ah choo

Bon anniversaire, sorcière folle

Je ne sais pas si tu aimes les moles

Tu as vingt-et-un ans aujourd'hui

Vas sentir les fleurs de la nuit

et quand les fleurs t'enivrent follement

n'oublies pas de manger un bon-bon

appelles-moi quand tu vas accoucher

je peux te preter une bouche pour crier

et quand tu dors sur les fleurs bleus

sous les etoiles et la lune et le feu

j'espere que tu reves à l'amour

et tu respires comme une petite ours

cartwheel

Yahooooo!

If I never do real cartwheels at least I can cartwheel in my heart.

Guavas and strawberries!

floaty

"Ah, he is savage, then? I could see it myself. He glows with danger. Most people just shimmer...he looks like a lightning bolt. It's terribly fascinating."

-The Stars My Destination

The summer's just began, it's scorching hot out, and I need a job, to end these daydreamy days, and for money to go to Mongolia or Coney Island or somewhere where I can get that feeling again.

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.

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.

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.

indian goddess

I think they did kill that tree after all.

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

rainy day women

There is a tree I always notice while driving to and from school. It's between the Choa Chu Kang and Brickland exits and seeing it is always special, at 100km/h, speeding past. Most of the other trees are lush and green but this one is all bare, with its branches twistedly growing out, gnarly and twiggy and mad and gentle and sad. But then the past week I thought it was gone, there were empty spots along the middle section of trees and I thought they had cut off my favourite tree. But then I spotted it again, with less of its main branches left, like a good friend who had a haircut. There's another one, at the exit to the BKE (is that what its called), bare and all its branches and twigs are spreading out and form a hannukah candle kind of shape, all growing upwards. Driving to school and back, with johnny cash, the wind howling, fun foreign workers on the backs of lorries listening to music with pink towels on their heads, sheltering themselves with umbrellas, laughing, looking at me as i look at them. Construction workers with their boots and spades and hats and mud and hands are so cool.

ring of fire

I fell for you like a child
Oh, but the fire went wild

I wish to think of everything at once, remember everything and imagine everything: my grandfather, the beatles, my film script, dinner, my grandmother, what to paint next, james dean, what to write in a letter, french conjugaison, japanese characters, the clouds, the trees, my part for the percussion ensemble, fauvism, futurism, dada, songs, the beach, the cosmos, fairies and forests and circuses. But my mind just thinks of things like Itchy mosquito bite on my leg, or I should probably go pee in a few minutes. And you?

wet bendy needles

O I wish I had a river I could skate away on

It finally rained for a long time, in the night, and I missed it while sleeping. It's still raining now, like wet bendy needles or feathertips and I wish it would pour and storm sensationally. Something is wrong with my faithful 6-year-old speakers, so that The Mamas and The Papas sound like they are singing Creeque Alley in an empty room with no happy jangle of guitars. And the horse clip clops of God Only Knows are soft. At least the proclaimers still sound awesome.

In the pictures on my wall, James Dean is always looking at me no matter which part of the room I am at, and Paul is always holding a teacup, looking out the train window, and in another he is at the piano, and Ringo poses in his polkadotted shirt. John is looking out from under an umbrella.

At percussion class yesterday we continued practicing for the little concert exam, and we played pieces related to weather. One is Hurricane (and I'm supposed to play the steel drums except we don't have them so I have to use this malay instrument of heavy golden bells like a mini royal xylophone) and there's the weather movement series, of which we're playing Spring Wind, a light and lovely piece with a jungle feel, and Storm Warning and Dance, an intriguing and rather mad piece. I never really could follow a conductor perfectly. But it's amazing. People standing in front of instruments, with someone leading them all. And out of nothing, they all enter a counting of beats and create a something that came from the mind of someone they've never met imagining how weather or a big happy green field on a summer's day would become music, and mutter '1, 2, 3, 4' under their breaths, and somehow enter this other world, all following nothing but this intangible counting of beats and try to play their loudest when the score reads 'ffff' like someone trying to type a bad word on a typewriter. And I hit a gigantic golden nipple of a gong. And then kiap the big mallet under my armpit like an auntie and grab my drumsticks so I can play the tomtom part coming up very uncoolly. And dainty girls' arms float up and down above the xylophone, marimba, with bouncing red and yellow yarn mallets, playing lovely sounds. Someone else scrapes a suspended cymbal. And I hit the middle of the gigantic golden nipple with all my might.

evening garden bliss

Do you want to hold johnny or sharkie?

