368: youth’s elixir fills our veins

303: japan: dancing in tokyo

So – here is the last part. We spent three nights in Tokyo, but it was effectively two and half days left because we flew off in the morning. Less words before the cut now because there is just so much more to see in pictures.

288: japan: tokyo story

Erm. I’m sorry this took so long, but there were really a lot of pictures. 

277: the kids are alright

Obviously I had no time to do this before today. So even if it’s 1.5 months late, thank you:

274: so you and me, babe

Isn’t it strange how music tastes change all the time? Some songs are still my favourite songs, even though I haven’t played them in ages, and others that I love don’t get as much playtime. Some songs just can’t be looped, if you know what I mean. There’s only so many times you can play a song that’s 11 minutes long, and yet that’s got to be my favourite one. Yet, everything seems to be me, and everything you play– you don’t know it, but it tells me who you are, too. 

A few years ago I would not be caught dead with Asian music on my playlist. Yet I’ve been watching Music Station since I was 12, and I listened to Jacky Cheung in the car, before anything else. I’ve watched more Channel 8 and TVB serials than I can count, and yet I’ve never watched Sex and The City, or Gossip Girl, or Heroes. 

I would say I’m not an English language person, but we all know how that would mean I’m lying. To me they’re just different. My favourite songs in English have beautiful lyrics, things that have meaning, that need you to uncover them like some treasure. There is often a guitar somewhere, and a haunting voice. It speaks to your mind or awakens some memory. My favourite songs in Chinese are all raw, who have simple lyrics that could mean so much more, who tug at your heart strings in a uniquely Chinese way. Like thinking of searching for your face along the street you’ve walked 9 times to no avail, or having your first love buy tickets to a concert you can only think about years later when you’re married and your husband sleeps silently next to you. When I think of English songs I imagine walls must be torn down; Chinese songs speak to you, through those walls. It’s okay if they’re up, so long as you understand them. And they hear you right back.

 

233: here to stay is the new bird

Sometimes I think, someday I’d like to live in a world where nothing changes. Where everything stays the same, stagnant and unmoving, like a puddle on the floor. I’d sit in my pool of water, and look up at the sky. A frog in a well.  

But puddles grow bigger and bigger as the rain gets heavier and heavier, and eventually spill over into the drain.  

232: gone away is the bluebird

Went to the toy museum at Seah Street today. 

218: bumbling along

the clock is winding down its time, but more and more so the pressure of the week seems to lessen as i keep clearing away the backlog. that appears to be a good thing.

my ceiling started leaking a few days ago, right between my writing table and my bed. the head of my bed, to be exact. so now i am sleeping on the other end of the bed in the hopes that i will still be alive when the ceiling falls down. hahaha. kind of like chicken little – the sky is falling down! the sky is falling down! wah. anyway that day i came home to find my little bedside table filled with water and the soft-baked cookies which were sitting innocently there minding their own business were utterly and thorougly waterlogged. ew.

as time goes by, old things get displaced from new environments, and they must find their place in the world.

#

i watched lust, caution twice – i did not regret it. there’s something about haunting films. some people don’t understand how powerful sex can be, which is why they edit it all out and pretend that showing people stripping naked and coming afterwards is an adequate substitute for a power dynamic, that can only be seen in its most primal form. my favourite scenes, however, involved a lot of eye contact. the very first scene at the mahjong table, and the one in the middle with the conversation at the restaurant. it is something that tony leung is very good at, and what separates the boys from the men.

after the first time i thought i wouldn’t watch it again, because it was too intense, but now i feel like i could watch it again and again. it makes a difference that you see the nc-16 version before the r21. only then do you adequately appreciate its importance, because you don’t need to imagine, but know, how it was like without the sex. and also: after you know the whole story, going back to watch it again makes every nuance weighted with far more importance. especially the scenes at the start.

it’s not like 2046, which is beautiful but not raw, and (very) surreal. but still.

so: every tale of lust is a tale of caution.

#

yesterday i was so bored in school, studying company law. so: peas be with you.

