She

When I was Secondary 4, I fell hard for an angel. As it unfolded, I wrote at the same time, documenting the happiness she made me feel and at the same time the torn feeling I felt liking her. I called it “Of Floortiles and Her” because everytime she passed me, I was so overwhelmed I couldn’t look at her at all and would start at the grey-pink tiles that lined the floor of my old school.

My memory fails me when it comes to quite pinpointing when it first started, or what triggered it off per se. The main factor was that somehow even though we were in different classes, I saw her almost everyday (or perhaps it was everyday). We had the same social studies and history class, plus I had literature with her.

There was just something about her. The way she smiled, a little shy sort of smile, like she was unsure of something, just melted my heart – and her small eyes crinkling into oblivion did nothing to aid the calming of my heart either. I wouldn’t describe what I felt for her as love in the conventional sense either. It was certainly a crush, but it seemed somehow very motherly in nature. I had absolutely neither sexual nor possessive romantic notions of her, the way one might feel in a conventional crush. Instead what I felt was an urge to protect her from the terrors of the world outside, to hold her and to take care of her and protect the good heart I saw within her from becoming hardened.

I suppose a large part of it was due to the fact that she possessed many of the things I did not and hence respected. She was a well-liked figure in school, intelligent and a top scorer, a relatively high ranking prefect and one of the top athletes in school. I was scraping the barrel academically, thin as a reed and feeling isolated from my classmates. The disparity could not have been greater. I suppose everything just clicked nicely during that time and I started to notice my heart beating faster everytime she approached and the surge of happiness I felt when I saw her.

I used to run into her in the bathroom a lot for some inexplicable reason. I think she used it a lot because she drank a lot of water whereas I just liked going for a walk in the middle of class. I did the same thing in ACSI, so I can’t be called some random bathroom stalker. I’d walk in, see her, and she’d smile at me then leave. And then I’d be floating from a massive pseudo-sugar high for the next few hours.

It created a massive conflict in me because of my religion. I was and still am a Christian, and though I personally believe that homosexuality is one of the lesser sins, it is still a sin nonetheless. To others, I didn’t mind, I even respected them for having the daring to do so – but years and years of drilling had affected my consciousness and I felt guilty nonetheless. She brought such joy to my heart, yet it made me feel so guilty inside. The effect on my psyche was overwhelming and I felt so terrible inside everyday.

The last time I saw her was in July 2007 when we call convened back in school for our graduation ceremony. I was just about to leave, sweating about in my nude stockings and blouse in 30 degree humid weather (oh I can’t remember feeling that way anymore after being back in England for more than a month), I saw her leave. As she walked off, she turned around and smiled that beautiful smile at me for one last time before heading off for the rest of her life. I smiled in return.

Violent Violin

There is a bruise forming on the thin skin between my breasts. It resides in the hollow where they both end. When I touch it, it hurts. I can feel something solid behind it, something I can only assume is my rib cage. Meanwhile, the thin skin and flesh that covers and protects my vital organs is bruised. Touch sensors saying hard and painful, alongside soft and cold fingers shoot to the neurons in my brain when I touch it. I press it to make sure its still there and hasn't fled from me overnight like you.

On Tuesday during Ceramics class, I burnished a vase that I had made. I had to prop it up on my chest in order to grip it to burnish. My pocket vibrated, and I got a text. The text was from you, of all goddamned people, telling me of some random event. I felt my blood race, and dilute venules in my cheeks. I felt my muscles tense in my shoulders, getting ready to fight my way out of a threatening situation. But no, it was just a text. And I was just a girl burnishing a vase.

I held on to the vase tighter and burnished faster and faster and faster. My chest started to ache in pain as the tissue started to bleed from the pressure exerted on it. I burnished faster, willing either myself or the vase to break first. But nothing broke, except for me on the inside. Even my flesh and skin has betrayed me by refusing to break alongside me.

I am alone in trying to repair myself for this world.

Bloomsbury

I think I have damaged the tiny veins under the skin of my hands. Cold hands constantly plunged into hot water lead to great bloomings of shrunken constricted veins, some going into shock with the sudden change in temperature. The skin on my hand turns bright red in angry patches and I cannot touch hot water without feeling slight jolts of pain emitting from a deeper layer of my skin. Little bumps raise up in protest, stop doing that, they say. It hurts.