My evening garden bliss is sitting in the mad coloured inflatable swimming pool with mr krabbs, spongebob, plankton, patrick and sandy, with the adults watching tv and eating fruits and chinese new year goodies inside the glowing living room, us outside splashing and shouting and eating ice cream and pretending. Except my grandmother thought leaving the pool on her grass overnight will kill it so she watered the plants and grass immediately. Does shining a torch on glow in the dark stars that aren't bright enough recharge them?

I can't wait for it to rain for days. O please come in the night tonight, howling and mad, till i awake and then fall back deep into sleep with dreams of jungles and smoke and hands and berries and then wake up suddenly in the morn with a deep sigh of madness.

During the christmas sleepover esmonde left his black toiletries bag here. I was following an ant trail from my dustbin with a torchlight when I found his bag under a small wooden table. And a whiff of Nomad soap and shampoo from crabtree and evelyn sent me to heaven. I saw a car bumper sticker that said 'HEAVEN. Don't miss it' with clouds. What does it mean?

I have decided to make peace with the unfathomable amount of ants in my room and feel like they are my friends inhabiting the same space as me, that they enjoy the deep blue and robin-egg blue of the walls like me, that they are happily and hardworkingly living their lives here and i should be happy for that. I simply cannot kill them anymore. Why is that?

And I'd like a pig as a pet! Fresh pink skin and GLORIOUS MUD and poo and grunts. This is like how I'd prefer an ugly chunky looking mashed up cookie or cake to a pretty prissy delicate one anytime. Does anyone else want a pig? We could make our pigs be friends and hang out with each other sometimes. Give them sunglasses and star tattoos and separate them everytime they are on the very verge of mating and then laugh about it. Evil taking over. NO, Olivia, don't worry, you can sleep with me as long as you don't release yer bowels in my grandmother's beautiful king-size bed but as you are a pig no one will blame you.

23rd february is a very special date and today my father got me a rugged blue and brown timberland backpack that will stay with me for years on all future adventures and travels.

When does it rain cold and when does it rain warm?

typewriters part 2

We wrote love poems in french class yesterday; tomorrow is the day for 'recitation with feeling'. Ah secret loves and desires.

typewriter tip tip tip

A is for Apple
























These are making me very excited

The Remington Portable up there was the one desiree found in the antique shop in glens falls and nearly bought for me for my birthday and when i finally saw it...it was like buttered peas and fresh flowers and strawberry tea in my blooming mind. I think I will get off my arse and do face painting and use the money to buy it. Bumblebee yellow keys melt my heart.

fly free duckies

Suddenly I turned around and she was standing there
With silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair

Lucy Clementine, I am feeling strangely excited about lunch today, because we are having nice clean porridge with warm vegetables and carrots with fried egg and the day is bright and windy. The past few days, we've been having curry and rice and mee siam and prata and sweets and spring rolls and beehoon and chocolates and sugee and help i can't stop my hands from reaching out for another biscuit or nut. But I have been getting better at catching nuts in my mouth.

Adult relatives who come to my room usually stand at the doorway with their arms politely folded behind them, faced with napoleon dynamite and the beatles, they gaze with heads slightly tipped up and nod. And nod. And nod.

TIME FOR LUNCH -jumps up like tasmanian devil-

I ran down the stairs shouting 'PORRIDGE!!!!'

Mother: PORRIDGE?

