despite a wretched eye


the worse thing about the Inconveniently Sore Eye is that i cannot go and run. but i really want to run. and run. and run.

+++

s is getting married on saturday so the office had dinner at indochine - conversation was very light-hearted and open; i told s ( a french girl with a vespa) that i listen to air and francoise hardy and i learnt that the french don't pronounce the 'h' and i asked about charlotte gainsbourg's cd which i haven't heard and she says it is very nice and tells me about serge gainsbourg; and i learnt that y wants to go to prague because of kafka and his meloncholy; and e told us the story of how her father reinvented the milo formula for the company to make it good - it originally wasn't so - and then drinks later at a cuban pub at clarke quay with live music that was too loud so we could only talk during intervals - okay now! thirty seconds -and s was surprised i drink beer; and there was a stoned indian family with three daughters on holiday staring into space, unreactive to the enthusiastic cuban musicians on stage - the thing about the music is, s said, it all sounds the same. and i nod and stare at a pop-up map of cuba on the wall with my black bespectacled 'schoolteacher-ish' eyes. and i love the company of these people - so real, uninhibited and candid.

+++

i must work smartly, hard-ly and sensitively.

+++

it is all a miracle. not on my own will, ever.

+++

ee jie is back = good homecooked food

+++



zooey d. with a wooden heart in a previous lula spread

i picked up a copy of RUSSH and although it is australian it is very pretty and good. i didn't buy nylon because it's the myspace issue and i am fairly irritated with that. also, lula is nice to browse through. the next issue is out in september.

i have an eye infection - yesterday my eye really bothered me so mingyao came and sent me home to get my spectacles and then to the doctor for some medicine and today i looked like somebody punched me in the right eye - mingyao came to pick me up and we had lunch then he sent me to the office - you look like a schoolteacher with your glasses, the boss said - you look like you watched too many korean dramas, she commented of my swelled-up eye.

sunday fun

today tomorrow yesterday now later afterwards last week next month in a while i pretty much love you. we bought magazines at the bookstore and slept in the car.

+++

met up with brenda after the stint at vivocity and had vietnamese beef noodles at nude at wisma which is a nice place to be at and then at the japanese supermarket she shopped for natadecoco jelly and i shopped for strawberry gummies and then we had smoothies behind borders. random random.

i love random.

this morning's ten minute don't-know-what-to-it breakfast was a quick fry in the mini pan - threw in shitake mushroom sauteed in teriyaki sauce, oregano flakes and lemon and pepper seasoning - scrambled in an egg and lay everything on a bed of romaine lettuce on a toasted whole meal bread slice and a dash of honey mustard (i have been honey-mustard-ing everything) and a slice of lemon and carr biscuits with seseme seeds. it was nice but boring because i need new sauces.

+++

last night's sushi date was at sun-moon something at wheelock place because chris was working there and she was cute, making sure she got our orders so she could serve them to us and pour tea precariously on a tray. whilst the salmon was firm and fresh, i still prefer the texture of the tuna belly sashimi at wasabi tei. nevertheless the portions were enough albeit expensive and creative and flavourful - mingyao ordered a yakisoba and with some creative addition of japanese mayo it tasted slightly closer to the one at elizabeth arcade in melbourne.

and then a scoop of ice cream each at hagaan daaz in siglap after a random walk about in town.

+++

i didn't believe i could ever do random, mundane things again with relish, during thesis, so everything is a happy thing now.

one wedding to attend this week and another next week. now with the city exhibition prep out of the way i can finally try to work out some workout schedule and discipline myself to sleep properly so i can run several mornings a week before work - i refuse to suscribe to the gym thing.

+++

ee jie is back! hooray.

the current issue of metropolis magazine is pretty interesting. i particularly like this article, plus that brave article about d&s. plus i have the latest monocle! finally! the new morning ride read. kerouac takes a backseat when monocle is here.

+++

tomorrow is sushi date with mister awesome!

mingyao is subject of the day

i had lunch with mingyao! he fetched me from work and it was raining and we shared an umbrella as we crossed the streets in the cbd and we had a saussage each from the hotdog stand outside uob centre after a mediocre lunch at the food centre after collecting two blue shirts from bobby the tailor.

on sunday i watched spiderman with mingyao! we held hands in the movie theatre and sometimes i saw him watching me and sometimes i watched him and sometimes we watched the show and i ate my japanese candy from the isetan supermarket downstairs and we had man tous and misc. misc. food and chinese tea from la mian crystal jade palace and there was a pompous big-haired lady with her nose in the air waltzing through the line with her uppity children.


+++

and then dinner with mingyao as he came by again to pick me - feels like it was a long time ago since we last met, he says as i get into the car, and i agree and we had a quick dinner at the basement of park mall before he went to church and i went home clutching the latest copy of metropolis magazine with a very lush pale pink and white cover.

milo from a big round milo tin.

coffee with brown sugar from a glass jar and condense milk from a milk lady (?) tin can.

that's how we do drinks at work.

