Psychoanalysis through a Love Letter

I don’t know what I was thinking, and I don’t know what to think. I let Mr. Big read my journal. He wanted to read it, because it had him in it. I don’t know what to feel and my emotional state has reached a strange sort of unpleasant excitement where my heart clocks up a 120 pulse rate per minute.

I thought about it over some rather over-exposed wine the whole morning after he’d left for work. I know I’ve been spending a lot of time these days thinking in a drunken stupor, and I actually believe it’s terribly effective as a drug for emo-therapy

It occurred to me that I had constantly felt as if I didn’t know enough of him, despite his constant admission that he was a perfectly open-book, because I wasn’t one. I have this insane need for people to only see me as I wish them to, and that inevitably led me to hide a whole part of myself from him. Not because I didn’t want him to know my soul; because I did, and very badly so too. I just didn’t know how charming I would still be after he saw it, so for a long time, I couldn’t.

Perhaps I wanted to assuage the guiltiness that came from the feeling of insincerity. I had been serially monogamous in the past, and the first time I cheated, I felt thoroughly horrid. I was so ashamed the whole farce did not last beyond a fortnight, and I had to stop seeing him within that time. I’m never concerned with morality, but I’m always obsessed with compassion, and I couldn’t stand him believing I was being perfectly faithful while I lied. The difference now is in the fact that I have stopped believing in sexual loyalty and romantic faithfullness within people.

Mr. Big was always hiding something; not on purpose, but something I could not extricate, because I needed him to be hiding something, so that I had all the right to carry on keeping my secrets.

It was the same theory that applied to my perfect disbelief in the existence of sexual loyalty. And trust me, I still don’t believe it exists. You can see where this is going. At this point in time I can’t be bothered to be sexually loyal (Not necessarily always in terms of the actual sex, but rather under the condition where you simply felt lust for another person and went about acting on it in some way), and romantic fidelity is an impossibility, I moderated my guilt by believing no one else was capable of it either. I must say most of the people I have met in the past haven’t been much help in dispelling this amoral conviction.

I asked him how many times a month he could fall in love last night. He told me I was perfectly mad and that it was an absolutely irrelevant question. I told him I could fall in love several times a month, and I wasn’t lying, because I really do. He said my definition of love was placed under a spectrum that was far too broad for the word to mean anything to me. But he must be wrong. Love to me is an illogical emotion, damn the day when it isn’t.

Because if I feel it, then it must be.

He ploughed through my archives and asked me who the G-Spot and the Boy was. Of course I panicked, and I told him he must not like me less. I feel terrible.

Two weeks ago I was jogging and musing to myself how perfectly incapable I was at breaking connections with people. I used to be so good at it once, but I stopped being able to; or perhaps chose not to any longer, because the feeling of comfort was too wonderful to be doing without the security that naturally came with it.

He asked me what was so fantastic about the Boy, what about him that made me so enamored of him, when I did not even hear his voice once a week and had not touched him in a year. I’ve thought about the answer so many times: Because my imagination idealized our romance. Because the separation we did not choose has such a tragedy to it that my masochistic mind simply cannot help but adore. And because I tried so hard and did so much to make sure our separation would not make me forget, trying to keep the romance eventually became a part of me, just like brushing my teeth in the morning, or reading before bed.

That wall of indifference you try to build around you, so you won’t get hurt, is really perfectly useless in the face of time and habit. You get used to people, and eventually you can’t do without them. I had a fine shock while I was listening to Ani D’s Promised Land (I listened to that CD many times last year when I had fist gotten to know him, but that’s another fantastic story for another day), because I realized that if Mr. B had decided not to see me tomorrow and forever, I would be Hurt. When the word came to me, it came with a capitalization, and the thought fascinated me in a morbid sort of way, and fed my love for the feeling of incredulity.

I know one thing I have never asked him before, and perhaps that is the most important question of all.

I must ask him, ‘Tell me frankly, how do you feel towards me. I know you think about me sometimes, because you message me when you’ve done something special or seen something strange. I know you miss me just as I miss you; or perhaps I simply like to think so. And you have told me I am unreserved in bed and read things most other girls in my demographic do not read. But you have never told me otherwise.’

Of course it would only be fair to return the favour. I have just realized I am equally as guilty –if not more so- at not telling him how I feel. But perhaps it is because I always think I carry my emotions on my sleeves, and since I never wear anything that covers my shoulders, they are usually falling from my wrist and seeping from my skin. So everyone must know how I feel about them all the time.

Three words.

You are comfort.

xoxox

Environmentalism

Serving Suggestion: French Wine and Pink Floyd.

I’ve been feeling like sitting around naked with a bunch of other people drinking wine, smoking pot and condemning progress. I genuinely have nothing against society evolving and growing, while humanizing the environment, really. But there’s just something so sexy about cursing the likes of Shell and the CAP, eating organic food, dried fruit and refusing meat.

Is there no one out there game for a little bout of good old Flower Power therapy where you are Pink Floyd’d out and completely nude. Because that’s just what I need.

But Goddamnit. Just when I wish to make the switch from the constant drive for knowledge to a desire for an engagement into ..uh.. therapeutic consciousness, there’s not enough women who are equally as interested and no pot to be found.

Environmentalism is so fucking sexy I want to screw all around the globe. I know this is totally pointless, but a combination of the aforementioned serving suggestion seriously makes you feel like you do not have possession over your own mind.

Oh yeah.

We don’t need no education,
We don’t need no mind control.

Can they hurry up with the nudist colony already.

xoxox

The Attraction of The Occident

I've grown up a little in the past few months. With all the blooging I've been doing; it's helped me understand bits of myself I didn't previously. And I thought I would re-write the Why White Men essay. But with a different, less bigoted, more compassionate slant this time.


***
It’s been a good few months since the time I wrote the initial reasoning for this phenomena; I say phenomena because I am clearly not the only Singaporean female attracted to white men. And I will plainly admit that my focus of the reason has changed over the course of these few months. The basis is still similar, but the heart is not where the dick is at. The tag-line stays though, because it’s cute and rude.

When I put all logic aside, I am simply attracted romantically to the Caucasian male, period. It goes back to the extremely basic system of effort, punishment and reward. In order for an Asian man to be attractive to me in that sort of amorous, quasi-romantic manner, he has to be extremely good looking. And since my ideal version of beauty has been defined by a western standard, these Asian men had too look occident. Obviously there were very few of them, and they were all in high demand. So since I look nothing like Lum May Yee, it was hopeless. A case in point of effort and no reward.

Why do lesbians want to make love to women who look like boys? If I had a girlfriend, I’d want her to look fully female. When I thought about that, the answer was clearly obvious. If I wanted a man that looked white, what would evidently prove to be the best solution was to find a white one. And since the fact that he was white was an appeal in itself, being exceptionally gorgeous was unnecessary for me to feel attracted. But I must stress that the ones I’ve dated have been more then just pleasant looking, contrary to popular belief, SPGs can tell the difference between a fat balding old ang-mo and a cute young one.

Another problem I always had with Asian men was how I simply wasn’t slim enough. I am now, as of this morning, I weigh an emancipating 41 kilos. But previously, I wasn’t, and they all wanted skinny girlfriends. Mr. B had always said I’d a fabulous figure. In fact, he said he couldn’t see how I could possibly loose any more. Go local, and he’d say I could do with an inch of my gut. My apologies for being so anal about my weight, but it’s always been an issue for me, blame it on how everyone else around is just oh-so-skinny.

That aside, there will always be something about the Other that makes it more appealing. The country is still not completely cosmopolitan yet, and anything foreign will always be more appealing. After all, it reaches out to our sense of curiosity and the need for novelty. That, combined with the fact that I simply feel far more rewarded in terms of romance, affection and sexual favour in the scant few relationships I’ve had with ang-mos when compared to my local relationships make up the reason for a near blind disinterest for local boys and a heightened sense of magnetism towards whites.

Do not infer that I dislike local boys. I hate the ones with that god-awful sense of self-righteousness that stems from being raised with terribly conservative values when it comes to sex. But the accommodating ones, I have absolutely nothing against. In fact, they make fantastic friends, because it never gets sexual.

I’ve asked nearly all the white guys I know why they suppose the local lasses seem to throw themselves at them. 1) They want a ticket out of the country. 2) They find them (the Mr. Whites) more interesting company; and almost as an after thought, but knowing full well it plays a big part, 3) Bigger dicks.

Some local journalist (might have been Neil Humphreys) wrote that a lot of Singaporean women didn’t eventually end up in the Uber cool cities along the likes of New York, Paris, London; Instead they’ll probably end up in a suburban sort of town along the likes of Glasgow, Perth, New Jersey. Frankly, if I were to raise a couple of kids, I simply wouldn’t want to do that in the claustrophobia of a city. That would be the precise reason why I would want to leave the country to raise a my kids. And that would be the only reason why I would want to marry someone non-local (note I did not say expat) in order to get a foreign citizenship. Singaporean women do not need to marry to leave the country. We have one of the most educated female populations in the world, for crying out loud. How hard can it be to get a work permit outside the country? Sensibly, that would be a logical course of action for our labour, the domestic market is 4 million, how much money do you plan to make out of 4 million people?

