalable! And they are so expensive to maintain! Human Resources are so cost efficient! We'll be rich and you can smell my fart!

But the Human Relationship's company never waivered. The management enjoyed having HR to talk to, in times of woe and appreciated their empathy. HR was often one of the reasons for their own retention. Despite not being scalable, everyone in the company was making good money. Being scalable was over-rated.

The companies which adopted the Human Resource approach never doubted their choice. Everyone in the company was making good money. If they had any problems, they talked to their families or friends, if they were unhappy, they either left or suck it and worked harder, nobody went to their parents' wake, and those who did had the look of obligation on their face, but it's okay, they didn't want to see them too, they only liked the "white-gold" (condolence money) they gave. Making friends at work was over-rated, one should keep work and personal relationships distinct.

The bosses of the consultancy firm laughed their way to the bank and back and spent all their money and went bankrupt and haha whatever who cares everyone just left and switched jobs.

...

1000 years later, all the companies collapsed due to the natural course of things. Everyone who ever cared about Human Resources or Human Relationship was dead and turned into dust. The question of which was a better model for your company was asked by nobody.

Grandmother (3)

2009-04-17T00:53:00.003+08:00

As I was sitting on the toilet bowl, incubating shit, I recalled my grandma telling me that constipation strained her heart, and it occurred to me that, one day, I, too, might grow so weak that just shitting would excite my heart to beat harder, and perhaps so much harder, that it would be too much harder and kill me.

Edward

2009-04-14T23:48:00.002+08:00

Edward had been working overtime for the sixteenth day straight (over weekends), and he lacked sleep and energy to do anymore "brain work" tonight. He thought to go home, but it was still one hour away, according to the company policy, before he qualifies for the overtime transport allowance, so he thought he might as well wait and then he would go home on a taxi cab. In the meantime, he decided to do some filing and went to shred away his unwanted documents. It's a good time since there was nobody around to annoy with the noise.

Ah, it's quite therapeutic... to just destroy copies of the paper and data reports that he spent nights and weekends preparing for nobody to read... (Kudos to the management for simply asking for a verbal summary at the meeting and made the decision from there...)

Edward zoned out and at how the shredding machine eat up the papers fed to it. Whatever life dealt the shredding machine with, it just shred. Except for staplets. Please remember to remove them. Other than that, perhaps he had a lot to learn from the shredding machine... just suck it up, Edward, just suck it up. But what would be the "staplets" in the analogy here? Edward wondered and watched the shredding... Suddenly, Edward noticed something written in a blue pen that was not his handwriting. Oh no! It was a signatory of his boss's boss's boss! For the approval of some decision that was relevant to some other decision that he was referring to in his report!

Without second thoughts, Edward fought with the shredder to pull out the paper halfway and lost... his fingers!

His immediate response on seeing the bloody stump that used to be his hands was "fuck, now how am I going to use the computer?"

Xiao Bai and the man

2009-04-06T23:03:00.004+08:00

There was once a man who had a friend in his pick up truck which was white in colour and was named "Xiao Bai" meaning little white. The man worked as a fishmonger and drove Xiao Bai everyday from home to the fish market and here and there to collect and deliver goods. The fishmonger worked hard and had an optimistic outlook in life. His dream was to earn and save up enough money to travel by road to the Sea of Japan which he had a picture book he read about when he was little. The picture book was second hand and when it had words, they were in Japanese, which he did not understand, but he learnt much about the fish of the Sea of Japan which was what the book was mostly about. He liked the book a lot not because of any particular reason except for that particular affinity that one sometimes develop for things for no particular reason.

When, the day came when he finally had enough money, the man ran around making exciting arrangements about the route and finding somebody to take over his business during his on year of absence. The preparations geared Xiao Bai up for the excitement of the adventure that it had heard about since the first day the man bought and drove it around.

At the end of the first Lunar month, the man and Xiao Bai took off. They wanted to travel during this period so that they would not experience winter in the middle of their road trip. They drove across different countries, and they saw landscapes that they've never seen before, experienced wilderness they've never had before, and felt loneliness like they had never felt before. When they reached the sea of Japan, they travelled along the coast for a month. They saw the different fish, some kinds of which they imported and sold, and had a good time watching the sun rise many times, and counting the number of fishing boats they could find. Looking at the fish at the fish market, they wondered what kind of life the fish must have lived, and how much more of the Sea of Japan it must know than what the man or Xiao Bai ever will.