But I keep doing it anyway because hot water in a cold foreign country is one of the consistent few pleasures that life has accorded me. I apply hand cream over the bright red skin, in hopes of soothing it. My hands now smell of cranberries. As I run my fingers over the other hand, rubbing in cream, I remember the other hands that once caressed it.

I continue washing my hands in hot water and watching my skin bloom.

Pinpricks

I woke up this morning feeling like I had just suffered a heart attack.

Now the blood that flows through my veins feels like its prickly and thorny, poking my soft skin from underneath. I feel it poke at my arms and at the pack of my neck. Studded metal haemoglobin globules bumping along narrow blood lines. I feel my heart clench constantly, like it has forgotten to diastole. I feel the prickly blood flow to the back of my head, creating tiny little pinpricks in delicate walls and slowly, but surely, letting my life flow out of me.

Chipped Nail Polish

The mark on my fingernail is still there from that night when we went out to Sainsburys' together. We got back really late and my roommates were sleeping, the door was about to slam shut when I stuck my hand to stop the door from waking my roommates up. It hurt like hell. I wanted to scream in pain. Later that night when I saw you again I showed you my finger, with pink flesh turning purple. You touched it and said it looked painful.

Now you're gone, from me. Taken by forces that were out of my control. No matter how hard I fought, I could not win a battle that required the hearts and wills of two. That mark on my fingernail is now covered with chipped nail polish, hidden and out of sight, but I know it still lingers on.

Blind, by Lifehouse

Last time when I was younger, I used to cry silently. Tears would just form in my eyes and slide down. Now however, whenever I cry it’s a rather violent and physical affair, with screaming and hitting of objects. Somewhere down the line, the emotional pain just escalated till I couldn’t cope with it anymore. Not only could I handle things less well emotionally, I couldn’t handle it physically as well. For the past few days, my appetite has been gone, I’ve been getting bad stomachaches, my head feels dizzy and my breath feels sucked out of me. Plus I keep vomiting. As a result I’m paler than a Brit now because I literally have no blood flowing through my veins. It’s like getting a mild version of extremely bad stomach flu.

Like I said, I wasn’t always like this. It’s not hard to imagine why I want to go back to the past. But today though, I laughed and felt genuinely happy for the first time in the past few days.

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I was 13 when I had my first boyfriend. He was someone from my church, called K. He was a year older. He pursued me. He also dumped me 3 days into the relationship. Fantastic. All we ever did was text and instant message each other, but damn did being dumped leave a nasty impact. It made me feel worthless, and I felt that I couldn’t face him. I left a series of dramatic messages where I told him not to contact me. I also remember being fairly depressed, something that didn’t lift for months. I couldn’t really remember why I was depressed, except I’d start crying in class, be really moody and snap at people. I shouted at my teacher once when I thought she was being unreasonable and immediately burst into tears. It only abated when I got really upset and started scratching myself. Looking back, I think it might have been related to my first failed relationship, but I’m not too sure. I actually forgot about K all these years, so I guess he left a smaller impact than originally thought.

Of all my years in Secondary school, I remember Secondary 2, when I was 14, as the fondest. I remember it because it gave me some of the best friends I ever had, Ianthe, Stephanie and Angeline, even though I’ve lost touch with Angeline. I remember all the useless project work days when we would hang out at each other’s house with the pretense of doing work, filming and finally video editing. I remember doing really retarded things, while screwing around with the camera. On a more somber note I also remember spearheading a petition to get the class chairperson ousted. It was so happy, that I don’t really have much to write about. I also remember running home and playing a lot of Warcraft III and GTA: Vice City. I scraped by in school again.

I guess its fair to say when I was 14, something happened that forewarned of the mad path my mind would take. At the end of church camp in 2003, when I was 13, I met a guy called M. He was 4 years older than me, and obviously was in the same church as me. He and I would text each other everyday and talk on instant messenger every night. Once he mentioned how awesome it’d be if we were both got married because our wedding invites could just say M2. AND of course being 14 and absorbed in my world, I didn’t imagine for the slightest moment that he liked me. And liked me he did, soon convincing himself he was madly in love with me. Like all completely irrational and hormonally imbalanced teenagers, I freaked out.

