i look forward to this morning every year

In our old house, which sat on the same spot, the kitchen wasn't white and modern, twas old with beige tiles and rattan blinds you could pull down to block out the sun rays. The kitchen would be most oily the morning my grandmother made bazhang, with oil from the just-cooked bazhangs dripping on the floor and we would rush there in our pajamas to eat a steaming hot bazhang. It goes wonderfully with tea or milo. My grandfather would be all ready for work with his gold watch, eating too. It was marvellously exciting. Each bazhang has rice, mushrooms, pork, and a big chestnut, cooked in a steaming pot for one and a half hours. But since I stopped eating pork, my grandmother has made hay-bee-hiam and chicken ones for me. It is very hard to make this! Takes a lot of skillful finger twisting, and my grandmother learnt this from her mother and mother-in-law. Once when I was young, I ate seven in a day, for all meals. My whole family loves it. And here it is, though it's in a different but same place, this time round.

deranged grandmother who started at 1am as she couldn't sleep

choosing good leaves is an important step.

the hardest step, wrapping up the bazhang

these are a few of my favourite things

plus home lunch cooked by my grandmother today: porridge, with some kind of juicy chinese vegetable (sometimes she has spicy sweet potato leaves picked by her friends from the reservoir, who grow it in a plantation they have), chicken wrapped with herbs and cooked for hours, fried fish with thin ginger slices from which she keeps trying to pick out big chunks of meat for my brother and I, and warm barley water with rock honey sugar. with such a blissful lunch i was ready to conquer anything.

Alcohol swabs

Highly effective in disinfecting keyboards, mouse-s, light switches, handphones and aircon remote controls. The amount of dirt that comes out is startling, the feeling after wiping is...taut. But they wipe the colours off some kinds of stickers (sandylion?) so the originally-yellow star that is above Dumbledore on my room's light switch is now twinkling silver. Disinfecting is HIGHLY SATISFYING, please try it. Think of the germs on your phone, from touching train handlebars, bus buttons, pedestrian crossing buttons, oil from food, and all this times the number of days you haven't wiped it, and then typed a message before having a cookie. Yikes.

In the past few weeks, two Singaporean uncles have said that I am 'definitely from China', two girls have exclaimed that I look very Japanese/Korean and a kopitiam drinks seller from China said he thought I was from Japan/Korea. I just want to be from Roald Dahl land, where life is fizzy, madness occurs and dreams come true.

One of the worst things I have had to do on the job, where I hardly pee (and you all know my bladder tolerance), was having to pee in a kopitiam toilet which was wet and there was no hook for my heavy bag, so I had to squat over the wet seat with my approximately 7kg backpack, with pants rolled up so they wouldn't touch the floor. My legs nearly cramped and all I could think of was, All this for a bloody pee. But that day, I met an 80 year old man and his wife who met decades ago at his school sports day (he was the star runner), an amazing father who does triathlons for and with his son, who was born with a rare genetic disorder, and a hatmaker whose one room flat was chock-full of heaps of things and smelt lovely.

Forty-eight more days, to blue nails, blue hair, stormy mornings, summer afternoons. In other words, The Glorious Holidays.

La maison où j'ai grandi - Françoise Hardy

Quand je me tourne vers mes souvenirs,
je revois la maison où j'ai grandi.
Il me revient des tas de choses:
je vois des roses dans un jardin.
Là où vivaient des arbres, maintenant
la ville est là,
et la maison, les fleurs que j'aimais tant,
n'existent plus.

Ils savaient rire, tous mes amis,
ils savaient si bien partager mes jeux,
mais tout doit finir pourtant dans la vie,
et j'ai dû partir, les larmes aux yeux.
Mes amis me demandaient: "Pourquoi pleurer?"
et "Couvrir le monde vaut mieux que rester.
Tu trouveras toutes les choses qu'ici
on ne voit pas,
toute une ville qui s'endort la nuit
dans la lumière."