That ang-mos are necessarily always more interesting is extremely debatable (and subjective to the individual). But that I was raised on their values and therefore their interests are what engage me, is a fact. The unrestraint, indulgent, individualistic culture of the west has always been a deep source of fascination and engagement. They coincided with my purpose in life; or they could have been the result of my definition for the purpose of my life. Either way, they are the methods to which I live by now. And I do not see a problem with it. Enjoyment in transient, pleasure is ephemeral, agreed. But life itself is of a transitory nature. If you don’t live for pleasure, what should you live for? Absolute values? Where shall that take you. You are beholden to no one but yourself, honestly. If I died tomorrow, I would do so with the knowledge that I’ve lived all the life I had been given to it’s fullest.

And individualism is something that so many local people do not seem to have enough of. It’s always being touted as a negative export of occidental culture. I beg to differ. Individualism is about finding yourself, and it’s about being independent. If you never find yourself, how can you ever be secure enough to be able to take care of someone else. If you never understand yourself, how can you understand someone else? And without individualism, you can never be confident. And that’s something I hate deeply in a lot of local men. Insecure people are annoying and I can never respect them. But the worst are the sort that hide their lack of self-confidence under a veneer of arrogance. Local women don’t show it (the arrogance) because it’s a fact that females are simply more accommodating to correction.

Why are local people always complaining about the accents of DJs? Is our society that insecure that something like how a person chooses to speak, simply because she thinks that’s the way her voice sounds the most delightful should be a cause for contention. Do non-English speaking European countries bitch when their people speak English with a British accent? Should Americans in China speak Mandarin ‘the American way’? When I speak the way I wish to (I don’t care if it’s a cacophony of British/American/Australian intonations) I usually either intimidate the local flavour or incite such disgust in them (Why can’t you be yourself? Well dumb-ass, this IS me being myself).

Some ang-mos I’ve met have asked me what’s up with the accent. Their usually more polite about it, but basically, that’s what they mean, and they never have a problem when I give them an answer as simple as, 'because I want to'. Sometimes I admit their accents rub off on me. That most certainly does not mean I have a weak personality, I am simply extremely adaptable. Besides, what has an accent got to do with your personality.

Am I sold off to the culture of the west? Who isn’t. It’s about unrestraint, it idolizes personal uniqueness, it’s human. Using the concept of individualism: It’s often taken out of context. To me, it means realizing individual worth, and there is a HUGE difference between that and just plain selfishness. If you’ve truly understood your worth, you’ll be able to understand the worth of another human being, and that’s why the most cruel societies are the ones in which the human spirit is suppressed (Why George Bush can lead the US into such extreme cruelty while 50% of his nation stand up for the true meaning of freedom is still a puzzle to me).

Finally, point number three. Dick size. As I have previously mentioned, greater reward in sexual satisfaction contribute to the reason why I find white guys attractive. How big is big enough? Well, enough that the act is worth the hassle of cleaning up after of course. But more importantly, enough such that every time I do it, I’m happy and not disgruntled.
Big tits might be preferable, but nice small ones can serve the same function.

At the end of the day, it’s the notion that I will be better rewarded in a relationship with an ang-mo then with any other race, for reasons of similar value-systems, and a familiarity with their culture.

I grew up reading British novels, American Magazines and watching Hollywood movies. And from the time I was 13, (and that is the stage where so much of a person’s value system is fashioned) I corresponded with people on international online forums, because the people around me simply didn’t feel like they would teach me anything. They lived in an environment similar to mine, attended the same school and read the same text-books. I read other books; they spent all their time cramming for examinations. And those that weren’t, were too busy fussing over boyfriends and bitching about other girls.

It is extreme wrong-headedness to compartmentalize racially mixed couples as propagators of immoral relationships based on sex and money. In this day and age, it’s extreme insanity. And in Singapore is just perfect lunacy. We’re a small, open country, a nation whose identity is precisely defined by it’s varied nature. We’re Singapore because we’re a concoction of so many races, and values. I have chosen mine, and am living the way I wish. And I make up part of the infinite variety of the nation, to judge my choice, or any other girl that so chooses would be to undermine your very only nationalistic beliefs.

xoxox

Drunk

Fuck. Have you ever tried to be drunk for 24 whole fucking hours? Well, I'm fucking drunk and it feels good. Yes i was rejected. I cannot comprehend rejection. Sometimes all the sex appeal in the world is simply just not enough in the face of responsibility. I respect him. He's amazing. He's so full of integrity. And me? I'm just a mad kid who doesn't know what she's living for. That's the problem with living for the moment, sometimes the moment strikes you with the feeling like life is a pain, and nothing matters, and all you want to do is die.

But I couldn't kill myself. I'm too much of a coward. And I'm too much of a narcissist. They might compliment each other some day, and I might just die because I cannot comprehend how people cannot love me. And I cannot stand people not loving me.

I wanted him to cut me. I wanted him to make a beautiful, perfect wound down my back, but he said he'd get into trouble if he did. I have no idea why. Then he left me alone, all fucking alone, and I stuffed my face with M n M's The ones with the peanuts in them and listened to Dido and did it myself. I scared the hell out of my sister. The wounds are ugly. I smoked 3 cigarettes. I've not smoked in a long time. And my thighs have all the marks of being abused for an ash-tray.

When you're drunk, you just can't face up to people you've never seen naked. Because so much of what you are feels like it's emerged onto the surface of your skin. And it's as if every single fucking person can see what you really are. And you can't bear it, because so much of you is ugly. And they are all hiding their ugliness, and it just isn't fair. I hate letting other people see me when I'm not made up to be what I want them to see me as.

Confident, beautiful, assertive, the alpha female.

Insecure, horribly grotesque, perfectly in need to be forced down on my knees and have a dick in my mouth.

Please abuse me. I'm so sick of abusing everyone else. Punish me, please on please oh please.

xoxox

The Importance of Being Earnest

Have I ever mentioned that my favourite play was The Importance of Being Earnest? I really love it. I like the laughter the ironies of life can incite.

xoxox

Obscenity

I’m nearly finished with a second read of Gorges Bataille’s Blue of Noon, I didn’t rush through it this time, and gave the narrative a lot of thought. And this time, I realized what he was attempting to do with the language. He was using it to disgust the reader. To make every possible sensations obscene, to pronograph-ize the emotion. And then it occurred to me that anything in this world can be obscene, it’s just a matter of how you look at it, or how you get other people to look at it.

I’m actually quite amazed at how you can turn anything into pornography, if you truly wanted to.

***

Dirty

I was filthy and upset. I had no idea when he had removed the condom, but at some point while subjected in that visceral position that required me to be on all fours, he had insolently pulled it off his dick. I heard the sudden snap of rubber as it came off, and felt the splash of hot liquid fall onto my lower back, before his naked penis made a re-entry into my pussy.

He was raping me. I was having sex with regret as an afterthought, knowing full well that the clinic for STD’s would have to serve for Tiffany’s at breakfast the next morn. It was rape.

Something detonated, and he came all over my lower back. And with the repugnant white liquid, he lubricated my arsehole and proceeded to fuck it with what had felt like his fist. I was almost worked up to orgasm through my bowels, and might have. I felt disgustingly self-conscious.

He picked my filthy little corpse up and straddled it across his waist, and made a successful attempt at transposing it to the bathroom. I was to be made clean, just as was mandatory for all pretty little corpses.

He stuck me under the shower and scaled my skin. His fingers burned on my pussy as he soaped me down with shampoo the flavour of Clorets.

It was then that I pissed on him. He knew it, my urine was hotter then the water, and far from pure. I wanted to command him to suck me dry. I loathed myself for wanting to allow him to fuck me, and I wasn’t capable of consideration when I hated myself.

I wanted him to piss on me. I found my collarbones erotic, not to mention extremely erogenous. I wanted him to piss on my collar bones, but I couldn’t ask. Instead, I cracked my kneecaps while falling down hard against the ceramic floor, wincing as I jammed his penis into my mouth. I chocked myself forcing it down my throat, the gagging feeling like pleasure. He continually muttered words of appreciation for the texture of my gullet.

Then he told me he was going to come. I pulled my lips away and rubbed the head of his penis against my collarbones, and he came all over them.

Xoxox

I Could Have Been Wrong

Sometime back I condemned reality, something I presently wish I could offer my apologies to, if it were possible. But it incessantly eludes me, with fact and fiction void of definition within my little space.

You can never know anything, because life will always be more capricious then any fickle-minded fancy you are capable of conjuring. I have proven it to myself. I can never imagine half of the shit that happens to me.

