Melt

If only staring at it would reproduce in my mind the taste of its scandalous, melting juiciness.

Crave has many facets. This is one of them.

The Colour of Breeze

city lights

Melt into the dazzle of lights and ceaseless traffic.
Feel the pulse but from a detached position.
Be intoxicated most importantly - by the restless city that goes on even when you fall and tear away from the ceaseless lights and dazzle of traffic.

Likes :)

Wish List

Time to indulge in a wish list. Things I yearn, though not necessarily in that order (but you are not supposed to believe this).

1) Macbook
2) VACATION
2) DSLR Camera
3) I-Phone
5) Coffee Weekends
6) Beach/Island Getaway
7) Run
8) Swim
9) SLEEP
10) Read my books and Magazines
11) Lomo Camera
12) Work Overseas
13) More Money, Get Richer!
14) Retire and enjoy life (obviously)

I did say it's a wish list. One therefore wishes for anything under the sky, otherwise why have a wish list.

"...when we're still young"

Now and then, I may receive an sms from Ms K that would draw an instant smile from me. She's got these quotable sms-es that are short but which are either delivered with a witty touch or they convey certain genuine truths, breezily.

"Ey are you up for yakitori shunjuu this weekend? SX and i in office thinking about how to get a life"

I so laughed at this when I saw it, and promptly read it to my colleague. It was a Friday evening.

"Ya. we are a bit nuts. But might as well play when we're still young."

This, after I declined to join her and others for a late night session of games, because I needed early sleep! But how true it was, that we'd better do the things we could while we are, relatively speaking, still young.

I have to say, the K siblings have this almost inherited insouciant and breezy attitude that charms and makes you smile. You just need to hang out with them and hear them speak to feel it.

The other day when I was with Ms K, Deb - her sis - and friends, Deb looked at her very exhausted friend and said:

"You slept at 6(am) and woke up at 10(am) - But that's the life of a happening person."

This, delivered in the right pitch and level of excitement (not much, but just right) that only the K sisters are capable of conveying. And I mean this as a compliment.

Water no more: same same but different

One of the things that tiny city-state Singapore will never escape is its intertwined relationship with its northern neighbour, Malaysia. I thought it interesting but unsurprising how the recent news of a water agreement between the two states coming to an end was differently portrayed in the national media. There's no subtlety at all, how the news was portrayed in each of the country, as with most other news relating to bilateral issues between the two neighbours.

The headlines in Channel News Asia on 26 April is:
"S'pore will not renew one water agreement with M'sia which expires next year"'

And the headlines in Straits Times on 27 April is:
No need to renew water deal

Now consider the headlines in the Malaysian National News agency, Bernama, on 27 April:
Johor To Stop Selling Water To Singapore From Skudai Plant Next Year

I think I need not explain further how the headlines would influence the respective domestic readers on the same issue. I thought the distinction just stood out so starkly when I came across the articles. Yet it's all nothing new.

Sunday, 6:44PM

Ingredients of a happy Sunday afternoon

1. Foamy Beer


2. Children art in multiple colours


3. Things hanging around for semblance of creativity


4. Downright unhealthy food


I like lazy weekend afternoons spent at cozy hideouts. (:

Seletar revisited

I said I would be back.

The decision to make good my promise was actually made on a moment of impulse. The good weather today fuelled my urge to be outdoor and enjoy the lovely breeze. My morning plan to cycle had failed, but I was stirred in the afternoon to take a second chance. I was in town when the urge to cycle to Seletar came upon me with a desperate urgency, so much so that I was willing to take a cab home before the evening gets swallowed by darkness.

In the end I managed to get to Seletar before dark, lingering there till the last light faded into darkness. Though it would have been nice if I had reached earlier, I was nevertheless able to enjoy a tranquil evening surrounded by big open spaces, water, voluminous clouds and plenty of silence. I felt contented.


The long inviting road packed with vehicles at the sides


Enjoying some me-time and the view in front


There were a few families around, amongst other people who have also come to enjoy the lovely space here.


The two brothers keeping each other company


It was nice seeing the kites. One of them went really high.


Such as this...


The clouds shifted to let in the crimson red burst through


I went into unchartered terrain, literally


The long road ahead was mostly empty. I would have gone on to Sengkang had the road not been sealed at one end by a fence not interrupted the road.


Scenes like this just stop me in my track. I can just admire it for a long, long time.


The old Seletar's gone, so very sad. I kept cycling into the small roads joining the remaining houses, but always came to a dead-end. The residential area has shrunk to a miserable puny area. The old England is lost.

For the Nostalgic

Just what stirs feelings of nostalgia? Is it a yearning for the yesterdays that were but now etched as mere memories? Or is it an unconscious lapse into the past that is ever drifting further away from our consciousness; an impulse, if you like.

I don't know, but I think nostalgia is a self-affirming need. Who we are and how we perceive ourselves must surely be related to the past. Feeling nostalgic is about making a connection to the present with the past, and making sense of our otherwise meaningless life.

I think nostalgia is also a natural defence mechanism, being at work when we want to block off alientation, loss, fear and even frustration. Familiarity, after all, lends a sense of reassurance.

During my early years, I actually grew up listening to Chinese music. That was until I'd had enough of crap music and endless advertisement and deejays' talking on the radio. Like every generation who believe that the music of their era is the 'real stuff', the more authentic, I also think (chinese) music from the long yesteryears were much better in terms of their sincerity and meaningfulness.

During my secondary school days, a classmate of mine, who inclines towards English and all things western, once conceded that English songs can never convey emotions and feelings to the same levels of depth and intensity as chinese songs. I believe this is mainly due to the fact that Chinese is a poetic and culturally rich language, and its words convey so much more meaning and depth than the English language.