When the time was up and the amount of money left was down, they turned around and headed back. On the way home, winter was harsh and it was difficult to drive around on the slippery roads and in the cold. The man couldn't spend the nights in Xiao Bai as he usually did, because he would die of the cold if he did, so he didn't. Xiao Bai was alone in the carparks and the man, in his rented room. The nights were dreadful and sleepless for them who were conscious of how the trip was nearing its end.

Finally, the day came when they reached home. After a heated rush of administering the everyday life to set mundane routines into motion again and mastering them. In between, they reminisced about the road trip.

The man concluded that his favourite part of the trip was seeing the Sea of Japan and seeing the fishing boats unloading the fish he recognised from the picture book he had when he was young. He especially liked to see dark clouds and rain fall out at the sea from the distance. In the distance, the rain looked like a gentle grey shadow of nothing which he enjoyed watching and imagining how it might be like to be out at sea.

Xiao Bai's favourite part of the trip was when they traveled in the mountaineous region, Xiao Bai was not as old as the mountains, but he was made of the mountains because steel and other raw materials that Xiao Bai was made of came from the earth. When they drove up and down mountains, Xiao Bai would like to observe the rain and how close they were to the clouds above and how rain fell at such altitude.

After some time, the fishmonging business was back to usual but the man was less enthusiastic and Xiao Bai aged significantly, and they wondered when should Xiao Bai retire and the man thought about getting married and starting a family and settling down.

One day, while on the way home from fishmonging, it started to rain very heavily. Xiao Bai was tired and it broke down as it thought about how life was more than selling fish knowing that it would always continue to age and would never get any younger tomorrow than today. While comforting Xiao Bai, the man felt alone sitting in the truck by himself in the middle of the way in the middle of pouring rain.

By the way: There's something about the way

2009-03-29T17:39:00.003+08:00

There's something about the way he looked, sitting on the back of the lorry truck.
Maybe it's the way he crossed his legs or maybe it was the way his bright orange uniform shone in the afternoon sun.
Or perhaps it was the way he listened to his friend, or not, or the way he leaned against nothing.
Maybe it was the way there's something about the way he looked at me.

She always carries a book in her handbag

2009-03-23T21:10:00.005+08:00

She always carries a book in her handbag so that when someone asks her about it, she can say she reads on the train or in the bus, on her way to work, when she will almost always regret for carrying out a book so heavy to carry because she usually wakes up late, and at the bus stop she will emotionally struggle about whether to take a taxi or not until the bus comes, and she will wonder if she ought to take a cab until she reaches the train station where she might as well take train now that she's at the train station, so she'll clobber to the platform, occasionally cursing her uncomfortable shoes, and hoping that she'll get a seat so that she can check on her make up, if her blusher was even if her concealer was concealing if her lips smudged because she might have bit on her lips just now, but she doesn't get a seat so she stands, hoping to stand somewhere comfortable, maybe she can get to lean by a wall, and she can read her book, but no, she didn't even get a pole, so she held on to that thing they hold on to as the train jerks everyone jerk with the train's jerk, and she wonders if she's holding on to a thing on a ship in the middle of the south china sea, oh! like a coolie indeed she's sort of heading south too, but she knows she's got it much better off, there is air-con, she's got her mp3 player, and she gets to check her clamshell phone for a message, but no message so early, if not she doesn't have to wish for a more caring boyfriend already, and look at the time, look where you're going bitch, look at the girl in front whose foundation was already caking, don't know how is she really going to last the day like that man, but eh, she's got that quite new gucci bag, but it looks quite old already, don't know how she take care, but like her shoes are quite cheapskate, and eh, that one at there also has a gucci bag, eh, that auntie also has a gucci bag, but not bad lar, she looks quite stylish for her age, but like gucci is very in now meh? Tsk. "But I still like Coach leh."

(sneak.)

