Screw optimists

As in, why the f*** am I so optimistic all the time??

Is optimism a state which I force upon myself, or is it my real nature? I've got so much going for myself, and so little, all at the same time. Why am I afraid to show how discouraged I truly feel sometimes, how bloody scared I am?

Sometimes I'm so sick of being strong for myself. Why can't I just curl up on someone's lap and suck thumb for a few days? Why do I repress myself and put on a smile and shrug as if to say "Nevermind", when what I really wanna do is scream and punch pillows and demand to know why the f*** things are the way they are?

Why do I hold back and be diplomatic when I really wanna shove everyone else aside sometimes and yell "You do what I want for a bloody change"? Why do I insist on being selfless when I want to be friggin self-absorbed sometimes?

Why do I smile and keep taking big strides when I'm really scared and wobbly-kneed sometimes?

I'm 31 years old. Why's my career so young? Where's the straightforward path to the rest of my career? Why hasn't anyone in my family (save one) been supportive about my choices? Why hasn't a single one of my extended family come to see any of my shows, including the one who blatantly stated that being an MC (let alone the other roles in the industry) is shameful? Why are the people I care about absolutely the most in my life geographically so far away? Why wasn't I able to bloody choose what I wanted during my formative years so the path wouldn't be so darn difficult now? Where's the sizable nest egg I should have by now? Where's my six-figure CPF? Where's my soul mate? (Oh yes, he's gone and married someone else. Guess that wasn't him.) Where's that someone who'll pat me on the back and tell me I did good? Where's the person who will be strong for me? Just because I don't have as much charisma as some other people, does that make my opinion any less valid? Why does that make you think it's ok to ignore me? Why can't I get my way more often than not? Why am I so giving when what I really wanna do is take more?

Where's my sense of self-entitlement??

If this post irritates you, well TOUGH. This self-centred rant is fucking overdue. I'm done being nice for tonight. Miss Nice will probably be back tomorrow.

Rare food rave

I rarely, if ever, rave about food, but I gotta this time. Ray just introduced me to this great little Korean restaurant called Kim's Family Food along Lorong Kilat, just off Upper Bukit Timah Rd. It's clearly a family-run joint, and patriarch Kim himself can be seen ambling around the restaurant in a t-shirt, while the young Kim-lookalike at the counter can only be presumed to be his son.

Why am I impressed? The biggest reason is that none of the food is salty, yet tastes fantastic - it's pure and true taste without needing to pile on any salt or MSG. Just about any main order, including a humble bowl of ramen, includes the very typical Korean barrage of side dishes (we counted 14), each healthy, containing very little oil, and tasting great.

We ordered the beef and pork bulgogi sets, one with the soya bean stew and the other with spicy noodles. (We were sorry it didn't occur to us to take photos of the food before we tucked in; we saw other people doing so, though.) Now I'm really not a soup person at all, but the fragrant, slightly nutty stew is something to write home about, with clams and prawn thrown in for richer taste. The carnivore in me was more than satisfied with the very tender and rich-tasting meat in each set.

The portions are generous, and the price is very wallet-friendly for the quality we got. Our sets cost us $15 (with noodles) and $10 (with stew - yes, the one with seafood in it) respectively.

What I didn't expect, though, was that none of the food was particularly spicy. My previous experience of Korean food was littered with pretty potent spice, but I found that the "spicy" food at Kim's was extremely mild - this coming from someone who can't eat fish head curry without going through three glasses of lemon juice.

Ray had heard that one shouldn't be fooled by the term "Appetisers" in the menu. The advice was to never order those unless you had a party of four or more, and boy are they right. We didn't order any, but we did see other tables' orders - one serving of savoury pancakes filled a full-sized dinner plate.

They surprised us with an unexpected humble little dessert at the end of the meal - I didn't see any mention of it in the menu, so maybe - like the side dishes - it just comes with every meal. It comprised a slice of watermelon and a small teacup of sweet cinnamon drink. Ray didn't seem to fancy his, but I'm a sucker for cinnamon, so I totally appreciated that.

If you like good, authentic Korean food that won't cost you an arm and a leg, go try this place!

You can find Kim's Family Food at 17 Lorong Kilat, #01-06, Kilat Court, S598139, tel: 6465 0535. It's in the same complex as the Korean supermarket Lotte Mart.

Short gush

Sudden urge to blog! This is just a short gusher blog entry before I attempt a more thought-through and coherent one.

