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

Promise To Myself

I don’t write as much anymore. Maybe, I am not reading as much. I don’t know or maybe it’s true that writing often comes from a sad place.

I went for a few events this week – some with my boss, some with my housemates. Most were about entrepreneurship – solving customers’ problems and needs. So then, writing can become labored and twisted to tell the story the individual wants or desires to. You just need to know whom you are narrating the tale to.

My emotions have been labored and exorcised in another outlet – cooking. It’s incredibly therapeutic to know what I am eating when I am cooking a dish for myself. To know what spices, herbs you are adding. To have fingertips smelling of lingering garlic and chopped onions. On Wednesday, I had wanted to forego my library trip – the hail and the cold of the winter seemingly forces to be reckoned with. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar was waiting on hold in the library for me but my dilemma was fixed when the Corney Island F train whisked away, split seconds too late, and there by a stroke of luck (or God’s plan?) thundered a Manhattan-bound F train into the platform. I let my gut instincts lead me to where it hinted I should – the Mid-Manhattan Library.

The library was not truly my real destination. There, I saw – on the hailing enroute from mid-Manhattan library back to the 34th Street Bryant Park’s D train platform - a homeless guy or lady (I do not know for he or she was wrapped in a grimy black hood, their hair a clumped and unkempt mess) seated on the cold, lifeless floor with two dogs huddled beside.  They looked incredibly kept, snuggled warm in their coats while (s)he – scuffed and dirty - was consumed with the task and want to clean their paws. Something grew inside of me. In the city of visible homelessness, it’s easy to be desensitized to their circumstance and plight. After awhile, they became another face, another number, another statistics frozen and static in the menial landscape and backdrop of the never-ending New York winter rush. I walked back and poured whatever little spare change I had into his/her little cup.

I remembered an icy night, where I was out and navigating my way with a Google Map on my hand. It started wrinkling like a sour prune from the harsh wind chills and became red, raw and numb from the exposed cold. I could only begin to feel my hand after I ran it down with hot gushing water – it felt like a privilege then. Even so, we tend to forget the privileges that we have been gifted. That night, I remember the pained and aged expression of an old homeless man with his swollen feet, sitting alone in a corner in the G train, nursing his numbed foot and nursing the physical (and emotional ostracization) hurt that might have been there.

It is a customary experience to enter a crowded subway cabin and to smell a foul reeking stench only to see a covered man nestled limply in a neglected lonely corner – as it was a shameful means to sit in the center of a packed subway train, as it was inhuman and undignified to be without a home, to be smelling of days spent without proper grooming and hygiene facilities because what is hygiene when you are freezing and starving in & out of the crevices of your soul and melting into the frames of your skeletal ribcages, starved from human empathy and nourishment. I admit I am afraid of talking and asking and of clarifying assumptions; the anxieties pounded by the belief and stereotype that “they brought it up themselves” or “they just have no want to be employed” or “that they might hurt you”. But when I see the tender manner in which (s)he cleaned the paws of his familiar dogs, I like to believe (s)he is as human or if not even more so than the majority. This is not a checklist but an expectation: To accord them their human dignity by not walking away from the direction of the stench. To not automatically and subconsciously assume that they are perpetrators of their own circumstances.

Moving here and living on an intern pay (Maybe its akin to Joan Didion's my silly pride: 'I never told my father that I needed money because then he would have sent it, and I would never know if I could do it by myself' - a refusal to be dependent on his (my) privileges). I realized I need little to lead a sufficient and adequate life. I had believed I needed more but when I see my pantry and fridge stuffed and brimming with groceries and food, I realized its more than enough for myself. I have excess groceries and spare changes to buy a few dog treats and to make a packed sandwich or two for my next library trip. And I promise to say hi the next time.

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. 

In the infinite (& finite spaces) of the mind, I lost my way home.

The unquenchable thirst and hunger to go home but where is home when all the ancient ruins have faded into dust, into stone and into tales? Into flimsy pieces of tales. I miss home. Is it possible to miss some place that you have never knew, never touched with your barest hands; where you have never touched the soft velvety, smoothed the rough carapace and the restless flames? Where arises my paradoxical longing and listlessness?

I miss home where my soul melds and pulsates into an entity, to a whole. Maybe, this explains my perpetual wandering, my perpetual languor. How would a restless flames burn if it was not sustained by oxygen?

&


They call the Doctor the "Lonely God" because everyone leaves in the end; important, pivotal in the turning axis of his life; and he is left stranded, alone and 1- I. The pronoun 'I' so rigid, so upright, so pertinacious and so inconsequential in its shape; almost a wallflower. For when you write sentences as such, "I have eaten, I have slept and I have laughed. I have cried and I have dreamt of past worlds and anticipating universes. I have left the world to go home." they become paltry.

Truth is, you don't really see the multiple of 'I's while reading, do you? Even with 31 words, the I does not impress; it screams and reeks for attention. the littered, multiple I's. You noticed the verbs, you always do - the actions and never the implied, the hidden. But there in it's characteristic inconsequential, it stands stale and silent. The Doctor misses home. The Doctor misses his companions but they leave and they leave and they leave. Because this is the way with life, doors open and close and people step into the heart and the Tardis remembers; it marks them for life. And when they bade the inevitable farewell, it's always like this: The obdurate Doctor, refusing to cry, wearing his quintessential poker face, clinging to what's left of  his wretched hope; hankering for days whizzing past stars, universes and fabrics of time with his companions.

&

0

english: zero, german: null & chinese: 零

They feel so empty, so void and so sad.
零 : the resembled "rain"  and "cold" plastered, fixed together to evoke the extremity of the rain and the cold?
So cold and empty.


1

english: one, german: eins & chinese: 一

After zero, rising from its emptiness and destitution, stands 1.

1
1
I
I
I