Wednesday, November 29, 2006

the days

Someone came to me in a dream

So when I wrote 'la mer' in the sand labyrinth that we obsessively dugand ruby got mad with iz for being obsessed with building defences so the rising tide wouldn't wash out our mountain and knee deep hole (with inner walls, no less), when the both of us were already done with our determination, he looked at 'la mer' and said 'lamer' and laughed at iz, called him an asshole. The lamer clenched a ball of wet sand, his body vibrating, his eyes shut tight and his lips pinched, and turned around and threw the sand at ruby. It splattered a little on me like diarrhoea so I didn't really see how ruby pushed iz after saying the f word. After the whole thing they were tired and sullen. Boys.

The night is scary and thrilling. More and more I wake up every night to some sort of a deep orange world where the glow of a lamp is not light and luminous but heavy and dreadful. It is easy to be filled, like dark blue water in a sea with steady currents, by thoughts that are engulfing, dramatic, exotic, exaggerated, frightening, lush. It's easy to lie there passively allowing the thoughts to come and yet actively thinking them up with yourself being the ceaseless master endlessly and manically throwing things into a potent mixture. And it's tiring going through it but even though it can be sadness and loneliness and fear in the middle of the night, in your own safe haven, I'm guess I'm glad for me active brain. So when I wake up to a plain paper-bland morning, the ol' brain still swirls with the haunts of the night.
beautiful bodies in the night

these curtains were billowing gloriously in the wind like from some roman stone castle


trees and cycling

obsessive digging

Monday, November 27, 2006

discoveries

Monday's discoveries:

I thought simon was garfunkel and vice-versa and how could i. It's just that the lovely curly hair seemed like a simon thing and the short limp hair seemed like a garfunkel thing with the bizarre name Art to go with it. Anyway Art turns out to be short for Arthur and Garfunkel was in Catch-22 which was on hbo today and at the end yossarian rowed away on a tiny bright yellow inflatable boat. Yossarian Lives.

Lex is short for Alexander. Lex sounds like a punk with tattoos and piercings, but maybe that's only cause Lex Van de burg from survivor africa was like that. Anyhow, such a name.

Isaac means 'laughing man' and actually he is.

Elysia (the baby's name) means blissful and she is bliss.

Another silly discovery:

Dr. Evil is actually a parody of a James Bond villian with a white siamese cat and who also looks like a psycho.

And can you ever get enough of these lines from the song Dr. Evil:

When your name is Evil that is good or so you think, but you're so very wrong, it's evil, but being wrong is right so then you're good again, which is the evilest thing of all.

Oh, what sense......!

(And p.s. fran drescher over oprah anytime!!!!!!!)

Sunday, November 26, 2006

sunday

SUNDAY AFTERNOONS ARE ROMANTIC

For so long and since I was young, they remind me of: garage sales, families at thomson plaza, grocery shopping, pumping petrol, visiting old houses, couples in shabby clothes and spectacles driving their cars and holding hands. And in recent years: staying home lazing around, the smell of desiree's old house, pink and blue flowers in garden vases, john lennon, watching gilmore girls in the dark, the ballad of john and yoko.

Yesterday the baby miraculously went into the big pool, a big achievement in her 4 years of life. And she was like a mad turtle, very scared, and everyone (all the other cousins and sister) wanted to claim possession of it and carry her. Everyone kept going 'Yaaaaaay' and 'Baby so pro!' 'Baby so pro right?!' and crowding around her. Later she clung to my neck with me floating backwards and her legs kicking and she laughed and gurgled like mad and went delirious when we went near what i told her was the stream of urine (water feature). Seth was like stitch/crazy frog with crooked teeth, big ears and blue goggles. I love Saturday nights.

Happy Holidays
Get hung up something

Thursday, November 23, 2006

it all ends well

Cosmological principles

Ah, but it all ends well. We visited ruby (reuben) and it was all merry as my parents drank hot coffee talking about which school ruby would apply to. I told baby about grinding crunchy cockroaches and pretending its cornflakes and giving it to her for breakfast (makes babies spellbound) and that people eat insects and she said 'got people like that meh????' I asked Ruby to call The Other pretending he didn't know his results.