May I say that I'm so excited I could burst!

Tasks I am happy to zip through these two days:

- Buy munchies for our pantry
- Buy toner and waterproof eyeliner
- Drop off receipt to a wonderful donor (tried to find time to sit and chat with her instead of just drop-and-run, but had the happy problem of no time!)
- Get cheque to pay programme printer
- Collect tickets, label them, and leave them at front-of-house
- Pack in towels and personal dressing room kit
- Remind mother not to be too scandalised watching the show
- Remember who to have supper with on each night
- Remember to breathe

More than four months' work has come to this, with some of the dearest friends I have. I can't wait for the rest of this week to come to pass, but don't want it to end. I can't wait to be skin-drenched-soaked, costume dress flowing one moment clinging to skin the next moment, towelling off sopping wet hair frantically, watching lights bounce off water and black floor and white floor, whispering ardent prayers, freezing, perspiring, more water, candle wax, brooms, stairs, wood, bells, voices, bodies, bulging biceps, white pants, silver on black, black walls, popcorn, everything!

And beneath that effervescent excitement, a deeply gravity-bound realisation of something larger, more substantial unfolding.

Morphing is a painful business

The topic of change and transformation has been (will continue to be in the coming months) very much in the foreground of my mind.

And that was what this morning was - morphing from one thing to another. A positive end to one stage, and a wait for the next thing to evolve.

But by golly, these things feel like a regression sometimes.

Nothing is pointless, nothing is wasted, and the past 1 year and 3 months has largely been good, and I'm glad that it moved on with a lot of warmth and love. Thank you so much, my dear xiao mao.

All the same, it hurts a good deal, more than I thought it would. That picture we took on your birthday is still on the shelf and will probably take me a little while before I put it aside. The ring will sit on my counter a while more too. Know that I'm missing you so much now.

Parting at my door brought back another very unwelcome memory: the previous time I'd said a goodbye on the same spot. I'm sorry to relate the two, which have nothing to do with each other, save their cumulative effect on my state.

Experience helps to heal more quickly but doesn't numb very well. The pain of parting becomes less long-lived but more tiring each time.

I really wish I never have to do this again, knowing I will, in some form or the other; I'd just been going through a good spell the past few years. But gosh, I really do wish I'll never have to again.

"Let me not outlive my own capacity to love."
"Let me die still loving, and so, never die."
~Mary Zimmerman~

A Barrage of evening

Chilled out at the Marina Barrage for the first time on Sunday. Trying to park there is friggin insane, but once you get that behind you, I must say it's quite pleasant there - if you manage to avoid being trampled by kids running blind with kites, or not get annoyed with noisesome aunties.

The sight of the sun setting behind the city skyline was pretty cool, if not quite awesome. Ray's iphone did a decent job of capturing it. Wish I had a Canon again.
Watching kite strings get tangled was also quite entertaining. It was a nice evening.

Interestingly, some security personnel started coming by and asking people to clear the concrete path that had up to then been quite happily strolled and pranced upon by kids and couples. This was a tad puzzling, until we saw a buggy approach with a certain white-haired pseudo-monarch perched in it, waving like a celebrity as he passed. He tends to do that, doesn't he?

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The IR is possibly the ugliest structure on the island, and it completely and abruptly ruins the skyline. Not sure which I hate more - what it looks like or what it represents.

Surface tension above abyssal disappointment

I hope it works out. I really, really hope it works out. I deeply want it to work out.

But it's not up to just me. What are the individuals willing to do to make it work? In the words of a wise friend, are we committed enough to do whatever it takes to make it work?

But it's not up to just one. Or two. Or three.

Steamrollers can flatten a few feet of terrain. But a steamroller can't level a mountain.

Not-so-final message

Last night, I was waiting for a mild migraine-cum-allergy-headache to ebb before going to sleep. I started stretching in bed, when a very sudden and intense pain blasted through my head. It felt like someone clamped on a really, really, really tight steel headband and kept tightening it. It slowly lowered in intensity but took residence in the right side of my head.

It was so sudden and unique in my experience that I was genuinely worried it was an aneurism. I was worried enough that I actually started typing a last message on my phone via the compose-SMS function so that someone might see it when they walked in in the morning and found me dead. And then, typical me, decided to play it safe and saved it under Drafts and re-opened it under the edit function so it could still be easily found and read without getting deleted accidentally, but without having to pay for sending it to someone. Anal retentive to the last, eh.