Quand j'ai quitté ce coin de mon enfance,
je savais déjà que j'y laissais mon cœur.
Tous mes amis, oui, enviaient ma chance,
mais moi, je pense encore à leur bonheur.
à l'insouciance qui les faisait rire,
et il me semble que je m'entends leur dire:
"Je reviendrai un jour, un beau matin
parmi vos rires,
oui, je prendrai un jour le premier train du souvenir."

La temps a passé et me revoilà
cherchant en vain la maison que j'aimais.
Où sont les pierres et où sont les roses,
toutes les choses auxquelles je tenais?
D'elles et de mes amis plus une trace,
d'autres gens, d'autres maisons ont volé leurs places.
Là où vivaient des arbres, maintenant
la ville est là,
et la maison , où est-elle, la maison où j'ai grandi?

Je ne sais pas où est ma maison,
la maison où j'ai grandi.
Où est ma maison?
Qui sait où est ma maison?
Ma maison, où est ma maison?
Qui sait où est ma maison?

on the lane where i live, there is a grand tree that sheds pink flowers once in a long while

Did elves and fairies come out to play when no one was looking?

a magic forest walk

On the way to finding a shady spot for Kali outdoor training at Fort Canning Park, taken with a cheap old family film camera we got about ten years ago

Old friends, old friends. Sat on their park bench like bookends.

(Art Garfunkel recorded old people in various locations in New York and Los Angeles over a period of several months. These voices were taken from those tapes.)

Voices of Old People, from the album Bookends.

Man 1: I got little in this world. I give honesty without regret. One hundred dollars for that picture. I remember taking a picture with...

Woman 1: Ooh! Let me show you. Let me show you our picture. This was me and my husband when we were first married.

Woman 2: I always slept on one side, left room for my husband.

Woman 1: And that's me when we were sixteen.

Woman 2: But this, this, this, this is not the case. I still do it. I still lay on the half of the bed. (pause) We used to sneak in...

Man 2: Still haven't seen the doctor I was seein'; there's been blood for the last, eh, forty-eight hours, and I can't get up the mucus for the last, eh, two, three months... oh yes, and I maintain, I maintain strongly, to this minute, I don't think it's an ordinary cold.

Woman 3: God forgive me, but an old person without money is pathetic.

Woman 4: Children, and mothers, that's the way we have it. A mother-- they are--

Woman 5: 'Cause mothers do too much.

Woman 4: That is mother's life, to live for your child. (pause) Yes, my dear.

Man 3: I couldn't get younger. I have to be an old man. That's all. Well...

Woman 6: Are you happy here, honey? Are you happy living with us?

Man 3: So anytime I walk with Lou and... that's all.

Woman 6: Mr. Singer? Are you happy living with us here?

Woman 7: But we don't do that, dear.

Woman 6: But are you happy?

Woman 7: If you mean, if, if you could say, yes, and I thought, and I was so happy, and everybody, "What is this? What is it?"

Woman 8: It just is, beautiful. Like, just a room. Your own room, in your own home.



Can you imagine us years from today,
sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange to be seventy.

'Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'

-The White Queen, Alice Through the Looking-Glass

You know how you listen to your favourite music and singers for so long and it becomes less special than it once was, and then one day you find yourself rediscovering them again? I can't count how many times i've rediscovered the beatles. The Anthology is one big heavy book in my bedside drawer, for sleepless nights, just in case, and they will be there. But mostly to read before sleeping. Beatles dreams. Tee hee.

Today I was supposed to meet Elfie for dinner, and was walking to meet him, and dreaming of fish and chips for dinner, and before that I had told him that we might have to cancel if news crops up at the last moment and I have to go take photos- and happen it did. I went to a convention hall where people and followers of an Indian woman were seated and listening to her. It was the closest thing to a hippie convention that I've been to. I spoke to an Irish woman who is following the Indian woman around on her travels. She (the irish woman with silvery and gray hair and specs that magnified her blue eyes) wore a soft white sari and her breath smelt of the sweetest herbs. Or was it her hair which was close to her breath?