The bee minder

2009-03-19T22:34:00.002+08:00

Billy went to see a lot of expensive doctors and specialists only to be diagnosed as a mild schizophrenic for reportedly hearing a bee buzz all the time, except when he's asleep. The truth was that there was a bee living in the fourth dimension in his head, it was alive and well kept and buzzing around in his head. If he was not distracted from it, he could feel the bee knocking against his skull sometimes. He even almost choked a few times when it flew too close to his nose and wind pipe.

He dare not describe his true sensation to anyone for fear that they diagnosed him as a severe schizophrenic, which he was not. He was just a man with a bee in his head that nobody else would ever believe him for, unless someone invented a fourth dimension seeing glass and cut his head open or something.

After running out of faith in medicines, Billy spent his money drinking, because it helped dull his senses, and he could take a break from hearing the bee's buzz when he got the beer buzz buzzing louder.

Mary

2009-03-15T12:49:00.006+08:00

Mary was the kind of girl who wouldn't strike you as a Mary. In fact, she thought of herself as more like a Marian, or a Marilyn, but she didn't get to choose her own name. (Her late father's uncle thought that Mary was a fashionable sounding name.) To her, "Mary" was just a name which begot the other kids in school to ask her if she had a little lamb. At first, she would think of snide witty remarks to reply with, like "no, I have a goat, though", or "I do love lamb chops" (which was true); but when they started to ask "then, how does your garden grow?", Mary grew to dislike her name, because she realised that these corny mary-jokes would never come to end.

Mary was the kind of girl who would constantly remind herself to watch "Breakfast at Tiffany's" if she would ever have the chance, so she could quote it as her favourite movie, and whose dream was to drive a Mazda 3, and to marry a guy whose income could be combined with to afford them a Nissan Cefiro, and they could ideally eventually live in a condominium.

She was the kind of girl, who would want to name her daughter, "Kimberly", and she and her cefiro-prince would speak only English to "Kimmy", to give her a strong foundation in the language and in giving people the impression that she's more high-classed. "Kimberly" was symbolic of Mary's favourite food, which was kimchi. Her favourite cuisine was Japanese, with the occasional craving for north Indian food, because they made her feel like a sophisticated metropolitan.

Kimchi, in turn, was symbolic of Mary's graduation trip to Korea, which sparked off her professed love or passion that was travelling. In recent years, she had taken to planning her two to three holiday destinations at the start of every financial year aligned to the mission, vision, and values of her life. It was similar to how organisations made annual business plans, which were what she worked on for a living - as an annual business planning executive - for the past seven years with the same company. Like the company she worked at, she too, did not include tangible steps for attaining her life goals in her plans. She just planned her travels, and largely ignored developments in other aspects of her life.

Mary had several relationships that looked promising to everyone, except that she had always known somehow that they wouldn't have worked out; so she managed to somehow let the guys lead the relationships astray. She told herself that she just did not feel that any of them were close to the type of guy she could spend the rest of her life with anyway. It was either because they did not have the cefiro potential income, or that they did not approve of Mary's travelling (expenses) as a "constructive" way of life.

Mary, however, was in denial of the true reason why these relationships didn't work out. It was because of a deep, dark secret that she had, and she did not dare to share it with anyone, even her boyfriends, some with whom she slept, which led to an impenetrable emotional isolation. A person in a relationship with Mary might have an impression that they were very close, but it was really like holding hands with somebody in the dark and not knowing of a grand canyon of a chasm in the space between.

Mary's secret was that she secretly loved the smell of shit.

She loved to smell the smell of shit like how a pimply overweight teenage girl would secretly love to smell the smell of the cologne of the teacher she had a secret crush on, or like how a durian fanatic, who married a petty angmor wife who hated durian, secretly loved the smell of a delicious durian during durian season and thought his wife stupid for hating it even though he vowed to denounce durian at their wedding. She loved the smell of her own shit, and how it differed from the smell of other people's shit, which she also loved to smell. She loved to distinguish how different diets would affect the smell of shit that eventually got shat out.

If only Mary would be honest with herself, she would recognise that smelling shit was the real reason behind why she seemingly loved to travel, to go to different places, and to eat different things. She had just wanted to smell how the change in diet and physical location affected her shit and if the people from different countries shat shit of different smells. She also liked shitting in the airplanes, because she was thrilled by the intensity of the smell mixed with the excitement of the embarrassment when she opens the door to greet the next toilet user.