I cut off all contact with him. Whenever I thought about him, all I felt was fear. I was filled with an insane fear that he was going to pin me down and rape me. Once I saw him in church and ran out to the toilets to cry. I had an asthma attack. Then another time when I saw him, I hid in the darkness of my now empty Sunday school classroom till I was convinced he was gone. It was madness really, looking back. All his friends hated me. Hell if I were him, I’d hate me. But yet I did it anyway. I still remember it vividly. It was an all-consuming fear, a fear that made my heart race and adrenaline kick it live never before. It was a fear that completely overwhelmed all mental rational processes and defenestrated it. It was a fear that turned out to have lingered for so long, than when he asked to be my facebook friend in 2007, I rejected him while feeling the same fear coursing through my veins.

2005 however, was the pivotal year of my life. It was the year when I was well and truly kicked into the realm of maturity. I like to think that the events that happened in the end of 2005 and early 2006 that ended up shaping me into the person I am today, batshit insane anxiety, full blown proper depression and extreme paranoia included. It was because everything happened at once, in a most violent manner.

2005 however, didn’t start on such a dire note. I remember it starting as the happiest year ever, when I confessed my liking to a guy I had liked ever since I was 13, A. It was one and a half years of liking the same guy. He was perfect to me, smart, funny and passionate. We would talk online and message each other with our phones. It wasn’t till end 2004 that he started attending the same church as me when our mutual friend brought him. At first after church, we’d go out as a group. Then when everyone slowly left to go home, we’d hang out together. He was the first person I kissed. I still remember the afternoon when he first brought me up to the top level of Tan Tock Seng Hospital and showed me the view. Then there was the afternoon we hung out and he lay in my lap at the small park next to KK Hospital. I documented everything thing down excitedly in my diary.

But he refused to commit. I didn’t press the issue that much, I think.

However at this point of time, L (as mentioned in the previous section), decided to hold training sessions to groom a new generation of church leaders. I wasn’t chosen because I wasn’t deemed ‘holy’ enough. All my friends, the gang I hung out with in church were chosen. Now this was highly unfair of a number of levels. It was evident that she had picked and chose those that came only from good schools, with no respect to actual depth of Spirituality, because A who was chosen had just become a Christian recently. Finally I had been serving the church since I was 13 by helping out in Sunday school and teaching. I was the ones who had gotten my friends into even serving in church to begin with. For all I had done, I had been unfairly passed on to be groomed as a church leader. I was upset enough, but I bore with it.

As friends are unconsciously wont to do, they drifted. All they talked about were little in jokes and things that happened during the training. Plus as the classes happened right after our Sunday school, I didn’t even have time to hang out with them. It also so happened that my best friend, C, was one of two girls really chosen in a class full of boys. I remember saying rather bitterly then that it was more of a potential mating club than a real church leader training group. I felt even more hurt by the fact that I now felt alienated from my friends completely.

And then before I knew it, the signs started cropping up. He started talking to me less. She started telling me less. Then I found out by accident that they were hanging out together a lot. Still I wasn’t sure. This was at the end of 2005. Then it really happened. I still can’t remember when I found out exactly, but it was to the effect that everyone now knew they were dating each other. But what about me? He, the guy I was crazy about, never told me anything. Nor did she, my supposed best friend. I was devastated. The two people who I trusted most, had betrayed me.

I had been with Hakka Methodist Church for my entire life, but I had to leave. I cried and cried for days in the interim. Even leaving the church cut me to pieces. This was the singular institution I had spent my childhood days playing about, where all the familiar faces of my parents friends were. This was where I imagined going to church my entire life. This was where a large portion of my hope and life had been. With one fell swoop, I had been betrayed by a church elder, my best friend and the first boy I really liked. Worse still was the growing gap I felt between my friends and they not even attempting to pull me back. It hurt. For all the love that I had given, I felt nothing in return.