It turned out we had to finish last night's copious amounts of mee siam and popiah. They had their NJC gathering last night here. For the past 2 decades and more, my parents' NJC friends have been meeting at one guy's house for on Christmas. But last christmas the tradition was broken, and now it's going to be at my house every chinese new year. My parents met in NJC. They were both in council. When their friends meet it's always a jolly time. I spoke to one of them in french about what my father was like then. Il ne change pas. Il est toujours pratique!

Enough with the lunch story, now onto my hair. O the whimsical topics in life. It was inky punk-blue and one morning I awoke to discover that it was mainly blue and purple on top, with a small patch of light purple (turning lavender) at my forehead, and a small patch of light robin-egg blue, with ocean blue across mixed with magic violet, with the sides blue-green with brown and black roots. Wondrous! It's protecting me with magic luck.

This evening if the weather is lovely I shall lounge in the inflatable swimming pool on the fresh garden grass, with my grandmother miles away in china and not able to see that my pool is killing her grass just by Being On It.

Fly free, duckies

love him in the noontime

Where are you going to I don't mind
If I live too long I'm afraid I'll die
So I will follow you wherever you go
If your offered hand is still open to me
Strangers on this road we are on
But we are not two we are one

Hello friends, and hello void! I feel like doing this again. What are all of you doing and what do you think of just before you fall asleep in bed? I wish we were more connected and lived facing the same forest and can play there everyday, make up plays and burn leaves.

The Darjeeling Limited made me sad at first but now it fills me with a tiny but hopeful pulsating excitement. The music from old indian movies are light, dreamy, pulsating, a little mystical, funny sometimes ("TYPEWRITER TIP TIP TIP TIP TIP TIP TIP").

The Super-Adventure of January (l'aventure super-fantastique de janvier)
Claire, Vivi and I went on the tree tops trail. It was peaceful with lovely green leaves protecting us overhead ('secret affinity with the trees') and I forgot any troubles. Being in nature is so wondrous and easy. We took turns kicking a lump of rock for a few kilometres. When we had a quarter of the way left, when we knew it was going to pour madly soon, my grandmother kept calling in panicked tones and asking me to take a cab home, but we had spent all that time...kicking the lump of pain! Finally we heard a ssshhh sound of the rustling of leaves, or rain chasing, and we ran. Claire first, vivi second and me last. It felt like we had plunged into a children's adventure storybook, twisted and exciting. The trees were all around us and the soil was littered with big elegant orange flowers. It rained so hard we were completely drenched, and ran with madness, I couldn't stop smiling (though also scared that we would die from lightning anytime) and we were all dripping water from our faces and everywhere. We also almost died when we decided to run across an open area with lightning and thunder very near then huddled under my red raincoat (oh yes, i had a raincoat in my bag all that while!) to call a cab and go to my house to dry off with milo and biscuits. YAHOO for this madness which saved me from another kind of madness.

I trust in the secret affinity with the trees.

single eyelid

Someday, when I'm awfully low

Help, the time has come for me to acquire a double eyelid. On my left eye. The one that stays open when I wink. Blame it on my half hearted single eyelid. My mother got double eyelids in her thirties, they just came with the wrinkling of her skin and decades of...sleep, i suppose. Why is it so early for me? I don't wanna get a double eyelid, help! I want to be a single eyelidded asian girl for the rest of my life! It usually comes after a long night of sleep, and disappears within a couple of hours, but today it has stayed all day, still there, and the feeling is less obvious now, almost as if my skin is moulding to it and getting used to it. No! I must resist!

I have a fantasy of working in an office. The clean, sterile toilets, neat cubicles, insanely obsessive sick cleanliness of the place, the smooth carpet with barely a piece of rubbish, sharpened pencils, clicking pens, printers making that churning sound, office workers huddled at their work, their secret selves hidden within them, seemingly boring, but with secret office romances and enemies. (I watched too many shows) But why is that in a way so attractive? Because it gives you many things to resist. And one has to resist things.

