lazy ways.

I'm gonna be frivolous today.

My fingernails are protruding at least 0.8cm. For some time now, they've been clean and unpainted because weeks ago, I cut them really short and now that they're long and witch-like, I've been too lazy to get down to painting them.

I love painted nails. They're an endless source of eye candy and great for pretending to be occupied when you're sitting around idly. Though arguably, they make a girl look insipid. I have to allude to my all-time favourite book now: Lazy ways to make a living by Abigail Bosanko. Maybe I should write a review for this book except I can't really articulate my love for it. I've read it at least 28 times. When I'm sad, or happy, or nostalgic or just because. Why? I find myself in the female protagonist. Maybe it's all narcissism. But when you're lost and you don't know who you are anymore, it's so comforting to find a constant. Rose Budleigh and I are so similar in our foibles that each time I feel alone in the world, I only have to turn to her and it's like a sharing between sisters.

But I digress. Rose is an accomplished chess player with a passion for painted nails as well. And she declares that seeing her painted nails poised over the chess board gives her a psychological advantage that no male players can achieve. It is amusing but Bosanko says it so earnestly.

Since I'm idling anyway, I'll evaluate all the ways we are similar. From memory. She reads when she's upset. Rose has read Jane Eyre many, many times. She calls it comfort reading. And she carries a book wherever she goes. She also fidgets when she's upset. I don't know if I do but nobody should ever hand me a piece of paper if it's important because you won't wanna have it back when I'm through with it.

Rose struggles a lot inside but it comes out comically to the world. Somehow, people are amused by her problems because of the way she seems and the way she seems to take them. It appears all airy and fluffy to everyone else but she cries behind closed doors and does things like write 'help!' with her mascara on a piece of toilet paper and stuff it into an empty bottle of wine she just finished. Whimsical but heartbreaking.

She is really clumsy; she is actually able to trip over empty floors. Rose is a romantic and she's gullible. But sometimes, she doesn't let on because...it's not all that funny to her. She's a hedonist. She'll spend her last dollars on a good bottle of wine that she'll drink by candlelight in the bathtub. Ok, that is…I think I'm a little more practical than that. And more of a worrier.

She doesn't really know what she wants. She thinks she has all these shiny principles but she's easily swayed and enticed by dolce far niente. Especially if it involves a clever suave arrogant man suffering from wealth ennui – Jamie Cameron – learned and full of vice, caring and presumptuous, with a weakness for her and quotes dramatic poetry, sprawled in his rose garden after a throwing a wild party, when she leaves him. And when she falls, she falls hard. Then she starts losing all her strategy. Not that she has much of that in the first place.

Look! I've succeeded in writing about nothing at all.

Book Review: P.S. I love you

P.S. I love you (the film) made me cry buckets and I really enjoyed it but having read the book, I think I prefer the book's storyline. I wasn't too impressed with her writing style, but Cecelia Ahern did manage to make me cry at crucial points. And she had a way of tugging at your heartstrings with the letters that Gerry wrote. What I really love about it, other than the letters of course, is the very believable process of Holly letting go of her dead husband.

When I first started reading, I thought the dialogues were too lame and far too haphazard. Much as I understood her passages, it didn't read like a book. But then I found that if I just skimmed through and got the gist of the sentences instead of reading the prose, it irritated me less. Maybe I've read one too many books that require readers to plough through each word painstakingly. Most writers would appreciate that, I thought, because much care is put into choosing the perfect words. But with her, the words just spill out like pixels forming an image. If you focus on the words too much, your attention is taken from the scenes she paints. Anyway, I'm starting to ramble but it's just, she paints detailed pictures, you just have to let the words flow past you without grabbing at them until the end image is constructed. If not, you'll lose a few pixels.

Gerry is amazing. Allow me to revel in his fictitious posthumous glory. The part where he plans his wife's holiday when he’s weak and the only one in on the plot was brave and selfless. And he asked for a sea view for an extra 30 euros! It is in these little details she describes casually that you see how deep his love for Holly runs. Also, she doesn't give an implausible overdose of saccharine romance. It isn't perfect. Gerry gets impossible sometimes. And Holly has her moments. But love isn't about perfection. It is about loving someone when they're the least lovable. And I think Ahern perfected that imperfection. Almost, anyway.

Alright, I did say her words seem to spill out but occasionally she hits the bull's eye and a quotable quote spills out. In his first letter, Gerry wrote: "...you made my life. (...) But I am just a chapter in your life..." That made my heart turn over.

I saved the best for last. Unlike other cheesy romances, Holly doesn't get her new prince and live happily ever after. And the bestest thing is, Ahern was angling towards the reverse for almost three quarter of the book. Actually, I would have been alright with it. (Though I was going: "One year?") I mean, if Holly and Daniel were to get together. Just one year after the love of her life died. You almost think it's going to end like all the others. But it doesn't. She does give a hint of a future with Rob the guy Holly met in the supermarket though. So, anyway, I'm glad Ahern didn't presume to fool her readers with a crap ending that Holly finds a new love after all that honest misery and grieving she describes.

