Wednesday, April 30, 2008

dust management

Housewife reports: HORMIGAS

I was possessed enough to clean my room this morning. It's a real energiser, after that I even tried cartwheels but was just a leap frog who can't fly. I stopped living in harmony with the ants and went to war with them today. Must've killed hundreds after finding three ant nests. One was in the metal hinge of the back of the wooden photo frame that held the photo of 6 young people dressed as old people under a mango tree; one was under a rattan container with about a hundred scattered items in it; one was, actually Is, inside the back of the at-least-20-year-old James Dean picture from my uncle. Oh and one also inside the about-17-year-old picture of me and my brother at the reservoir when we were a few years old, arms around each other, my hand holding his hand that is on my head. I look peaceful. For the pictures, I just scotch-taped the holes where the ants come out, hopefully they get trapped inside and die of starvation or lack of air. (Can you imagine the crazy labyrinth that might be inside?) The other ants who were crawling along the walls when their homes were sealed/destroyed felt lost and simply froze on the walls for some time not knowing where to go or what to do, along with a few other dead 'uns. It's difficult to reconcile a harmonious acceptance of the tiny wonderful ants with a sudden madness to kill 'em all. I must lie in bed and reflect upon my barbarious behaviour till the next time it takes over me again. And I didn't see no queen ant. I KNOW there is another nest, another route, between the hole in the back of my built-in cupboard (where i uhu-glued the hole but they bit through it anyway) and the darjeeling poster. Possibly another in the jewellery table, another in my cupboard (Auntie Samsyah the knower says that they crawl there and find hiding places), another under the bed. Enough! I found one in the hershey's hot chocolate packet that lucy gave me when i had bronchitis for me to drink when i got well but i forgot, and couldn't bring myself to pry it open for the tiny crawling struggling madness that might've been there. After that as I dusted the remains of tiny dots of cocoa powder off the acid green envelope she stuck it to the smell of chocolate danced in the still suburban air. But from all this I found things for the dollhouse- tiny pictures, cardboard, a plastic egg (this could be a...chair? toilet bowl?), a plastic basket from the lantern festival pig biscuit (a cocoon bed?) It's always mad cleaning your room because you are reminded of everything. All the artefacts from your life, sweet damnation. Damn cultural studies notes, big bird sharpener, panda bear eraser, wisdom teeth x-rays, percussion scores, badge that desiree made for me and where are my chops, the Ariel chop! And efforts at dust management in my room are futile. It is the most dusty antsy room in the house that I shall have to learn to live with the dust or go mad. Does dust have any nutritional value if you eat it? Because that would be the easiest way to get rid of it, just licking it off the tables. Mmm clean sweep. Now I feel all antsy inside and my grandmother stands here and says in chinese, "Jie2 ah, wo3 yun1 le4."

Oui, c'est l'histoire triste de la poussière, des fourmis, et moi.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

summer vacation

The Grand Summer Vacation
(you paint the walls red and I'll polkadot them white)













Le Machine à Ecrit que moi et Le Thong ont peint pour le 21eme anniversaire de Sunshower. I hope the waves and light clouds don't make her too pensive while clacking away on it. We also spent too much time making a decoy present of army pants, with careful stitches, and painted Japanese words EAT SHIT and DROP DEAD and Arabic words PEACE BE UPON YOU and CAIRO. Yo-ho-ho!











Vase-painting for my auntie on a sunny afternoon. My favourite part is adding the yellow of the daisies.

I wiped my dollhouse yesterday and it was insanely dirty, filled with cobwebs. The eerie sad cobwebby era is over, now it will be filled with happy curtains and furniture, maybe even a bathtub if i find a tin can and attach legs. Mail me a tiny picture sometime and I'll hang it up. But how do you find little people for a dollhouse?

If I had my own house I'd invite my friends and we'd paint the walls, flowers in the toilet, lion in the living room, dragonflies in the balcony! And for now it's grand -and very lucky- when you get to spend the days like this.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

pink tootsie

it was an itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow polkadot bikini


desiree and i spotted this one delirious night some part of clementi after we popped in and out of an ah soh shop with shiny hanging handbags. this car belongs in a summer suburbia movie where there are cat-eye glasses, popcorn, honey, teenagers hanky-panking in the back of the car, and then maybe a big fight at the end of it all.


this one is often parked at the row of shops near my house. electric blue. i think the uncle from the paint shop owns it, he looks like a kind but grumpy walrus who looks at me wearily everytime i ignorantly ask him about paint. isn't a blooming beauty.