217: 你的爱还在不在?

you know, it is always amazing how things pass by really fast – in just two hours, CLT was over, and i could get on with my life.

which now consists of property and company law. not terribly exciting, to be sure, but one step closer to the finish line. and more and more, i find myself inching closer to the second half of the class.

okay. that’s enough depressing talk, because nobody likes it when people whine about studies and how they are supposed to be brilliant but their grades are not reflecting it. so i will talk about how i love 伍佰.

yesterday while we were in school, i concluded that we should set up a co-op exchanging chinese songs – from the past. songs you remember singing from your primary school days, when you were small and young and watched on channel 8, formerly known as SBC (and the no transmission sign on premier 12 was rainbow-coloured). like 被动 (LIVE), 红蜻蜓 (by 小虎队 — so long ago), 你知道我在等你吗？and the one and only famous song that 黎明 has: 今夜你会不会来?

(你的爱还在不在?)

and so after that i went on a downloading spree, and now i have lots of songs to tide me through those long and lonely nights in the study room. and if 伍佰 ever came for a concert, i would so go and watch. AHHH!

i observed a disturbing trend in all this, which i told mok last night, which was that all of us exchanging songs somehow appeared to be from hwachong. HAHA! (:

today is sunday – the jacob ballas garden is full, yet again. people with big cars should not have the licence to any how park. they are contractual licensees! they can be chased out at any time! wah lao! slap them. and then they park and block the entrance to the car park some more, with their huge black hulking mercedes SUV.

you think just because you are rich means you can any how park is it?! KNN! (*#%&&#%!!! zzz.

/rant

173: deathly hallows

there are spoilers everywhere now, so i will try to keep it spoiler-free by simply saying that after a whirlwind 5 hours of reading, everyone i wanted to survive did survive in the end, even though there were many who did not make it. i have gone through these 7 books for ten years of my life. these ten years have been wrought with changes and filled with many other note-worthy happenings, but i will always remember the fascination of waiting for these books to be released, to be reading them. some argue it isn’t life-changing in the slightest, but for me it has been the best young adult series to be produced in a long while, with themes that still reverberate into adulthood. it is strange, still, finally, to be saying goodbye to harry potter.

171: city of blinding lights, a city lit by fireflies

so you take a little trip down to town and find that nothing much has changed except the christmas decorations, although those at peninsula hotel always seem to have that extra sense of class, that magical feeling, those yellow stars. the neon lights draw you in, there are side alleys that lead off into darkness, into people sitting on wheelchairs begging for money, into unbidden surprises. one thing about hong kong is that appearances can be deceiving. walk into a shop and take the stairs down and suddenly a space becomes ten times bigger than it turns out to be. flowers are fake. a massage centre is really a pornographic wonder. there are stars on breasts, there are porn theatres, advertisements flashing out in neon colours that blind your eyes and are a grandiose swirl of colour. such nuances cannot be accurately portrayed by words nor by the unsteady hand of a camera. one day i’m going to go back into lan kwai fong and see the other side of hong kong, away from midnight curfews and parents’ prying eyes. it’ll be lovely. there’ll be lights.

*

168: things to feel glad about even though i did not really buy anything

- actually being able to enjoy the rainy cool morning and reading newspapers in my garden. because i am actually AWAKE at 7am
- buying a new pair of emergency sandals because my shoes fell apart while shopping with mum today
- this udderly champion moisturiser that smells like milk (haha) called udderly sMOOth with a cow print on the tube!!
- cakes from my favourite patisserie ever in takashimaya (rive gauche!). haven’t eaten their choc charlotte in so long, and this totally swoon-worthy matcha swiss roll with clotted cream and azuki filling. yum. i have such an anglo-japanese tendency :x

i am now having two slices of that roll with some wheatgrass and vegetable juice. lest i sound like a freak, this announcement says WHEATGRASS JUICE = ACTUALLY VERY YUMMY!!

- i am going to nail that pair of jeans from massimo dutti asap (i.e. as soon as all the wannabe aunties get out of my way in the changing room!!!)
- watching magic school bus
- watching TOM AND JERRY! (omg so funny)

amazingly, as an illustration of how hard to see my hair colour is, my mother has not said anything about it. it has been 1.5 days, and she spent the whole day out with me today. however that also means she will not be knowing where all my money has gone. heh heh.

TO HONGKONG IN TWO WEEKS! better plan my to-find list.
there is a movie on belle de jour in the making!
i still want to watch the original belle de jour, currently residing in my cousin’s UK apartment. bleh.