Is the fault then to be found in our stars, or in ourselves, that we are underlings?

Are our fates ever stagnant, can we ever make decisions based on complete information? Is there such a thing as all-inclusive, non-partial information.

Blame this sudden bout of philosophical intrusion on the rain I managed to get caught in. I suppose I stayed in it because it had seemed like such a terribly romantic thing to do. You can now tell me how erotic drizzle on a pitch-black silken tarred road, glossed over with warm-street lights can be. And I would understand.

xoxox

Keeping my Hands Off.

November, December… August. 10 months. It’s been a long time the Boy and I have been together. I called him yesterday (and it’s a big deal to me, because I don’t call him very often) to reiterate a perfectly peculiar dream I remembered upon waking up. I can’t recall much, only that I had woken up remembering him holding my hand throughout the night as we spooned on plastic sun-chairs. In the dream, he had looked like Albert Speer in that Nuremberg movie, which made it all rather bizarre, since the actor that played him happens to be my dad’s age.

I felt as if my arm had been broken off and a part of me had been ripped, from me, the whole morning. And while thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that nothing ever really made sense.

After I had felt, for once, in a long time, that I had indeed connected with someone on Sunday, it was difficult waking up to the reality that there was in fact No-one, here, now.

I get so frustrated sometimes, thinking about the handful of months I have to wait before we would go on that holiday promised to ourselves. Sometimes it seems intensely absurd, not to mention retarded; Something like that can never work. But so far it has, so why should I give a shit? After all, I live for the next five minutes always and all the time.

We talked for a long while about things that didn’t really matter; Spain, US Politics, His new job in London. Well, the last bit matters, I’m excited for him, because he’s excited about it. Then he made mention of a bunch of his friends coming down to Singapore on an internship program from the University; it was the same program he came down with last year.

He was perfectly rude about it and told me to keep my hands off them if I met any at the pub from which he’d picked me up. He said some of them were really good-looking, and honestly, he didn’t mind if I was sleeping with someone else, only that it’d be terribly upsetting if he ever suspected that I was screwing with a freshman he knew.

‘Hello? How slutty do you think I am? I would never do that, it would desecrate the novelty of our relationship if I decided to maintain romances with every since batch of interns that come down every year. Man, that was a mean thing to say.’

But arguing is such annoyance, and I can truthfully swear that it was something I avoided adroitly with absolutely every person I have dated , so we promptly dropped the subject for the mundane one of how he was to find an apartment in downtown London.

The café had started to get rather noisy by then (I had called him from Starbucks after an exhausting hour of trying to understand The Harvard Business Review), the rain had stopped and the place was starting to pile up once again. The grind of the coffee machine was starting to become too much to bear, and the brutal chatter of a fat Australian girl talking down an unassuming Asian boy (who seemed to be totally besotted and had been consistently buying her an ever increasing number of muffins throughout the afternoon) was starting to disgust me. We cold barely hear each other anymore, so we said the obligatory I love yous and hung up.

Ten minutes later as I was walking to the supermarket for some figs, he called back.

‘Hey, I didn’t mean to insult you when I mentioned that you should keep your hands off the new interns. I really love you and I’ve never felt possessive before. Don’t know how to explain it but I could ever bear the thought of you… I mean, I can’t imagine… '

I attempted to stutter in something but gave up.

'Good luck for your examinations tomorrow, I hope my advice helped' He said.

I wasn’t even done with bye before the line was cut off. Perfect timing for a Low-Batt warning. Or maybe it wasn't the lousy T68.

xoxox

On Blogging.

All-right. I’ve nearly almost never blogged about the feedback I got through email, mostly because it always seemed to me a terribly egotistical thing to do, and secondly, because there are better things to blog about. Not that I do not appreciate compliments about the way I write and my ability to tell stories or the criticisms on the perception of my thoughts. But things seem to be getting out of hand lately, and I’ve gotten too worked up about it to ignore it anymore.

So far, two people have emailed me about wanting to write novellas based on my judgments and feelings, and the quirky mis-adventures I often stumble into. One of them seems to be rather sane about it, and from the impression I get, what he's writing isn’t so much about me as it is about a bunch of other cultural observations. Which is fine, as long as you’re not ripping content wholesale from my work, I’m actually extremely flattered. The other one is the reason for that ridiculous line you see below my links at the moment. I am not about to have some unknown individual guilelessly threaten to write my life story, simply because he imagines to know me inside out, from reading portions of my thought and writing something based on absolute fallacies (who knows how he’s processed the information?).

This leads on to another question I’m always asked, usually more rhetorical then anything, but I’ll address it anyway.

Is what I write true. Is any of it ever real? Well, I’ll just say this: It’s what I want to tell you. That’s the essential purpose of all art, eventually. To impress upon an audience particular emotions and thoughts. It’s how I felt for the day, and it’s what I want you to feel too. Frankly, I think Michel Moore is a fantastic documentarist, despite the fact that he’s intensely biased and bluntly put, full of bullshit. Because, at the end of the movie as the credits start to roll, you don’t leave remembering the tiny details, but you go with the impression that the war was pointless and done for all the wrong reasons. Which was essentially what he wanted to put across, and was what he very aptly managed.

One thing is for sure though. This whole sex-blog thing is spiraling out of hand, and so many people are jumping on the bandwagon I don’t feel particularly very special any longer. Not that I really was in the first place. I ripped off the idea straight from Belle DuJour. But it wasn’t because I wanted to get famous, not in that sort of glitter and glam manner anyway. I started it because genuinely love writing, and up till now had an audience limited to the people I conversed with on a daily basis, which is to say, not very many. It really killed me to think that so much effort was put in to entertain so little people. So blogging was the best solution, of course.

And it is powerful. It’s becoming a whole new limb of the media, and I am sure by 2005, this rather inspired neologism is going to be part of the English language. Just like ‘television’, ‘newspapers’, ‘advertisements’, whatever. The idea that absolutely Anyone can publish Anything in such an easily accessible, not to mention, FREE (yes, so very Singaporean to emphasize the word) media is beyond comprehension. It’s a media through which ideas and ideals are published Without an editor.

It’s raw, straight for the nest.

Pure, unsullied thought.

Democracy at it’s finest.

And what do I wish to get out of it eventually? What insane, idyllic purpose and direction do I have in mind that compels me to write so religiously everyday (and I can tell you it’s no easy feat, because I’m an absolute sucker for perfection and I hate reading crap and can’t stand reading my own work and going ‘man, that’s crap.’), spending very many free moments that could instead be exhausted leisurely, fantasizing about doing it doggy with Adrian Brody; instead, on thinking about the gossip for the day.

I suppose the best reason is for the want of people to try and understand things from my perspective, and how I want to try and understand myself. It’s bizarre, the power something like a fucking Blog can have over your life, but it can. It’s a thing, but it’s also more then that. It’s a thing with a whole fucking part of your soul in it, an inanimate, intangible ‘thing’ that contains a huge chunk of your life and a great many of your thoughts. Some of which were not even created until you actually wrote them out on the lovely familiar blue and orange interface you’ve simply gotten so addicted to.

xoxox

Coffee and Cigerettes

The last few hours have been splendidly strange. Most of it was spent in the plush couches of all the secret cafes I could think of, lounging about over long blacks, his hands massaging my thighs with my feet propped up onto His lap. Ocassionally, he'd bend down to kiss my knee and the side of my calves, lick the tips of my fingers, asking for a 'real' kiss, leaving me feeling completely out of the sphere of reality.

***

We were both standing by the philosophy section, browsing through the same book; something about how the demise of democracy would lead to greater individualism. It didn’t particularly make any sense to me, so I wasn’t concentrating much. What I was noticing was Him. There was just something about him and made me want to say something. Perhaps it was how he struck me as very bohemian. Maybe it was the choice of literature, the embroidered linen shirt, the funny goatee, I honestly can’t place a finger on any of it all. I figured he was one of those drifters wandering about South-East Asia, and I was right.

I struck up a conversation, and it somehow led to him mentioning Richard Linklater, LSD and Waking Life. We’d been talking for what must have been half and hour or so, while standing on the same spot, and I felt myself feeling very comfortable. Before I knew it, and without knowing, I’d picked up his hand and pulled him along to the graphic novels. It just felt like the natural thing to do, and I didn’t even realize I was doing it till later.

He started talking about Coffee and Cigarettes, one of those movies with self-explanatory titles and a lot of engaging superfluous dialogue where people sat around talking about stuff. It occurred to me to mention Before Sunrise.

‘It’s about two people who meet perfectly by chance on the Eurostar and find a connection and basically sorta fall in love with each other. And the guy, Ethan Hawke, he has to leave for the States the next day, and that’s why it’s called Before Sunrise, because that’s when they part and…

It hit me like bucket of what-the-fuck.