But anal retentiveness aside, what that did was make me think about who I wanted to say "I love you" to the most, and I've got my list down. I'm happy to say it's a good-sized list, and all of the people listed already know they're loved by me.

I also know what to say about my life at this moment, distilled down to three sentences. All three are good ones.

And, of course, I had to mention I'm a full organ donor, just in case my heart hadn't stopped yet when I was found.

I'm glad it isn't a final message after all. But I'm more glad about what it's made me think about.

I ended with a more pensive last thought, though.

Non-permanance

Events of recent weeks have brought the idea of permanance, or lack thereof, to mind (and heart).

Just over 3 years ago, I was intensely mourning the loss of a permanance I assumed I had, permanance that I'd spent a lifetime preparing for, confident I wouldn't settle for less than what I deserved. Turns out, I deserved far more than that.

Upon reflection, I realise I had known deep down that I would be settling if I'd gone with that permanant state as it was. Questions of what-if and what-else-out-there had been softly flitting through my head, and I silenced them. I believed what it had was precious enough to supercede any possible doubts I had. And as that turned out, it wasn't I who had the doubts, in the end.

Towards the end of that episode 3 years ago, the one who will remained unnamed said, someone told him that if you don't get married within the first two or three years of the relationship, it gets really hard.

What if he'd popped the question early, before the spot appeared and festered in his heart? What if I'd said yes, as I was likely to have?

The more I think about it, the luckier I feel right now.

It was the loss of this permanence that solidified my awareness of what I truly wanted.

But back to events relating non-permanence of recent weeks.

Trust was broken for someone rather close to me, and a beefy person out there is on probation while they see if there is some glue out there that could possibly mend something so thoroughly shattered.

And then there's another entity infinitely closer that has a definite but undefined conclusion. But sometimes, non-permanance is not a bad thing at all.

Acknowledging that non-permanent nature brought the gladness that comes with meeting someone at a crossroad, glad to have arrived at the same point at the right time. Knowing there's so much to love and enjoy within a finite time brings a richness in each others' company, and a strong desire to embrace each moment.

Sometimes, non-permanence teaches you things, and makes you cherish the present so much more. It can bring you closure. It can undo a knot inside you. It can release you.

Some say it leaves emptiness behind after it's done breaking you. I say it's empty only if you tip all the contents out and don't learn a thing. It breaks you only if you let it.

Here's to every moment, my dear.

Dry, mute tears

The kind of tears you shed for a friend when it's theirs and not your heart that's broken, though you wish you could take their pain and spread some on yourself so they don't hurt so badly.

Just spent some time with good friends, one of whom has been abominably hurt. The noise we made was pregnant and silent, and once again we found ourselves with the iceberg syndrome, where what you saw (or, rather, heard) was only the tip of everything else that was there but had no decibel rating. A perpetual group hug even as we sat separately in different spots in the room.

[The trouble with being an introvert is trying to gauge the balance between being an active friend (versus a passive one) and avoiding being intrusive. I wish I'd know what I could do to ease their pain. But that's self-conscious babble. This is not about me.]

How to be a friend when shit happens.

Sometimes you can be there as a shock absorber and topical analgesic.

Sometimes you can be there for them when they need a sounding board.

Sometimes you can be there for advice (when asked).

Sometimes there's nothing to say, and no need - you can be there as silent but sure support, a reminder of how much they're still loved by you, even if it's not the kind of love they have just lost.

Lots of other kinds of love is still better than love betrayed.

We love you, dear.


P.S. We ate your cake, MoFo. And it was GOOOOOOOD.

Ancient Egypt at the museum

Went to see the Quest for Immortality - The World of Ancient Egypt exhibition at the National Museum a couple of weeks ago. Fascinating, of course, as with all things ancient Egyptian. I wish it'd been a more comprehensive exhibition, but they travelled all this way to humid, humid Singapore, I'm just glad to have seen it.

Among the busts displayed (that is, statues, not boobs, you dirty minded things), this was my favourite for its shadows and un-empty spaces where bits of it had come off.


I really like the effect of incomplete images and likeness, the suggestion of so much more than you're able to perceive. A partial likeness is so much greater than the sum of its hidden parts.