My mother baked a recipe I found at allrecipes.com (an amazing site)- banana blueberry quick bread, which turned out more like cake, and she didnt like it but it was wonderful. Bits of soft gooery banana and sour or sweet juicy blueberries with chunks of walnut. Anyhow, I suddenly got an idea! I told her, practise baking so that when I open a cafe someday, and you retire, you can bake for the cafe and your life won't be meaningless after retirement! Yay, be my slave baker and your life will be full of meaning! My sister added, "I want to go there and study".

In fu man ren jian today, zheng guo ping/xiao dong, a beatles-mad guy, one of the chef disciples of his father, lover of sixties dancing (scuba move and peace sign across the eyes, and hip-wobbling), most frivolous disciple of the four, mad laugher, wearer of black and white checkered pants, danced a lot, and went mad when he saw chen xiu li/margaret ma dancing in a record shop. It was wonderful. He pined after her in his room filled with beatles pictures. i profess his dancing was hilarious and fun to watch like nothing i've ever seen (though madonna in the 80s papa don't preach mtv, in a black leotard and short spiky blonde hair was sensational).

My cousin, my special friend, my ex-everyday-buddy and holiday pal, who would play the computer as I asked him whether my clothes matched, who would follow me around the house as he had nothing to do, who sat on my knees when he was 2 and I screamed as i put my finger in his ear and felt a huge ring of earwax surrounded by cobwebs of...earwax, who used to run around the room naked before bathing, with his cellulite butt and cute big tummy, who can explain scientific phenomenon better than i ever will be able to, who yesterday explained lots of first aid to me, who is also a cancerian and also nostalgic, who went around with his childhood blanket till he was 12, my neurotic isaac, is now officially taller than me.

Goodnight Sunday.

zhong qiu jie

I just went to upper seletar reservoir to join my grandmother and her gang of reservoir friends (friends who jog at the reservoir at every morning) for zhong qiu jie. They were seated in the dark, like the other groups of people there, on the stone benches lining the place, and chatting, all jolly, and there was a table of their combined supplies, like mooncakes, agar agar, red wine, pee-colored wine, chinese tea from a hu zi, and other things. One of the women wore one of those lights around her head and looked like an insane coal miner and the other women laughed at her for looking like she works at a rubber plantation. She looked mad indeed. They had to make comments about me (any grandchild would have been subject) and said, in hokkien, 'wah, so big ah!' and 'so pretty, like ah ma!' and 'now you look more like a girl'. I could sense my grandmother's pride. I'm glad she has such a group of friends. They go on holidays together, to places like helsinki, and china mostly. And I met that man, the man who films their holidays and then goes home and burns vcds for everyone. Yes, the man who filmed a building for a few minutes before it chooted with smoke. The man who films his old friends getting off the tour bus, and films them taking turns to take pictures at places. And who goes home enjoying his videos of people taking pictures and then burns it for his friends. And he was surprised that I, grandchild of one of the group, would know of the video-er. One day i shall go on one of their old folk holidays. On holidays my grandmother wakes up at 5am to scrub underwear in the toilet.

Oh yes, my father just came back from his work trip to korea and japan, and got me The Most Expensive Umbrella You Ever Did See, and high socks. One pink and white striped, one ahma canal-water colored with black and maroon lines, one rainbow striped. Sigh.

We went to nokia today to collect my phone and i told them not to upgrade the software so my things wouldn't be deleted but as i secretly guessed they did and everything was gone, almost 200 numbers and 500 messages. My father was mad, or acted mad, and spoke to the manager and demanded a letter of apology, which i will frame. It was hilarious and i wish i could've filmed it. Damn technology!

Remember?

I'm sitting here in a boring room
It's just another rainy Sunday afternoon
I'm hanging around, I'm waiting for you,
but nothing ever happens,
and I wonder

Happy zhong qiu jie, the childhood festival of glowing lanterns and playing with fire, wherever you are.

ginger snaps

I watch and wait

On Saturday we (me and the old friends) went to booksactually and to a japanese teahouse, then chinatown. Chinatown is fun then, all sun and silly tourists, silly middle aged caucasians with sunglasses, fanning themselves, fascinated by cheongsams and name chops. teenage girl tourists, in huge vintage sunglasses and thick cotton vintage dresses. what fun to watch, them sweating like flushed pink pigs searching for the oriental items that are most exotic to buy.