If I may add something, I like the way she developed the Richard character too. Instead of just breathing life into Holly and Daniel and a few others and attempt to prop the story with some cardboard figures. Richard's side story touched me. Bit like an uncredited dark horse by the side of the stage.

So there! My first review. Phew! I'm not much of a critic but figured I need to diversify if a future in writing is my hope.

exiled.

Are we too old for idealism? Or is the world too pragmatic? Why do adults scoff at youthful pursuits of grandiose?

My parents look at me like I'm a nut in dire need of psychiatric help every time I happen to mention something - anything that hints of my dreams or ideologies or philosophies. Any attempt to rationalize things invariably warrants a heated argument about pragmatism and "why can't I be normal like everybody else?"

I happen to like to be weird.

I cannot help but wonder if life would be different were I born to a family of kinks and liberal insouciance. A family where my laughter and my songs will not die in the arid lifelessness of the air.

Even that is not easy to imagine. I've reached a point in my character development where I'm stuck. I'm an in-between. I'm not practical enough to fit into the prosaic and neither am I imaginative enough to thrive in the radical. Here, my fear of mediocrity mounts.

I have grand dreams. But my inadequacy impedes them. And it depresses me to no end. I can drop these dreams, leave them to people more equipped to accomplish great things. If, at the end of my life, I've achieved even a small fraction of my dreams, that would be enough. But I wonder, when the time comes, whether I would still have the courage to set forth. Whether years of monotony have quenched my thirst and subdued my spirit. Do I still have that wanderlust, a voice steadfast enough not only to speak for myself but also for the people who can't themselves, and the hands robust enough to better lives?

But I am selfish. I wonder if because of this, God will not grant me enough strength. All these dreams grow out of a self-serving agenda to bury myself in other people’s problems because my own monsters are too hard to face. My desperate desire to find myself by losing myself first.

I want to leave. Just the primitive flight instinct.

template for a man.

I've always had a thing for the darker side. Prince Charming on a white horse really doesn't interest me. I'd rather hold out for the one in a suit the color of midnight atop a dark horse. The one who doesn't smile. The one with that enigmatic look. And smoldering dark eyes.

Like Batman.

Spiderman may be cute with all his schoolboy awkwardness. Superman...isn't in the running. Wolverine, with all his manliness, might have some issues. Cyclops is deliciously suave. But no hero steals my heart like Batman.

I love his noble impetus to protect. His struggling ambition to save the world. How he stubbornly believes in goodness even through his tribulations. I love his scars. I love how he isn't bright and shiny anymore. How he's beaten, but not broken. His quiet strength and formidable spirit. His disregard for what people see him as. How he is everything a man should be and so much more.

He is also, unfortunately, fictitious.

that forgotten tingle.

Why do we sometimes care so much for a person that every single time we think he's sad, our hearts crack? But what if we don't feel happy either when we think he's happy?

How can a cynic be a romantic as well? The combination is odd and fatal.

Oh! It must be the weather! I miss the heady feeling of newfound love. The quickening of your heartbeat when you hear the beep of your mobile. The soft smile that stays on your lips all day long. The bounce in your step. The boundless good humour. And the wonderful feeling that nothing bad can come your way.

When can I see the pair of eyes that will jolt my heart when we lock gaze? When can I hear the voice that will cause the colour to creep up my cheeks unsuspectingly? When can I feel the touch that will send a frisson of surprise through my being? When?

Must I forget first?

harvard commencement speech.

This has got to be the most insightful, pleasant and entertaining speech I've seen.
http://harvardmagazine.com/go/jkrowling.html

Thanks for the link, Tong!

we worship power and money.

I don't have any more patience for this. Supercilious trash talking that makes shit sense.

My friend recently got accused of stealing at the place she interns. Details I will not reveal here but suffice to say, her principles and values are impeccable. Furthermore, she is so stubborn that even the most barefaced temptation cannot make her waver, so there's no chance in hell she'll even come close to taking something that is not hers.

But this got me thinking. And it got me in one of my shit pissed moods about this fucking corrupt world and really, I spent the whole day getting pissed at random strangers who were performing stupid ridiculous antics.

I'll get to my point before Dean gnaws out his fingernails waiting for my drama to start.

There is no fucking justice in the world. Justice is the sort of fairytale they feed us in NE class when we were fucking children. Oh gosh remember Ah Cai the policeman or some shit? (Is that his name?) I used to love reading those. I thought those blue guys were heroes. I adored them.

Okay, but this is not a personal attack.