+++

this weekend i have to recharge proper. i have to clear up some (literal) mess at home and do some school things and sleep alot. and run alot. i need to get into that focused thesis mode to get the rigour right.

+++

mingyao is a blessing a million times over.

i love you now

and now

and now

and now

today a client, a feisty elderly mother asked me, if i were from a convent school.

record the smells, record the lights, record the sounds, record the textures, record the arabian carpets on bare concrete floors, the refuelling of tea looking out into the backyard of brown wooden frames and green frosted window glass...

"time for some serious action"

friday night was dinner with yvette and shiv along the winding waters and we stuffed ourselves with what should be a carnivore's dream at brewerks - huge beef patties medium well done in between oversized bread - dash of mustard and dips of barbacue sauce and some light beer and shiv had a hot dog with melted cheese draped over and yvette says wide-eyed, you mean they use whole real oninons in oninon rings (something like that) and it was cute and we walk to the carpark and the boys they look over shiv's car and do the manly talk about engines and sound and something about boot space while yvette and i stood and the side and admired colour and the shape of the car light - looks slightly like mingyao's car, i said. and we wave goodbye and mingyao says where to next (it's a friday night, he says) and we drove to the airport - for once he says let's do coffee - but he orders a snapple and i order an iced coffee with syrup and we sit at the corner playing - worms - on his handphone and the conversation amongst the friends on the next table that punctured over was lame and so empty it made me cringe - but - worms - it was so fun. quote of the night would have had to be - now for some serious action - as the boyfriend takes his turn to bazooka my worms.

extracts from jack kerouoc's lonesome traveler: chapter 5_ new york scenes

"Lester Young played there just before he died and used to sit in the back kitchen between sets. My buddy poet Allen Ginsberg went back and got on his knees and asked him what he would do if an atom bomb fell on New York. Lester said he would break the window in Tiffany's and get some jewels anyway...

...Let's get out of here, it's too literary. - Let's go get drunk on the Bowery or eat those long noodles and tea in glasses at Hong Fat's in Chinatown. - What are we always eating for? Let's walk over the Brooklyn Bridge and build up another appetite. - How about some okra on Sands Street"...

..Beatnik Angel Peter Orlovsky in the supermarket five doors away buying Uneeda Biscuits (late Friday night), ice cream, caviar, bacon, pretzels, sodapop, TV Guide, vaseline, three toothbrushes, chocolate milk (dreaming of roast suckling pig), buying whole Idaho potatoes, raisin bread, wormy cabbage by mistake, and fresh-felt tomatoes and collecting purple stamps. - Then he goes home broke and dumps it all on the table, takes out a big book of Mayakovsky poems, turns on the 1949 television set to the horror movie, and goes to sleep.

And this is the beat night life of New York."

favourite windows of the month





we go really retro. everyday smells of dried fish, cinnamon, spices and odd fragrances at the entrance, up faded concrete stairs and swirling tactile timber balustrades, peering into the old merchant offices - i see typewriters and and old water flasks - glass bricks in the staircase core and in through steel grilles and we have painted wall tiles in the kitchen and original pink and white flower-patterned floor tiles. i love the windows best.

the end and the beginning

"But the individual who walks up straight to (God) looks into his face and rises confidently to his shoulder. And is powerful with respect to God. And is critical for God. And this gives me the heart for life: that I must be great in order to benefit his greatness, that I must simplify myself in order not to complicate him, and that somewhere my seriousness connects with the seriousness in his being..." - p. 220


and with that i end of this book i chose so carefully with my first borders coupon, that i initially begun with reluctance but gradually devoured with relish, a hunger like a baby for milk, that i took to phuket with me on the family trip in december through to end of thesis on the train ride. dog-eared and scribbled on, it is now worthy to be stuffed into the overweight shelf. and i will begin on the next book.

trainrides are always wonderful if one has an ipod full of awesome tunes and a good book, provided one is not exhausted. i love dressing up. i need better shoes. i need to run tomorrow. i can't stand feeling sluggish. it hurts like a bad book.

i have been loving everyday since monday. today on the way home, i finished this book. Rilke writes exactly how i have been feeling - an exuberance, sometimes a tremour of excitment, sometimes a little fear. I have been discovering new things in old spaces everyday.

"Now she felt that grown-up's prerogative of experiencing everything the trees and creeks underwent, of witnessing nto just the sunniness, the things that are easily bearable and fill one with happiness, but also what was sad and solemn in nature, as if she were now an adult being initiated into a whole range of relations and shown everything that might frighten and shatter a child..."

"This is what enables us to live more peacefully and in a deeper agreement with nature, i.e., more intuitively. If behind our sadness a shimmering springtime flickers and moves about in high clouds,then our sadness will be more healtfelt, and our feeling dons purple robes when it forms wreaths out of falling leaves and expends all the colours of October without any thought of what their dying means.-..."

