Back-up! haha

Considering the vast amount of work i haven't done. I thought this would be in order.

Ji Ching's Will.

1. All my material posessions, except those of an academic nature, will go to my mom, who will complain that I always give her extra work to do.
2. My textbooks, notes, mindmaps, undone tys will go to my brother, may you have better luck with them than I did.
3. My blog will go to ame, on the condition that she doesn't change the font colour to pink and scatter cutesy objects all over the place.
4. My undone blake essay will go to 'one sick kid' (aka gery), whose wonderful talents will make sure Perry remembers me in a favourable light.
5. The scholarship money, of which I have yet to receive, will go to the great hwa chong institution, who hopefully will give me a posthumous plaque complimenting me on my magnanimity, seeing that I think of them even while dying by their hand.

In the case that I do survive, all of the above is rendered void except number four. (: *hides from gery*

The circle's payback

I have been through a rough patch lately, and I can’t say I am totally grateful for it, but at least it helped me realize what is dearest to me, and what, when everything else is stripped of its rosy tint and superficial ethereality, really remains.

Too busy chasing after inconstancies and abstract ideals; I have neglected the one thing that had sustained me all this while, something that I have been trying stubbornly to shut it out from my world. Friends come and go. Some walk alongside you for a little while before embarking on a different path, some stick around a little longer, taking the same turns, making the same imprints, but eventually, some other part of life will beckon, and paths will be diverged.

So it is that friends are not constants, and they should not be taken for granted to be so. Life becomes much easier really, when you see the people around you as temporary faces, faces with potential to change your life, support you when you fall, share laughter and tears with you, and leave their own distinct set of imprints on memory’s lane. Thank them, gently, for the times they made life wonderful and move on. Life should not be a desperate clinging on to things that no longer are, but an enjoyment of things that at this point, at this very moment, gives tangible joy.

Yet there is one constancy – family.

Family is the one thing I don’t have to worry about losing. There’s no such thing as drifting apart, or losing contact, or even having to find words to fill the silences that would be awkward in friendship. Somehow, I know I would always be able to pick up where I left off; somehow, I know you guys will always be there, eager to hear me tell the same stories over and over and over again.

No matter how I have turned my back against you.

Thank you dad, for the countless times you had to turn down the volume during ‘Superstar’, I know television is your only form of entertainment in the evening, and I am sorry you had to sacrifice a bit of that for your audio-sensitive daughter. Thanks also, for choosing to ignore my snide remarks throughout this whole troublesome period, and I am really grateful to you for being understanding enough to not start an argument about my less-than-polite attitude. I will remember to greet you next time when you come home I promise! You don’t have to tap on my shoulder, and say ‘Ei, I am home’ anymore. Thank you also, for the long discussions over the latest news and events, though we might not agree all the time, but at least you respect me enough to value my opinions, and I really appreciate that. (It would help my GP loads too!) And really, I do notice when you take the effort to be extra nice and funny, just that my stubborn pride would not permit anything beyond the usual ‘lame.’ I am sorry for being such a wet blanket and all, though right now I still can’t figure how you can run from Bishan to Woodlands and still complain about a short walk from our house to junction 8! But besides that little glitch, you are cool, really. I will always remember the time you tried to do a handstand on the mattress, ok, so you didn’t really go beyond 90degrees, but hey, it’s a good try for someone who already hit 50. In fact, I can’t think of anybody else’s dad who would dare attempt this age-defying feat!

And mom, I know I have been a really good example of ‘that troublesome adolescent period’ all mothers have nightmares about. Its not that I don’t treat you like a friend anymore, it’s just that there are times when I don’t really feel like talking about it. I am sorry about the times I hurt you by brushing you aside when you showed concern, and honestly, your concern did make a very big difference, just that I was wont to show it, being a prisoner of my own world. Thank you for the ready way you took me back into your embrace despite everything. I know how I had scoffed when you kissed my forehead and called me your girl, and the times I had looked daggers at you when you ventured into the touchy topic of ‘mugging’. I was behaving like a totally deranged idiot I know, whose only seeming purpose in life was to devour the next set of notes, the next textbook. Thank you for the quiet pride you had in me, undeserved though it may be, and the way you justified my behaviour to others by calmly saying ‘girl is studying’. It gave my life purpose, and carried me through many late nights, when the music from your favourite Korean show soothed many bouts of panic and insecurities. Thank you for being always ready to reward me with good food and putting up with my curt ‘anything’ when asked to state what I wanted to eat, and the devastation that is the dining table after an entire day of mugging. Many times I have raised eyebrows at your ‘childish’ attempts to cheer me up, and I know now that it was I who was being immature, and that my cynicism was a mere cover-up, a farce I think you saw through.