‘Oh Christ. You must be thinking I’m some kinda crazy girl trying to live out some convoluted, fantasy I just saw on DVD. Honestly, I know the resemblance (and I made a gesture that basically referred to him and me) is terribly uncanny, but I swear I didn’t do it on purpose.’

He laughed and said he thought it was totally bizarre too, but asked me to carry on with the synopsis.

We went for coffee at my favourite café (I love the colours of the décor), and must have spent the entire afternoon talking. He had a taste for my blend of wistful romantics, and we flirted in a very pensive, dare I say abstracted? manner. I would be conversing, and he would look right into my eyes for as long as I could sustain the topic, and not blink. He would stroke my fingers and twirl the edges of my hair. Or rest his chin against his palms and looked thoughtful, while sipping the foam off the latte. I thought there was some measure of theatrics, but it didn’t make the situation feel synthetic. At some point, it occurred to me that perhaps, without consciously knowing it, we were emulating the movies we admired.

I had wanted to take him to another secret little place for cheese-cake and live music, but when we’d gotten there, I’d realized the place had closed down. That’s the irony of truly hidden coffee places. The thing that makes them fantastic; that there’s nearly almost no one there most of the time, is also what closes them down eventually.

We walked around to the art museum, and there was nobody there (You can’t help but like government funded secret places). And there was a point in time as we were walking through a small corridor into another exhibit, where he stopped me midway. We looked at each other for one of those whiles that seemed like forever and I placed my hands on his chest. For a short time we stood there, breathing, before I turned and walked on into the other gallery.

There was a walk along the river, and as we walked he started to hold my hand and took liberties of my shoulders as arm-rests. Then at some point, he stopped and pulled me into him and kissed my forehead, and the tips of my ears. I was enjoying the sort of physical contact we had. It didn’t intimidate me and he was coming on very lightly. Then, as a bunch of pre-adolescent children and some Japanese tourists walked by, he pressed me to him and smooched.

I had felt like going home, because I had so much to do, but simply couldn’t. I suggested hanging out at my pool, and we spent the rest of the night sitting facing each other on a sun chair, talking about relativity and the human incapability to understand what the eternal was, because our minds were all products that had an origin.

He pulled me up towards him and splashed a droplet of water onto my right knee.

‘I know this is going to make me sound like I’m on LSD, but just listen. Imagine that the little drop of water is a universe, and there’s all these galaxies in it, and a million things are going on in it at the moment, ever since I created it, and,’

He stroked off the droplet, flicked it out of existence.

‘And now it’s destroyed. In one single moment, it’s gone. But whose to say it wasn’t much longer? Do we ever really know anything? We could be terribly small in the big scheme of things, and our time passes this slowly, or this quickly, because we’re this small. What about outside this universe as we know it? Maybe there are two people, exactly like us, you and me, and the me is going to whack everything we’ve ever known existed into oblivion…’

‘You Are on some sorta drug.’

‘I think it’s just you.’

I laugh. ‘Well, you don’t need to think about it in such a cosmic scope. I mean, look at us, feel us. It’s nearly midnight, and you think, god, time really flies when you’re having a great time, but then there are points, where we just look at each other, and there’s just this immutable silence and that one moment seems forever. And in the grand scheme of things, this whole situation, like how you’re by my pool at the moment, is entirely out of reality. It’s an anomaly, a bubble outside a bubble. It doesn’t feel like reality, and time doesn’t seem to make very much sense. I have realities I have to face up to after I say goodbye, and not very pleasant ones at that, but at this point, this is everything my life is.’

My arms went around his neck, perfectly out of their own accord, and I pressed myself against him. He told me I was a fine, wicked tease and hitched me onto his crotch, suffocating me in an embrace and pushing his against mine. I cannot deny that I was enjoying myself, but there came a point when I thought it would simply be a bad idea to carry on, and pulled away a little.

‘Gosh. You know, I’ve been having a hard on for the past hour. You know what are blue-balls? I’ve got them now, and it’s giving me this incredible stomachache. I mean, no, don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to suggest we should do anything you don’t feel like, but I really need to use the bathroom.

‘You could come with me. I mean, you don’t even have to do anything, I’m not going to force you, I mean, it’s just Me, I’m perfectly… biddable?’

‘Oh? Are you at the point where if I just touched your dick, you’d come?’

I sighed. ‘You know, if I’d met you a couple of months ago, I might have not given a shit, but I’ve realized that with things like that; it’s great now. I’d fuck you, and I’m sure it’ll be fantastic. I like you, it’s been 8 hours, but I feel as if I’ve known you forever, you’re hella cute and all. And trust me, aside from the fact that it’s not biologically possible for me to have testicles ready to implode on themselves, it’s not any easier for me.

‘But I know I won’t like myself for it when it’s all over. I wouldn’t know completely, for sure. I could find out, but I think I wouldn’t like myself for it, honestly. God I sound like such a priss, I try not to be but…’

He was very nice about it, and it didn’t matter.

At breakfast, I mentioned my little belief about how people were just like cities, and how you can’t just read about a city, and look at tons of pictures on it, and imagine that you’ve actually been there. It’s not the same. And it’s likewise for people; Sometimes sleeping with someone would take you to that other level of consciousness for the person, give you that extra compassion.

‘It doesn’t matter. It’s all serendipity, and no one’s to say it would have been better if we did sleep with each other. Circumstance made it the best it could be, it’s really none of our business to have interfered with it, although if we did, it would be all part of chance, wouldn’t it.’

It’s just the way things are, I supposed.

Parting was such an annoyance.

If everything was really all part of a film, we would part without remembering things like email addresses. That’s the way films are. Melodramatic.

‘Oscar Wilde did always complain that women didn’t know the beauty of letting memories stay memories in their pure state, instead they are continually dragged out and rehearsed until they are all ruined and bleached of colour.’

He scoffed and wrote his contacts on a book he’d given me (Voltaire’s Candide).

‘This is reality. People want to connect, partings can never been final, it doesn’t have to be.’

‘Hah, all right. See you around.’

xoxox

Serendipity

I met a thoughtful boy at the bookstore today. We talked about philosophy for 8 hours and walked around the country. Then we made out by my pool. He loves Waking Life too, and he's given me a book by Voltaire; Candide.

I'll give a detailed account when it's all over. Because it isn't. We're to meet for breakfast tomorrow, but he doesn't have an alarm clock, so he might just not turn up. But it honestly would not matter, it was one of the most quixotic, dreamlike, fantastic 8 hours of my life.

But if you want a rough idea, it's something like Before Sunrise.

xoxox

I Bet You Knew...

That I have oatmeal and milk for breakfast every morning.

That I love Pistachio Gelato.

That if I could choose a person to answer the meaning of life (not taking into account the exsistence of any spiritual being), it would be Umberto Eco.

My favourite flower is the Cyclamen.

My favourite sandwich filling is peanut butter and jam.

And the best muscians alive today are the Dave Matthew's Band. But where music is concerned, Ani DiFranco, Tori Amos, Massive Attack and The Gotan Project (Tango music turns me on) all come close.

And the thing that attracts me to the opposite sex is a perceptive, observant mind, and the ability to convey all that.

xoxox

Old Habits Die Hard

Ever since my Grandma died, my daddy's been going though truckloads of old photographs dating all the way back to the 1920s. My Grandmama's been dead for about 2 months already, and I still can't believe that she is, but it doesn't affect me as much anymore.

He's up to the 1980's now, and my mom came into my room today with a photo that pictured me rolling on my back, touching my toes (as you can clearly see).



'You were such an awfully adorable baby. Look at you! So young and already showing the world your snatch.'

You gotta love her sense of humour.

***

In more other news.
My sister turned on the television and we saw our lovely cousin acting in some Chinese drama serial. She turned to look at me and asked why I wasn't there instead of the other girls.

'You forget. I can barely speak mandarin.'

Which reminds me of this interview with Steve Earle, where he talks about his new album in which he sings a lovely ballad to Condoleeza Rice. Ah fie, cock-sucking is simply not enough these days to get you a love song.

xoxox

Red-Flag

The Girlfriend continually reminds me of the fact that I have a crush on the Gallery Guy. Of course I have a crush on him, I’d freely admit that. I like having crushes, it’s so nice to be at the giving end of the infatuation line occasionally. And mind you, I mean Very occasionally only. Any more then that would be simply detrimental to my ego.

Now, all throughout the week I’d been wanting to pay him a visit, but had been feeling far too lazy, and too bogged down by work to do so, but last night saw the perfect excuse come by for me to make a trip down town. It was to procure a copy of this particular China Culture magazine whose editor has emailed me offering me a chance at being East Asia’s Carrie Bradshaw, minus the mid-life crisis and menopause. (Extravagant claims, but it’s very intrusive of you to try and be the arbitrator of my fantasies.)