I dropped contact with almost everyone. But they kept finding me, finding me on facebook where even now till today their little church outing photos pop up in my livefeed, and I tell you it still hurts even now because it feels like for all I felt that I had done for them, they had not appreciated me. They didn’t chase me when I ran. They had forgotten me. I felt like I had been easily replaced. All we were was just facebook friends, who didn’t contact each other directly.

At the same time I was experiencing problems in school. A classmate had tried to commit suicide at the end of the year when her school results showed that she had not qualified to move on to the next year of school. I still remember the blame I heaped on myself, for not taking Angeline’s casual passing remark about that particular classmate mentioning suicide before, for letting her out of my sight. As I ran through the corridors that day looking for her, I felt all the hope fly out of my life. We found her. We cried.

That Saturday I remember I started thinking about the events during church practice. I remember breaking down uncontrollably and crying without cessation.

When 2006 rolled around, I was a Senior in Girl Guides. During one of the first orientation meetings, some of the older girls were trying to break in the juniors by making them play those typical orientation games with the apparent idea that public humiliation = bonding session. I remembered being an awkward 12 year old and not wanting to make a fool of myself, so I stepped in and told the other leaders that if those girls didn’t want to do the chicken dance – or some other absurd thing – then they shouldn’t be forced to. I walked away not knowing the implications of what had happened, that the other leaders felt offended by what they felt was an usurp of their authority. They started boycotting me.

At the same time, a lot of my classmates were also in girl guides. I remember calculating that either one-third or a quarter of the class were girl guides. I first found out by the boycott when a long time friend just stared ignoring me completely. While the rest of my classmates still behaved as per normal, she ignored me completely. But there were the others that treated me coldly. At the same time, I had also been talking to and counseling my ex-classmate who had been retained. That my classmates had so easily forgotten about her, and had written her off as “desperate for attention” had affected me badly. I could not accept that others could do such a thing to another person, a depressed one at that.

The more the life that I had known and previously treasured deteriorated, the more inward I turned. I lived 2006 inside the confines of my mind and online, talking to Suat Ying, I had literally felt that my life had gone, I had no classmates, no girl guides and no church. The three largest portions of my life had turned into a nightmare for me within a few months.

2006 was the year that made me into the person that I am today. The crazily depressed, anxiety ridden, paranoid and insecure person that I become whenever I feel life goes out of control. The scars from 2006 affect me even today.

And that is why I’m writing this, so I can finally learn to let go of everything.

I worked my ass off, getting 10 points for my O levels and somehow making it into ACS(I). I felt like I had finally succeeded and was working to a better life, to leave 2006 well and truly behind me. But of course more things happened.

Eyes Wide Open in Horror

It is yet another day. My eyes open up as I wake and I stare at the wall. Slowly, the realization hits me that the last two days were very much real, not some terrible nightmare conjured from the deep-seated fears of my heart. The idea of the nightmare that I find myself once again having to pick up the pieces of my life. I cry, because honestly, what else can I do? I long learned that keeping tears In just makes you feel worse. That’s why whenever I can, I cry. I wasn’t always like this. In fact it wasn’t all too long ago that I was very much a different person. I was less scared, less anxious, less troubled and perhaps less aware. But 5 years is a very long time in the development of a person’s character. Thing is: I still feel the person that I once was inside of me. I feel it whenever I talk to friends, whenever I am with my family. And I miss her, I miss her a lot. Though I know there are some things that are well and truly irreversible – I don’t think I can ever go back to the carefree and somewhat ignorant person I was then – I also realise that somehow, I need to get rid of all the emotional baggage that has been saddled on me these past formative years before I have any real hope or finding real lasting happiness.

I still remember an incident when I was about 12 or 13 vividly. I was with my two best friends then, and we were a silly lot. There was a store that sold sambal fishballs in school that were really yummy. My friend and I would scarf down 2 of them, then run all the way from the canteen to our classrooms where our water bottles lay. Run because honestly the sambal was too hot for us to handle, and it’d make us cry. But we felt free and happy. People looked at us weirdly as we tore past them on the staircase, but we couldn’t care less.

