hi coffee and exhaustion

I am feeling really drowsy and tired now and I don’t even know where this exhaustion is coming from but it’s the kind of tiredness that spills all over your body and renders you jelly and slimy.  That’s how I am really feeling right now and I want to grab another cup of coffee (for the third time) but my logical mind tells me I have gone too far and getting that another cup is going to cause me insomnia later on at night. You know that kind of feeling where you left your brain half a world away? I was typing Lana Del Ray into my Spotify and I ended up typing Lanal because in that brief moment, I momentarily forgot what I was searching for. I must have misplaced my brain cells somewhere along the journey to 5:53pm.

Jerald & Ziping's Wedding @ Four Seasons Hotel

The past week has been a blur of assignments and meeting up. I met up with the soccer girls and we sat and had Al Maan and I ate Sambal Style Fried Maggie Mee in what seems to be forever. Verdict: My spicy tolerance has dropped a few levels and I can’t stand spicy. So much I want to write but my mind is emptying itself out. My professors think I have the capacity to pursue masters and honour thesis but practical needs ensue that I dropped my frivolous notion of pursuing honour year -  I mean after all getting a degree is about getting a job in pragmatic Singapore and I already have one waiting for me. (Laughable, considering that in my three & half years of university, I like my final year and/or the higher level modules best.) I think about the empty houses, empty rooms and emptiness in the middle of a stale deathly wintery night. And I think of how I have to return to that state.

And sometimes I don’t even know why I persist in writing and reflecting or in embarking my run on lines and subconscious teetering of thoughts - truth is I really should get back on my work (compiling of press release and PR lists) but I am stunted by an impeccable stillness and numbness inside. I guess as Virginia Woolf says & insists: "the main requisite in re-reading journals is to write as the mood comes of anything…” and than trying to understand it on hindsight.

Gangggg

slips to fall /

09/06/2015 

 i always thought i hated the beaches. but maybe what i merely hated - under the blazing singapore sun and her crowd - was its unnaturalness. its fan farce and its falseness. always the intrepidness of its unnaturalness.

 of its sands and water; gathered and coagulated by machines.

 of its waves; mere and weak, absent of nature’s passion.

 i like the serenity of the beaches here. to sit by the beach and ocean, and to watch the waves and its torrid, jarred ebbs and flows, crescendo into a cacophony. i like its paradoxical intensity and calm. 

10/02/2015 

on sunday, i sat on the grassy muddy hills of chattahoochee hills and teared. i was afflicted with an intense atmosphere of surreal and nostalgic homesick; the kind of homesickness that isn’t delineated by geographical boundaries but a waspy want for the steaming hot congee, for the company of friends. i wanted to go back to new york, to singapore, to malaysia; it didn’t matter where it was. i just wanted to go back to somewhere that felt like it was home.

 i get so awkward with new people. and i dont know how to hold a conversation. i hold conversations like i hold water in my palms. people and words slip away from me. i remember the time lord, and the doctor; that finale, his overwhelming sense of eerie and omen of what’s to come - goodbye and farewells. somedays, i am scared. i might lose all my friendships. distance doesn’t make the heart fonder, it makes it colder and staler. and than i get angry. angry at the mismatched in time. somedays i wish for the gift of time travel. but then i remember the time lord with his gift / curse of time travel is still as lonely, as alone.

 alain de botton mentions “I” in 'on love' - its fluidity and identity built on self referential to others. the “I” seemingly singular but never alone; always a mirror of other selves, of the bridge between what others think v.s. what “I” think. i never thought i would like porter robinson. the shoegaze, dreampop and psychedelic variant. it makes me forgot. i like how the music makes me escape into another world.

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?

During tutorial, the teacher brought up the juxtaposition of state’s performance of NDP against the performance of the marginalized, forgotten and unheard. The state performs the loud fire cracking, thunderous and homogeneous drums, the celebration of harmony and belonging in the nation. It performs an ideal of belonging and yet ironically, her singular narrow performance excludes the individuals that desperately want to be included, to belong. It reminds me of Zhang Yimou’s Hero when Emperor Qin standardized the Chinese script and “homogenizes” the tribes into One; thereby marginalizing the rest. And yet, out of an intense, immanent fervor to belong, we try so desperately to scrub and smooth out the sharp edges to conform into the pigeon holed boxes of identities

Why do I fix my identity on this axiality? Why do I want to belong so much to something?

Maybe one day, I will find what i am looking for*

“I knelt on the black ground and wept, and wished that I were as good as Sir Galahad, and could do deeds as he did, not to win glory, but to help those who needed help. And as I wept, I was aware of a great light over me. I looked up and saw a silver beam, and across it slowly moved the Holy Grail. It was no longer muffled in a cloud, but shone crimson as a ruby.”

"The part I really loved, was chasing him. "

*Or I shall be like Chiyoko in Milleniuem Actress, chasing after a phantom and loving the chase. 

Letters of Vincent Van Gogh

Things I learn, wish to remember:

1. Never cease searching, learning and discovering. 
2. There will always be a constant struggle for Happiness. But do not despair, because the struggle itself brings happiness. 
3. You see the blind girl as one robbed from sight, from beauty and yet, she sits in the grassy fields appreciating the beauty she cannot see. Why, How?  -- Be less of the little sister and more of the blind girl; robbed from beauty but still infinitely feeling the beauty that surrounds her. Appreciate what you have. 
4. Remember to love people for the love of people will bring you great wealth; will vanish all imaginary prisons and demarcations in the mind; will bring you home. Maybe at the end of the day, I will find my home in the people I love.  
5. Love yourself because what good is love for others, when you cannot even begin to love yourself.