Ruby: Eh what did you get? 255?
Iz: Lower
R: 254? 253? 252?
Iz: You got it.
R: WOWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Iz: .........252 sucks. What did you get?
R: 237.
Iz: Oh..., that's good.
R: So are you happy with your results?
Iz: I'm happy but also not happy.
R: Why, you wanted 10 marks more?
Iz: How did you know?!
R: Ah I anyhow guess one...so are you ok?
Iz: I'm ok. I got 3 A stars, how many A stars you got?
R: zero.
Iz: oh..

So in the end it takes one noble friend to make the other feel better about something :-)

Astronomy tomorrow and my head is cramped with astronomical facts and phrases that are ever so....cosmic. The Great Red Spot on Jupiter, starburst galaxies, gamma ray bursts, hypernovas, supermassive black holes....and though my head feels like it couldn't really take much more teeny facts like cheese threads squeezed into the tiny spaces left and they will just melt together like messy sticky cheese clumps when I try to extract it tomorrow I am loving it like the magic dust tails of comets.

tiny tragedies

Tiny tragedies

The day of PSLE results. Me, my auntie and grandmother went with iz to get his. All the boys were walking around the hall, chatting and running about for a long time before the principal came. A whole wall of parents stood behind the boys. After the whole hall ceremony we went to the classrooms and it was hot and sticky and awful there as all the parents from 2 classes squeezed in one corridor peeking in through tiny windows into the classroom making gestures to their sons. It was FUNNY. Trying to show numbers. It was also ridiculous. My auntie stood at the window watching him not wanting to look at her while my uncle came later and pressed his body against the door watching his son covering his reddening disappointed face with his paper. He didn't get 262 as he wanted, and was upset and angry and fiercely disappointed. Said his results were very lousy and warned us not to tell anyone. It was sad seeing him caring to an unreasonable crazy extent. And the other cousin was sighing over the phone, disappointed with what he got, asking me to guess. Lovely children bearing so much upon their hearts on this terrible day.

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

sensational things

Everyone's rooting for you

Driving in the rain in the night is sensational. Today I saw a curtain of 2 huge golden and white cloths billowing magnificently in the wind out of one of the huge windows in the condo opposite. It felt like some royal curtains was blowing out of the stone walls of a roman castle or something. It was that kind of golden. Last night I had a dream that was, the only word to describe it, awe-inspiring. It's going to sound stupid because this awe-inspiring thing involved harry potter and THE FIGHT BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL that usually ends every harry potter book. At the end of the dream a group of people (my family and close friends) gathered and held hands very tightly (i was between my father and arika's thin hand) in a circle around the bad guys (only a few people, but very evil) in this combined strong clear magical effort against them. It felt somewhat peaceful and at the same time insanely uplifting. We wore black wizarding robes and had these powers and were supposed to take turns to fight the bad guys and everyone was watching out for everyone else and held hands so tightly. Wow. When I woke up I realised that fantasy and dreams are so powerful.

La mer....

Sunday, November 19, 2006

sixpence

Bring bring, bring your flowered hat
We'll take the trail marked on your father's map

We went to see my da jie jie's newborn baby in her house yesterday and as the adults sat outside on the porch in wooden chairs admiring the house I crept inside to look at the baby, lying near the wooden stairs, sleeping beautifully. He was breathing like this: 'hmh. hmh. hmh. hmh.' but it sounded peaceful. You could see the veins on his soft head, where a soft layer of lovely hair was spreading. Such a lovely little baby. And somehow when his silly irritating grandmother carried him he didn't hug her but when his mother carried him he sort of put his hand on her chest. I can't wait for me and all my friends to have babies someday.

When the exams are over the sewing machine will arrive and I can really get down to sewing, and driving around everywhere!!!!!!!!