I never felt like I fit in anywhere. I always felt like the child that was a bit too weird for the norm. Too rebellious and stubborn even at a young age, too much of a troublemaker, too energetic and too enthusiastic. I remember because I felt so out of place, I was constantly searching for affirmation. I tried to hang out with the ‘cool’ girls, like all misguided kids do. Of course they evidently didn’t want to have anything to do with me. I even remember a friend I had since I was 7 jokingly referring to me as someone she didn’t regard highly when we were both 11. It hurt then, it still hurts now. Somehow, I managed to survive with nary a conscious dent, though I know deep down it exacerbated the already present childhood traumas of my heart.

My family was a very unconventional one – and by this I refer to my father’s side of the family. Its structure was mainly matriarchal. I came from a line of strong and empowered women. Even though my father was evidently the one that wore the pants in my parents relationship, I always knew I was surrounded my strong women. My grandmother, just 70 this year, used to run multiple businesses in what was very much a male dominated field in the 1950s, much less in a conservative Asian society. Her mother before her also ran the family business after her husband died and built up a family fortune only for it to be gambled away by her second son. Then there was my Aunt, an opinionated, assertive woman who again worked in a male dominated field – computer science in the ‘80s, who was also simultaneously battling lupus. It seems evident that a streak of strength, determination, ambition, stubbornness and intelligence ran through my blood.

However there were other things brewing in the family bloodlines as well. There were also propensities to extremely bad tempers, extreme anxiety, paranoia and depression even. It’s of much debate whether such attributes are passed through the generations through genes or nuture, but all I can say is I either inherited all the abovementioned attributes directly, or through my relationship with the family absorbed all of them. I do wonder if things were ceteris paribus, whether I would have gone on to be close to where the Wong women are, whether I’d be more settled and happy. But either way fate threw me a wild card: my brother.

My brother was probably the first indication that I would live a less than average life. Born when I was 4, he was supposedly a playmate that I longed for. My father always said that he didn’t want a second child because he knew that as a child, I needed a lot of attention. Either way this got thrown into the wind when it was discovered that my brother was also autistic and a low functioning one to boot.
I remember being very happy when he was first born, but as I struggled to understand why my brother wasn’t like the rest, I got angrier and frustrated. I didn’t understand why everyone was making such a fuss about him, I remember getting very jealous and upset. It’s one thing to say “your brother’s different” to a child, but very much another for that child to understand. To understand why her brother isn’t talking, and playing with her like she thought he would and at the same time taking the family’s attention away from her. I ended up bullying him. I was the proverbial horror child without a conscience.

Having a brother like Ryan also had another effect on me, it made me partly the centre of unwanted attention. Everyone didn’t know how to relate to him. It either went two ways, the oh-my-dear-you’re-so-pitiful way or the why-is-that-kid-so-weird way. More than often it was the latter sort of stare. Growing up I remember the dehumanizing stares of people around me as I went about with my brother. I could see the way they looked at me differently, as the cogs in their heads started moving, trying to figure out whether or not I was mentally disabled too. I felt burdened by the way people viewed me. People assumed I was mentally disabled by extension.

As a child growing up, two of my biggest social groups I remember were that of my mother’s family and church. My mother’s family, bless their souls, were a wonderful and kind lot. All of them happy-go-lucky folks. However as much as they were accepting people, they never knew how to relate to my brother. It’s almost as they saw him their minds immediately blanked out. They just didn’t know what to do or what to make of my brother, and I, the sister was caught up in all of this. I always felt alienated from them because of my brother. Sure every Chinese New Year they’d grasp my wrists and tell me to eat more, else I’d be blown away by the wind. They’d pat my head and tell me I’m a smart girl and to study hard. But I felt less like a person and more like an object. I was the unrelatable unreachable enigma.

Church as well posed similar problems, but to a lesser extent. This is probably because in church I was separated from my brother. Still it lingered, all the curious questions, all the stories that people begged for from me. I admit to telling great whopping lies at the expense of my brother to make the others laugh and like me. I still remember the details of those stories, probably because I still feel guilty. There were other aspects too, like hearing others, especially the younger children say things like ‘Why is that Ryan so weird?”. Hearing that hurt me to no end. Sometimes I’d fight back, but more often than not I’d just keep silent.