And Gui Feng you nosey parker, (I refuse to call you Jeff Denver!), irregardless of how I have been complaining about you to practically everybody since you were born, and how in many irritated moments, fervently wished for an older brother instead of a grinning, pesky little (or not so little) twerp like you, hell, you have been a total angel these few days. (mark the irony!) Thanks for the incessant stream of ‘zeh, you want to drink ice milo?’ at half an hour intervals, the ‘zeh, you want to drink mushroom soup?’ at two hour intervals and the ‘zeh, look! Spider on the wall!’ at four hour intervals. I am really glad that you (in your more sensible moments) and I can still talk about a lot of stuff, and you might not believe this, but you have grown up, and I do value your advice. (Now, don’t start getting big-headed or I will clobber you!) I am sorry for the times I have ousted you from your room because I needed to study in a nice and neat environment (which leaves my room out of the equation), and I will make up for it by helping you tune your guitar and not letting Dad know what you have been up to. (Don’t worry, he reads slowly, so by the time he gets this far, you would have already closed the window.)
I have forgotten how many times you made me laugh with your insanity, your john Denver ‘imitations’, your shameless exhibitionism, your smart aleck explanations (NO, water does not travel up a plant because the water ‘pull each other’, its called transpiration pull.), and basically by just being who you are. How many times have the tears I tried to choke back turn into laughter just by your utterance of a single word. Don’t ever change, (don’t grow taller!), you are just fine the way you are, though I will die before I tell that to your face.

Phew. It feels good letting all that out.

But really, I don’t know why I took so long to appreciate all that! To think that it took so much mugging and inner turmoil to get this simple fact into my head is really quite insulting to my intelligence. But to heck with intelligence, I have been too clever for my own good. The mind is a nuisance sometimes.

Thank you for letting me feel that I don’t have to be strong for anybody, and that it is, somehow, possible to turn back time, and go back to being that little girl I was always afraid to be.

I have come home, from the precipice.

Msn convos

equipment is important.
be sure to load up
with colons and brackets
(for the containment of)
Overflowing emoti(C)ons

Blossoming
Into the corn-fed constancy
Of fingers on keys

almost-imperceptible
butterfly taps
on newly shuttered windows.

-------------------------------------
Not really what i intended. But well, mugging saps inspiration and any residual brain matter is rendered dysfunctional at 2am in the morning.

isolate all other factors...

One more week.
I can do this. Irregardless.

A brief interlude

What is left really, after you plow through stacks and stacks of flawless logic, substantiated povs, and bombastical pseudo-realities?

A certain distaste for sunrise, and a waxing delight in moonshine.

----------------------
If life is but a dream, someone quick, wake me up!

I am getting seriously sick of mugging. Or at least the feeling of trying to mug. I mean, the feeling a of a guilty conscience breathing down your neck at every turn totally, (if i may use the epithetical expression of teenage angst) SUCKS. Now my daily schedule simply reads, 'wakeup, mug, go online, sleep', out of which only going online is a utility maximising affair. (Yes, econs! A good example of how mugging has assimilated itself into my life.) But even then, lots of precious time is wasted by me stoning in front of the screen before realising that my computer, who, posessed of gentle constitution, is waiting patiently for my password, the key to opening the gates of paradise. And after that, everything is just one big farce. I just sit around, pretending I am making the best use of my leisure time, typing the occasional hahas that make everything sound (quoting aaron) 'nice and amiable'. Indeed, this self delusion continues until one by one, people leave, and I am left with the quietness of an utopia I try so hard to resurrect. This superficiality is slowly getting to me as I get more adept with 'msn lingo', when my hands think faster than my mind, and wham! before I know it, a smiley is produced, a mocking monstroity of a cheeriness I didn't feel. Ah well, I feel like a druggie! I break out into cold sweat if I don't go online, and its not like haven't tried, but all cold turkey attempts have proved futile so far. So there's nothing stopping me from sinking deeper into the quicksand of superficiality. And all this while I am advocating being one's true self!

this calls to mind an old sec 2 poem. (I have been flipping through old writing and feeling kind of sad about the loss of what perhaps one would call "a childishly optimistic view of the world", which is why i wrote revisitng innocence in the first place, but yes, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible to go back. Not that maturity is bad, in blake's terms its just a contrary state, yet one can't help but feel nostalgic about those days when life was so easily embraced and celebrated.) As part of some e-learning project we were all supposed to write poems and post it up on the net. This one I wrote is from the point of view of a sleeping pill, who advises its sleep-deprived master not to look too deeply into things, sounds like a sanctioning of superficiality, but no, not really.

