shhh

My com is next to a window, which I keep open when my parents insist a window must be kept open because if I open it from the other wide, dust will get all over my nice work table.

That means that when the wild wind blows my fingers FREEZE.

It's an oddly pleasant feeling. Oh, I am masochistic.

look at me skive. Whee!

I think it's time I drew a new comic.

call me emo

I know that very often when I have to talk to people I occupy the same mental space as when I sleep. The ideas just all rush in and cause a fat jam in front of the filter between my mouth and my brain. The result is that I take a long time to say anything, and that I never say anything useful. What doesn't make it better is that I don't like to tell other people what they should do, or even to mind their own business (it's my problem if I wanna jump into the pool in pink trousers and a loofah in each hand) which means that the more self-righteous blithely steamroller the conversation and my identity at once (without realising it too, bless them). What makes it even better yet is that I don't like making conversation in school, for several unreasonable reasons. And school, apart from the private life I have every sunday or sommat with my very small circle of old friends, is all the social life I really get. Bad for tongue-exercise, and WHY THE HELL am I feeling so sleepy all the time when my burden is obviously not the most disgustingly heavy of all the overworked people I know? Doesn't do much for my speaking prowess. And I have this nasty urge to get up and wander aimlessly about when there's work to do. Being sick on Chinese New Year but still forced to go visiting also meant that on top of all this, my cousins must now all think I'm this stuck-up misfit doodling miserably at the table while they were all in one room playing Risk. I don't know why I'm not feeling good, because I'm lucky not to be dead yet and fully supplied with food, arms and legs -- among other things. But I'm not feeling good. Empty gnawing feeling and all that.

Part of it is the Kelly thingy. See she and I were bidding for Pong's extra-special A-class ticket for the Phantom performance on the last day of March. I don't really like bidding, and although I didn't mind going to see the show I didn't really mind NOT going either: the meagre collections from this year's hongbao money rather made the decision for me actually. So I told Pong that I was going to put up 10 cents more of whatever she bids. This is the sort of thing the really skanky people do on e-bay, yes. But obviously Kelly thought I was serious about it and, after further SMS prodding in which I unleashed the deadly Smiley Face on her (smileys really infuriate certain people), she went and wrote a little article on her blog that showed that she was really pissed. Sigh. Never mind. Of course it was funny at first. But I guess there're some people you shouldn't play jokes on. And since I'm not very used to playing jokes on people, I probably did it very badly. Not nice to make a friend angry, especially if that friend is part of that very small circle of old friends that constitute the bulk of my social life at this point in time. Now I shall go drown my sorrows in orange juice and start working out syllogisms on the Great Gatsby. The Great Gatsby is so amazingly compact there is now way I can write a decent essay without sorting out all my ideas first. It's Pong who can do that kind of waffle. Without the usual exam adrenalin I need a good long think.

Speaking of dreams, last night I had one about my mother having died, and feeling fed up that she had died without passing on her m4d spare-rib c00king skillz to me before she had condescended to kick the bucket. I have no idea what having a dream like that means, but I feel rather guilty and uncomfortable.

Hopefully I will cheer up by monday, because XT informs me that when I'm sleepy/depressed I drip worse than a bugbear that's been pushed off the ice floe.

Kelly, if you read this, ignore the emo, all right?

Five-day respite

I must remember not to go for class reunions in future. I always feel inhibited. Intimidated. Moreover, they are a WASTE of $$. People wiser than I very cannily fail to turn up.

On the other hand, the little orgy we had around Mysti's hospital bed later in the day was completely fun, except that people would keep on talking about Guildwars!

QX says he will see if there are any of those square raccoon cushions left in the online store, since the stocks of those in the store's physical manifestation in Citylink Mall in the wake of Valentine's Day are Sold Out! I can't wait to wriggle it's striped ikkle twinkle again.

Burdie

Spring is in the air, and all the birds are starting to get warlike. Mynahs everywhere are deep in battle, and even the chirpy little brown bitties that usually fly away if you so much as look in their direction seem more aggressive. And then there are the amazingly exotic birds that appear out of the marshes near where I spend my days rotting: in school, for example. Last week my P.E. class and I were treated to the sight of a hawk floating overhead against the rosy morning clouds. People lucky enough to live in the wild country might see things like this every day, but this was a residential-industrial area in The Big City we were talking about. We had a good long stare at the hawk's underside before it disappeared into the distance, merging into the landscape above the HDB flats. And then just yesterday -- was it yesterday? -- I espied from the corner of my eye a brilliantly turquoise bolt of blue streaking across the canal outside my window and settling elegantly onto a branch. It had white-rimmed wings and David says it's a collared kingfisher. First one I had ever seen in my life. I suppose I could blame global warming for these abnormal sightings of fulsome little animals venturing into strange places, just as I can curse it for the cheerfully infernal weather we're having now, but then where's the fun in that?