My parents were also very different from that of other parents. They always treated me in a mature manner. I’m not sure if this is because they had their hands full with my brother, or whether that was their actual parenting style. They pretty much let me do whatever I wanted, with little discipline. My parents really only scolded me when I got exceptionally out of hand. As a result when I was young, I went about mostly untamed, doing things impulsively and speaking my mind without care. They didn’t even force me to study, resulting in me pretty much coasting about with bad grades for most of my schooling life. My parents also never stopped telling my how much they loved me, how clever I was and how pretty I was, yet it served to have little effect on my self esteem.

Looking back, I actually attribute most of the stereotypical parenting to have come from my paternal grandmother, Mama as I called her. When I was young, I clung to her like crazy. Once I even spontaneously flew with her to Ipoh because I refused to let go of her at the airport. She used to wake me up every morning, get my clothes ready and make breakfast for me. After school she’d teach me Mandarin for many hours (which would later turn out to backfire) and force me to exercise. She’d make a special dinner for me because I was a fussy eater and then force me into bed next to her when she went to sleep at 9pm. For many years that was my routine, till finally I got too rebellious for her to handle at 11. She hired a tuition teacher.

My relationship with Mandarin has always been a tricky one. It started when I was first dumped in Nanyang Kindergarten, a rather traditional Chinese school, after we moved, from a predominantly English liberal sort of Montessori. Naturally this move was akin to caging a previously free bird. First day of school I went home crying because I had been badly scolded for not knowing how to write my name in Mandarin. That was really when my grandmother really started intervening in my education.

I hated that school. I don’t remember having many friends as the new kid. The others weren’t friendly at all. As a result I recall trying too hard to fit in, with the end result of being subjected to even more social isolation from the others. The boys, who I really wanted to be friends with for some now unfathomable reason, turned this round on its head and ended up bullying me. I remember Nanyang so vividly only for how miserable I felt, all 6 months long of it. To this day I can really only recall having 3 other kids who were nice to be a treated me kindly.

Primary school was a well known Christian Girls School, the main reason why I was even planted in Nanyang for 6 months. First day of school I remember being really happy because C my friend from church was also in the same class as me. We talked so much that we got separated by the teacher within the first few days of school. I don’t really remember very much except that I spent the next few years doing the same things, trying too hard to seek affirmation from teachers, trying too hard to seek affirmation from classmates and random incidents of talking back to teachers. I fainted once when I was 9 and the teacher had to carry me to the sick bay. When I regained consciousness, I puked all over her. I was incredibly awesome in that way.

The first time I recall really really having to study hard was when I was 12 and sitting for the PSLE. I had gotten 192 or something for the preliminary exams and my mother panicked. She took leave for a few days and sat me down for some good old Singapore style cramming. It was the first time she actively participated in my education. I sat for the examination, scored 212 and managed to get into the sister Secondary school. Hooray. But there is one incident that happened on that day that stands out in my mind though it wasn’t made known to me then, of a certain call made to my grandmother by C’s mother, L as she shall be known. L, a long time church friend of my parents as well as my Sunday school teacher. In the call she asked my grandmother how I did for the exams, and when my grandmother told her she sounded very surprised, then annoyed. My grandmother was offended and relayed this to my parents.

L, was the person who would later destroy my old life and change me forever.

Oh hey look. I got the comments working. Lol?

In order to preserve all that has been said about the previous Palin post, I'll stick them here:

Chun Wui: Wah.... hard hitting political blogger... very aggressive... lol. How how, mend your words lest you may incur the wrath of others... hahaha

Malcolm: First and foremost, the prolife/prochoice stance is something that will be forever contended - Palin's nomination to the office would not be the be all and end all of the pro-life argument.