Sleeping PIll

You think too much, my lord, my lord
What everything might seem to be
'Behind the stars there poetry lives
beneath a smile a motive grim.'
My Lord, you go to such extremes!
Trust only but what eyes can see
A better place the world would be
Our life runs deep in mediocrity.

'Trust only but what eyes can see/A better place the world would be.' That's only if what you see is what really is.... oh well. endearing naivete. But well, what can truly withstand the ravages of time? I am tempted to say hope, but that sounds like an answer intended to illict 'oohs and aahs' from a less discerning audience. I shall not attempt to play sage and pass judgement on things and concepts beyond my comprehension. 'Trust only but what eyes can see.... '

i guess it's back to me and my notes.

Revisiting innocence.

‘Maybe somewhere along life's journey
Everything would fade, and we would part ways
Yet we live in the now
not in tomorrow,
And childish affections serve well in memory.’

.................................................. -Me, 14

I wish I could go back to the time when
Imagination could take flight from
careless words, tossed
...........................into the wind
And tears,
coalesce like morning's dew,
effortlessly,
from the deep wells of
a soul-protecting
Chrysalis.

When the world was not a perilous
Shadow-play of
............black, white and grey,
but a starburst of colour,
.....Made simple
by the warmth of
.............your hand in mine.

Then, the mingling of breaths was good
enough reason for laughter,
and the stagnation of seasons
Mere extensions,
of frolics
under a sky too high
.............................to fall.

...I remember,
The log where we balanced
Adolescence, the first
tentative stirrings of wind
and leaves.

...................My haiku,
of roots like dragon claws,
which in its tenderness,
always remembered to leave us
...........................unscathed

.........leaving me to ponder,
what childish optimism
brought me to embrace all that wonder,
and somehow, knowing its transience,
still manage to
.......................let go?

don't read anything into this

(take it that it's for your entertainment, and my " "--->any english word that is along the lines of "fa xie" )

It's almost funny how things can go hideously wrong. Right now, my life must be testing heaven tectonics with all the divine beings (angels/deities/air/whatever you believe) rolling on the floor laughing at me. *looks up* Tell me, am I entitled to free entry after this? *dodges wings* THANKS!

But before I start mimicking foolish Icarus and his holy ascend (and descend – proof of global warming in Grecian times!), I should ask myself why the ‘heaven’ should I care? Life should have told me by now that human power is really nothing but the ability to eat, sleep, breathe, and ensure the continuation of species, a function that is under threat even now, what with all the unhealthy exposure to (men) radiation and (women) education.

URGH. What the heaven am I saying?

I hate my current writing style, it does nothing but lapse into sarcasm from time to time. Where is the writer's sensitivity and attunement to the finely woven threads of existence? Where is the ability to FEEL? I FEEL NOTHING BUT CONTEMPT, fellow masqueraders!

Dear heaven, where is my humanity?

Maybe I should lay off blogging for a while; I end up saying nothing I want to say.

I need to believe again.

Seclusion might not be such a bad idea after all. I am desperately in need of time to mug, and think –I have a hell lot to think about. I have put myself on a hiatus since January, and now all the layers are starting to crumble. Urgh. Think of all the cleaning up I have got to do after that. But anyway, I guess its time to take a step back and observe the fray from a different point of view,(since I can’t even get my own right in the first place) and figure out my own place from there? It’s difficult to chart a course through unmapped terrain, but OH WELL, I need to stop feeling that I am pushing another person off the boat just as I attempt to save the one in the water. Yes, and really, the whole point of putting this up is because I want to apologize for things I don't know whether I have done (in my more complacent moments I suspect I have), but it's still my fault nonetheless. The reason why I haven’t gone up to you and said sorry is not because of lack of courage, but because I don't know whether you are even hurt. (Okay, so that means I am too cowardly to ask if you are.) But anyway, you MUST know that it was all un-intentioned, and I don't want you to feel that I have been capitalizing on you or anything, and that this whole situation is all because I am teeter tottering on a border that doesn't even provide stable footholds. But then again, the whole chunk is based on a lot of assumptions, so tell me if I go off track, or let me embarrass myself further, whatever it is. Urgh. This whole thing feels like a feeble excuse to explain myself, if only I can get myself clear enough to explain! But yes, for better or worse, I need to get myself figured out first. I don't know HOW, but at least I am going to try. Where is the deux ex machinas when you need one? I can't script my own life properly, not when i am compelled to yell "exeunt!" at audiences half the time.

