5:31pm: I am in school now, tapping away in the CC. Discussed Singapore Gaga in class which spoke profoundly to me.
Singapore Gaga is a prelude to the tender quagmires of mess and the emotions that comes with belonging/not belonging and rejection/acceptance – it is a cacophony to the unheard rhythms of my thoughts. For a very long time, I have been feeling a strange bubble of emotional detachment to most of the films I have watched. And then, I watched Singapore Gaga for my film module and funnily, something changed. The film is socially, politically moving in a way where only a local that has lived for long in this baked sun-ripened island would understand. I don’t know if people possess life motifs like the grandiose thesis and arguments elucidated in academic essays , or the attention grabbing statements plastered on hipster tee-shirts, but if we do, my life motif would be that of a languorous chase for ‘home’. It always boils down to this: the sense of belonging/not belonging to something, to someone, to a temporal space and time – to an abstraction, an idea. We are the colonized and colonizers. In desiring to claim ownership of objects, material and immaterial, we fixate our attention and energy to colonizing. Yet, we inadvertently do not realize the profundity and complicity in doing so; we become enamoured, obsessed with our desire to own and claim the elusive ‘home’ or that notion, we begin chasing paper butterflies, we become colonized by it. It is easy to fall in love with an idea. Maybe, my Achilles heel or the anticipating Greek climax in my life would be this endless search for an idea. I will never find it, will I?