BOOM.

I feel a little happier about me, and I'm going shopping on friday. And before that, tomorrow, I'm going to watch Pan's Labyrinth at last. I really HATE depending on my parents for money, because I can't seem to be able to starve on demand and my pocket money can only last for school supplies, canteen food and maybe one good meal. If I take a job now I will either expire from lack of sleep or offer my teachers the stake to impale me with when they see my test results. And this is why I continue to depend on my parents for money.

Every time I go out hunting for footwear I rediscover that I'm shoe one size too big for Singapore.

In the meantime, here is a snippet from the newsletter artwork from last week.

















Will post the entirety on deviantart after it's safely published and distributed.

I'm not being paid enough for this

A truly terrible week. I’ve been sleeping past twelve for days and days, waking up at five thirty in the morning. I am a person who likes lots of sleep. And I'd screwed up a math test, to boot, and am now seeing double – triple – (did trees jump about like that?) And there is a compulsory school event tomorrow. On the other hand, the cover page of the next issue of the school magazine looks FABULOUS.

No more about that.

Today was a field trip to a synagogue. We came there early and, because the guide was late, sat inside for about twenty minutes looking at each other and everything else. The rabbi popped by and said hello -- he was gentle and gentlemanly in a very olde-worlde kind of way -- and popped past into a room hidden by hangings, and then popped off with a huge velvety cylinder which, as we would see later, was a portion of their scriptures. THe atmosphere was heavy, redolent with the complete absence of anyone other than ourselves, and would have been oppressively quiet if it hadn’t been for the heavy drilling from the construction site next door. As it were, our voices echoed.

The place itself was over a century old, certainly old by Singaporean standards. The meticulousness of the work was amazing: rich embroidery, wooden carving, gold-stamped books, scrolls of amazing intricacy, soft suspended lamps, beaten silver. I dare posit that most of them were hand-crafted. (Not the pews and the lamps, obviously, although you never know.) It was easy to tell that the people who had made the things had put their heart whole into the work.

It was also easy to tell that the place was old. A length of banister creaked when I rested my arm on it.

The scrolls were in a small room at the head of the synagogue, hidden by three hangings of three colours. The middle would be twitched aside or drawn back when the inner sanctum was opened. It was rather like being shown into a clutch of Faberge eggs. But better. The guide opened one and showed us the parchment, coiled into two enormous blocks at each end with a strip held flat in the middle. Calligraphy ran in perfect lines across the strip.

Gosh.

Despite gushing over the ornaments and things, Wwhat I’m actually most impressed at was actually their emphasis on community. Our guide spent over an hour telling us about Judaism, their traditions, their festivals, their history. There was a very strong and idealistic intensity in their attention to life, duty, faith and resilience. It is something I can sincerely admire – but at a distance, because I am, after all, what I am.

I left the place feeling rather more peaceful, but tired in that thin sort of way. And I could feel a really royal headache, ominously brewing. The atmosphere in the hall, with its richness and its strictness, had been just imperceptibly pressurising. And I am, after all, a stranger.

So you can tell that I was not completely cogent when some idiot at the traffic light got my attention with some difficulty and told me that his friend wanted my phone number.

‘What for?’ I said. It was lucky that XT was there too. She saw the whole thing; go ask her.

‘Because he likes you,’ said the guy, rather a bit sheepishly. He had a silly little haircut and a chin stud. ‘Um. Really likes you.’

And he pointed to his friend, who smiled sheepishly at me too. He had enormous teeth and was leaning on another friend, ostensibly for moral support. I felt no threat – not really. They had outrageous haircuts and piercings and that was most of it. They were soggy and hopeful, and they really had to be desperate to be popping up at traffic junctions bothering random people in school uniforms.

Regretfully I dismissed the desire to tell them to sod off, but I think I managed to convey the general idea of ‘no’.

Then the traffic light on the right changed, and they wandered crestfallenly over. Some schoolmates who were on the other side of that traffic light walked across to us and asked me about the three bedfellows. Apparantly they had been harrassing my schoolmates too. XT managed to cover me. I was still feeling vaguely traumatized.

All this after I have had this morning, of my own half-hypnotised academic violition, signed a document in ink that should have been blood. My IS proposal will be travelling to Cambridge next week.

I am not optimistic.