I'm off tomorrow and looking forward to the morning sunshine, slow breakfast, repairing my watch, collecting photos developed from film (a few which might've been exposed and ruined because I opened the compartment), my sister's birthday, Kali class. There's nothing like the shen2 mi4 gan3 (as the shop auntie says) of using film to take photos and waiting for it to be developed, especially after I take hundreds of shots a day at work. Nothing beats taking one precious shot and waiting to see the photograph on a summer afternoon.

13 hearts autumn

Life at the New Job has been challenging. And everyday I find myself somewhere absurd, like outside a factory in an industrial estate as it is raining, or all alone at some part of the turf club, or at a super ulu country club literally at the end of Singapore, or with someone I've seen on television growing up, calling me ke ai because I asked him to do kicks for the photoshoot. I LIKE THIS ABSURDITY. My heavy backpack sometimes cuts off circulation to my arms, now I know what NS boys feel like on long marches.

p

Little things that make me happy:

My father helping me carry my bag from the car to the house

My uncle doing the same <:-)

My grandmother steaming broccoli for me. Smells like farts but has pure natural sweetness.

Having dinner with my family at the end of the work day

Snuggling in bed to read a bedtime story

p

They (cousins, sister, grandmother, auntie) went for Disney on Ice today. I called Little Gingercat up about it, and she said the little mermaid segment wasn't much though my sister said they did tell the story of Ariel and sing songs. But here's what Gingercat said: "they just...ski about and make some noise and then happily ever after."

sea blanket

Have a magical Friday the 13th <*:-)

Alone Again, Naturally

Ever heard the song? I love this song. My father has liked it since he was in jc (three decades ago) but that day I asked him the lyrics and he had no idea, he liked the tune. When I first heard it I thought it was John Lennon singing, but it was Gilbert O'Sullivan. Alone Again, Naturally album covers:

Dark Friday

Drying Records

Records can actually be washed in the sink or tub with soap and scrubbed gently in the direction of the grooves, then towel-dried (though this bit sounds dangerous, what if the little soft worms of the towel cause scratches?) and perhaps hung to dry, if anyone finds a way to.

to friday the 13th, a fizzy day

Empty Park,

for Christy the Salem witch.

a red fire-lantern carrying a wish floats up into the cloudy night sky!

Here's what my cousin told me. Her father was lecturing her, her younger brother and sister on their bad mandarin and telling them to speak more mandarin because that is our culture. She says his metaphors confuse them terribly.

Father: 我们华人像狗，洋人像猫。我们不应该像猫meow meow.
Younger brother: Then 鸟 leh?
Father: 我们是雨，不应该学鸟飞。
Younger sister: 可是雨不可以飞。

Younger sister doing homework: Papa, 怎么说 ‘Eraser to the rescue’?
Father: Mmm…橡皮英雄来了。。。可是你说，‘我有橡皮’就可以了。

a time of innocence, a time of confidences

"Silly Billy, Lemon Squeezey"

But I'll see you in the sky above, and the tall grass, and the ones I love

I just counted my hongbao money and wondered in how many years I might possibly be giving hongbaos to my cousins? Far-flung as the thought is. And then proceed to play with them like I wasn't grown up, and not make any small talk with the adults who visit. The best chinese new year goodies this year are the cashew nuts my grandmother fried and sunned and salted slightly, very useful for times of boredom and to provide some little entertainment to relatives (who are bored anyway) by practising throw and catch-in-mouth, but only in my own house.

p

Oh yes, my friend and I are leaving our internship jobs; no more hot long sleepy-geylang 15-minute walk to work, which was incidentally my favourite part. And I shall miss the flowery musky smell of the pink toilet at the end of the enclosed small corridor, my five-minute refuge. Hurray to new chances and jobs whatever they might be!!!!

