Deus et Aemaeth

Note: This was also meant to be on my KI blog. If you have a weak brain or an unhealthy obsession with religious dignity, I suggest you go away.



I’ve always, always, HATED puppets.

Even now as I declare it I half harbour a superstitious fear that they will hear, and they will revenge. But the fear stays between my heart and my stomach, somewhere in my gall bladder, simmering in yellow juice until it is ejected away with the urea and the saccharine.

When I was small I must confess that I wanted a doll very badly, because I had none: the best my parents had scraped up for me was – if I remember – Lego. We played with Lego day and night and built houses with the bricks and hopped the little yellow figurines around inside, their little Lego worlds accounting for squares worth forty-by-forty smaller squares and the number of bridges we could build between them. We disassembled little Lego people to see how the joints worked and switched the heads around so that a head with a little synthetic ponytail will end up on a muscle-bound torso printed with synthetic tattoes. We played little games with the little Lego people I can never remember now, but I don’t think I ever want to watch a small child play at Lego. Lego is cruel.

My first doll was a second-hand Barbie. In the days where your peers routinely expected a Cabbage Patch monstrosity or half-sized automobiles (for Ken to pick Barbie up in) for your birthday, and took them to kindergarten to show them off, this was nothing next to a cardinal sin on the part of my parents, who really didn’t approve of dolls (for reasons concerning ‘creative toys’, but heck about that!). I think they were hoping to break me out of my Barbie fetish. In any case I didn’t care – I was fascinated. I broke a comb in her hopelessly dirty tangled mane and felt at the hard little bumps on her chest, wondering why my mum was soft. Then I made her lord it over all the other toys. Then my younger brother joined in, and the games evolved from tea parties to criminal interrogations. If children are cruel to Lego they should never be allowed anywhere near a doll. Susan Hill of the didactic morals on parental guidance evidently hasn’t remembered much of her own balanced childhood.

The trauma started before I twisted the little Barbie’s head off – by accident, I swear! – but didn’t deter me from asking for another doll, a brand-new one this time, because I knew something was wrong with the one I had – which I’d attributed to it’s second-hand-ness. Of course that didn’t solve what was really wrong, which stayed at large and elusive until it came back years after I’d completely forgotten about it. My mother wouldn’t buy me one I wanted, in a blue-purple taffeta ball dress, for some lame reason which I dismissed out of hand but complied with because one doll was better than pissing her off and getting no doll. (I thought.) So I got my new doll. It came in wholesome pink and white and had legs so varnished that they shone. This new alpha female had a catfight with the old and loved-off model the moment she came home: the old one lost on account of her head being lying somewhere in the depths of the toy-box, under an avalanche’s worth of discarded Lego. Then in a year I entered Primary Four and suddenly I had no time any more for toys. The crushing homework, the first computer game that ever saw the interior of my family’s apartment and new classroom politics put toys out of my mind for ever. I never even noticed when my mother got rid of them – but she must have, because they’re not anywhere any more. In fact if I came across my old doll’s head by itself on the floor now I’d scream. And never stop.

I first saw the Sims when I was twelve. To show off the game functions my friend made a whole family of Sims, built them a house, filled it with a fireplace and flammable stuff, put them in and removed the door. So the all the idiots died. (None of them even thought of opening a window to jump out.) What is relevant about this scenario is that we were manipulating them and their brief lives, yes, in what must seemingly be in a more godlike way, made real through the screen and the then-excellent graphics. But it still felt less real than twisting the head off a doll. I mean it. After all, I had two dolls, and. And.

It took me a decade to realise that neither doll had name. They were just 'The Barbie'. Not a real name, just a brand, something poor Mattel's daughter will have to live down.

Why the sudden soliloquy? – I’ve just watched Ghost in the Shell: Innocence. It is not a good anime to watch just a week before your first final exam, but here I go again, tempting fate. (Admittedly, the first first final exam is KI of all things, but that's irrelevant considering how all the other subjects are piled up behind it.) It didn’t put new questions into my mind on the subject of dolls – not hardly – it merely reawakened old ones… I wish I had a guardian angel to warn me whenever I skid past the sign on the rink that says ‘thin ice’. My mind is like an ice floe it has safe spots, weak spots, spots with holes in it for fishing and spots in which the smallest and most unsuspecting mosquito could sit on and probably shatter.