Just try to imagine if my friend's parents were some top dogs in some hugeass corporation. The same discipline master who was libelously maligning her would be falling all over her whole family's feet, kissing all the way up to their asses and obsequiously apologizing for his oversight and misjudgment. (She's interning at some sort of institute.) By the way, he said things like 'I know you stole it, so admit it before we call the cops and they'll perform a lie detector test on you' and like 'so you study psychology...then you know all the ways to read people's minds and words' and 'I see that you're wearing a very short denim skirt'.

What. The. Fuck. That lie detector can't sense shit right? I'd be scared to death if that thing were assessing my innocence. My mind would be all over the place, wringing itself with thoughts like 'is my heart beating too fast', 'are my pores flaring' and yada yada. I'd probably be the most guilty person alive. And please. You're working in an institute and you don't know what they teach at tertiary psych. Don't walk out and tell people that. Oh, I love his last comment. If I were sitting in that room being questioned, I'd be saying in my head: "Are you thinking I'm sexy? I know, right? This skirt so says I'm a whore who won't pay a cent for something I can take from others." Unfortunately, I don't think I'd be flippant enough to say it out loud in that situation.

Anyway, my point is this. If you have power and bathe in shitloads of money, you win. If you're poor and helpless, you go to jail, bad boy!

i. need. to. sing.
the toilet should be sound-proofed.

the shove into adulthood.

At Jian Kuan's Commencement last night, Adeline and I were questioning the use of the word commencement for this ceremony. "Don't they usually call it Convocation?" she said. I certainly think convocation sounds more prestigious.

Yet, commencement is aptly used here. Other than 'a ceremony at which academic degrees and diplomas are conferred', commencement means 'A beginning; a start'.

Last night, I saw hundreds of fresh graduates in their gowns at the UCC. The University probably tires of this. Rounds and rounds of graduation ceremonies year after year. And it's sad because to each of these graduates, this day holds so much anticipation and trepidation. The defining moment that we have been working towards all our young life, the culmination of our academic pursuits. Everything boils down to the day we receive our scrolls. And nobody else actually cares enough.

Society may have its own markers for adulthood. We might have at times, made bravado attempts to take on our world as tough-speaking adults and perhaps also just as frequently, have cowered back behind the shields of our status as students. But the day we're being handed our scrolls, we would no longer have that privilege of pleading ignorance. Henceforth, we would be judged to possess the faculty of reason; we would have to take full responsibility for our deeds. We would be adults and no one will take any excuse from us.

If we're poor, it would be our own fault. If we're suffering, it would be our own fault. And if we fall, no one's going to coddle us and say, "stand up, child, be brave".

On that day, we're on our own. On that day, the rest of our life would commence.

P.S. It's such an anti-climax to that chilling conclusion but I wanna add that girls look way better than guys in that gown! 'Cos we get to show just a bit of ankles on that sexy pair of stilettoes! So hot!

resounding gongs and clanging symbols.

This morning, I woke up to this text:
"(...) Do you believe that you only really love once? (...)"

Haha I feel like Sophie except my food for thought doesn't come in small white envelopes.

But isn't that interesting? We're always thinking about love. If there's anything as mystifying as life, it would be love.

No, I don't believe we only really love once. And anyway, feelings are not static. But love should be mutual (all the time or at least at some point). Love comes in different forms. It might be the flaming passion that this person ignites in you or a mellow steady kind of love that comes from years of stability. I like the second kind of love; it grows on you and it feels more sincere. The flaming passion seems like it will fizzle and die out, like a supernova. And of course, it may just be lust. But the best kind of love is a combination of both.

Actually, this is so half-hearted. I don't want to be talking about love right now. Only people who are blooming in love and romping in the sea of passion want to talk about love. I'm bored with this. I wanna be serious and prim and career-minded. Please go away, love, and leave me alone. Knock on my door when I'm ready...someday.

I'd rather be talking about stilettoes.

brevity is the soul of wit.

Tock. Tick.

For Procter & Gamble - Oil of Olay.
Sheer brilliance. Saatchi & Saatchi almost always nails it.

nus is too boring for me.

I wish I were an Art History major. Or something equally esoteric and frivolous.

clever girls.

This is for my friend Benedict Chen who wrote:

"Nice guys finish last.
Bad boys don't finish at all."

This means:
Clever girls who act dumb to hoodwink guys finish first. They manage to use ALL the guys.
Which is proof that guys think with their dicks.

If the world was fair, it would be as he revised:

"Nice guys finish last.
Bad boys don't finish at all.

Clever girls finish first.
Bad girls don't finish at all."


But the world isn't.



EDIT* now I have more proof that guys only have one thing on their minds.

Evan Tan, I hope you read GREAT MEMORY 101. That was a prank. Don't waste my effort.

no sense.

I had the weirdest dream last night. A part of me wants to deconstruct it. The relentlessly curious (kaypoh) side. But the other part is afraid to because it involves my family and it's morbid.

