Cattree

See the colour version to be up soon at http://minamata.deviantart.com

Concepts of fulfilment

This should have been a Good Day, but – having completed my next-next draft of the new H3 proposals and full of Ets’ chocolate cake (happy birthday Ets!) – I feel oddly empty. Maybe it’s because I’m tired. I know I’m tired. But there’s this vague feeling of guilt that I should have been studying. The next three days at least will be dedicated to study. I must finish all my holiday assignments before I can even have the conscience to consider asking my parents if I can go and squander Saturday night away with friends. Self-control has to begin somewhere, you know! (I don’t.) We shall see over the next three days how my resolve develops. But I do know that if I don’t start cramming in revision time now when there is still time, next year will be even more hellish that I think it’s going to be.

And I'm starting work next week -- NO TIME NO TIME NO TIME NO TIME ...

wedding karaoke

This time of the year must be an auspicious season for Malay marriage, because I saw three separate wedding parties within five minutes' walking distance of each other on my way home yesterday evening. By that time they were toned down and reduced to a couple families chatting quietly over leftovers while their kids dozed over the silken tables.

There's another one today, right below where I stay. From what I gather from a life of watching the processions and feasts with interest from the tenth storey apartment, the bride and groom are mostly there to be ogled. The other people participate in good eating, some dances and martial arts demonstrations, and far too much karaoke.

Friends and relatives partake freely of the karaoke. Not all of them are in tune. The microphones are very powerful, and echo dreadfully.

But I don't think anyone minds. I wish more weddings -- all kinds -- were held at void decks. It's noisy but festive and it sort of hammers it in that once people used to stay in kampongs where weddings were another excuse to have fun. And it's nice to think that the wedding couple is going to be blessed by everyone who sees or hears the revelry, passers-by and all. Look at me: I'm even getting used to the karaoke.

On Thursday

I believe I know why every time I start to blog again after a long period of blissful silence, it will be about the swimming pool.

There must be something about sitting in freezing water in near-nuddy that brings out the worst in people. It appears that the water is arbitrary for adolescents, who contrive to make as much noise as possible in large groups anywhere. The effect is, however, amplified when they are all clumped together in an echoing changing chamber and laugh like hyenas.

A whole bloody pack of hyenas, screeching about the current fashion and brands of lipstick at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

The pool itself was safe from them. Deep water halted their advance like nothing else, as the serious swimmers hogged the lanes and the torrid teenagers had nowhere to clump. So they retreated to shallower places to make a nuisance of themselves – but the competition pool has perils of its own.

Take the elderly people out for their morning swim. Huge old ladies floated about peacefully like displaced logs in floral swimsuits. Occasional mutterings of Hokkien could be heard as they communed with each other disparagingly of the sun and the absent sea. A brown old man with muscles that would have made Michaelangelo bash David to pieces in despair bounced cheerily at one end and consequently disappeared from my knowledge, while others of comparable age (though not physique, alas!) hauled themselves in a determined fashion back and forth the length of the pool.

Not all of them were competent swimmers, although no one drowned. In one incident where I was halfway down the pool, my goggles had fogged so that I could only see a rather round old guy coming straight at me from the opposite direction at the distance of about three strokes away. So I turned to avoid him. He also turned, but in the same direction! I swear the sod was trying his best to run into me. It so happened that I was capable of some acrobatics underwater to avoid him, but he contrived to come close enough that a boll of water ran up my leg: unless you’ve had the same thing happen to you, you will have no idea how PISSED I was. I kicked my way past (my foot connected with nothing [sigh]) and concentrated on creating silent torture techniques while I rowed myself to the other end of the pool. I can only hope that this incident was because the man was half-blind or just an inept swimmer, and not because he was an old perv.

Further danger came in the form of a flotilla of small children struggling across the pool in soggy pyjamas. One small child is capable of a surprisingly firm kick in the face, or flicking spray just when you’re coming up for air. A whole horde of them learning the front crawl is murder for anyone unfortunate enough to be in the near vicinity. The little darlings were still using floats and obviously have no idea how to steer yet, so all they could do – and did – was to kick very hard and hope for the best, and they went at it with an enthusiasm that would make a bullfight look like a tea party. By ten-o-five the whole place was flooded with packs of similar swim-groups, and I decided that enough was enough; I quit the pool while limbs, nerves and sinuses were still intact. Next time, I decided, I should go earlier.