Why am I talking about dolls? – because dolls are the most anthropomorphic – personifications (ha!) – of people I have at hand. Because we train children to grow up with dolls to inflict with our desires, our beastiality and most faithful fear: we teach them to be children at dolls, because dolls can’t fight back. Puppets can’t fight back. A puppet sitting among its tangled strings, limp and hooked in unnatural ways, is a terrifying sight. A puppet being openly manipulated across the stage in a show is slightly more bearable only mostly because the terror is hidden behind the story. A puppet being openly manipulated by a hand to do horrible things to itself is fodder for a recurring nightmare. Shit, that I think of it means I have to wish I’d better not actually dream about it, because if I do at this critical period I am going to start screaming in the middle of my math promos. And never stop.

Why are all religions so fanatically sacrificial? In multi-cultural Singapore I see masochism everywhere I walk. People staple themselves all over with huge long pins and carry pretty portable pavilions on them which must weigh like hell; people walk on fire; people slaughter goats ceremoniously; people are nailed onto crosses. In fact in the Month of the Hungry Ghost it is said that people used to sacrifice a pair of young children to the fire to pay company to the deceased so their ancestors won’t get lonely. Now they are replaced with effigies of cheap papier clothes and cheap gold leaf and rouge’d cheeks that rubs your fingers red and black eyes, black eyes that put the fear of death in you, if they are all you are going to receive after you die, and Mamoru Oshii must have had seen a ceremony like that as well because he put it in his movie. He knows. He has the benefit of age and experience over me and so he is overwhelming; at the same time given the proof of his existence I can’t help but believe that there are other people around the world who feel the same.

And this is why this is on my blog. You can slap me with a jail term for bureaucratically-defined general disillusionment. I am telling my truth.

Fake-drawn children’s faces ashing, curling in fantastic curlicues from the edges in, revealing their paper vulnerability before they are altogether burnt: in the roaring wavering of flame their eaten bodies seem to writhe, and this is why they are consigned to fire of all things – through the fire we see the way to heck. This is the way in which they travel; the flakes in the sky are merely the flesh.

This is what I imagine in my head if I ever voice out my objections.



Me: *$&#@!

Mother: Shhh! Be quiet! (cue cursory threats of impending pain.) Be quiet! (giving up.) Shut up!

Me: But it’s -ing horrible! Stop it!

Mother: It’s traditional!

Me: I want to go home!

Mother: It’s not over yet! Show some respect to your grandmother!

Me: BUT THEY’RE THROWING KIDS INTO THE FIRE!

Mother: They’re not real kids! They’re ten bucks from the store down the road! They were made in a factory!



You have no idea how horrified I would be by the time I get to this part. Unless you do.


--
A quote from the movie: “We weep for a bird's cry, but not for a fish's blood. Blessed are those with voice. If the dolls also had voices, no doubt they would have screamed: ‘I didn't want to become human.’”
--



And a poem from me.



--
BARBIE

When I was midway little I possessed the one doll.
When you have only the one there is no need for a name.
She had too many shoes but one dress: the one in which she came,
Her long hair blonde and ready-brushed to a frenzied cotton-boll,
With silky spider legs rose-tanned, with breasts that came to points,
Cool cerise lipstick chipping off a bleached, clenched smile,
Enbalmed in plastic brilliance that made it hard to revile
The fact that she was a little… faulty at the joints.

I’d lavish hours on her alone regardless of the time,
In toy-gatherings of parties heaped with plastic foods sublime:
Shove gorgeous silver dancing shoes upon her stilted feet
And dream up her Prince Charming just to make the waltz complete –
And when I twist her head of (in accident!) and can’t fix her after all,
She was packed in separate boxes, and hid behind the wall.
--

Appearance and reality, ideal and ideology – ad nauseum please!

note: this is already on my KI blog, but since it is effectively hidden in the deluge of end-of-year articles corresponding to the release of all the assignments of Term 3 at the same time, here it is -- because I want it to be read by someone.



I was watching my mother trim the fat off a pink, stripped chicken when I suddenly thought: ‘so this is what we look like on the inside.’

It was a very disturbing thought. When you are a carnivorous little hypocrite like me it is best not to think too much about the stuff that tastes so good in your mouth. For all we know we could be eating the offspring of poor families deep-frozen from Victorian times.