HITLER'S CAR. i saw it once, parked at the lane where i stay, then again on chinese new year. It is shiny black, with a german flag stuck to the side which probably billows silly in the wind when the car moves, and had labels about vintage volkswagons and a german phrase (maybe i imagined this), and inside there are red leather seats, a cream plastic steering wheel with a big velvet rose on the right, and in the centre of the wheel is a golden greek face. maybe in the glove compartment is hitler's girlfriend's lipstick, like in the movie rat race. upon seeing this car, female admirers should grab a handkerchief and wave and wail and wait for hitler to appear then seduce him for a ride. i peeked in, the owner is a clement tan or timothy tan. i spotted him later as i was spying from my big window and he wore black sunglasses, old looking jeans and a big checkered shirt. he sat on an old metal swing in my neighbour's house, the one with 2 pairs of twins. one of the boys from the older pair shouted 'HELLO KO KO!!!!!!' at me when i cycled past that day.

If I ever get one, I'll call her dixie-lou, or call him tom paul. He/she would be turquoise, with a nice horn, bad aircon, cloth seats, boopy-sounding horn, musky smell. When i was young i watched a channel 8 show where Cassandra See talked about her big pink messy space wagon and i thought it was the coolest thing ever. If i have 5 children we'd all paint our big car.

Awesome cars I saw:
1. On the way to school along mandai. a typical old greyish van, except they had stenciled words on the back, band names, randomly everywhere. ACDC, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath. I sped forward to find the company name or anything, but on one side I found neatly, in the middle, a lightning bolt, and 'If you are about to rock and roll, we salute you'.

2. At a carpark in Ang Mo Kio. An old van, with lots and lots of words stenciled everywhere but what i saw first was, in Red, 'THE BLOODY SHIT HUB'. The rest of the words, everywhere, in black, were funny things like 'why got women in men toilet?!' and 'the sweet smell of the toilet' and toilet jokes about flushing and shit. It was a toilet repair company, and i've got the number, ARRRR.

3. Along PIE tuas. One of those big vehicles that didn't have anything attached to it at that time. Usually at the back of the driver's compartment section there might be, in big silver letters, the vehicle brand. But this one had, in gloriously shiny silver letters, 'SHIT U'. And near it, diagonal, red and in some funny font, 'cute la'.

Yoddles crocodiles and pee.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

indian goddess
















I think they did kill that tree after all.

Wednesday, April 02, 2008

fresh black grass

My hands are shaking
From carrying this torch
From carrying this torch for you

The end of the fizzy hair adventures
It went from electric blue to light blue to blue-grey, then to inky rich blue, punk blue, dragon purple-blue, magic purple, sweet purple-pink, taffy pink, light pink, to light pink with purple-white and condensed-milk-yellow strands. I cut it all off and now it's fresh black grass. Fresh black grass on a rainy day is marvellous to touch and marvellous to feel. Also, I bought a Belle chop for elysia which leaked pink ink from a grumpy hag who doesn't let people test it and a pack of 56 glow in the dark dinosaur wall stickers which turned out to be 7 dinosaurs and 56-7 stars = 49 stars smaller than a thumbnail. Ants are crawling all over my walls and suddenly I feel like I could be standing at the door of our motel room at Martha's, on a rainy day when we get sent back from work because the go-kart tracks are wet and squeeging them won't help and we're all wet and soggy in our electric blue shirts that have The Great Escape stitched small and white into the left breast and big khaki pants and Desiree is watching The Biggest Loser in the room and I open the door to see that there are people riding the red and yellow Boomerang and screaming their heads off in the white sky in the cold summer rain. Oh please cut my hair again in a bathtub, at least I still have my red raincoat though you threw away your green one dear witch.


P.s. Adding footnotes in microsoft word is AMAZING