"I want to have an autumn. I want to cover myself over with winter and not betray my presence with any colour. I want to remain snowed in for the sake of a coming sprintime so that what is germinating inside me might not rise prematurely from the furrows..." - p. 200-201

Diaries of a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke

shopping superlove





it's like first day of school all over again. i stocked up on stationery, muji style. a new grey filofax with cute cream paper clips and a new white stapler. i also bought a dark blue cotton top from muji - love it - with mandarin collars and a pretty good fit. and of course, a new book - 35 percent discount borders coupon was a catalyst - for an exciting travelling time.

that was after having lunch with sharon and ying at serangoon gardens. we are so un-zen. we all talk gilmore girls - style with sharon winning hands down like a bullettrain.

it's been a whirlwind. the blessings just keep coming - much to give thanks for. feels like i'm at the eye of a storm but there's always the bubbling under.

"Don't seek refuge from your uncertainties in art. Only when for the first time some experience takes hold of you, in this first coalescence of your being, whether from grief and loss or from abundance, then throw yourself into art blindly, eagerly, and with unmitigated confidence. Then you will receive an image in art, an image that makes you who you will be. Will see towering into the sky the figure whose darkening, agitated wave-image you are, will know that you exist somehwere else, eternal and serene, and that only your reflection will vanish when one day you withdraw yourself along with your true being fromt he deep waters of life..." - p. 166

homework tonight. mingyao and crab tomorrow.

for the record

after cellgroup on thursday we sped (metaphorically) to crystal jade kitchen at holland village for fried rice and chinese-style fried squid (like calamari but with a great salty taste)and shopped for vegetables at 1215am at cold storage.

i look at those signs like an eager child after lollipops. i still toy with the idea and i will definately meddle with it somehow one day. for now i will be focused on this one.

"This daily attentiveness, alertness, and egarness of the senses turned outward, this thousandfold seeing and seeing always away from onself...This purity of life, this always being joyful becuase something always is happening, not that it has any bearing on one's own personality, but simply that there is motion and change. How large the eyes become here. They want at all times to possesss the whole sky...one stores up beauty the way one does knowledge and bits of wisdom. One scarcely uses it...the time hasn't come yet. One learns. One learns always and from every moment..." - p. 163

no time for war and peace. i will just finish the diaries by this week. then i need a new story for train rides - reading is a balm to soothe the annoying claustrophobia, for in my mind i can be in a field.

what i keep thinking about is the light from the window with the retro window grills. light in its various personalities can really affect my inspired nature. subconsciously, that was one factor.

"we walk through the heath together, in the evening wind..." - p. 147

we ordered in pizza and watched a rented dvd on the plasma. we walked around east coast avenue in the light of the lamps after dinner. we went into the petrol station and bought a drink each. we had a supper drink of teh ping at siglap.

tired and in love.

"For in all the best fairy tales there is no yearning. All possibilities arch over them, so close that yearning is much too long an arm..." - p. 148

somehow after every submission i read something from f. scott fitzgerald - somehow to bask in the dancing mood of luxury and indulgence - perhaps that is the overflowing of the sense of freedom. however, before the monday of beginning comes, i shall, inspired by rilke, finally start and finish the monumental war and peace, which i've always tried to start but never gone beyond fifteen pages.

"I am currently reading War and Peace. I am in volume one, and my fullest sympathies are with Prince Andre. All the best passages I have marked." - p. 133, Rilke, Diaries of Young Poet.

Parallel lines, move so fast,
toward the same point,
infinity is as near as it is far.

parallel lines, kings of convenience

amazing on every page

"But we do not become rich by having something dwell in our hands and wither there...but the things are meant to wander on beyond our hands, sturdy and strong, and we are meant to retain nothing of them but the courageous morning song that floats and shimmers behind their fading steps...

that sensuality is not a secret flame that always breaks out in the same place - let that be our pride and strength. we want it to become a cheerful torch that we hold laughingly behind all the transparencies of our being..." - p. 87

...if the poet does not come to the land that raised him, then that land will come through all things to the poet..." - p. 121

"Each thing is only a space, a possibility, and it is up to me to fill it perfectly or poorly. For since human beings and circumstances are so capricious and forever in turmoil, by what is one to measure oneself if not by the willing things?"

"This is the first presentiment of something eternal: to haev the time for love" - p. 123

+++

yesterday, i begun a new beginning. i threw away my tendencies for mindless day-slumber and threw myself straight into what i fear i might not accomplish. It might have been the rigour of the past weeks, fusing into the sudden freedom, the train wreck of emotions coming to a halt and then a gentle huffing across terrains, the view of the august goal in perspective, the need to be an adult at twenty six, overdosing in green tea, or the snowy diffused lights coming in from the fifth floor of that building, the love for my family, for mingyao and the love for life and living or the prodding of God.

but i have begun it and i will do it well. In every aspect i will strive to be as inquisitive as a child and i will see it with new eyes. embrace embrace. new shoes should help pretty well.