If only Mary would be honest with herself, she would confess that she loved the smell of Korean shit the most, because of the way shit smell with eating kimchi, and that Japanese shit was her second favourite, although it sometimes smelled a bit too sweet for her liking, especially during winter when shit usually smelled a little like ice-cream. The smell of baby's shit was like japanese shit in winter. On rainy days, shit usually smelled a little muddy, like the smell of wet muddy sneakers from playing in a wet muddy soccer field on a rainy day. Shit was typically the most pungent on sunny days, and it was easily affected by spicy food, which was most spicy on sunny days. It could be due to how chillies grown in the dry season are more spicy than chillies grown in the rainy season.

If only Mary would be honest with herself, she would then realise that it was not so shameful or despicable to love to smell shit, and she would be able to laugh a little about it, or write a little book with all her gathered knowledge, and be unabashed and tell her next boyfriend who may find it a little odd and overall cute and endearing and indulge her a little and love her and marry her and live the Cefiro-Kimberly dream with her, and remember to leave the toilet door open when he shits his shit for her.

(sneak.)

Fib, the Dung Beetle

2009-02-24T18:55:00.005+08:00

In a horse stable somewhere away, there lived a dung beetle named Fib. Fib was born with five legs, and it was how he got his name. The "F" "I" from "five", and the "B" from "beetle".

Usually, beetles with five legs were not born with five legs; instead, they lost one of their legs in battles which was considered gallant. Fib was born with five legs, and was thus, considered a freak.

Fib was made fun of when he was young. His peers did not take to him for posing as someone who lost his leg in a battle, even though Fib had not deliberately cut off his own leg at birth. When he was quite grown up, it was worse, because he finally understood what the women-folk said about his mother sleeping with the horse ("five legs is exactly the average of six legs plus four legs, you know").

Thus, Fib took it upon himself to be crazy about dung collecting, he wanted to provide for his mother, so he worked very hard. He also hoped that by working hard and doing good it would quell the rumours and gossips and whatever bad reputation, so that he could make some friends and live happily. It was hard for a dung beetle with five legs to roll dung, because he was one leg short on one side, and it was harder to make the dung ball round. Yet that was not enough to stop Fib, who worked hard against the odds to roll a lot of dung balls for his family.

Alas! The other beetles just made remarks like "Wow, Fib must really be the horse's son, because the horse dotes on him enough to shit in little pellet balls especially for him. How else could he be able to have so many dung balls? He has only five legs, surely he couldn't have rolled them all by himself. Even if he did, they wouldn't be so round, he is five-legged, you know."

Wednesday and Monday

2009-02-19T09:38:00.004+08:00

There was a pair of sisters who were into attempting suicide. Nobody knew why they were like that, or why they were depressed, or if they were depressed at all. Most people blamed their mother for not going through confinement properly, because instead of staying at home and not showering for a month, she when out shopping for Prada and Gucci clothes to fit her little girls. They came from a high-income family, by the way. And the mother not having gone through confinement was hardly a logical enough explanation for the girls' condition. So, nobody knew why they were like that.

The eldest sister's given name was Feng Ling, the younger sister's name was Ling Long. "Feng Ling" meant something like phoenix's agility, and "Ling Long" meant something like resourceful and clever and agile too. They had pretty Chinese names, yet, when they came of age, Feng Ling decided to call herself "Wednesday", after the Addams' family character. Ling Long called herself "Monday", because Monday was blue, and she liked blue.

By respectively, 16 and 14 years old, Wednesday and Monday had tried hanging themselves, drowning themselves in the sea, storm drains, swimming pools, and many kinds of substance abuse (including ingesting doll parts in attempt to choke themselves). They always took turns doing it so that the other person could prevent the attempt from succeeding.

Wednesday's favourite past time was to draw mosiac patterns on her wrists with wrist slits, and then to plaster the cuts (and blood and gore) quickly with glue, and then to sniff it. Monday's favourite past time was similar, except that she preferred to use blue paint instead of glue.

