Chronicles: Wisdom Teeth Extraction

I had five teeth extracted two days ago. This is a typical menu I have developed for the speedway to recovery, considering the magical nutritional properties each of these foods offer. I couldn't have done it without some help from my grandmother, but if you have a simple slow cooker and a blender you should be able to make most of these.

JUICE
Any combination of the following:
Fruits- bananas, avocado, papayas, oranges, blueberries, strawberries
Vegetables- cai xin, spinach, carrots, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, any green leafy vegetables
Mixed with- rice milk, raw honey, ginger, black sesame powder

PORRIDGE
Fish porridge with ginger
Brown rice porridge with fish and mashed sweet potato

SIDE (if any)
Tofu with soy sauce
2 half-boiled eggs with raw garlic, olive oil and soy sauce. Garlic has high anti-bacterial properties.

BETWEEN-MEAL SNACKS / OTHERS
Warm cardamom cacao rice-milk drink
Warm lemon-honey drink
Vitamin C supplement

NATURAL MOUTHWASHES
(supplementing chemical mouthwash provided by dentist)
Sea salt and water
Turmeric, sea salt and water
Olive oil

Innovation goes on.

Cooks
Grandma Ng #1 (72 years old)
Grandma Ng #2 (25 years old)

Though swollen and feverish, I have been oddly energetic and unable to take deep naps or sleep well in the night. This, I think, is owing to the food, especially the juice that immediately energizes the body by being quickly absorbed by the stomach, before being rewarded with a lovely bowl of grandma's warm porridge (to be taken in small amounts, spooned to back of throat).

My lower lip and chin regained full sensation in the first night- hurrah, no paralysis despite the odds of prolonged numbness! The swelling began on the second day and got worse on the third day (today). I speak by pushing the words out using my vocal cords and barely moving my lips. Being somewhat speech-impaired has made me appreciate what it might feel like to be unable to speak, and understand silence and patience as companions.

On the second day, I made a necklace of my three intact teeth. To prepare them, I soaked them in olive oil and apple cider vinegar, boiled them, flossed them and scrubbed them with colgate about five times in between. The remaining flesh and gum had to be dugged out with my fingernails. My little talismans.

If you badly need to remove your wisdom teeth are but afraid to do so, it's worth investing in a good dental surgeon if you can afford it, and go for general anaesthesia if the injections, slicing of gum, drilling, pulling, splotches of blood and stitching will traumatize you too much in the chair. It's a good price to pay for the reduction of mental trauma (different from a perhaps worthier mental trauma such as the spirituality of giving birth).

As the anaesthetic flowed through my veins in a gentle gush, making me feel like I was in Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere or had a superpower, I told the anaesthetist (a gentle man with side-parted silver hair) in all seriousness that going under was like going to outer space, and asked him about whether his patients had dreams. He didn't really reply, probably thought I was almost under, and looked out the window with a cynical bemused face.

The next thing was a black hole, and then I awoke with an abhorrently swollen mouth, soaking up gauze after gauze with thick blood, drooling red saliva on the floor, missing someone so much I cried on the way home.

Singaporean Curiosities #0.5

toilet door at Bollywood Veggies- presumably painted by Ivy Singh-Lim's husband

meditative popsicle toilet at Cairnhill Arts Centre

Indian-Muslim kopitiam at Upper Thomson

View from OnePeople.Sg building at Braddell

behind a whiteboard used by unknown people

10-year-old's artwork

grandfather playing jackpot on his iPad as grandmother watches taiwan drama on a Sunday night 

Hari Raya style

underpass at Peninsula Shopping Centre

August

How is it that the people who invented the word August or the latin word that became August made it a word of sadness? It sounds like a bursting bloom of bright yellow leaves, crackling and dying after, but in a way that does not invite tears. Same for September; it sounds like a single newly sharpened pencil in Autumn, lying plainly on a school desk. October's a bit better; it feels like a sturdy fire and a fat bowl of soup. I still like July, the time of daisies.

Multi-tasking: when I have to remember and coordinate at least 10 things at once (which I often have to do these days), my brain feels like it is being sliced into many neat and equally sizable pieces, all working hard like hands on a wooden washing board. The feeling still disturbs me, and I think it should. It pushes me towards the mountains and the seas.

Today at a voice workshop my partner (a shy lady probably in her 40s who does yoga and had a glimmering healthy bronze body) had to cup her hands around my ribcage as I breathed. Her hands were like firm bird wings, restraining when I inhaled so I had to breathe and expand slowly against her force, and squeezing when I exhaled, so I had to let as much air out as possible, reducing to a tiny bag. It felt primal, comforting, like I was in a cave. I told the teacher I enjoyed it, because breathing can get quite lonely.