It's completely bizarre and I swear I haven't even been reading or watching anything close to macabre lately.

My dream.
Disclaimer: This would be a confusing read not because I'm incoherent from the trauma but because it was a dream and my dreams are always hazy and disjointed.
I'm taking the lift up to my flat from the first level. Instead of going up, the lift goes down and this horrifies me for obvious reasons. It takes me underground and when the lift door opens, something hazy comes into the lift, it probably also has a human form. The hazy thing is trying to speak to me but all I hear are 'ghost' and 'stroke'. I am screaming like a desperate lunatic. Somehow, my Creative Zen stone is in my hand and it's on recording mode (the lousy device has died on me today). This is a rather important piece of information.

The lift starts functioning again and manages to get me back home. I calm down and begin recounting the lift incident to my parents. As I do so, what the ghost was trying to tell me starts coming through more coherently and I sort of begin to understand what's going to happen next. But just as I do, it happens. My father falls to the floor in some sort of a seizure. The Grim Reaper appears to collect his soul and I actually see my dad's soul rising. At this point, the hazy thing flashes in between my dad's soul and the Grim Reaper. GR collects the ghost instead of my dad's soul.

As my dad awakes with my mom fussing over him, I play the recording. At first, nothing other than the commotion can be heard. But as I turn up the volume, I hear a thin, whispered voice: "I am a ghost. Blah blah your father blah blah stroke blah blah blah. Help me." The thinking me who's watching the dream doesn't get the complete message but I comprehend it.

The ghost is saying that somehow, when he died, the Grim Reaper didn't collect his soul and now he's just a wandering soul with no place to go. He knows my dad is going to get a stroke and the Grim Reaper will be there to collect his soul. He can help me by letting the GR collect his soul instead of my dad's. I'm supposed to help...I don't know how...but in the end, he managed on his own. So, he saved my dad by saving himself!

Chilled my bones when I woke up this morning. But I get the recording part. That's from The Sixth Sense, when Bruce Willis listened to the recording of his session with the first boy he didn't cure. Yikes. How did a story like this get into my subconscious?! It's almost too complex for a dream. Even mine. Normally, my dreams have no distinct plot, they're just dark and morbid, kafkaesque type.

A dream is just a dream, right?

when they're pushing up daisies.

What good are sweet gestures when the receiver is no longer alive?

Why is it that we never see the people in our lives until they're no longer around? Why do we try to ease our conscience by being extra nice and generous to them at their graves? All your flowers and tears and apologies are in vain. Why do we do this? Why is it that we never learn these things until it's too late and then we make that same mistake with another person?

We're all selfish bastards. We are the centres of our universe, so puffed up and arrogant and self-important. Until our worlds come crashing down and we get buried in the debris of our damn regret. And then we realize we're all so small and we need our pillars of support and they went, not knowing how much they meant to us.

Some time later, we return to being selfish bastards.

I reckon we'll give an arm and a leg to bring our loved ones back and we're still not going to learn how to cherish them when they are. We're almost certainly going to fall into that same narcissistic routine and cry all over again when they're gone. Again.

Why don't we save those remorseful tears, apologetic flowers and desperate promises? Get a better bargain. All they need now is a bit of uninterrupted companionship, an occasional whispered 'I love you' and you, just being you, beside them, with your mind, heart and soul.

Oh but we'll never get it. I know I won't. And all these words, I'm using them against me. One day, when my parents are no more, I'll scream and wail for them to be back and beat myself up for never letting them know how much they mean to me. But for today, and many more days to come, I'll continue snapping at them. Why do I do this to myself?

i'm sorry i can't be perfect.

Do you believe people with perfect lives? Evan and Debra vehemently rejects the idea. They're convinced that people who impose stories of their perfect lives on the world are secretly suffering from an inferiority complex and seek validation for their activities.

Wow, what a mouthful.

I don't know. That's like my mantra these days. But I honestly don't. My world and everything I know about it are all muddled up. I don't know what is right or wrong, good or bad, black or white. I don't even know if that's a good sign, though they say wisdom comes from knowing you don't know.

But definitely, I know my life is far from perfect. It's like the antithesis of perfection. Why else do you think I'm depressed and suicidal and nihilistic? So nihilistic, in fact, that I can't even finish reading Le Mythe de Sisyphe.

Some people have very fixed ideas of how things work out. To them, there are formulas and procedures and a time for everything. Sometimes, I wish I had that clarity. Evan might be one of those. (Am I right?) But then, really, I've seen examples of how some things just don't follow rules. You can do everything right and it turns out wrong or you can do everything wrongly and it turns out right. So, who's to say?

Should I believe in the concept of perfect lives? Possibly. I think I can at least believe the person. Meaning that he truly believes his life is perfection and bliss. But then, I might also fairly decide that the person is delusional.