p

Is it unhealthy that I've been listening to largely the same music for the past four to six years? Like many people I listen to music while doing daily-life things- lying on my bed, drawing, on the train, painting, writing letters, sewing, emailing, in other words live on it somewhat. And all this music makes up a big part of anyone's inside world, which means my 'inside world' (l'intérieur monde) has been influenced by the same musical landscape for some time, and what if it stays that way till I am an armchaired granny?! The music is mostly old songs, and I can usually tell if I am in a Beatles or Bob Dylan mood, but it is very puzzling not to know what mood you are in. I haven't been in a The-Who mood for more than a year. Isn't it funny, measuring your mood by what you feel like listening to?? Do you guys do that sometimes? If you do, let's play a game, and tell me now exactly what mood you are in and what are the first lyrics you think of when you close your eyes, and last night's dream if you had any :-)

In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer

'Au milieu de l'hiver, j'ai decouvert en moi un invincible été'

-Albert Camus

Comment ca va, mes amies? Un jour, si j'avais un maison, vous devez aller chez moi et je cuisinerai un tres delicieux repas pour vous. Surtout des champignons et des courgettes.

he's been so sad, since you said his accent was bad

TGIF

(a poem written in the depths of The Pain Of Waiting For Friday Lunchtime)

Thin tortoise in a leotard
And light rose-pink stockings
Prancing and twirling
Breathing and farting
I mean, whizzpopping
Pardon my manners
I haven’t got them
And the distilled water
Is it better than mineral water
Because I like milk
But not more than Napoleon Dynamite
My friend got uggs
Bet they’re goody snugs
She is across the peppermint sea
Darjeeling tea
Me staring at the screen
Thinking of sad circus
Pierrot and a tear
Blossoming lights
and cinnamon kisses
Lego parts face me
Office no faze me
Thank God It's Friday
Kites are flying, my day

days of wine and roses

Fall is here, hear the yell, back to school, ring the bell. Brand new shoes, walkin blues, climb the fence, books and pens, I can tell that we are gonna be friends, I can tell that we are gonna be friends.

part 3, pemberton

it and its friends had a tuft of shimmery blue-green-purple feathers tucked under the brown ones, which shine when it flies, which is seldom, as this is a lazy duck who paddles here and there nearly always

Elvis' house guest

(Since my baby left me, I've found a new place to dwell, it's on the end of lonely street, Heartbreak Hotel)

firewood collector

they live in the Hidden Valley there


Darcy, the goodest dog I ever did see, who is now across the seas. We stayed on an estate in Pemberton with Darcy's owners.

<*:-)

part 2, wildflowers

my nature days part 1

From our balcony in the fremantle apartment. There were boats with names like meerkat, cloudy bay, sundancer, bronzewing.

From the living room of our house in Margaret River, a purple house among a few others in colourful Australian bush. It makes you feel like you could go trekking for hours starting from your backyard.

Fishing in the Indian Ocean

Lonely Seagull No. 1

Our laundry hanging out under the stars, which were MARVELLOUSLY BRIGHT

danny

My father put a match to the wick of the lamp hanging from the ceiling and the little yellow flame sprang up and filled the inside of the caravan with pale light. "How about a hot drink?" he said.

"Yes, please."

He lit the praffin burner and put the kettle on to boil.

"I have decided something," he said. "I am going to let you in on the deepest darkest secret of my whole life."

-Danny the Champion of the World, Roald Dahl

He was so romantic, I could not resist

Snow White sounds rather like a lunatic in an asylum, in her padded cell, singing her heart out to no one in particular (maybe the little scurrying animals). Scary, which is what i suppose love will be like.

And Pocahontas sings 'JUST around the riverbend!' quite madly aggressively.

Oh yes grandfather long legs did not die. The next morning, I brought him down in the dustbin (covered by my primary 5 science notebook) and released him into the garden. He crawled out and teetered on the edge, contemplating crawling back into the dirty dustbin but luckily decided the fresh carpet grass was better for the rest of his life.