149: this was where it all began

took this off pak, so i don’t have to look at contract law for tonight…

East-West

changi airport holds too many memories to count, from when i was small enough to sit on the trolley and go whizzing past everything while my parents wheeled it around, to me dreaming of getting sent off one day, to sending people off
expo i only remember for the book sales. i only ever went once, i think – with ian and yanj
pasir ris – 10th birthday parties with yumun and her twin, sending ian off to tekong in january, bumping into haireez, weekend getaway at costa sands (:
tampines is where douglas stays – we watched soccer through the night drinking whisky and ice!
simei is where patrick stays, and that’s about all i know
tanah merah is a stop-and-go place, where there is a country club i don’t look at and people who stay there, but all i know about it is that i need to get off the platform to somewhere else
bedok is where my auntie lives, where douglas brought me to eat bak chor mee
kembangan is where my grandparents, grandauntie, and zing live, which is near siglap with all the nice food, which is near where caitlin and ruimin live
eunos is where my uncle lives, where 93 ends, and where i got lost one fine day trying to make my way to parkway parade in search of douglas (i dunno why my encounters are all so douglas-centric, maybe he is a harbinger of doom)
paya lebar – studying for A levels at the post centre, running to catch the no. 28 bus, desperately hoping i didn’t miss the last one on the way back from shuki’s house
aljunied – first a jamming studio in 2003, with a band i’ve lost touch with, and a trip to swee lee not so long ago
kallang – the eagles, eric clapton, jacky cheung concerts, sitting in the dark by the river just two people alone
lavender makes me remember the diamond shaped hawker centres with huge tables that sat 8 people with the nice fishball soup and SIR where i keep going, for whatever reason
bugis – where my dad used to work for intercontinental, where i cut my hair, the random shops in bugis village that hide treasures only if you bother to look hard enough
city hall, where i found myself in sec3 time and again after i got bored with going to town, to avoid people; there’s always somebody to meet at the starbucks at the top of the escalator
raffles place is somewhere where my mother used to work, and where there is lovely roast meat
tanjong pagar – we met in sec2 for a choir concert and i was walking behind charlene while whispering to somebody, i don’t remember who, that she was very skinny
outram park was where nadia and i got lost after taking the 190 bus to nowhere, and where we stopped to get to SGH to visit hailing after she fell
tiong bahru is where i stopped day in and out during the june holidays of 2003 to get to delta house
redhill is somewhere i’ve never been.
queenstown reminds me of ikea, which reminds me of meatballs, but more importantly the colourful furniture, and the dreams of the kind of room i wanted when i was a kid
commonwealth is just another MRT stop to me
buona vista is where all the RJ kids used to pile up, then it became the place to go when you lost your ez-link card and needed to replace it
dover is where rochester park is (:
clementi is where i went to go to the west coast, taking a bus whose number i don’t remember now (even though it was just last year)
jurong east was firstly for iceskating, and secondly for a place to go when there was nowhere else
chinese garden was somewhere that only appeared in my chinese textbook
lakeside is where keith stays!
boon lay is the furthest place on earth and yet i still go there, because i love my brother

North-South
bukit batok is where i volunteered, for a brief period, to take care of kids at a daycare centre type thing with bernie, and we always took the 157 home
bukit gombak is where shuki stays!
choa chu kang is somewhere i don’t know much about
yew tee is some part of singapore
kranji has a war cemetery, where we went in sec3 after being shown an abortion video during the first and only lesson of the day, biology
marsiling always reminds me of marsupial
woodlands is a passage to malaysia
admiralty is more recognisable as a MTR station in hong kong
sembawang has a nice park with friendly ice-cream uncles
yishun is where the first GV was, the last stop on our take-a-random-trip-on-the-mrt fest, and where i had a long and awkward train ride back to civilisation after settling some fac comm stuff at ziyao’s house, so much so that i couldn’t stand it anymore and got off at novena by cooking up some excuse, even though i said before boarding the train that i was heading to town
yio chu kang is where krystal lives
ang mo kio is where i used to stop alot in sec3, where a ton of people live, and has nice fish and crab beehoon
bishan is grocery-land, infested with RI boys i never used to care about till i started teaching there
braddell is where i sat on a bench at the platform in sec3 watching the trains go by for an hour
toa payoh is where i spent the first 3 years of primary school, and thereafter taking the no. 28 bus home almost everyday in secondary school, where i watched the bus interchange morph from the kind you find in yishun to another across the road to back on the right side but with aircon and a shopping centre
novena the church, the food opposite the church, those nights spent watching movies on our laptops, mugging for SLS in starbucks, spent on the overhead bridge
newton was spent, in my childhood, avoiding stingray, and then gulping copious amounts of it with lots of beer on late saturday nights after concerts and events along bukit timah road (almost inevitably involving a few chinese high boys)
orchard is somewhere where the whole world lives, where you can bump into almost anyone, where you bump into strangers that become familiar faces because you bump into them so often, a place that hides memories and creates them all at the same time
somerset is where i sold flags, fell in love at emerald hill, and had nice korean food
dhoby ghaut had booksales too, and got immensely cooler when the NEL opened – and now i only ever go there because i want to watch movies at cathay and eat carl’s jr while i’m at it
marina bay is somewhere i got stung by mosquitoes non-stop while the rest played capteh and random games