Last night I had a strange and gross dream. I was journeying by myself to a convention, going through overgrown fields with big sad-grand old-modern buildings in them, all alone, somewhat blue, yet strong, till I got to a construction site of sorts, and took the clanging lift, which had metal netting as the floor, and I felt like I had to poop and could not control it and let it out, and it kept coming and coming and then I looked down and there was a sticky big mountain of poop between my feet (this is the first time I have had such a dream). This morning I realized the dream was a premonition when my brother scolded me for leaving chocolate stains in the car.

This evening my little cousin said, 'You know why I ask you so many questions about your future? And what you want to do? Because there are so many possibilities. There's....everything! And it's very exciting.'

Earlier she also said, 'Hmmmmm, I seriously recommend you to become a youtube star.'

the raw spookiness of a flame in the mountains

what is worth having? in a time where we have so much- rose-print lace stockings; frayed good morning towel; spanish marmalade harvested from a family farm; writing pads, old stock; lemongrass-mint soap with exfoliating salts; glow-in-the-dark stars and planets; warm woven mirrored indian rug; teh halia.

Can the comfort of a big old floral printed armchair enveloping you on a musky Sunday afternoon form a ballooning happiness strung together by objects of gravity? Maybe if the armchair was part of the memory of a person.

In the past you could pack a suitcase of your life and go away to a new land.

Now even a room cannot contain me and my belongings. A home cannot contain me and my heart. The world wouldn't be big enough either. You would need to open a thirteenth dimension.

What about being a cloud?
History-less, free-form
No past or future
Simply presently
blooming
and
shifting

So what.


You don't need to talk about inner peace. You fight but you don't need to win. You can drink rainwater when you are thirsty; eat flowers when you are hungry. Every morning you wake up and measure your life with a wooden ruler. Tea bags are soaked in water before being used to soothe the bruises from your parents as they sit in the next room reading the perennial newspapers. Tissue is no longer for crying, but for making soft flowers to be hung from ceiling lamps in colorful rooms. A book told me that kisses help you develop immunity against more germs.

If I carve out my intangible dream on a piece of soap and burn it over a flame in the mountains, will the cats come out to smell the wisps?

I don't know lah. I just trust in Singlish, in the simple gravity of Clair de Lune, in a banana for breakfast. Look at the sky in the mornings. Then walk down the road and don't look back.

One Saturday Morning

I went to Ang Mo Kio on a Saturday morning and found a clown sitting by the post boxes in the void deck. He had a baby sparrow feather in his woolly winter hat, curly salt-and-pepper hair, and a thousand-colourful-mirrors shirt complemented with a wacky black-and-white-smileys tie. On his feet he wore black Crocs and from his bag out stuck a pair of cheap plastic clubs wrapped in aluminum foil (from NTUC?). What are you doing? I asked. I'm waiting, he said. And then he whistled Tian Mi Mi, ending vibrato style. That was nice, I said. You're welcome, he said. Is the aluminum foil from NTUC? I asked. No, he replied, it's from Sheng Siong; they have an offer on aluminum foil every second tuesday of the fifth month of the zodiac year of the rabbit. Oh yes, I recalled, my grandmother once told me that.I invited him for tea at the kopitiam but he said, I only drink kopi-o or teh-o. Me and those like me  are lactose-intolerant. Oh, I thought, this is the most important thing I learnt this weekend. When I went back to work on Monday, I decided to be lactose-intolerant too so that I could be more like him and those like him. After 33 days, my boss fired me for non-conforming behavior.My gynaecologist gave me some good advice so I went to Mongolia and became the first vegetable farmer there. All my smiling meat-eater neighbours came to buy my kang kong and sweet potato leaves and learnt from me. I made sambal kang kong and became the richest vegetable farmer in Mongolia. One day, I was sitting in my ger tent knitting a turquoise scarf when I heard someone whistling Tian Mi Mi outside. It was a hot day and the infinite grasses looked thirsty. I parted the cream-coloured cloth and there stood the clown from the Ang Mo Kio void deck. He looked exactly the same but carried a huge lemon-yellow backpack that looked like it could have made 500 glasses of lemonade that hot day. What are you doing? I asked. I'm waiting, he said. For what? I asked. I think I'm ready to start a life here with the infinite grasses and the blooming clouds, he said. Okay, I said, we can do this together. Okay, he said. We went in and chomped on celery slathered with American peanut butter dotted with Chinese raisins. It started to drizzle outside. We smiled at one another and I shared with him the secret of growing kang kong in Mongolian weather.