That, if I may mention, is a disturbing thought too. Most disturbing, however, is the niggling notion clinging fiercely to the back of my brain that I wouldn’t mind trying the meat-as-it-is either – i.e. raw.

I bring up no defence against myself except for that it looked like a special kind of jelly. The canon of Pavlovian conditioning tells me that this might account for the strange impulses I get from staring at that slimy pink lump – but no. The jelly I like is radically different both in appearance and smell from a slab of limp substance on a chopping board. Moreover I have never tasted raw meat before, and have no inclination to act on the inclination to try. I have been fortunate enough to have eaten only vegetables, fruit and processed preservatives uncooked; the only exception would be three very thin slices of salmon, which bears only a superficial resemblance to the almost-defrosted chicken in the kitchen sink. Bye bye Pavlov.

The primal subconscious so dearly beloved by Freud and his bevy of little protegés is no excuse either. For one, if it were subconscious, why am I conscious of it? I’m only supposed to be conscious about other people’s subconsciousness(es). For another: the attraction has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with sex. All right, I know I grossly overgeneralise, but I’m not sure I am the only one of the world with these strange little urges to go picking at the dismembered corpses of dead fowl. In any case, if these ‘strange little urges’ were the unhappy remnants of the tastes and preferences of a triumphantly savage evolutionary throwback, I’m in hardly any position to help it – but what I can do is not follow up on the notion to pick up the oozing stuff and run away with it. Which is precisely what I did. Which brings us way back to the clash of civilisations – the clash between impulse and ideology.

A classic and ever-relevant example of this would be of how ‘Meat’ always sounds so much more appealing compared to ‘Muscles’ or ‘What might once have been the legs of an eating, breathing, defaecating being’. Once in my impressionable childhood I asked about what part of the animal we were eating at the moment and was reluctantly told ‘muscles’ – and when I tried to probe further I was firmly told to stop asking so many irritating questions. The scientific truth and its implications seem to be something everyone is quite happy to remain oblivious about. I slash my way through the foliage to reach it at my own peril.

This route of conversation is particularly pertinent because, being Chinese all the way down to my little toenails, I grew up eating Chinese – rice, cailan, hair fungus, crocodile soup. The Chinese are famous for being able to make a good dish out of everything and anything that may or may not move. This means a lot of difficult questions at dinnertime – and if you think the questions are bad, the answers are worse: it doesn’t help that my mother is a nurse who always knows exactly what we are eating. Liver, brain, lungs, kidneys, trotters, stomach – colon – sea cucumbers – all the things that normally go into sausages in the hardly less decadent worlds of traditional European cuisine, they come out unmauled and recognisable through the heavy sauces in weddings all over the country. Even better, these dishes tend to be exotic and very poetically-named: one is expected to be so grateful for the opportunity of actually getting to lay tongue and chopstick to these delicacies that any childish enquiries to the original functions of the unmentionables in the gravy was liable to get a smack in reply. A smack once too often tends to breed a certain complacency in the food put in front of you until you grow up a little bit only to find that, all your life, you have been seriously enjoying congealed pig’s blood as some sort of tofu substitute. The feeling is quite indescribably strange.

Education in food, as one might say, comes first and foremost from the clumsy but amazingly accurate English translations of dishes on the neon menus at the humble hawker centres. Verily does one find truth in the strangest places.

It is not just words and ideology that make eatables… edible. It is packaging as well. A fortune goes into the food preservative and colouring industry just so that our apple juice does not turn out in their transparant jugs to be some kind of grey colour (like baby apple puree), and that jellies squirt properly out of their appealing plastic cuplets in liquid neon shades that children love, and that ice cream retains their jewel-like creaminess and orange boiled sweets melt a wholesome orange. The moment aesthetics was applied to food was the moment were were asking for trouble with the truth. Even the little labels listing the ingredients on one side of the box has little impact on what we think we are eating. The tangible properties of a food we didn’t kill, gut and fillet ourselves are the first we go by and usually the only ones we consider when making a choice for tomorrow’s lunch: no one is going to care about the percentage content of sodium bicarbonate unless it is widely known (to supestitious precision) to be prodigously unhealthy. Food labels are there only for worried mothers and health freaks; ordinary people, much less snack-scarfing adolescents, are unlikely to bother. How much do they know of what they are eating? Are your potato chips really made of potato?