One day, when their mother gave them clothes that were not designer, they were shocked. Their father had been retrenched, and even though they had a lot of money tied up in assets, they had to pretend that they were middle-income. Their father thought that they were going to take it badly and commit suicide for sure. He was sad because he loved the girls, though he previously had no time to spend with them, he never even bought sweets or chocolates for them as little girls. In his fit of regret and remorse, he bought sweets and chocolates and ice-cream for his daughters. He took care to buy blue colour sweets and blueberry icecream for Monday. It turned out that their mother had all along deprived the girls of such things to keep their dress sizes small, so they can be super models someday.

Having tasted sweets and chocolates and all different flavours of ice-cream, Wednesday and Monday had a rush of sugar high that they had never experienced before. They abandoned their previous hobby and all thought of suicides so that they could live and love sugar. They never attempted suicide again and lived happily ever after.

Space Cadet

2009-02-12T01:34:00.004+08:00

Lately, I would suddenly recall one of the strangest dreams I ever had. The dream was about being shot into space and floating around in space and sometimes getting sucked around in worm holes and being stuck in dimensions for timeless period of time.

I was looking for you. Or waiting for you, in case you were looking for me.

There was a dimension where there were other people who were stuck in as well. In this dimension, there was a big black room that I stayed in for a while. The room was too big and black to describe how big it might have been, I was in a corner of it. The ceiling was too high and it was too dark to see where it ended. If I should walk along one of the walls, I would be too tired and u-turn before I reached another corner of the room. This dimension was unique, because in this room, there was gravity, and there was sound. Elsewhere, perhaps because in space there was too much vacuum to go around, everything was silent. Here, people spoke. They asked me to tell them things about Earth. They might have passed me some messages to bring back home, but I have lost them all. They generally freaked me out by being obtuse. I was afraid that if I stayed there too long I would forget you. I left after leaving them with a message for you.

I came back to this room, after a doing a round of bouncing around in space. You reached there shortly after I left. I regretted leaving. But I thought not to take it for granted that I still remembered you. You left shortly before I came back. You left them with a message for me to wait for you to come back. How would you know that I would come back here? Did you go around leaving messages for me? Where were you?

While waiting for you, I recalled how it felt when I was orbiting around a planet, in the dark in the emptiness, silent until there's not even the deafening sound of silence, trying to swim and direct my navigation but to no avail. I don't know why I remember it in so much detail, but I remember. Recalling that I was recalling in dreams happens when I have too much coffee and too little sleep. It makes me wonder if all these even happened in a dream. The memories are more vivid than my memories of being five years old.

Towards the end of the dream, you came back to the room and found me. Before I could feel joy and be reunited, we jumped into a little unimpressive space ship and we flew away. You called me a space cadet, you must have been my trainer or captain of sorts. I wondered if you knew I was in love with you and how relieved I felt when I saw you again.

Untitled

2009-02-10T11:50:00.004+08:00

She was angry at him for not remembering the details of their first kiss and the first time they made love. How could he forget such memorable events of their being together? She raised her voice so that the tension between them would hold her heart together from falling apart.

He had always tried to keep these things in mind, but his memory failed. He was apologetic, but how could she not understand that loving her did not require remembering all these? He was getting sick of having to always argue about these things. He didn't even remember his mother's birthday! He looked at her face for signs of her possible empathy. His mind shut out on her emotional blackmailing with whatever that she was saying or not saying. He looked at her... He did not find empathy.

Her small face was so flushed with frustration that it looked like she was going to explode any time. Unthinkingly, he reached out to hold her face in his hands and said,

"I don't remember the first time we did it, because I'm always thinking about the next time we'll do it."

Untitled

2009-02-10T11:39:00.002+08:00

I dreamt of taking a walk in a field at night. They were having a competition there. About flying model planes. Now to the think of it, it wasn't exactly late at night, it was in the evening, because I could still see the colours of the model planes.

There was one that was red, styled like an old fashioned aeroplane. With propellers. Some of them didn't look like planes at all. There was one that was yellow. It was in the shape of a hot-air balloon, except that it was just a cut-out. It looked like a surfboard.

You had gone for some dinner, and I was just walking around, waiting for you to call me when your dinner ended.

I remember I felt lonely. Perhaps because I was amidst the people, the teams, scampering around, working together on their model projects. Perhaps because I was alone. Perhaps because I was without your company.

My Ex-Chinese Teacher

2009-02-07T13:48:00.002+08:00

I saw a woman who looked like my high school Chinese teacher. I wondered whether they could have been related. Perhaps she was her cousin. Perhaps not. I don't know.