On Saturday night we (me and some of the family) participated in a silly lantern procession and it struck me, what were all these adults doing, walking absurdly around, holding lanterns with little children? What was the whole damn point of everything? To make the children happy, to give them the experience of ti-deng-long! Gently glowing paper balls, gentle pink, red, orange, yellow. This glowing, dangerous, beautiful thing they have to hold outstretched, with their tiny arms and it represented something, though they don't know what, but it just seems like something to be proud of, innit. Then we, 6 of us, played noodnight (what elysia calls midnight catching, catching in the dark) and she giggled all the time and got caught because she kept holding her rustling beloved stickers that i got her, 180 different tiny squares of anythings (mad turtles, crazy eggs, apples). the kind of thing that really fascinates a kid. it kills me. and that han read pride and prejudice at 13, and shann gobbled up the 3 chocolate bars i got him the way i knew he would.

On Sunday afternoon we (me and my mother and the whining work-fearing one with the halo of curly hair) baked ginger snaps. they had lots of cinnamon in them and were rolled around and coated with raw sugar, magical little golden crystals that give them a chrismassy glow. the kind of biscuits i always wanted to make since i was a silly naive girl believing in chrismassy cookies.

Tonight we baked more ginger snaps! My sister said, "next time, when you open your cafe, you can do it in my room!" what super silliness. the girl next door played Noel beautifully on her violin and her mother caned her younger brother. she works from till 11pm nearly everyday, is wanted by her mother to get 100 marks, practices the piano and violin a lot, hardly plays and is almost forbidden from watching tv. she told her maid that she wishes her mother would die earlier, so she could play, or something. how can an 8 or 9 year old girl think that? maybe some ginger snaps, spongebob and harry potter would help her. i hope she gets piercings and tattoos and becomes an insanely intelligent delinquent who does something madly extraordinary someday. go little girl. (who is obsessed with tinkerbell and disney princesses, she showed me her room once, excitedly) i'd like to think that if i start a plan and invite her over to do work and we become friends i can be the one to slowly liberate her, her neighbour jiejie.

I have been having mad dreams every night and does it say something, the kind of thoughts you are swathed in, or people you think about, waking up, or rather, half-awake, under the safety of the plush blanket, like floating in a dream, or rather wisps of floaty thoughts. These days sometimes my thoughts at this time are about the park, especially the morning routine and walking to the park in the morning, jaywalking across the road in the hot sun, with a view of country inn and suits across the road, our wallets and sweets or whatever in our pockets, in the electric blue shirts, walking along the rather foresty road to work, and twice or thrice john was on the top of the tower, or climbing down, against the clouds.

I don't mean to sound rambly or measured because the holidays have not been like that, they have been kind of awesome.

Oh yes, one day, a woman and her two young children alighted from a bus, and she just stood there at the busstop while they ran away to a nearby grass area. I thought she was letting them play while waiting for the next bus but guess what, the children, a boy and a girl, pulled down their pants/panties, next to each other, right there next to many cars passing by, and peed!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Cha cham bo!!!!!!!!!!!!!

from FOUND











my grandfather's tombstone











funny happy picture that i woke up to one day in a dingy charming room in vermont











my father, mister earnest, mister righteous, mister once ns man of the year, with japanese people presumably in japan. see how they are adorably suited and seated with tiny meals. mad asian men!!!!!

SCHOOL'S OUT

I am wriggling with excitement. Saw people parachuting down from the glorious sky blooming with big white clouds. Some things i must surely do: put facepainting flyers around my neighbourhood, bake, sew, read, cycle, find tsachikis. Lying on a couch with desiree watching movies and eating potato chips the way we used to would be SPLENDID too. Swimming under the hot sun too. Even waking up would be grand. I love the holidays.