In the suburban evening, in gravelly neighbourhoods all over, people are watching television in the descending darkness as their maids cook dinner. And my grandmother is obsessed with making my brother eat whenever he comes back from NS. She is so afraid that he will go out with his friends without a word, that he will not try what she has cooked specially for him. She shouts frantically and desperately for him to try this and that, and he replies rather monosyllabically and eats some while watching television as she sits hunched staring at the english show she cannot understand, and watching him eat.

In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in about 2:55, when you know you've taken all the baths that you can usefully take that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.

--Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

Watching Jamie At Home, the show about Jamie Oliver in his wonderful sunny home with his backyard of tomatoes, pumpkins, fresh vegetables, magical herbs (cinnamon sticks he grinds over food) old outdoors stone stove, mushrooms (but never pluck them, for they may very well kill you) and flowers, watching this show is sheer torment and bliss. It just tortures me madly with its insanely divine plucking of fruits from the backyard and then vigorous fresh zesty fizzy cooking (from him in colourful knitted winter hats). He made pumpkin fairy cakes (also called muffins). It was even worse when he had to go into the forest with the mushroom expert and they plucked fat mushrooms from the cold forest ground and then sat down with a portable stove and a pan and fried mushrooms with butter and herbs and then toasted their bread on the pan and scooped the juicy hot sticky concoction of fresh forest mushrooms onto the damn bread and crunched it right there in that lovely cold forest!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Sweet peaceful restful dreams to all the tired children who got their psle results today. (including my dear sai sai)

tom

Tom died. Tom the gangly swaying tree that I see from my huge window, in the next next door neighbour's house, a tall lean tree with fluttering leaves that are so high they are against the clouds from where I see it. One day I was just pottering around my room, I turned and saw that tom was sawed in half. It was a horrendous realisation, like finding out

OH MY GOD THERE IS A PRAYING MANTIS IN MY ROOM ON THE FLOOR, IT LOOKS LIKE THE ONE IN A BUG'S LIFE, IT IS WALKING LIKE A HUMAN BEING.

I half expect it to turn around and start giving me grandfatherly advice.

Back to tom. I will find pictures of him, before and after. Actually he isn't really dead. He's just...half gone, but what I liked most was his tallest branch. Actually tom was more that than the tree. Goodbye Tom. I didn't even see you when you left.

Praying mantis is crawling up old filthy ikea wooden kids chair. It has reached the top, it is praying to the lights. It is looking out for friends to talk to, because he will soon be lonely and has to pass the whole night by himself, in a strange room and not a garden. What shall I do?! He looks like he is preaching to a crowd, his legs seemingly gesturing, but there is no crowd on the seat under him! Sad, little mantis. I admit he scares me alot.

There is a concert this saturday at the vivocity amphitheatre. Old bands from the 60s and 70s from Singapore and around the area (including one nicknamed the beatles of malaysia) will be playing their songs, and BEATLES and rolling stones and other oldies. Even though its not really the beatles playing, watching someone sing the beatles is...very special. Like the beatles tribute band concert we went to, the wigs they wore, the fat fish-and-chips-sailor ringo, Hey Jude, the grass we sat on, That Feeling. Oh my, will there be many people who grew up on records and kampongs and old singapore there this saturday night? People who listen to GOLD 90fm (where I by luck found out about this concert). Lucy and I will put on our sixties clothes and have a psychedelic nostalgic sweet time. I can't wait. My heart flutters and melts at the thought of the music.

The praying mantis has scuttled off somewhere! What if I try to leave my room and he stops me, and starts speaking to me?



ARRRRRRRRRRRR the mantis just flew on me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
My heart is beating like mad.
And then it went into the dustbin and I covered the top of the dustbin (and as I did, it looked at me with two maroon-brown googly eyes).
I shall tell myself I am leaving it there, for a good night's rest snuggled among the mucus tissues and whatnot tonight.

Okay?