There was quite a lot of animosity between my Chinese teacher and I. As in, I didn't like her very much. She was in charge of my form class and a pain in my neck. She'd nag at how I should pack up my table and how I failed at Chinese.

Once, when I finally did pass one of my class test, she was surprised and sarcastic and remarked at how the sun might have risen from the west - meaning that it was an impossible and unlikely feat that I managed to pass. Never mind the fact that I probably cheated anyway, but that was not what a student who had finally passed something had wanted to hear. As much as I disliked her, I wanted her to say "well done" or something to that effect. I may still dislike her even if she commended me, but I still wanted to hear her commend.

She also told my mother at the parent-teacher meet that I wasn't going to get into a good school. Never mind that I eventually didn't. But her words really didn't help, and it pissed me off because it violated the expectations of what good teachers were supposed to be like. Good teachers as portrayed in school textbooks and advertisements for the teaching career. Nevermind that I wasn't a good student, I was a kid and I had room for improvement. On the other hand, all teachers should be good teachers, if not, then not a teacher at all.

I went to her funeral wake, after she passed away. I wonder why they call it a wake. The wake for the eternally asleep? It happened a few years after I graduated. She died of cancer, I think, one day. I wonder if she had suffered a lot. A few of my ex-schoolmates gathered to go to pay our respects. It was one of the first funeral wakes that I went to. At least a non-family-related one. As a kid, I was usually excused from attendance.

Prior to that, I had already heard that she was unmarried. As a cruel student, I had probably called her an old virgin woman, behind her back. I didn't understand what it really meant, until at the wake, I noticed that it was quiet. There were no children by the altar or many people around when I was there. I think that her only sibling was a brother, whom she lived with. Either that, or I might have remembered it wrongly, and I just thought it was quiet because I was quiet. I think the casket was opened, but I didn't go and see.

I dreamt of her. After she died. I dreamt of her, a few times. Once, several years ago, in a dream, she told me that I was a bad person, and that she was dead. As in, she told me that she was dead in my dream. So, I was pretty spooked and feeling pretty guilty. Was I really a bad person?

Perhaps I shouldn't have defied her so much while she was alive, and she was my teacher after all. But somehow I had developed a self-righteous attitude that I wouldn't respect anyone simply for her position of authority, and that she ought to convince me that she should deserve my respect. I don't know if I believe in that still. Anyway, I would think that if she were a good teacher, as portrayed in movies and television shows, she would have understood that I was just a kid who was feeling empowered to rebel against teachers, but was just really being stupid. Then again, she was not a good teacher. And may not have understood me, or might not have even cared.

Then who was she? She was a human being. And human beings die. So she's dead.

And does a dead human being care about being a good teacher? No, the dead don't care.

Who cares? The living. Not all of the living though. Only human beings. Not all living human beings though. Only stupid ones. Like me.

(For my Ex-Chinese teacher, and other dead ex-teachers, RIP.)

Grandmother's story (2)

2009-02-03T23:25:00.006+08:00

I visit my friend's grandma sometimes. One day, she told me a story that I cannot forget. She used to be a nurse, during the 1930s to maybe 1960s, I don't know what's the time period for sure, but it was during a period of time when women committed suicide by drinking acid.

Grandma used to be nurse and she trained at a ward that housed the depressing patients who attempted suicide. It was during a period of time when the people who attempted suicide tended to choose dying by drinking acid. The idea was to have the acid burn up the internal organs, resulting in death. It must have been a very painful process.

For those patients in the hospitals, their suicides attempts must have failed. To fail in an attempt to kill oneself by drinking acid was to have to live with a disfigured face, burnt esophagus, and possibly damaged internal organs. If living was hard before, it was sure to be worse after. It was not uncommon then, for patients to attempt suicides in the hospitals.

That was what grandma was telling us about, on that day. That when she was working there, she was a bit bothered with possibly being surprised by hanging dead bodies behind a door.

A minor detail that she casually included in her account of dead people was that there was this particular woman, who drank acid, and whose insides were so badly damaged that she couldn't eat, and grandma, being her nurse, had to feed her by pumping milk up her anus.