This happened on Thursday, by the way, which was the same day as when a nice friend treated me to Seoul Garden. We went to Sunplaza park and ate dried mangoes, and it rained.

Monsoon rains are terrible. The whole sky would be overcast and sunny at the same time so that we are lulled into complacency, and when it finally does rain, it occurs without warning. The weather went from pleasantly breezy to torrential tropical storm in a matter of half a minute. And it so happened that on that particular day, of all days, I HAD FORGOTTEN TO BRING AN UMBRELLA.

But that was on Thursday.

wanderer

first layer

I'm bored. Entertain me.

One. Think of 15 short bits of interesting stuff about yourself. And they've gotta be true.

Two. Come up with 5 false statements regarding yourself, but for fun's sake keep them in the threshold of believability.

Three. Jumble them all up together and list them in any order.

Four. Post them on your blog and let people guess which the five false ones are!

Five. Get 5 others to do the same.




I've seen this on Kelly and Pong's blogs before, but I am now bored enough to make my own;

I tag all those who want to be tagged. Could be more than five, because I don’t like rules.




1. I own all of three soft toys.

2. My natural habitat is the library.

3. My parents are terrified that I’d get a boyfriend one day.

4. I’m tiring of being alive.

5. I want lots of money and have no idea how to get it.

6. I can walk to my school in the same time it takes to travel there by bus.

7. I shall have been using my current pencil-box for seven years now.

8. When I die I want to be embalmed in chocolate first and then melted down for fondant creme.

9. I like little siestas.

10. There is a ziplock bag with rice husk pillow stuffing at the foot of my bed.

11. My first movie was when I was five years old, but the second was when I was eleven.

12. I used to count the flies perching on the walls in MacDonalds toilets.

13. I get travel sickness from sitting in public buses.

14. I own a charm necklace with a bronze dragon on it.

15. I have never really learned to draw a human face.

16. I am hopelessly in love with kittens.

17. I haven’t touched my watercolour set in years.

18. I can hold one end of a sensible conversation on Japanese weaponry.

19. My piano is so old that it flakes wood strips.

20. I don’t want to go to south America.

I really do love my parents. Very much. This is going to hurt like a bitch.

Do I get the feeling that my parents are grasping at straws to keep me young and pliable?

Yesterday I went shopping with my mum in the morning. It was after a surreally traumatic incident that took place by the light of the com in otherwise total darkness, at midnight and over. She knows all about it because she made most of the trouble.

We still went shopping. I had a thumping headache and I couldn't feel the extremities of my fingers. To say that I wasn't in the mood for being communicative was an understatement.

So to make me go somewhere, with ears to the handphone and eyes somewhere else, she grabbed my hand and felt around until her thumb found the pit of my wrist. And then she DUG HER THUMB IN.

You only do that when you want to disable people. She knows that very well. She used to practice taiji.


I think she was sorry afterwards, because I snarled at her for it in a fury for which I'm still guilty, and she bought me something nice. But today something started again.

(Sigh.)

She told me not to email so much and concentrate on my work. The 'concentrate on my work' part she'd been repeating all morning (in the face of all compliance) and at the moment I was doing the laundry. Excuse me for not being at my math right at the moment.

I think she got the 'email' idea from that surreal incident two nights ago, because she's never done it before. But what's consistent is that she doesn't know what she's talking about. Apart from the termly long letter I send to a friend who's now overseas, how fucking long can I spend on one email -- and how the fuck is most of it outside schoolwork? She blusters obliviously on the most ridiculous subjects all the time and it infuriates me to hell, especially when she tries to teach me with it. It's not as if she's irrational by rational choice. Allow me to give an example.

(scene: watching discovery channel)
programme host: The puffins nest on the cliffs in droves at mating season...
mum: oh! Oh! Puffins! These are puffins, you know!
me: Stop it, I can't hear what he's saying next.
mum: you think you know everything!


And it was like that today. I told her 'All right, but I don't think you know what you were talking about,' which was honest but a mistake because she was immediately pissed. So she went away for a while and came back and started talking about how I should 'do up my math'. I bit back some smart replies and said something mild. I don't remember what happened next. But we both got increasingly irritated and finally it was enough for my mouth to turn snarky, and she snapped: 'the problem is that you think too highly of yourself! What you lack is experience!'