A little coffin for a little beetle. OK, the beetle was not that little. Apparently, some species of scarabs grow to 17cm in length, but I'm not sure what size Egyptian scarabs typically were (but I'm sure they were big).

A crocodile mummy! A really small crocodile mummy.

And of course, jewellery caught my eye from afar.


Check out the neat detailing on the necklace charms.

The attempt to blend in didn't work like we planned. We should've brought our own white towels and knee-high boots.

What caught my eye about this one is the expression on the figurine's face.




The beyond-prolific symbolism is pretty mind-blowing. Found myself fascinated by the recurring theme of raising the dead one's feet and head above the earth, like the platform painted into the inside of the coffin beneath the feet.

We didn't need to be told these were servant figurines.


Where your vitals go after you die. Not your brain, though.

Scarab charm on the mummy's wrappings.

Pages from one Book of the Dead. No harm ever came from reading a book, right?

Charms and more charms. Love the one at the bottom - it's made to resemble two fingers.

One of the fun activities at the start of the exhibition: either shade and decipher hieroglyphs (which we had no time for and didn't want to fight with the horde of students hogging the display), or fold your very own pyramids. The product of mine and Raymond's origami fingers.

The exhibition is on till 18 April.

Another goodbye

Today I stood at the open window in the room that had been converted from an open balcony in 1988, the same spot where I'd stand the night before Christmas, waiting for carollers to pass by so I could shout "Merry Christmas!". I stood there, taking in the suddenly extraordinarily beautiful view, and I cried.


The house at Begonia Terrace had finally been sold, and we'd been making the final excavations before handing over the house in a few days' time.

I had to go back one more time.

I opened all the doors upstairs, and I walked through all the rooms, and I let the afternoon light into the dim hallway. I entered the master bathroom and was reminded how much I miss having a bathtub, and thought about the amount of fun I had wasting time and splashing water in that bathtub as a kid.

I paused at my old bedroom, noting the places where furniture had been, and where it still was. I saw that my postcards and pictures had been removed from the dressing mirror. I opened my old closets and saw that the only thing left in it was a tiny picture of Tom Cruise in the movie The Firm that I had pasted behind the closet door when I was 14. I pushed aside the curtain and looked out my bedroom window, the same one that once let moonlight through to fall on my face as I lay in bed looking up.

I didn't realise I'd forgotten to look at the mirror behind my bedroom door till now.

I entered the kitchen, the only room in the house with a hideous colour scheme (because it was the one room my dad had been allowed to decorate). I realised what a great kitchen it was and still is. In spite of the glaring banana yellow cabinets and mucky green tiled floor, it was cheerful and very comfortably oriented. I suddenly loved that I had tried to play hopscotch on that tiled floor, that the oven never worked, that the fridge surface was stained from all the magnets that had clung to it. I loved that it had another door that led to the backyard. I'd never noticed how spacious the backyard was because it was usually half covered with clothes hanging out to dry on bamboo poles.

I closed the doors, recognising all the unique sounds each door makes, missing the metallic twitching sounds those old doorknobs make when I twist them.

I walked down the stairs, remembering how, as a kid, I'd try to climb down the stairs on just the banisters without getting caught by my mum, and how I'd sometimes take my toys and play under the stairs. I saw the odd spot on the wall where they'd decided to paint the wall around the piano rather than move it.

I'd also forgotten to look at the beige marble floor downstairs, where little me used to love to scan it and fancy I saw shapes of objects and people in the marble swirls, the way some people like to identify shapes in clouds. Those marble swirls were my clouds.

I walked through the garden, where the big ixora shrubs and some trees were still flourishing, even though our other garden residents had faded. I looked at the empty spot where the old mango tree had been cut down years ago because it stopped fruiting, and the other empty spot where the guava tree had also been chopped when it became diseased; its guavas sometimes grew bigger than my head. I looked at our beautiful rambutan tree - my dad remarked that this year's harvest would have been great as he'd been fertilising it well the past months; I drew some little comfort in that the new owner had said he wants to keep the tree.


I passed the two rusting bicycles - I'd learnt how to cycle on the blue one with the basket, and I'd spent my teenhood zooming through Seletar Hills and pedalling to piano lessons on the large black mountain bike. I'd spent so much time roaming the estate on that bike, learning every lane, conquering (almost) every slope and discovering the sweaty, achy way why the Hills were named so.