"Er, grandma... wait... what? How did you feed someone by the anus?" I had to make her back track.

"Ya, like enema. Enema, you know? Like just pump the milk up her anus until it reached the stomach. Because her throat was so badly damaged that she couldn't eat la. Poor thing, she was as thin as a stick. These women, they mostly did it because of men, you know? Heartbroken and all that. I wonder what happened to her... the soldiers came around then and I had to go away..."

(For Gary's grandma. And the woman mentioned.)

Owl's Story

2009-02-02T18:39:00.004+08:00

One day an owl came to me and told me to write a story about him. He was clutching on to a stalk of aloe vera, and I was curious if this owl had come from the desert or something. So, I asked,

"Did you come from a desert?"

"If I did, would you write a story about me?"

"Even if you didn't, I can write a story about you. Do you have a specific story in mind? If you tell it to me, I can write about it."

"Hoot. Hoot. I didn't come from a desert. I like to eat aloe vera. As a punishment to me, one day, my children disappeared and all that was left in the nest were stems of aloe vera, in their place."

"Why would you be punished for liking to eat aloe vera?"

"Because this aloe vera belonged to Queen Cleopatra. You see, I stole it from her garden, so she stole my children from me."

I blinked hard at the strange owl and began to frown. I didn't know how to carry on the conversation from here. I couldn't imagine how to write a story about what was exchanged. So I continued to frown as I tried hard to imagine. Meanwhile, I also realised that I didn't recollect seeing any owls in the day before. This must be a special owl. At that, the owl hooted two times and flew onto my bed and began eating the aloe vera. After staring at him for a while, I decided to turn on my computer to make notes for the ensuing interview.

"So, owl," I asked, in a way I thought journalists asked their questions, "what is your name and please tell me about yourself." I sounded more like someone at a job interview.

"That is not important," the owl replied, "I want you to write a story about me."

"Is it the story of Cleopatra and the aloe vera?" I raised the left half of my face as I watched the juice from what he was eating sipped into the sheets of my bed.

"No. Write a story about me. Write it such that I am an eagle in the story."

"Why would you want to be an eagle when you're an owl?"

"Why would you want to be a man when you're born a woman?"

Then I realised that I do sometimes want to be a man. I did not know why the owl knew that, perhaps he was just drawing a random analogy, but I reminded myself that I shouldn't be surprised with what a talking day-time owl could say anymore. I asked,

"Alright, so anything else you'd like to be included in the story?"

"If it's possible, I would like it to be a love story. Other than that, nothing. I just want to be an Eagle in a love story."

"Alright, then how will you repay me for a story?"

"I don't know. Hoot. Do you like aloe vera? Or name your price?"

"A favour. You will repay me with a favour."

"Hoot. Alright. The degree and level of the favour must be commensurate with the depth of the story you hoot write."

I told myself to aim to earn at least a favour for clean sheets.

Once upon a time, there was an eagle named Owl. Many people did not understand why the eagle's mother named the eagle Owl, but these things happen, even for eagles. And when these things happen, they have to be accepted, even for eagles.

Owl was a sea eagle, and liked above all, to eat cuttlefish and squids that usually live in the deep sea. Being unable to dive that deeply, he decided to court a sea turtle, so that she would go into the deep water and catch squids and come to the surface and regurgitate it out for him to eat.

Unexpectedly, Owl succeeded to make a sea turtle fall for him. He named her "Squidcake" as a term of endearment; and because she did not have any other names to be called by as it was unfashionable for sea turtles to have names, being under the sea where they have a "silence please" policy like in the libraries.

Owl and Squidcake spent many many mornings and afternoons meeting on a deserted little rocky island. Owl would bring seagull meat for Squidcake to pretend that he loved her, and then gorged heartily on the squid remains of that she regurgitated. Sometimes, she would bring him whole squids, if she managed to keep them in her beak as she swam to meet him. They would exchange tales about Owl's soaring in the high heavens and exotic sightings on land and Squidcake's deep sea diving and curious friends at the coral reefs.