***

The escalator stopped at the floor the gallery was on, and I tried to peek into the office from where I was, trying to see if he was there. I thought I saw him wandering aimlessly around, but I couldn’t be sure. And all this time, a strange, childish feeling was swelling up in me, turning me into something I had not been in a long time.

The unsurity of self had turned me into a coward, and I rode on with the escalator into the store above, too chicken to do what I really wanted to. ‘Later’, I kept on telling myself. Later, when the gallery was about to close. Come by then and ask him if he wanted a drink, and wait for him while he locked up; Yes, Later would make more sense.

But I was illiterate, browsing thought literature I couldn’t understand. All there was were the words chanting in my head, telling me to do what I wanted to. And after a pointless 30 minutes, I gave in and finally tossed the graphic novel I had been mindlessly fanning onto a shelf.

Walking into the gallery always made me feel like I was stepping into private space. Usually it was because every single painting gave me the sense that I was entering the thoughts of someone else. But this time, the awareness of me as a trespasser was more domineering then it usually was.

I felt like I was trespassing onto his space, and for the want of being welcomed, for that, made it all the more difficult to bear.

I stood at the entrance for awhile, pretending to muse over the new exhibits that had been placed up. He was on the phone. I wandered a little deeper. I felt a little like an intruder, and didn’t dare to make too much noise with my heels. There was much wondering about if he knew my presence, but I didn’t dare find out through looking directly into the office, and at him. It was ridiculous. I had managed to come this far, and now all I was doing was hiding behind canvases and make-shift walls. Did I expect him to want to play a childish little game with me, to match my childish little feelings. There was no reason behind it, aside from the fact that I was simply not prepared for anything. But it was just one of those things you can never prepare for, and it was ironic, considering the predictability of human behaviour.

He put down the phone, and there was the clink of China. And I knew He knew. He strolled out leisurely as I bit my lip and pretended to steal a glance from the corner of my eye, knowing full well he was aware of my attention. I thought he was looking at me, and I realized it was so when I turned my head to look at him and saw that he responded, almost in chorus.

‘Hey Isabella, (he remembered my name. That’s a start! I didn’t even know his) how are you doing?’

La liberté!

The most difficult part is always in bridging the silence after-all, am I not right.

He was across the hall, and when I responded with how fine I simply was, he walked over. I attempted to sustain a conversation about the new exhibits, but the desire to ask him for a drink agitated me, and before I knew it, I’d asked him if he was free tonight.

He looked at me with a slightly surprised smile, perhaps with a pleasantly pleased lilt to the corners, and repeated the suggested time; ‘Tonight?’

‘Well, I was around the area, I thought I’d drop by and ask you out for a drink, I mean, it’s all right if you don’t want to, I..’

‘Oh no, I’m terribly sorry but I’ve a flight to Hong Kong tomorrow, or tonight, depending on how you see it. I’m incredibly sorry, I’d love to, but…’

But I promptly switch the subject. Rejection was always an embarrassing thing, and most certainly something I wasn’t particularly used to. But he did seem sincere in his apology.

‘You see that painting over there?’ He said, gesturing to a canvas awashed in throbbing tones of ocher. ‘It’s by an Iranian artist. The clothes you see on it, they are not real…’

There was a strange discourse over Iranian culture after that, and he apparently shared the same fascination with obscure Middle-Eastern movies.

‘You can distinguish their art. They are all painted in a sort of silent tragedy.’

He looked at me as if he were weighing my thoughts.

‘They suffer a lot, and it shows, I’m sure you can see that. All their art express repressiveness. It’s more terrible when you think how prosperous Iran once was, and now it’s run by mad-men.’

‘Hah. Chauvinistic, insecure males you mean.’

He laughed at that.

There was an odd looking coffee table below the painting, with nail varnish spilled into a structured disarray.

‘Modern art.’

‘I know it’s modern art,’ I replied. ‘But I can’t say I know what modern art is. I will never understand it, aside from the fact that it looks great, and that it would make a fantastic centerpiece for an after dinner conversation.’

‘Ah silly, there’s nothing to understand. It’s pretty, I like it. That one over there… ‘ He gestured to a sculpture of a naked African adolescent. ‘I love that one. The artist is a friend of mine.’

I hadn’t noticed the figurine before, but now that I did, I thought it was lovely. Mostly because he said it was. Sculptures normally never caught my attention. And this one was particularly lovely.

‘Because the adolescent form is so seldom captured nude, you know. It’s a pity. It’s one of the most fascinating phrases of human anatomical development, and yet it always passes us by because we’re so afraid of the taboo…’

He nodded his head, smiling and stroking the head of the girl. ‘She’s a Lolita.’

I couldn’t help but laugh.

‘You know, when you get back from Hong Kong, whenever that is, you should go to the WOMAD festival.’ I suggested. (Of course hinting that he should go with me.)

‘Oh no, I’m simply too old.’

‘Nonsense. You just sit around listening to great tunes hand-beaten on drums and dance to reggae and salsa beats. It’s fantastic!’

‘Oh, you salsa? My wife’s a fabulous salsa dancer. But I can’t do it.’

‘That’s insane. Anyone can learn how to salsa, and it should be easier for you, since you already have an accomplished partner.’

The revelation of my disappointment could not have been more then a split second, but it took me awhile to get over the shock. He must have known I was disappointed, I was sure of it. I thought it was obvious, because for the next 5 minutes, the words ‘wife’ and ‘kids’ came out of my mouth quite liberally, although inside me, I knew I was being incredibly stupid.

The conversation had ran it’s course by then, and I’d over-stayed in someone else’s private space. I told him I’d take my leave, and he suggested I emailed him the number of the place I went to dance at (or where I used to anyway, I haven’t had the time recently, and have gotten terribly rusty, and you know how these things are downward spirals to a final degradation), and left me with a name-card.

‘I’m really sorry I had to decline your company tonight, but you know how it is, when you have a family. You’ll know what I meanwhen you do.’

‘The word you’re looking for is responsibility, and I do have a family!’ I laughed.

And I knew it was a genuine laugh. I was disappointed that he turned out to be much older and with more responsibilities then I had previously thought, but all that did not deride what I’d felt previously.

Just before I left the gallery, he stopped me and asked how old I was.

‘Why? Do I look pre-pubescent? My anatomy is nothing like the statue of your Lolita.’

‘Oh no, it’s just that, I think your thoughts are …’ He struggled to find a word. ‘Deep. Advanced?’

‘Matured.

‘Do you really think so? I get that quite often, although I can’t believe people my age can be sillier then me. They are, but I cannot believe it.’

‘You are, and I wouldn’t insult you. It’s really a compliment.

‘But thank you for coming by, I had a pleasant time, and I’m sorry again that I can’t go out with you tonight. But perhaps we could do it sometime in the future, you can email me, or call…’

I look at him.

‘Oh no, you’re the busy one, you should email me sometime, and we’d go out. I’m free quite often anyway.’

‘I couldn’t do that, you’ve been nothing but nice to me.’

Frankly, I didn’t quite understand what he meant, and right now, I’m stuck in a bit of ambivalence. But a red-flag is a red-flag. Remember how I said I didn’t believe in absolutes? Well, there are some absolutes. A wife and kid are absolutes.

I went to Starbucks thereafter for a frothy latte, a wheat spinach bagel and some time out to think about what I felt.

And I felt that I was a perfectly dislocated individual with a hyper-active imagination, and that I knew what being in love was. Of course I did.

He was compassionate and considerate, and that was all that mattered.

xoxox

I Really Don’t Give a Shit

Really. Especially when it comes to wearing bras. I HATE bras. If it weren’t for the fact that the breast wrapping hegemony advertised constantly that your breasts were bound to sag if you didn’t wear the ‘proper’ bra, I would never wear them unless it’s primary purpose was to do the whole not-really-there thing. Think delicate lace with Mallorca pearls, tie dyed ones with sunflowers on the nipples, bras like so.

Back in school, and in Primary school too, they’d get people from triumph underwear (the choice of lingerie for most women here, although it’s slowly being relegated to the market for mommies and aunties with the advent of chains like Eros and Blush!) to give us talks on how to choose the right bra, and to brain wash us with analogies of fat African women who could swing their boobs behind their shoulders to feed the babies in the baskets they carried on their backs.

Of course it never occurred to me then, as a perfectly flower-fresh 10 year old (whose only sin up till then had been masturbation in the shower) that African women did usually have breasts much, much, and very much bigger then Asian women.

But it’s too late, the damage has been done, and I wear bras out of the fear that my breasts will sag and look like my grandmother’s before I hit 40. (Although I heard the problem can be easily remedied by soaking them in ice cold water for 10 minutes, twice a day. Apparently it really works. I learnt that from a comic book.)

Despite that, I don’t put them on too often though. Possibly only on weekdays, and when I’m in running about from lecture to lecture.