I find the phrase 'you think too highly of yourself' an oxymoron so amusing I cannot hear it being said, to ANYONE, without getting angry. The first time was when I was in Korea -- a taunting voice I know very well from the back of the bus -- and I had to resist getting up and going back there to slap her across the face. It is one of the things anyone can say I hate most. Not only does it demonstrate personal complacency on the part of the speaker concerning his moral superiority, but also absolves him from all rational argument and, as long as benchmarks remain fuzzy or personalities private, will always be an assertion without basis in fact. It's all right to think it, to speak about it with people who may or may not agree with you, but to say it to someone in his or her face is to TELL that person that he or she is intentionally so, and -- even better, if you take the inductive meaning of it -- that the person who said it is less so. It is a self-righteous challenge. It is a deracination of truth. It is a flagrant and unshakably flimsy statement of accusation that nevertheless holds the power to disable reason.

This was what happened today. She said it. I stopped short.

Then I said, slowly and carefully: 'I know precisely what I lack. I'm not sure why you need to repeat things over and over again.'

I remember she said something to that after a long pause, and I said something I know very well in reply to it, but I can't seem to recall it at the moment. I know for certain she fumed a bit but my mind was blank with rage and I can't remember much. I finished the laundry.

I'm just thankful she didn't dismiss it all with 'You're just like your father'. That one is the worst and most irrational thing she can possibly say (and she says it often, whenever she finds herself cornered), and I always feel like watching a few souls burn in hell afterwards. She knows I go incoherent when I'm angry. This is what she does, and it usually ends an argument there and then because if I said anything afterwards it'd probably rip us all to shreds.

Oh! I've remembered what she said. My unhappiness was leaking out at the edges of my voice, so she took it as some kind of challenge and told me to 'respect my parents'. I remember very clearly how I responded, which was amazing because my brain was cold and dead by then. 'When you talk I must assume you know what you are talking about because I respect your intellect. What you need to do is to respect mine.'

I think there was nothing after that.

You can't blame me for feeling the least bit buay song.

Do you get the feeling that my mother at least is grasping at straws to keep me young and pliable?

Which of your elders still parrot the commentator on Discovery Channel under the impression that they're educating you?

WHO DOESN'T KNOW WHAT A TURTLE IS?

DO YOU REALLY PREFER THE APPEARANCE OF RESPECT TO THE REAL THING? I CAN GIVE YOU THE SHIT IF I STOPPED RESPECTING YOU. STOP TAKING IMAGINARY BEATINGS TO YOUR EGO AND AND LISTEN.

More Dead than Alive, thank you

My morbid curiosity was satisfied last night at the price of $6.50 and too many brain cells. But I think I shall talk about DoA as Raye requested. What I shall not do is wax too long on the subject. This sort of thing can strip an entire year’s worth of myelin from your neural circuit.


Here are some.



1. Kasumi was properly ruined. Devon Aoki acts wonderfully.

2. Tina Armstrong and her dad were the only people in character – I like Tina!

3. The ang moh staff designing the movie all obviously believed deep in their feeble little coconut-craniums that Chinese, Japanese and Korean were really the same.

4. The ang moh staff designing the movie also obviously knew absolutely nothing about Japanese clothing – ignorant bastards – skimping on the fabric even –

5. The choreography-editing was CTHD standard (guess the acronym!) but occasionally indulged fantastically in all the wrong body parts.

6. The accents made my eardrums curdle. In hell I shall hear Hayate’s voice for all eternity.

7. There were some really adorable Chinese pirates – in fact they were the highlight of the show.

8. Which self-respecting ninja screams maniacally when they sneak attack?

9. Which self-respecting ninja goes on a noisy ass-kicking spree in full sight of security cameras on a fact-finding spy mission?

10. Bra, anyone?



There you are. Having bundled up like a beautifully pink eskimo (3vil salmon-coloured hoodie) I sat in the glacially-endowed movie theatre wallowing in the bullshit I was being fed via colourful colours and too many katanas. Who the hell made this movie PG?

Was this just Singapore trying to loosen up? (okay my blood freezes at the very thought. I’d better stop here.)