All was well and full of happiness and delight until one day, Squidcake was late and Owl felt worried, because Squidcake was never before late, and Owl was never before worried. Owl wondered if Squidcake had met with any accidents when she was catching squids, because she weren't really good at catching squids anyway. Squidcake herself liked to eat jellyfish, and ate cuttlefish only to regurgitate for Owl. Oh, should anything happen to her, Owl would never be able to forgive himself. He would rather give up eating all the squids and cuttlefish in the world just to see Squidcake again. This made him realise that he had really fallen in love with Squidcake.

"Why are you crying, my dear?" Squidcake asked when she finally arrived, "Are you upset because I am late? I'm sorry, I had to do run some errands. I'm sorry, I'm just a little late. Please don't be upset with me anymore. I promise to bring you a big cuttlefish next time, okay?"

"No, please don't. I don't want that anymore. Squidcake, I'm not upset with you at all."

"Then why are you crying, my dear? What is wrong?" Squidcake asked.

But Owl could not answer her.

想你18

2009-02-02T15:37:00.002+08:00

昨晚，我梦见你了。
梦里，我哭了。
醒来，我不见到你。
想你。我笑了。

The executive, his colleague, & the auntie

2009-02-02T15:00:00.002+08:00

There was once an executive who had problems with a colleague in his office. His colleague would always embarrass him by taunting him. For example, at lunches or during office outings, the colleague would accuse the executive of sucking up to the bosses or of being spineless for not standing up for his own proposals. Sometimes, the colleague would even insult him by talking about the size of the executive's penis.

The executive felt maligned and upset. He just wanted to do his work and fuck off, and get paid the end of the month. So what if he doesn't stand up for his own proposals? He doesn't even care for them, really.

On a particularly bad day, he was so stressed that when he went to the toilet to splash water on his face, he blurted out his complains to the auntie cleaning the toilet.

The auntie, like a genie, took out from somewhere a stack of newspaper and a red marker. She mumbled something in a dialect that the executive didn't understand and left.

The executive then thought that he was taking the auntie's advice, vented his frustration by scribbling the name of the dreaded colleague with other rude things on the newspaper and threw them around in the toilet. He wetted some newspapers and stuck them to the toilet walls like posters.

The colleague was shamed and learnt to keep his mouth shut.

When the executive next saw the auntie, he gave her a wink, and before he could thank the auntie, the auntie took out her stainless steel tongs (like barbeque tongs which she usually used to pick up rubbish) and beat the executive's backside one time good good.

"Wah lan! Auntie! Tia leh!" shouted the executive, which roughly translates to: "My dick! Auntie! It's pain, you know!"

"Of course I know it's pain lah!" replied the auntie angrily, and tried to beat his legs, "I am so good hearted to give you the newspaper so you can look for job elsewhere if you're so unhappy working here. Who ask you? Si lang kia, throw the newspaper all over the toilet for me to clean up. You think I auntie auntie like that, easy to bully is it?"

"Wah, auntie, your ang mor is very good leh. Sorry lar, I thought you give me the newspaper and marker is to put like poster on the wall. Then use newspaper easy to clean mah... Why you didn't talk to me in ang mor that day leh? I didn't understand what you said."

"Now you're blaming me is it?" The auntie glared at him and beat him and chased him into the toilet. She only relented after the executive gave her fifty dollars for the trouble that he caused her.

Tom, Dick, & Harry

2009-01-29T00:15:00.009+08:00

"You know what I really hate? Forgetting if I've locked the house door when I step out of the lift, then having to wait for one to go back up to check. Usually I have it locked. But there was once, three years ago, when it was not. That's the worst thing that happened, I tell you, because it proved that it's possible that I should forget to lock the door. The threat is real! So, my paranoia is founded! And if my wife finds that out, she'll nag me until the cows come home and go out and come home again. You know what I mean?"

"I don't have the exact same problem, because my mother is always at home. But maybe I can empathise. Do you think it's like how I forget that if I've brushed my teeth, then I have to go and feel if my toothbrush is damp? My wife thinks it's damn stupid."

"You guys think you have a problem? When I'm done taking a shit and by the time I return to my desk, I'd entirely forget if I wiped my ass. Then I'll have to go back to the toilet and check! Imagine how my wife will go crazy if she finds shit stains in my underwear."

"Oh, right... I can see how the suspicion is completely valid... Seeing how you usually completely forget to wipe your nose when you come out of meetings with the bosses."

(sneak.)