Malcolm: Subsequent candidates can and will contradict with this. However you can argue that it could be a political move as well since a large portion of America is comprised either of christian fundementalis

Malcolm: Subsequent candidates can and will contradict with this. However you can argue that it could be a political move as well since a large portion of America is comprised either of christian fundementalis

Malcolm: her background, would it not make it all the more impressive that she chooses to adopt a prolife stance in spite of her premature pregnancy and downs syndrome kid? In some sense she does conform to

Malcolm: the "superwoman" tag entrusted upon her as she - at least in her personal life - shows that it is possible to triumph over the baby-vector role. Thus it is still a step forward for femminism - it's a

Malcolm: highly publicised example of a strong woman. In addition, you can hardly blame her for running, after all it was Mccain who elected her - she didn't campaign on the basis that she's an emblem of

Malcolm: female empowerment. So while the motivation behind her nomination is suspect, you should blame the system and not the candidate. To wrap this up, I have absolutely no idea about Palin's background and

Malcolm: constructed this based solely off the content of your post and the sentiments that i formed as a result. Probably for the purpose of playing the devil's advocate. Either ways, take it into

Malcolm: consideration, and have fun reading it off your chatbox. In an unrelated vein, where the heck did you find time to do this?!

daryl (who wins an award for being most succinct): Yeah, Palin is a scourge

daryl: Palin is a political gimmick. Obama picked Biden because he was weak on foreign policy. McCain picked Palin because...? He was weak on being young, probably.

Nic: Mong, you do realize that anyone caught in the situation of pregnancy via rape is not going to be able to be apathetic about pro-life issues, yes? It's not some hypothetical game - if Palin's veep,

Nic: there is a high likelihood of women in that situation who will be essentially forced to become 'superwomen' like Palin, juggling careers with unwanted additions to the family.

Nic: Okay, the grammar is that last tag was ****ed, but whatever you get my point. Palin

Nic: *in

Nic: goddamn.

Nic: Mel can you just enable comments

daryl: Heh, Palin's pick is not advancement for women. It's a step behind because McCain doesn't respect her for anything but her gimmick value.

daryl: *the Palin pick -- It's quite insulting, in fact, "I'm choosing you because you can attract disenchanted Hillary supporters simply because of your biological traits"

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Lol? First off I think the main point of my writing that was missed - which is that women wanting to elect Palin on the basis of obtaining gender equality are misguided and that Palin's own policies would make gender equality worse off. Also, I'm not going to bother to respond to all that has been said because 1) no time, 2) my brain is fried from econs.

Oh God Econs.

I admit when I first heard that the Republican vice president nominee was a woman, my interest was piqued. This was for two reasons, one that the Republicans have notoriously been stereotyped as misogynists and secondly that a woman had once more been brought to the top tier of the American political scene. However minutes after my first reaction, the realization sank in that this was a very political move. Firstly as McCain himself said, if he picked Joseph Lieberman who was one of the front runners, the Republican delegates would have walked on out him. Secondly, the hopes of (misguided) feminist America had been brought up when Hillary Clinton was in the running for the Democratic nominee. Feminists everywhere were saying that 2008 was their year – their year to finally prove that they were politically capable. When Clinton dropped out however, so did their hopes. By choosing Palin as a vice president, McCain knew that he would no doubt be able to pick up votes from the dissatisfied Feminists. Essentially picking Palin was a political move and nothing more.

I now turn to the brouhaha that has been brought up in the wake of Palin’s nomination. As expected rather pessimistically by me, women are essentially emotional creatures. I’m not saying that there is something wrong with being emotional because I certainly am – but the responses that most women have shown seem to lack any semblance of reason. Is this not then playing into the hands of misogynists by fulfilling a stereotype?

In today’s Today (6-7 September 2008) on page 24, there are two commentary pieces written by women on Palin’s nomination. The first one is purely emotional, written I believe by a reporter. The piece goes on to talk about Palin’s life, how she eloped with her husband and she raised her kids – therefore the writer sympathises with her AND THEREFORE SHE IS A GOOD LEADER. I kid you not. Nothing is said about Palin’s political stance or actions while in office (don’t forget that for someone running on an anti-corruption platform, she has done some dodgy things while in office).