I often hear chinese pop songs from the nineties whenever I walk to or passed by the back lane that has many shops selling things. The music is loud, but most of the times I didn't mind because the songs playing were familiar and pleasant pieces. Hearing them inevitably reminded me of earlier times, and I would be suffused with a warm fuzzy sense of elation. And these days while taking the overcrowded trains, I find myself tuning in to chinese music stations, hoping to catch a familiar nice song.

Perhaps I have been living an extended period of nostalgia, trying to relive the past through the songs I once heard and enjoyed fondly. For the nostalgic, it is through yesterday's sights, sounds, smell and feel that bring back memories of our younger days. Listening to old songs reminds me just how much it is that our life journey's accompanied by music, different songs playing to different era.

I am not alone

Over email with T today, I actually felt better after the short email exchange with her. I think that's what they called, Connection.

Prelude: T sent me a url.

Me: Every now and then i feel like im having a little life crisis. These days feel like another such period. Sigh.

T: YES I know what you mean. I think I’ve hit the “crisis” several times, but this time it’s a wall!

Me: You need to break down the wall then. Haha.

Me: Thanks, it was nice reading your email. ;) You make me feel like I am not alone out there, that there are others feeling the same and facing similar 'problems'.

T: You are definitely not alone.
Ahhaha, there’s plenty of us in the same bloody dilemma.
Where to from here.

The exceptional Vagrants

I finished reading The Vagrants by Li Yiyun about two weeks ago. It was one of those excellent storybooks that kept me turning the pages once I get started on it. I remembered staying up late one night just to finish the last few pages even though the end turned out to be more than a few pages.

The novel is written in the third-person and the language style is simple and straightforward. Yet it is this simplicity and third-person narrative that betrays an understated poignancy and suppressed tension that holds the plot tightly.

The story examines the impulses of and psychological effects on people living under communism in the 1970s. Through a singular event - the execution of a young woman who had lost faith in communism - the writer cast light on a host of particular characters and general townfolks: their attitudes under a communist regime; the way they live and perceive their lives and other people; and the forces that shape their private lives. As you read the novel, you feel almost furtively let in into a town hanging on suspense and permeated with unuttered fear.

In particular, I admire the writer's way of telling the story at times through the lenses of other characters or through narrating multiple events simultaneously. Her perceptiveness and adroit craft is demonstrated when she writes about separate but related events that are taking place at the same time, using this to great effect in heightening certain truths or episodes.

I've taken the liberty to extract the following paragraphs which I thought powerfully conveyed a significant episode. This was achieved mainly through the eyes and minds of the seemingly random and important people that appear in her novel.

"Disturbed too were other souls. A female prison guard, off duty for the next two days, claiming she had a minor cold, woke up from a fitful dream and gasped for air; her husband, half-asleep, asked her if she felt unwell. A ridiculous nightmare, she answered, knowing enough not to tell him that she had fainted at work earlier that morning, when the warden had ordered that Gu Shan's vocal cords be severed so that she could not shout counterrevolutionary slogans at the last minute. The woman had been among the four guards assigned to pin the prisoner down for the procedure, but it had not gone as smoothly as promised by the warden and the doctor; the prisoner had struggled with a vehemence that one would not have imagined could come from her skinny body, and the female guard, whose nerve was unusually up to her work, had fallen backward and bumped her head hard on the floor before the doctor finally finished the operation.

Unable to sleep, in another house, was an old orderly for the police station. I tell you, he said to his wife, who answered that she did not want to be reminded for another time about the bucket of blood he had washed off the police jeep that had transferred the prisoner. But it was unusual, he said; I tell you, it was a horrible thing, to clean up so much blood. What did they do to her? Why couldn't they wait until they got her onto the island to finish her off? He threw one question after another at his wife, who was no longer listening. He was getting old, after waiting for answers that his wife would not give him, the man thought sadly; he had fought in the war against the Japanese when he was a boy and he had seen plenty of bodies, but now he could not sleep because of a bucket of blood from a woman who was no longer alive. The story would make his old platoon friends laugh at the next reunion, the old man thought, and then he realised that he was the last one remaining who had not reported to the other side.

She had to die anyway, one of the two surgeons who had operated on Gu Shan told himself one more time - so it didn't matter, in the end, that they had changed the protocol because the patient did not believe in receiving something from a corpse and insisted that the prisoner be kept alive when the kidneys were removed. This was not the most challenging operation for him, but it would be the one to make him the chair of the surgery department, and put his wife into the position of the head nurse in internal medicine, though she was still unaware of her promotion and would be overjoyed when she found out about it. It would also help their twin daughters, fourteen and a half and blossoming into a pair of young beauties, to get a recommendation from the city government so that they could go to an elite hight school in the provincial capital. The man thought about his wife and his daughters - they were fast asleep in their innocent dreams, unplagued by death and blood; the burden was on his shoulders, the man of the household, and he found it hard not to ponder the day when he could no longer shelter them, the two daughters especially, from the ugliness of a world that they were in love with now, rosebudlike girls that they were. What then? he wondered, painfully aware of his limitations as a man trapped between practicality and conscience. In the end, he had to make himself believe that he had chosen the best for his family. The long-needed sleep rolled over him like a tide and washed him offshore.

In an army hospital a hundred miles away, medicine dripped into an old man's vein. He was surrounded by people congratulating themselves on the success of the transplant operation. And in Muddy River, in a hospital populated by many more patients and fewer doctors and nurses, sat Mrs Gu, who was dozing off at the drip-drip of the saline solution into her husband's arm. Now and then she woke up and watched her husband's face, shrunken and suddenly too old for her to recognize."