jiggy polkas

Seven more days to playtime, and in between, the return of more old friends. It's building up inside of me like a pot of warm honey. Skate-scootering around chinatown, bukit timah hill, tree tops trail, more Kali, curling up with books at home, blue hair, sleepy chinese tea sessions, penang, and night safari with my cousins are just some of the promises of summer.

sticky memories

i. my brother fell from the sofa (how that warranted a hospital stay, i never understood) when we were jumping up and down as we usually did during the theme song of Power Rangers on a saturday morning. i remember my father being very angry, but he stayed with my brother and took lots of photographs. and in the photo, that's us presumably enjoying the hospital television.
ii. grandmother's 56th birthday, with excited fat little tots who are now taller than me. we must have had hundreds of birthday photos taken at that same spot.

looking at old slides are like making a discovery everytime you hold each piece of plastic up to the light. it kind of feels like you are sitting in a little classroom in a plastic primary school chair and someone is projecting these slides onto the screen in front, with the clacking sound of the slides changing themselves, and your life appears in three-second intervals, enough time to notice someone's silly smile, someone's haircut, and for a knotted feeling to pulsate inside. slide film apparently has higher contrast and resolution, so it really is like a burst of colour to see a memory of the past in miniscule form. i wonder if the photos will look different against glowy yellow late-afternoon light, instead of the noon sun?

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.