friday the thirteenth two thousand and two

I am 25. If I don't live to a hundred, more than a quarter of my life has passed. I have morphed from a brat who loved sitting in an armchair after dinner reading storybooks; to an awkward teenager who adored the beatles, read up about 'hippies', and was an encyclopedia of oldies; to a human clown with a secret, floating on a cloud, pierced intermittently by acid rain, faithfully drinking liquid chlorophyll every morning before a fruit blend. Gee, maybe soon it will be time for a voyage to the moon. Did you know it wasn't real? The publicity, the facts, the people sitting in front of their TV screens believing in magic. This shows that magic doesn't quite take place like that because people in power are almost always bad; that real magic is not an old-time magician with his trickery props, his heavily-eye-lined red-lipped classic beauty and his jangly alibaba pants, slicing her in two, nor is it in smoky potions or elusive alchemy because we cannot touch what has passed for too long (though I can touch the sixties because it wasn't far too long ago), but real magic is in asking people if they want to come to the moon with you, warm thin thosai on a rainy day served by a waiter whose shirt has lost its button at the belly, holding the hand of someone you love and not thinking exhaustively about Other Things, a bird drinking nectar from magenta flowers after a drizzle, the clouds moving slowly across the sky. If you ask me what all these moments add up to, I don't quite know right now. But if you trust in the moment and let it be (whether you are being interrogated by your boss -who is boss?- or whether you cannot get up in the morning, anything that creates bile in your pink belly that once had nothing in it, nothing but breastmilk, now it is full of shit) you might find that everything is lighter, and you can breathe easier. And then some things don't matter so much anymore. And the things that matter, you work hard to keep and improve. Voltaire said, choose to be happy. I suppose the reply from the dark is yes, Yes. That was the word that took John to Yoko, or Yoko to John. (though now, he is in the sky and Lucy -Yoko- is down in new york city living in an apartment overlooking his mosaic memorial) I saw this written on the table of someone in office who sits near the pantry:

After the final no comes a yes. And on that yes the future of the world hangs.

Friends, let's slowly build our sandcastles, and let's try to do it together.

lionessa leonette lyonine

"The Barbary lion (Panthera leo leo), also known as the Atlas lion or Nubian lion, is a subspecies of lion that became extinct in the wild or extinct in the 20th century. It is often considered the national emblem of Morocco/Marruecos/Maroc."

7 + 7 = 13

~~} Silence is all I need

Not dark yet

Leo Thirteen

(When Padma and I were rushing for a train ride somewhere in a small town in India, on a bumblebee black and yellow autorickshaw, kicking up dust clouds through town roads, I caught sight, in the distance, of Leo XIII Primary School)

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

Einstein

from Luca's quote bomb tonight

I like nonsense- it wakes up the brain cells

Dr Seuss

Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Steel blue twilight in the world

And in my heart a timid star

Sara Teasdale

There's such an effort to try and explain people.

Tilda Swinton

I don't like standard beauty. There is no beauty without strangeness.

Karl Lagarfeld

Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.

Dr Seuss

Interstellar Travel

There are wormholes in old books, the sky, an old musky jewellery box, bedtime stories, a song, a quote, a poem, a found photograph, a kiss (I wouldn't know though), the rain, the mail, going under the covers with toys. But will we ever know if there are mermaids and fishes (or unimaginable creatures) swirling and swimming in the underwater world of Ganymede? (warm currents, covered by a layer of ice, Ganymede, one of Jupiter's moons, looks like a glowing crystal ice ball you could suck on) And what if meteorites (pieces of rock from asteroids that fall onto earth) are actually of colours that we cannot perceive, imagine or know of. They are not actually grey. They may even Glow or do other things we cannot conceive, like glow/meld/morph/interlinked with new concepts. Oh how cosmology blows my mind. It's wonderful, it's coming, my rocket takes off in five days.

moon light years

I can't give you anything but the air between us

dust particles that float in the cosmos between us

little galaxies of uncertain age

galloping to disperse, suiciding towards black holes

to free the space between us

a gravity-free void

to free fall into

free fall orbit

we'll lead stellar lives

STELLAR LIVES

free falling eternity

for as long as the universe keeps expanding

multiplying into infinite alternate parallel universes

(alternate or parallel?)

to the point of no time

time out of mind

no return, no mime time,

no infinitive relativity-

deep breath into love lungs

a trillion moons fly by our bodies

the stars shine forever

Love is

my grandmother asking me what I want for breakfast every night;

when she watches me eat the nutritious steamed fish with ginger

that she cooked with her tubby belly sticking out at the flaming wok;

my father who doesn't give a hoot-ass about the art I make

picking me up from the mrt at 11.30pm in his pyjamas;

my mother, not giving up;

a real tight hug;

lunch at 12:15;

sitting close;

letting me use the toilet first;

sharing water;

packing lunch too;

a handwritten letter, sent by post;

a brush of the hair, pat on the head;

a rusty old accordion;

landing in India;