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

coincidences

She looked good, she looked fine, and I nearly lost my mind

The exams start tomorrow. Thank goodness. I couldn't wait any longer for it to end. Some cosmic force out there in the universe is doing things to my life these days. Last night I woke up just on time to turn my head and see the lizard that has been tormenting me nearly every night with its mating cries that echo around the glowing emptiness of my room, crawl out from behind the bookcase and look at me look at him on the wall. Dear little lizard-child. Stop trying to have sex in my room!!!!!!!!!!!

Coincidences always scare and fascinate me more than I admit. It shows that some cosmic force out there is trying to push things your way or spark some magic realization or something spiffy of the sort. It is trying to brew some potent mixture of your life, sometimes throwing in someone else's life. And even though cosmic magic signals cannot be ignored, probably only a few times in everyone's lifetime will the brew fizz into anything meaningful and as crazy as you thought the coincidence was at first.

les filles de ma vie

Les filles de ma vie



ballet girl

Sunday, November 12, 2006

springleaf

Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup

my cavern



the clouds are blanketing us with peaceful blessings


Saturday, November 11, 2006

L-O-V-E

Two in love can make it, take my heart and please don't break it

For the first time in a very long time, my family had a wedding dinner to attend (but it was very different from all those we used to go to years ago when everyone went and all us children went mad, though, almost as always, none of us really know very well the person getting married). The first real wedding dinner for me after growing up more. The bride was my grandmother's dead adopted brother's daughter. Hey i just realised it's her neice! Didn't think much on that day. No wonder she got to sit at the 'special table' (not that special after all, since the bride wasn't there, leaving all her favourite people to face each other with a sense of delirium and odd emptiness, at least that is what i imagine it might feel). The only children who went were me, sai sai, nat and baby, all the girls. Baby (elysia) wanted to run here and there so we went to the stage and she saw the 5-levelled cake and the champagne-glass pyramid and the red carpet and she kept dancing on stage alone to my grandmother's exclamations of 'xia lai! bu yao zuang dao dong xi! xia lai!' and she was enthralled by the bride and groom walking in and in the end all of us ran around the lovely empty carpetted hall outside. There were just so many ROSES! The Every table had a rose arrangement in the middle initially, with rose petals littered all around the circular chinese-table-rolley-thing. The tables and chairs were black so the colour scheme was very...modern rather than white and pearl and lovely and rich. They had an animation video of how the bride and groom met, and halfway through the dinner the groom sang L-O-V-E to the bride (nat covered her ears and grimaced while papa closed his eyes and nodded his head. think he was drunk) as it was their song. What really got me was how, when we just arrived and i first saw the bride, she was so HAPPY and just glowing and when she saw that one of her close relatives had come after all she embraced her and jumped a little and exclaimed- she was just so happy that this person came, and so wonderfully happy that she was getting married. Despite how it was in many ways a traditional and somewhat restrictive chinese wedding, that was enough to make it a special one. And it isn't just her, but at weddings girls dream and married women remember. Weddings do put ladies in such a state of mind.

Thursday, November 09, 2006

do you believe in magic

Do you believe in magic?

This is in my astronomy textbook.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time

T.S. Eliot

Do you ever get that feeling where you feel like screaming or whooping or cursing?! Like after reading something or realizing something. What do people do when that moment comes?! If it is a crazy frustration (e.g. my brother accidentally taped stupid channel 8 drama instead of project runway) I usually jump up and down and go mad. If it is a strange pulsating fairy lights feeling (somewhat like....in harry potter, the cool feeling harry got of someone cracking an egg on his head) I find myself somewhat frozen, remaining in a sitting position, somewhat smiling and letting that feeling pass through for a few seconds till it pulsates off my fingertips. It's all very instinctive of course. What do you, dear reader, whoever you might be in the galaxy, do when that inevitable moment comes? Maybe some people, not knowing what to do at the fairy lights moment, scratch their armpits with a strange twitch. I'm just imagining. Oh it's 1am and this sounds..what's that phrase...off the rocker, absolutely wonkers. 'Life's a piece of shit, when you look at it, but...always look on the bright side of death, just before you draw your terminal breath!'