I looked over the last of the stuff we were not going to take with us, and fought to resist taking many of them with me. Obvious as it was, I regretted that we couldn't take the huge grandfather's clock with us, even though it'd stopped working 15 years ago. Instead, I grabbed some books that I'd forgotten and walked out the front door onto the porch.

On my way out of the driveway, I paused at the front gate, briefly pondering the countless memories and life landmarks that took place at that exact spot. How can one tiny geographical spot contain so much of a person's life, hold so much value?

The gate was shut and locked, and I turned away, feeling the tears come up again and pushing them down. As I pulled away down a street that is beyond familiar, I turned back for a last incomplete glance, and said my silent goodbye to my real home.


I love that old house the way a dog owner loves his mangy old mongrel. It's hard to let go, knowing no one who comes after will love it the way I do. It's old, has cracks in the paint, pieces of parquet flooring that insists on coming loose, probably still a leak somewhere, old fashioned interior, lopsided roof on one side (thanks to my neighbour). And knowing that the new owner will not love it for what it is and will probably modify it drastically, if not tear it down completely and rebuild, breaks my heart.

After we'd moved out 6 years ago, I still had dreams, both good and bad, about that house, in the various rooms, in the garden, on the streets hugging the house. No one can live and grow up in one place for 23 years and not have it echo and haunt and insist on its place in your consciousness. I sometimes still dream about that house.

Like losing a loved one, goodbye is never enough.

January-February doldrums

January and February have always seemed to be my low time of the year.

As a school-going kid, it felt simply like the drudgery of going back to school, coupled with the usual confusion of adapting to new school things.

As an undergraduate, January-February immediately followed the fun inter-semester break - where hostel life would be school work-free and full of hall activities, competitions and friends - back to the most hated duty of studying a course I didn't understand and didn't like one bit.

And let's not forget that these two months house the Chinese New Year period, and you can never go anywhere without being irritated to death by the cacophony of 'festive' music and blinded by garish decorations that endeavour to part consumers with their money. I've always disliked CNY.

But it was after I started freelancing that I really started to feel the Jan-Feb curse rear its head each year. The breakup process with K certainly set the mood, rendering that period utterly miserable. After that, each Jan-Feb has seen a big lull in work, and a giant dink in my mood. Even with whatever work I get during that duration, my creative juices stop flowing completely, my mood hits the floor and I get an overwhelming need to procrastinate everything. I sometimes actually want to hide in my room all the time and not go out at all.

Which is certainly not good at all at this instant, since I need to set things in motion now for the rest of the year.

Why am I dragging my feet?

Maybe I ought to have been born a bear and hibernate in northern winter.

Drivers and Coasters

Going through some old photos yesterdays, I was reminded of someone I knew very well, who epitomised for me what inertia is.

If we take the road as a metaphor, drivers are those who choose points of destination, make conscious choices about the routes to take, and act on those choices.

Coasters are those who get in their cars without really thinking about what they want, and let the traffic move them, without taking the responsibility for making their own choices. The inevitable result is most of them don't know where the fuck they are after a while, and can't be bothered to figure out what to do.

(In case QC is reading this, I'm bracing myself for puns about putting coasters underneath my drink glasses.)

We were alike, this person and I, in that we were both coasters by nature. But unlike him, I'm a strange hybrid of both coaster and driver, and that I constantly battle the laziness of inertia to get to where I want. But ultimately, I've always known what I want and tried my best to work towards it.

Let's call him Ernie. Ernie used to lament that he had no passion; that he liked things, but didn't love them. The usual result is that his interest in things tended to fizzle quickly.

I didn't like that much, but now, I downright don't respect that at all. Over the years, I've come to know others like him too. On the surface, they're often likeable people known for mild temperament, but my take is that they're so insecure about feeling strongly about one thing or another that they just don't show any extreme of negative emotion whatsoever. No one dislikes a mild person, but in the end, no one respects them either.

I think it boils down to laziness and insecurity. The mentality is: don't invest too much heart into something, and it won't tire you out nor let you down. Who can respect someone who's unwilling to take responsibility for choices by even making them?

Yes, it takes effort to drive something you feel strongly about. It takes courage to feel strongly about something. It takes more effort and courage to keep at it. If you see the worth of your destinations and the journeys still to come, the effort is just a small price to pay.

Drivers may sometimes mow you down (hopefully by accident), but at least they're getting somewhere. At least they want to get somewhere.

Coasters just irritate me. Get off the road, you Sunday drivers!