Now, on the topic of schools and brassieres, Singaporean schools have a particularly odd rule. No colored bras. Which also meant no bras with political or feminist slogans. No lingerie that said SLUT or SMUT or had Osama Bin Laden’s face on it. And most of all, no neon pink ones; Only plain, white, or skin toned bras. Things is, only mommies and aunties wear those sort. The rest have prints on them. My ‘practical’ bras, and I must say, I am an extremely practical person when it comes to underwear. They’re either the extremely plain, sporty sort or the fully lacey, useless, meant to be taken off sort. Anyway, the practical ones all have a spot of bright cheery colour on them so that I can peek at my boobs in the bathroom and feel happy when I see the colour (I hope the boys that see it feel happier after they do too). But even that’s forbidden. So screw it, some mornings, I simply don’t bother to wear a bra. What a way to solve the permissible bra conundrum.

My Daddy hates it though, but he nearly always never notices when I do wear one and when I don’t. My brother though, is an expert. He never means it, but it always gets me a chastising when he opens his trap and goes, ‘hey! No bra again!’ Which would usually result in me getting called a slut and being asked to put one on before we went for dinner. The argument would always be the same.

‘My breasts are perfectly covered. The shirt isn’t even flimsy, and you can’t make out the nipples. Why should I wear a bra? They are so uncomfortable.’

‘Your mother wears one, everyone wears one! Why can’t you just behave yourself and stoop acting like a slut. Why bother to go to church if you behave like that?’

Ouch! God I have a lot of things to say to that, but I know my daddy doesn’t Really mean what he says when he’s upset, but it just proves that some really entrenched moral beliefs that can never be changed.

Seriously though, what is wrong with not wearing a bra?

My mom says it’s because I’d cause men to lust.

Oh. Is it my fault that they do? They only lust because society dictates that wearing a bra is the decent thing to do, and not wearing one is decadent. And anything decadent will always incite lust. Is it just that Iranian women cannot participate in the sport they are best at because they have to wear the burkha, least their hair emanates rays that incite erections? (It covers their faces because eyebrows and eyelashes are hair, and some older women plainly need to thread their mustaches).

I always loose. (you always loose with your parents if you’re Asian and the matter concerns sexual decency.) and end up putting on a bra while musing over the fact that with or without one, I’d cause men to lust. And how I’d be very sad the day I realize they don’t. And besides, it’s really Them and not Me. It’s what they choose to focus on. Keep on focusing on trying to be self-righteous, and trying not to lust, and trust me, you will end up lusting. The most decent men are the ones who think the least about being good.

From a very Christian viewpoint (At this point, I always feel the need to stress that I am in no way evengelizing, but merely stating an amusing fact I think you might find interesting), the law was really made to bring out our need for grace. So trying to be moral will only make the sin more apparent. We were not made for social convention, we made social convention, so why the hell are we being bogged down by it?

Perhaps, we are all simply called Priggish, Prim, and Proper.

xoxox

Prescription Sex

I did a silly survey on Deviant Art today, and it asked me the name of a famous person I would wish to have lunch with, if I could. I would presume that when you had lunch with a famous person, you’d want to get to know things about him that were not already known, and with famous people, how much is there left to find out that he would tell you over lunch?

So I added in another question to the survey, it’s terribly clichéd, but a great deal more fun to give an answer to. You guessed it. One famous person you’d like to sleep with.

The primary consideration I had was, what sort of famous. The generic MTV marketed fame is a definite no-no. They get so much sex already, sleeping with such would be a perfectly pointless endeavor; you’d be just another lay. And anyway, as the Postmodern Courtesan puts it, Actors and media personalities in general are stupid. (I fear for presidents too often seen on television).

Sex should not be just sex, because when it is- as a particularly sexually licentious friend puts it, it’s masturbation with a warm body. (Or as the Boy has placed it; comparing a dollar hotdog to a tete a tete at the Claude Colliot.)

There are some people worth getting to know on that intimate level. People you adore from which you wish to discover certain thoughts that are worth the trouble and things of much importance, like what has affected and influenced and made him produce all the lovely stuff you admire.

People really are like cities (and cities like people), with their own brand of vibrancy and laws and sets of cultures. There are some cities you’d like to discover and soak in, learn something from the experience and leave, and some you want to be in forever. And lunch can only be a fling, like bypassing a town, only to stop for fish and chips at the local diner. It’s simply not enough if you really wish to unravel anything.

Of course it would not be very ideal if the person you most admire you had to search up on Dead or Alive first. Which rises the question of whether sex is really necessary to get to ‘that’ level. On a very intellectual basis, no. I know some people very well, and I’ve never slept with them. But getting to know someone isn’t always about logic, is about feeling what he did when a particular thought formed, or how he felt when that bit of inspiration struck.

And I don’t ever think there’s a feeling quite so wonderful as lying in bed naked, with your fingertips touching, and asking silly questions like why is cotton candy always cheerful.

Sure there have been shitty choices for partners in the past, but of late, I think I shall turn more discerning. It’s just a personal choice to want to grow up and treat sex differently. Personally, I think it’s a perfectly healthy attitude to accord to sex. Where you sleep with people that are worth it, as opposed to doing so because you can do it (and that it feels good, which is part of the point but doesn’t mean it makes it any less pointless), it can affect you profoundly, good or bad, I wouldn’t know. But that’s hardly the issue, if sex really is about finding out more about yourself.

But perhaps I’m simply philosophizing sex to get away with promiscuous behaviour. I could be doing that, but don’t suppose all I’ve just said are whole lies either.

And pertaining to my answer on one person I’d like to sleep with, today it’s Neil Gaiman.

xoxox

Singapore has gotten to you if...

9. You think it's okay to have only one meaningful choice on a ballot.

(Agreed. I don't have much faith in the western ideal of democracy anyway.)

15. You think that S$100,000 [= US$ 57,000] is a reasonable price for a Toyota Corolla and S$1,000,000 is a reasonable price for a bungalow, but S$5 [= US$2.85] for a plate of fried noodles is a barbarous outrage.

(Uncannily, I feel that Mr. B is slowly getting there.)

16. You believe that not being able to get decent roti prata outside Singapore is enough to keep the best and the brightest people from leaving.

(Bad roti-prata is a pity, but buckwheat crepes are fantastic alternatives.)

18. You justify every argument with the phrase "in order for us to be competitive in the 21st century."

(Just look at what's on our local paper yet again today. And even the Economist is talking about it.)

23. Durian and belachan no longer stink to you.

(Balachan will always stink.)

28. When you cross the border into Malaysia, you automatically and deeply fear for your life and your wallet. Especially your wallet!!

(Alternative, you could loose your girlfriend. Or wife. Or whatever appandage that looks vaguely female.)

xoxox

Socially Stratified

People in Singapore are class conscious. Secretly, we are, no matter how much we pretend we’ve all really been amassed by the government into one big throng conveniently called the middle-class. The divide is not as apparent here as it is the other south-east Asian cities with yawning wealth inequality, but it’s there. People are conscious of each other’s wealth, and despite everyone living relatively comfortable lives, the fact that someone else has it more comfortably affects people.

It’s all rather peculiar, and I wouldn’t deny I’m not of the phenomena. Whether we like it or not, we’ll always be envious of someone else’s good fortune and their chic demeanor. Why else buy pirated goods? (I don’t by the way. I wouldn’t be caught dead with a fake. Not even VCDs, because I just download those.) Or why else are we so particular about the sort of house we live in ( I read from a recent report by the local press there were people who’d tear off the parking stickers that they needed to use to park below their government subsidized flats), the car we drive, the schools we send out children to. Why do kids boast about living in real prime estate and why does my adolescent sister report to me every little detail about the claims to the ‘upper-class’ of her classmates.

To have parents that own a huge piece of real estate, a number of cars, a marble fountain and to posses that academic RGS accent are all very desirable characters, according to her.

‘How many square meters of the house can her skinny ass occupy in a day. And you speak with that infuriating accent yourself.’

I will admit that I do too, and it doesn’t bother me because it’s how I like speaking. To do otherwise simply to sound ‘more Singaporean’ would be counteractive to the precise philosophy that we should converse in the legitimate lingo we were ‘born with’ (what bullshit)- because, honestly, I would be faking it if I didn’t speak how I like.

While the class divisions are not all that apparent, I must admit that I feel it at times. Not so much with people with more affluent lots in life then mine, but with people less than. Talking to them, as ridiculous as this may sound, makes me go, ‘oh dear, poor you.’ And secretly go, thank god it ain’t me. And the only times when I genuinely feel that I wish I were born into a more well heeled lot in life is at the Art Gallery. (The paintings are priced all-right, but for the love of God I live in an apartment.)