To say it is all about packaging is to call a tiger a small pair of earmuffs. And it is supermarkets that is the biggest and baddest player in this civilised game of deception. In small-scale grocery stores there is bad fluorescent lighting and rather ugly iron shelves; in wet markets everything is hot, raw, noisy and bloody where the fish on the ice are still alive and the butcher cheerfully carves the meat to your liking. In supermarkets everything is different. Food is packed in neat and coordinated rows according to selection and category. Food is wrapped in plastic and put under treatment of the most flattering UV light. Food is stuck with yellow promotion markers, advertised, arranged in appealing formations to entice the hand that pays the cash. Allow me to revert to the example of raw meat: let us not talk about chicken this time. Let us talk about pork or steak. (No, not pig and cow, pork and steak! You see?) In the wet market these products are hung in all their raw, whole and gory glory, without benefit of special lighting or air-conditioning to hamper bringing the distinctivly stinging scent of blood to your nose. In a supermarket the pork or steak are lovingly bundled in transparant plastic held taut against the neatly portioned cuts and the styrofoam, with little stickers telling anyone who would read about how happy the aforementioned pig or cow was before it died. I spent most of my childhood in the supermarket poking with fascination at the taut transparant plastic, feeling it yield beneath my fingers, and then poking the clean, strange, sterilised stuff beneath it, and then reading the label proclaiming in mechanised type that I was holding in my hands a great lovely specimen of HIND LOIN.

A supermarket already is a vast conspiracy by itself. Worse than a supermarket is your mind.

Construction of knowledge in food is something not to think about too much or too deeply if one intends to continue to eat, because you can’t eat without killing something. One day if someone suddenly makes the discovery that green things really do have thoughts and feelings, carrot juice would become murder – for real.

If God made this world in peace and harmony, it was a bloody farce. If people made ‘civilisation’ a civilised word as they do all the time I think I shall in the future not attempt to desist from simply laughing in their faces.

Bus Drivers on Thursday

I took sick leave from school for the first time in years this week.



On Thursday.

The grumpy morning idyll of the early morning (so early that it's dusky) journey to school was shattered by a bus driver of a vehicle that arrived late. He was a large and rather leathery kind of person with a jowly face, a little too big for his drivers' compartment, and that's all I remember of him in the half-light.

These were the circumstances.
1. I was the first of many on the bus. Everyone was crowding up behind me.
2. I had in my hands a small bag, my tapping wallet, my pencilbox and an open file. Remember, I have only two hands.
3. I was SLEEPY.

So I waved my wallet as best I could until I heard the required beep, before I moved on.

Then I hear this strange mangled roaring from behind me... a bastardised mixture of Chinese and dialect... and I turn around woozily to see his potato-shaped, lumpy, sagging face looming in the handy light of the driver's compartment cubicle.

Apparantly he wanted me to go back and tap again, just to make sure.

So while everyone else stood helplessly blocked at the entrance of the bus, I staggered backwards and touched my wallet to the machine, the wrong way round because I was sleepy, and then the right way round, until I heard another beep. Then I moved on again.

But NO that wasn't enough for Mister Bus Driver: the cretin demanded, in his incomprehensible garble, that I do it AGAIN. Utterly pissed by now, I slammed my wallet into the machine, which read


'EXIT OK'


And then he had the bloody balls to contrive to shout at me, yet again, in his barbarous manner. I was in no patient humour to decipher his pidgin slang, but he was in some way insisting that the first two times I had achieved my beeps on the card-reader machine was a sham. I stalked upstairs, by now in a mood thoroughly foul.

Why am I so angry? HERE is why.

I. The bus driver had no regard for the reasons why I might have been slightly sloppy in tapping the card. There was a crowd piling up at the doorway behind me, all trying to get in. And he automatically assumed that I was out to cheat him and his entire bus cumpany.

II. How much stuff was I carrying at the time? What kind of bus driver can't see silhouttes against a bloody neon-shining card-reader machine? He would probably have treated pregnant ladies or old dears the same way. The only difference would have been that if they'd bludgeoned him with tongue or handbag he would probably have shut up, but then I was in school uniform.