Night you silly grandfather praying mantis!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


but...will it die? I don't want to kill dear grandfather mantis :-( If i wake my grandmother up I don't think she will bother releasing him in the garden, she'll probably just slap him dead with her bare hands, saying 'Aiyah, like that also scared'. How? This is grave, a life is at stake. And the ethical decision rests with me. If only I could enclose him in a padded bubble and then throw the bubble into my house garden, upon which the bubble would dissolve and he would be free. Oh no grandpapa, what is going on in that germ-filled dustbin now? I think there are some crumbs of caramelised molasses biscuit inside, as long as you don't die of lack of oxygen. Golly no wolly. Damn my insecty room. Horrible notes: 1. there might still be ant nests in the pictures on my wall. 2. there might be many many ant/hopefully-not-other-insect eggs lining one of my bookcases. 3. there might really be, like my grandmother said, cockroaches under my bed. 4. i found a dead beetle carcass in my backpack in the food compartment.

Yikes.

roger mcgough

Poems by Roger McGough

Snow and Ice Poems

(i)

Our street is dead lazy
especially in winter.
Some mornings you wake up
and it's still lying there
saying nothing. Huddled
under its white counterpane.

But soon the lorries arrive
like angry mums,
pull back the blankets
and send it shivering
off to work.

(ii)

To
boggan?
or not
to boggan?
That is the question.

(iii)

Winter
morning.
Snowflakes
for breakfast.
The street
outside
quiet
as a
long
white
bandage.

(iv)

The time I like best
is 6 a.m.
and the snow is six inches deep

Which I'm yet to discover
'cos I'm under the cover
and fast, fast asleep.


Cinema Poem

I like it when
They get shot in the head
And there's blood on the pillow
And blood on the bed

And it's good when
They get stabbed in the eye
And they scream and they take
A long time to die

And it all spurts out
All over the floor
And the audience shivers
And shouts for more

But I don't like it when they kiss.


A Poem Just For Me

Where am I now when I need me
Suddenly where have I gone
I'm so alone here without me
Tell me please what have I done?

Once I did most things together
I went for walks hand in hand
I shared my life so completely
I met my every demand.

Tell me I'll come back tomorrow
I'll keep my arms open wide
Tell me that I'll never leave me
My place is here at my side.

Maybe I've simply mislaid me
Like an umbrella or key
So until the day that I come my way
Here is a poem just for me.

America

America- A song by Simon and Garfunkel

"Let us be lovers we'll marry our fortunes together

I've got some real estate here in my bag."

So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner pies

And we walked off to look for America

"Kathy," I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburg

"Michigan seems like a dream to me now"

It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw

I've come to look for America

Laughing on the bus
Playing games with the faces

She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy

I said "Be careful his bowtie is really a camera."

"Toss me a cigarette I think there's one in my raincoat."

"We smoked the last one an hour ago."

So I looked at the scenery

She read her magazine

And the moon rose over an open field

"Kathy, I'm lost," I said, though I knew she was sleeping

"I'm empty and aching and I don't know why."

Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike

And they've all come to look for America

All come to look for America

All come to look for America

this songs reminds me of last summer, the train rides and this place, a creaky musky room that the giraffe and i stayed in when we accidentally landed in the wrong town. the best thing about the room was the sink, just like in mr. bean's room. there was no air con and it was still and sweet-smelling. the corridors were quiet and orange, with a corn painted at every door, and we locked ourselves in the toilet to bathe in the two cubicles with the cool night air outside in a strange quiet town. Has anyone tried Mrs. Wagner pies and what are they like? If this were a song about Singapore, they'd say we boarded the sbs bus in jurong, orchard seems like a dream to me now, and it took me 45 minutes to hitchhike from tampines.

Work is piling up, decisions to be made, I feel like burrowing in a hole like a wombat (do they actually do that?), or a mole, and hibernating warmly in the soil for the winter and waking up for ginger cookies in spring. The internship promises a pay which I will give a part to my grandmother, a part to my parents and a part to getting an armchair and table for my record player for my room. THAT! IS EXCITEMENT.