The G-Spot was terribly acerbic the last time the subject came up. I was being stupid about it, I must admit. He’s a very real, raw person, and that’s why I like him. He was making fun about my lot in life (which is really quite boring and terribly bourgeoisie. Think all the 5 Cs: Cash, Car, Condo, Credit and Carnality –all right, I forgot the last C, but at least I made the distinction between Condos and Condoms.) And I got quite upset and said a very dumb, bigoted thing. ‘It’s a big beautiful condo, so shut up.’

God I was embarrassed after that.

He dates a girl who spent most of her life being broke, buys clothing from the neighborhood retail store (the sort that functions as a community with the localized wet markets) and is 15% sure he wants to have her babies. And who also chastises him for wasting money.

Frankly, I never thought of class coming in between any sort of romantic relationship, until today. And it made sense. I suppose one of the reasons why I despise the Ex so much was because he wasn’t well-heeled enough; actually, that’s a real understatement. His family was bankrupt. And he was 10 years older then me and hadn’t even graduated. But that’s beside the point. The truth is, if you’re more affluent, you’ll have a whole different set of ideals, aspirations and concerns that are separate from someone much less. It’s the same concept as people in developed countries not having similar concerns as the ones in developing nations. It was one of those irreconcilable differences that made my whole relationship with him, when I think about it now, all the more implausible.

It is a meritocratic society, and the poor here really aren’t poor. But when I thought about it, in this generation (the country is on to it’s third since it’s founding) cultural, artistic and literary literacy between the top half of the middle class and the bottom half are still jarringly existent.

xoxox

Falling Out

I met the G-spot. Finally. After a long hiatus for no apparent reason I can think of aside from the fact that these days I’m stuck studying for exams and that he was probably out of town for a long while. Someone actually asked me what had happened to him, did guys drop out of my life ‘just like that’? In answer to the question, yes. It’s rather bizarre when you think about it. How can someone you’ve been sleeping with for quite awhile, (I may be fast, but I’m talking about it in terms of months here.) just fall away completely from your life. But most of the time, there’s often no point in ‘talking about things’.

In fact, there’s nothing that freaks me more then a guy who says, ‘we need to talk’. Firstly, guys do not say things like that, girls do, so it’s unnatural. Secondly, it just makes me feel sick. There never is anything to talk about. If I don’t feel your worth my time any longer, you’re just not worth it. What can there possibly be that would require discussion of such severity as your tone implies.

Strangely enough, the guy from the last relationship where we simply fell out of each other’s lives sent me a rather strange text at lunch-time, and I do believe it must have been the wrong girl. He basically asked me to drop by his office. I asked him rather politely how he was after telling him he must have gotten he wrong chick.

Honestly, I thought he was a great person. He just had one big, bloody flaw: he was simply too much of a slut (which also meant that he was a god in bed). I must have known him for months before anything transpired between us, precisely because I didn’t think any sort of relationship with him would be healthy in any sense of the word. But I had been feeling terribly neurotic one evening, had just finished watching Maggie Gyllenhaal in The Secretary and was feeling extremely oversexed. I regretted it almost immediately and felt incredibly dirty. The ironic thing was that, it was precisely because he was a slut that made me think he was quite genuinely a person pleasant to be with

It’s been awhile since, and I’ve learnt a bunch of things (among which that I was really no better then he was – there’s no such thing as moral superiority, only extreme self-righteousness) and one of them is that sluts really are the best sort of people in the world. The people with the lest sense of self-righteousness are the best. They always strike me as possessing characters that are more socially intuitive, considerate and exceedingly accommodating then the norm. And candidly, they’re too busy making love all the time to have the facility to be antagonistic. That’s a good thing. And just for the sake of a shot at making a candidly astute observation, if all those extremist were to stop thinking of the 72 virgins (hear they were really raisins) in heaven and started taking advantage of the millions of beautiful women on earth who aren’t, the world would be a better place. And better they think about sex every five minutes then a million and one ways to kill off everything occidental. I would be sad.

(Actually, I do not think the world would be a better place. The world will always be equally fantastic, we’d just have to find something else to fuss about.)

The G-Spot and I had a rather pleasant conversation. He's up to no good, as usual. Strange story about a girl, a guy, and a pool. And another guy trying to wedge between the two former characters and some hard round fruit being thrown. I returned the fabour by bitching about conservative, puritan American boy-friend. Or whatever he is. I rekon we're on some sort of silent conflict at the moment, of a reason I do not care to disclose. But I could be just wrong, he could have just left the country. That does tend to happen. He told me about his travel plans, but I'd managed to forget them in under an hour.

Oh, and as a side note, If you didn’t like that feeble grasp on Islamic extremism, I make no apologies. (But if you want a more perceptive observation, it can be found here) I’ve been having such great fun the whole day reading Persepolis. It’s a graphic novel about the Iranian revolution told from the perspective of one of the most likable little girls. She reminds me of Totto-chan.

xoxox

Perfect Girlfriend

(text) I kinda tried to teach myself how to be the perfect girlfriend.

Indeed.
I perverted myself as a kid because that's what the TV shows told me guys wanted. Guys liked latex and leather, anal sex and orgies. They didn't know how to commit and only cared for the pretty girls.

Of course I grew up. And I don't do all those things because I want to be the perfect girlfriend anymore. I would do them because I want to. All of them, except the anal bit. I might consider His ass though.

Children have a very strange sense of sexuality. I suppose the ones that never got to see people having sex didn't have much sense of the act, but I had an impression of what sex was at about age 8. I saw them do it on the screen, and on comic books, and insinuated by Madonna in one of her older glossies, before she became all about Kabbalah and other relevant commercialized modes of spirituality.

I’ve always thought of writing something over what I fantasized about as a child. I think it was all very disturbing, and I doubt I was the only one out there.

I knew a pair of twins who used to blow each other. Maybe I’ll write about that sometime. A short, little disturbing graphic novel about childish libidos. Have you ever thought of the alternative uses of a squiggle pen? The sort they used to advertise on TV that came in primary colours and vibrated as you wrote so your lines would turn out curly.

Would ‘Castle on a Cloud’ sound like an apt title for a book like that?

xoxox

Germatriculator

What the hell? My blog is 67% evil. But I thought I was such an angel!

The Gweilo Diaries rates a shocking 99% good. Go figure ;)

And This is 79% good.

Wedding Guest Eats Victim

Buyot, who surrendered to police and is acting as a witness, told police they then roasted Ganay's body using coconut leaves and kerosene, Bacuel said.

Baule senior later forced Buyot to take a bite of Ganay's flesh, which he claims he threw up but was then forced at knifepoint to swallow, Bacuel said.

Someone went to great lengths to tell me cannibalism was practiced in the past as a form of respect for the dead. Well, it might have been, but even in words, it's absolutely not palatable to my delicate tastes.

xoxox

Aficionado

I went back to the gallery again, after quite some while. I stood outside for a moment contemplating the guy who runs the place. I do so want to get to know him.

I always think about a number of things before I enter the gallery. One of it concerns the retail syndrome. It’s where you simply don’t want to stand around for too long because you’re not going to buy anything. Quite a stupid way to feel in an art gallery of course, because no one buys paintings every time they enter, but it’s just something that’s been drilled into me subconsciously, somehow. The other is the fact that (yes, I’ll admit it.) I have a crush Him. Oh, it’s terribly mild, but he’s just someone I absolutely had to get to know.

A friend of mine had been telling me I was being absolutely silly in thinking he wouldn’t want to talk to me. Guys are guys, whether they report the news, sell software, or run an art gallery. Basically, Guys talk to pretty girls. I know that sounded terribly egotistical, but it’s simply the way things are. I am pretty, and I know people can’t help but like me because of that; we are all beings chained to the aesthetic after all, and in any case, its an asset, so I am not complaining.

I entered the gallery and he peeked out from the gap between the office (that’s located facing the entrance) I thought what the hell, and gave him a nice, medium sized smile endowed with a sweet breakfast blueberry muffin sort characteristic (as opposed to a maple-syrup mannerism). And he smiled quite pleasantly back.

I wandered around for a bit and fell in love with a painting that featured a boy selling a wheelbarrow of fish, with wild curly hair and blue eyeliner eyes.

Then He came out and walked leisurely past me, towards a back room to fill up a coffee cup. I couldn’t help it and stole a glace. I could barely remember how he looked like, because he’d never given me a chance to. (But already I had a crush on him, now how is that possible?)

We were shoplifting each other’s graces. He was equally as guilty, so more blueberry smiles to go around. My pulse increased, and my fingers felt a little jittery. There was a painting with two milk bowls on them, and I could see nothing but an erotic imagery of vague definition. My mind simply kept on trying to eroticize the milk-bowls. Milk-bowls-blueberry-smile- Milk-bowls-blueberry-smile, so on and on.

He wasn’t going back into the office. Instead, he started talking to an old man who sounded rather pompous, like one of those modern art-snobs that had visited virtually every gallery in Europe but had nothing better to say about them then what was in the brochures. He wasn’t even talking about the paintings, he was talking about the galleries.