III. I walk in the full knowledge that I own a bus stamp, and may forget to tap any time I fucking well please.

IV. I really do loathe aggressive people.


At this point I might be called upon to consider mitigating circumstances in the darkly amusing behavour of His Majesty the Bus Driver. Why was he in such an asinine boor? He probably had family problems! (that's the one they always pull out first, right before the one about having a traumatized childhood.) He might be irritable because it was so early in the morning. He was probably so used to seeing students attempt to cheat their way past the paying system that he could afford to be an authoritative asinine boor on me.

On the other hand. I had a test to study for. His bus was late and he still had the corrugated intestines to be rude. I was laden and unwieldy and longing to sit down, and here he was, a jowly prig smug behind the partition around the drivers' cubicle, shouting in the most reprehensible excuse for a language, to which I had no way of replying or to even understand.

And if he was in no mood, neither was I.

My entire morning was ruined. I called twelve kinds of hell down on him before I staggered off to my Econs test. For the first time in my existence I was serious about it -- he has a choice between colon cancer, tubercolosis, and AIDS.



In other news, I just killed a mosquito by squashing it between my second and third fingers.
Poor mosquito.

thirsty

Swimming with Kelly yesterday! And fun it was too. Kelly was determined to swim 40 laps: I (mostly) just stayed at the side of the pool trying not to drown, and burnt my sinuses trying to dive for my lost hair ties.

And I had CAKE for the first time in months. Thanks Kelly's dad for driving us around and treating me dinner!



Anyway, this afternoon I discovered that I was thirsty, so I popped into the fridge for a convenient drink. Except that the drink was not quite so convenient because it was unopenable.

After asking everyone else in the house to have a go at winching the bottlecap open, I gave up and took knife and fork to it. The results are a very mutiliated bottlecap and a drink that is still not open. (no picture, sorry.)

Bloody waste of a perfectly good $1.

Off to moider some more. Guilty pangs.




P.S. I just realised. It's always been just MacDonalds that's making me retain fat (despite the alternate-day pre-dawn forced marathon during term). I had it yesterday along with western food and a slice of cake, which I know doesn't add substantially to my weight because I checked once, and the next day when I felt strangely heavy and weighed myself I realised I had upgraded by 2 kg. YES.

Thank you, Super Size Me, for making me see the light. Goodbye Macdonalds fries: four times a year only shall I ever see you again.

sinople

I refuse to blog about how much I miss the L4M3Rs. That's because I miss them all the time, and if I blogged about that, there won't be room for anything else... but tabula rasa is the word for the people I'm encountering out there in school. This only helps to make things quite that much worse.

Sad.

My father, you blind – smug – vulnerable – unreasonable – words fail me. If I were an employee I’d really hate you. But I’m not, and I don’t. I know mum might have, but I don’t.


I really don’t know what to think.

Try and make peace.

Not 4ngst! KWA HA HA HA HA! Love the 10th floor window.

The lock on my bedroom window grille is permanently rusted shut, and the grilles themselves permanently open (because I like lots and lots of fresh air.)

Here I was reading today history standing on a pink stool I didn't buy, the top of my head level with the upper ledge of the big wide corridor to the nether ether -- and I looked out and away to the fire-blasted green beyond with all its white-bellied birds and bell-ringing bicycle hooligans and went 'oooh, prettyyyy.'

If I ever commit suicide it'll probably for curiosity.

my deviantart account is alive again! go and look!


http://minamata.deviantart.com

The triumph of Inquiry is rather bitter

I should never watch science documentries with my mother. It's only very rarely that she realises that the days where I had an attention span of a crazed gnat are long over -- and tries to TEACH me things about the documentary that she knows nothing about. And when this happens, she never ceases to tell me the stupidest things.

One of the things I never look forward to about growing up is the increasing awareness that you actually do know more than your parents about certain things, so that when they try to educate you about it you discover the shallows of their blatant ignorance about the areas they profess to be competent. It is not pleasant. At best you feal resigned, cheated and unsure. At worst you feel like the world is being pulled away -- BY the world -- in the way of a kindergarten teacher engaging in a wrestling match with a child who loves a small blanket.

Call this adolescent hubris if you will, but adolescent hubris verified can be inordinately devastating.

Joy to the world, and goodbye Pluto -- good riddance.