28-rupee thali eaten by hand;

phone call from home in another land;

delirium spice mixed by heart;

long silent train rides, crazy wal-mart;

magic marvellous masala chai;

sharing roadside pad thai

you had coffee I had soya bean

you have long hair I have short,

you are tall I am so tiny but we

confidently walk the dark streets side by side;

landing in changi airport and

going to the girl's toilet together;

waiting waiting waiting and then

going to the movies together;

sleeping over with the cousins;

the smell of dried flowers;

the fresh taste of mango;

the warmth of tangyuan;

the wholesome fragrance of nasi lemak rice;

when you tiao found dou jiang;

garage sales on sunday afternoons;

phlegm wriggling in the pavement;

an old hard scab;

a wrinkled veined hand;

a gloomy reservoir lake;

the talon of a black cawing crow;

droplets of nosebleed;

throwing chicken rice at the wall,

sweet sauce stain and red chilli brains;

terribly sleepless nights;

nearly a heart attack, angry blue blood;

the familiar smell of insect repellent;

rough tree bark outside my house;

rainbow suicides on sunny days;

playing pretend on rainy days;

pretending to love on empty nights;

a mime;

without time;

time out of mind;

fat juicy lemon-lime;

not needing to explain;

dangerous, poisonous, consuming;

simple, gentle, sweet, kind.

I am my own castle; head to the blooming clouds, roots to the wet damp soil.

beautiful bag of old flowers

'my heart will stay yours until the day I die

even tomorrow in other's arms'

(dear you-know-who, like the smile?)

Tweets from Yoko (I used to wonder why Yoko would subscribe to technology like tweeting, then I visited and found out that the way she tweets is wonderful and spreads something out there like ripples):

Watch the sun until it comes into your body and stays as a tiny sun. It will keep your face shining even in the coldest of winter.

Imagine a cloud slowly going across the sky and back. Send a postcard to your friend.

Look at a star in the sky not as something unreachable but as a planet you would visit one day.

Tell us when you first noticed the sky. Tell us when you first thought that the sky was beautiful.

The sky was the only constant factor in my life, which kept changing with the speed of light and lightening.

All my life, I have been in love with the sky. Even when everything was falling apart around me, the sky was always there for me.

As I told myself then, I could never give up on life as long as the sky was there.

The Abduction of Amelia Earhart

I don't know much about her except for

'Adventure is worthwhile in itself'

but the moment I set eyes on

Collage by Joana Coccarelli

I knew it must have been.

Tonight I lay alone in the baby pool looking up at the salmon-smokey clouds in the night sky through artifically planted coconut trees in my auntie's housing estate, my ears were submerged in the pool so everything felt like a vacuum and I was somewhere else. Slowly I realised there was a ringing tone in the baby pool. Brrrrr...........brrrrr.............I sat up into the real world and looked around. There was no one else. Then I let my ears in again, they got filled up, and there it was, somewhere in the depths of the 0.6m pool......Brrrrr...........brrrr.................was it Amelia calling from outer space?

Then I got up and sat extremely still and my goosepimple legs were hugely magnified in the water and didn't seem like mine. Little bubbles were sprinkled all over my belly. They are like pearls you can't touch because they keep running away, you can't even feel their surface. But you can flick them up and they fly to the surface, like parachutes going the other way. I stared at the tiles with my eyes so close to the water it felt like my eyes were seeing that way by themselves, and the grimy turquoise tiles were like the surface of an alien planet with distorted proportions and no weather, and luminescent waves of light floated across the surface like gentle dancing, and I stared harder and it was like a miniscule Amelia was climbing the tiles which were steps from another angle, climbing endless grimy turquoise steps in an other-land that wasn't peaceful or bad but just. And then it was time to go home.

My love, she speaks like silence

Saigon, please wait for me.

You have selected a departure date that is in the past.

'Spit your oranges into this basin!'

'I am falling off the castle! Hallllp!'

'Spit, SPIT!!!!!!!'

'I don't understand why we are not in the swimming pool?'

'Why did I ever fall in love with you? Too many oranges! Madness bloody manic madness stupid craze everyday from bloody pips and orange peels and orange-coloured faeces'

'Let's dive off the castle and forget about oranges forever'

'WHY CAN'T YOU EAT LEMONS INSTEAD'