But I suppose some can liken it to a conversation about a provocative author instead of his writing. In which case it would make sense, and I am being an art snob myself for saying what I just did.

My heart was still fluttering. Out of the corner of my eye, I felt him continually stealing glances. And it was a completely different sort of emotion, far flung from the sensation I was used to getting while flirting in a bar. It felt silly, and childish, and truly novel. I hadn’t felt like that since thirteen. I was flirting with a guy I couldn’t possibly touch.

The old man walked away and He made his way to the entrance of the office, but did not enter. My eyes were glazing over the painting beside the entrance. Walk past him, smile, say hi, do something, Damnit!

‘Are you having a good day?’

I broke out into a big smile,

‘Great! I love the new collection. Especially the Larrieu, however you pronounce his name.’

He returned the big smile.

‘Did you get to meet him? He was here two weeks back to launch the exhibit. You did get the invite, didn’t you?’

“Oh yeah, I met him from a distance. I wasn’t invited, and didn’t have the desire to crash such a chic function.’

I can’t quite remember what he said at this point, but he basically hinted that he’d talked to me before (he might have. From what I recall, I was with an inept art student -not being narcissistic, but I genuinely think she had no flair for illustration art-, and he had probably been talking to her continually while looking at me, equally as frequently. That is unfortunately simply what I’d like to believe now and cannot possibly be the entire truth of the matter.)

But I had a feeling he remembered me. He kept on insisting that he couldn’t believe I didn’t get the invite because he’d seen me around so many times, someone must have given it to me tot ou tard.

I started asking him to pick out paintings he really liked, and not uncannily, we both had a taste for all the most beautiful paintings. In the gallery. Go figure. We talked about Kaplan, and he mentioned that it was a pity I didn’t meet him when he was here to launch his exhibit, since I did seem to be very enamored of his genius.

‘Kaplan has fabulous composition. Fascinating techniques for focus.’

Being terribly incompetent when it came to the more technical aspects of painting, I could only talk about the subject matter. Some retarded diatribe about the way Kaplan was so incredible because was able to mingle very civil elements of human society that focused on the fundamental tenets of human culture –romance, love, pleasure through the depiction of numerous cafes (which make me think of words like serendipity, because who hasn’t thought of meeting their soul mate in a clandestine coffee bar.) with perfect, unsullied nature.

‘He combines everything and everything just looks like they should be together. The juxtaposition of the human and the natural’

When I thought about it later, I realized by saying that, I have the intrinsic belief that humanity was no longer natural.

We had a rather pleasant conversation over the new collection, which I doubt anyone would care to hear about. Then he pointed out this one particular piece that I had been glazing over while still waiting for him to make the first move. My back had been facing towards it, and he touched my shoulder lightly to turn my focus. It was brief and unsure, and I am almost convinced I imagined the entire thing. The tension was incredible. I can’t possibly know what he felt, but on my part, it steamed (not sizzled). This was so much better then all the times I’d cozied up to people I didn’t know at Cayote. Better then being sandwiched between perfect strangers, beautiful though they could have been. A million different scenarios ran thought my head based on ‘what if I kissed him. Right Now.’

The painting was a riot of colours and looked like something out of a pop-out children’s book. But it was gorgeous.

‘Don’t you think the flowers look like marshmallows? I love that one, because I’m a fan of marshmallows.’

I was quite surprised –and mildly please at this strange, personal revelation.

‘I’m more of a donut-with-the-jelly inside kinda girl. But those flowers make me think of candy pop-corn.’

He said something, and I felt like it meant that the world was so grey it needed paintings with riotous colours and ordered disorder to abate some of the blandness. And as he said it, I really noticed him. How he looked like. And I thought he was simply gorgeous, and distinguished, and possibly much older then me, but why should that matter? There was a call for him, and I’d like to think he was almost disappointed he had to leave me and I had to go. There were many promises of an invite to the next exhibit.

So I finally managed to talk to the French guy at the gallery.

And I can’t believe I forgot to ask for his name.

xoxox

Friendster Network Nightmare

Have you EVER thought about how many people you've slept with to the second degree?

I made a rough maximum estimate today. It had to be an estimate, because some guys never disclose exactly how many partners they've had. I suppose it would be a weird thing to do, but they usually don’t mind telling when I ask, because I'm not one to bitch about sexual histories. I have no right to, after all.

Back to my estimate: Refer to title of post.

Anyway, if you have never calculated, you should. It’s Black Comedy, Self-Mockery, Satisfaction and Aversion, all at once. You know why it would be satisfying, because when you relegate the people you’ve slept with into mere figures, they feel more like trophies then personalities.

Shame on you.

xoxox

What the Hell?

My couzzie's a DJ?
And on one of the hottest radio stations too?
She sounds terribly manufactured, but I cannot deny, absolutely fantastic at the same time.

I am duly envious.

xoxox

My Cellphone is Badly Behaved.

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Absolute Morality and Blasphemy

Mr. Big can get quite puritanical at times, and totally against my grain of morality. Presuming that I have any strong direction in the first place of course. We had a perfectly boring conversation about places to have sex in. He didn’t have any particular preference, but doing it in public places is always fun. Mine was theatre backstage of course.

Then it was the church thing. You know, the Church thing. Everyone seems to want to have sex in a church, or maybe I’m just hanging with the spiritually amoral these days.

“I would have sex in a church. I never really thought about it, but now that you ask, I would.” I told him.

I have fantasized about it, many times, but that was eons ago when making out in public places was still necessary since I couldn’t make out at home, or at whoever-it-was’s place. The parentals were never too keen on it, for all their libertine qualities. And it was back when I was still attending a church with a real sanctuary, the classical sort that’s mostly roof and made from slanted panels of wood. I forgot about it for many years, possibly because I started attending one of those modern places of worship not very unlike a cinema theatre. And also because my spiritual direction switched from one of being-forced-to (who wants to spend their Sundays listening to scripture that tells them what they already know? Which would be that they were constantly being punished for their own good and because they deserve it.) to one of because-it-feels good.

I used to listen to Manson (both Marilyn and Shirley) at top volume during the sermon till it pissed my parents off so incredibly much they excluded me from their Sunday Morning rituals. I obviously had no respect for the religion, and wanted to go to hell, because it looked like a great deal more fun. So sex in a church was (un)naturally appealing under all circumstances, as long as they were confined to my imagination. And appealing always in reality as long as there were no one around. The most sacrilegious aspect of it was that, at this time, I was in the sanctuary a great deal. Most certainly, I was spiritually confused. Yeah, on one hand I hated listening to sermons, yet on the other, it gave me great pleasure to attend care meetings and be criticized on a personal level for my behaviour, and constantly tell myself I would be a better girl after each time (never succeeding of course). There was something so redeeming in being chastized by someone else, along with being told what I had to do to redeem my character. It was as if I were being punished for my deliverance, and it was satisfying, because people simply love to deserve their own salvation (People love to work for things, for some strange reason. We’re all masochistic like so.) It was also fun to listen to other people’s confessions.

Mr. Big told me I was being absolutely blasphemous, and that my thoughts showed no respect what so ever. And to my own faith too.

‘It’s not a place I’m hell-bent to have sex in. I wouldn’t do it for the sake of doing it, but if the opportunity happens to occur, it wouldn’t bother me. (Depending on the context it’s done in of course).’

Namely, I wouldn’t do it on the alter, nor will I degrade any holy symbolism. But sex is sex, and at that point in time in all that physical exaltation, who cares where it is. But even as I said all that junk, I had a sense that it was wrong, at the same time feeling like if I were in the situation, I wouldn’t feel like it were wrong. I don’t have any answers for myself of course, and it doesn’t bother me. Chances are, It’s never going to happen.

‘But can you NOT do it. It’s not big deal, so don’t.’

‘Well, someone’s full of absolute morality.’ I derided.

‘We need that sometimes.’

‘But human nature is so variable, and the nature of the situations we get in are of infinite possibility. To apply a singular law to each an every one, and in ever situation is just not sensible.’ (I had to say that.)

‘Don’t you think it’s precisely because human nature is so variable, and subjected to the whimsical that we need absolute morality? You, most of all.’

And since I am so open to correction, I could not disagree. He did have a point.

However, here’s my take on absolute morality, from a very charismatic point of view. That it is in place to bring out our sin. Because the truth is, it is absolutely impossible to conform to absolute morality. And since the Christian faith is all about the acceptance of grace, then it would make sense for us to give up hope on ourselves and be entirely open to grace as the only form of redemption.

Yes indeed, you may go ahead and think about what sort of bullshit am I spewing since being under grace doesn’t seem to make me any more moral then the local whores.

But hey, let him who has not sinned cast the first stone.

And I still find the idea of making impassioned love in a Byzantine cathedral right after I kiss the groom terribly romantic. (I’ll remember to go for hymen reconstruction first of course!)

xoxox