The poetry of love

If only love was like poetry,
though words fail me sometimes,
they fail not this relentless waiting
a meiosis, for dawn to dusk.

If only love was like poetry,
Though my thoughts may run
On- at least there's eternity in paper,
Not your momentous haiku-ed love.

If only love was like poetry,
though cacophony and dissonance reign,
they spare the euphemism of your-words-
and-mind, an oxymoron.

If only love was like poetry,
Though mayhap the persona eludes me,
At least it hides in places I can find-
Damn your soliloquy.

If only love was like poetry,
Though pathos swarm the woebegone,
Truer than your epigrams,
Cajolery, your epithet.

If only love was like poetry,
Though there be chaotic vers libre,
Odes and sonnets harmonise,
And euphony is the lovers' song.

If only love was like poetry,
Though hushed maybe, unspoken words,
Drown the onomatopoeia of your lies,
And truths- Bombast! Absurd!

And yet our love is poetry,
In nights when burlesques cloak my mind,
And hyperbole star-moonshine
Chant your litotes, mock benign-

.....................Of a not-very-love love.


(have been indulging in this kind of crappy word games lately, mugging must be screwing up the wiring in my brain. haha. And my portfolio is still thread-bare.)

The Centre's lament

'And though it in the centre sit
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.'

-John Donne. ' A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.'

Funny how-
I am the one you fall back on when your world goes awry,
and you rely on me, and my devices,
to regain Perfection,

the wonderment of an existence without rough edges,
Shaven clean of all nicks and notches,
that mar your countenance-

You orbit around me,
As I dole you
The confidence to set foot again,

from beginning to end,
filling out and blossoming
until your life is complete.

and how, despite all that
I was never really a part of you

only there in crisis- and
hastily erased,

when you find your circumference.

Childhood games

I still have your autograph, hidden beneath the peels
Of memory too dusty to see, smell
touch. The childish scrawl that writ on
old basketball courts, toddler numerals
nursed in square cradles we struggled
to jump out of. A wallet, stone, or beanbag
chronicling our paths, where we had been and
Who. Sometimes overstepping the mark, others
Losing balance and treading, into
each other’s personal space,
the security of having two feet on the ground.
Till the end, when rules forbid
us to look back, granting only the occasional
Brush, the disconsolation of material on skin,
Cursory smiles overarched into a frown.
we rummage for future’s promise.


A grid of memories, peppered by time.
................Your house.
....and Mine..............adjoining
................But never
................called
................upon.

cap scribblings.

Words strung together voluntarily and involuntarily.


Beside Eusoff hall

Do we need to speak?
The wind whispers my poetry-
Sighs your boughs echoed.



Dance journal 1.1

And then they were quiet –
Silence swathing
Arms. Legs. Shoulders
Muffling, the clacking of joints
Long caged under skin.
The tick tock of clockwork
Transcribed, (by hand)
Into a mere cock of the head.
Seeping like mercury
Turning bone into fluid.
hush-
See the void turn molten silver.
Hush!
Listen to the silence,
As shapes become music.



Dance journal 1.2

(Of dance conventions)

A sudden rap on the door
Ruptures oblivion’s bubble

We stand, trembling like flies
Caught in time’s web, ensnared
In a standstill. Right over
Left. Our patchwork eyes
Watching, as horizons
Unfurl like delicate thread
Extending in a criss-cross, criss-cross
Criss-Cross. Infinity tangles-

Barring the spider that would not come.




Question

How deep do the roots go?
You ask me

The equatorial wind whispers
My answer, into your ear-
Beneath populated skies


And Under
......The...... fragmented ......shadows
...Of a canopy
...........................we cannot Name.




{ekphrasis} Three Women Washing
based on a painting entitled ‘Three women washing’ by Yong Mun Seng


you double your steps
as the familiar dampness
wends between your toes.

The gurgle of river-water
Laps at your ears. You
Slip into your favourite spot
Downstream-

Between two women
From the next village
Whose babble runs
In tandem to river-song.

Rattan basket river-washed.
The current kisses your feet.
Singing its pleasure.

(Your husband will be expecting the same later)

Dip in, dip out-
You watch as the clothes shed
Diamond tears.
Day after day, one after
Another. Only
To be soothed by the sun.

Dusk falls on waters
Washed blue, by the colours
In your eyes.

Far off.
The cackling of geese calls home.