North-East

harbourfront was where we stopped by on the way to sentosa for a tan, and then where we got together one fine day
chinatown, land of heritage tours, too much smoke, too much red, lots of food, including dessert soup i love nowhere else, and cheap karaoke
clarke quay, where people stroll down by the river, falling in and out of love
little india is the land of primary school heritage education and masks a whole horde of photo opportunities
farrer park has a tunnel you don’t know exists
boon keng has a comics connection shop along the road
potong pasir is where somebody’s grandparents live
serangoon is where i grew up in
kovan has nice durian puffs
hougang is where i took a train to at 7 in the morning, sitting in the macs alone in my pajamas drinking iced milo, then sitting out in the open till the 10am sun emerged
buangkok is just another place the train whizzes by
sengkang is too far away for comfort
punggol has fish, and no memories for me

123: and all the lights that light the way are blinding

it’s been altogether too long since we’ve met. in between lots of things fly by unrecorded. some are things you want to remember, and the rest you can’t decide either way. the week had a few bright points, though it drove both of us to insanity (along with many other people) but anyway chinese new year is coming and i’m very glad i started doing my memorial early — the number of msn nicks relating to memorials is mind-boggling, and the admin person in NUS who came up with the great idea of placing the deadline on reunion dinner day is clearly not chinese. it’s been a long road.

in any case, these two weeks have been stressful. i seem to say that after every assignment, but it seems just to rise to unprecedented heights each time. but it’s a steep learning curve, maybe, though they say in law, it never ends. there are more white hairs on my head in the past few months than i’ve had my whole life; maybe my coasting days are over. one day i got so crazy and frustrated over memorial i took off and sulked in a corner of the school, and today at 4pm i was still scrambling to mark citations and the day seemed to pass in a blur. i don’t remember much of this week, aside from going to school at 9am every day and working on my memorial the moment lessons ended till school closed, then going home to work on it some more. LAWR is taking up a crazy part of my life and really should be 8 credits for the amount of work we put in it. my crim and contract readings are left on my beanbag to rot the rest of their natural lives away. sigh. J estimates that during memorial season he spends an average of two nights a week at my house. since it will forever be memorial season, i suspect we’ll be seeing much more of him in the future.

in other news, my new year clothes are very pretty. but they are all in some variation of black! oops.

check out the crazy antics we get up to when we’re stressed out.

on 04 x fanfare the moment dennis walked in while patrick was reading joseph constantine day

note how i look like a rockstar whereas patrick just looks gay. i present my mooting partner, everyone
and guys, the best way to studying: eat your paper

actually the only reason why this series of pictures came about is because my mother bought mini mandarin oranges for chinese new year (and i love them, i keep eating them, they have no seeds) and they’re so mini and fascinating i just had to blog about it to show everyone the splendour of its miniscule size. nevertheless it degenerated into a photowhoring session on a wonked-out sunday night

`

on another note, picnics kick ass. island life, we love it

that day we worked for the first half of the day. later on in the afternoon i was made to hide my head under a jacket (or some other similar visually-impairing action) all the way while he drove on and on to forever and neverland, and made to walk down an interminably long slope with my eyes closed. later that night i realised valentine’s day is pretty amusing to watch on the streets. all the guys had flowers in one hand and their girlfriend in the other. well, all except for one angmoh kid whose t-shirt said:

i’m with stupid
(insert x number of derogatory adjectives here, cos i didn’t read)
i’m single