The second piece was written by Constance Singam of Aware. She managed to live up to he organisation’s name by actually coming across as more aware of the issues at hand (Oh God I finally succumbed to making a pun). She mentions Palin’s anti abortion stance and even goes on to call her as a “role model…for pre-feminist days”. However at it’s very core the article expounds again largely on Palin’s personal life, even going so far as to call her a “superwoman”.

How how women? Mend your speech a little, lest you mar the fortunes of all womenkind. By turning Palin’s nomination into a feminist issue, are you not throwing us one step back? Yes, women have come a long way. We’re had Thatcher, Merkel, Wu Yi as examples of exemplary female political leaders, then we have the dodgy such as Megawati and Arroyo. So yes, women have already proven their ability at running a political office. So why then is putting a woman into the White House such a big issue?

By turning Palin’s nomination into some huge feminist issue “OMG SHE’S A WOMAN THEREFORE WE SHOULD SEE THAT SHE GETS INTO THE WHITE HOUSE”, are we not forgetting that fact that the main argument we’ve had for years is that Women Are Every Bit As Good As Men? If Palin is really as good as political candidate, should we not see to it that she if elected on the basis of her merit as a political leader instead of simply her being a female candidate? If a woman is elected based on her gender, we have already lost the argument because women need to trumpet their gender in order to be elected. It is only when a woman is given a prestigious position based on her own ability that females all around are able to say “We are every bit as good as men”.

Furthermore by espousing largely on Palin’s personal life, these women writers are shooting themselves in the foot. Yes she might have had an interesting life, eloping with her husband when she discovered she was 1 month pregnant to giving birth to a child with Down’s Syndrome, but how is this remotely relevant to how she is going to behave politically? Governing one’s home is vastly different from that of political office – sure you can argue that they all require good foresight and excellent multi tasking skills, but at the end of the day knowing the best places to do your marketing doesn’t equate to knowledge about fiscal and monetary policies. If someone is going to be having a big hand in running a very large and important country, don’t you think it is more important to look at her political record rather than simply talking about her background? In this aspect dear women writers, you have failed.

Lastly and more importantly the significance of having a woman nominated to the White House is that it is a triumph for women because the glass ceiling of the highest office one could ever aspire to be has been broken. Thus hails a new era of women rising to the top without being oppressed by sexism and sexual harassment with freedom and equality for all. Wonderful. Now only if that would actually come true if Palin made it to the top. Instead women would be sent back to the ‘dark ages’ where our lives would once more be dictated by our bodies.

The whole debate about abortion stems from the fact that some people consider a fetus an already living thing, therefore killing the fetus is tantamount to murder. Others however believe that the fetus is not a living being, therefore abortion is acceptable. Now I’m going to put my neck on the line here a little and express my own personal view: I do not believe in abortion but I believe in a woman being allowed to make her own choice.

My reasoning for this is that in the event of a rape, a woman would be further psychologically traumatized if she has to bear the child to term. Furthermore if a mother is unable to care for her child, then the child is worse off for being born. I do not quite accept adoption as a viable alternative because simply there are always more orphans than wannabe adoptees – there are bound to be children that remains orphans their entire lives. Therefore I believe in the woman being allowed to make a choice. If Palin was elected to the government, people who do not believe that life begins at conception will be forced to conform to something they do not wish to. Young girls who have made mistakes will be forever forced to live with them, their lives irrevocably altered. Couples who are struggling to earn a living will be further weighted down with an additional burden. Furthermore since the argument against abortion has its roots in Christianity, I will go so far as to say it is a deliberate imposition of one’s religious beliefs on another. So much for America being a secular state.

That dear women, is why I thoroughly refuse to even conceive the day they Palin enters the White House to take a Vice Presidential position. Not only will feminism take a step back because she’s been voted for the wrong reasons, it will forever be flung headlong into the dark ages where women would be mere birthing vectors once more.

Ghost Filling

I began writing this in December last year, before I wrote Suicide? and today, I have finally finished to the tunes of Pink Martini! Hooray

Thank you Suat, for helping me with editing :D

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Ghost Filling

It happened almost too suddenly, but then again almost every death is ‘too sudden’. He walked out, slammed the door. She ran behind and flung open the door. He barked, “stop following me!” and crossed the road. She stood at the pavement, half wanting to follow him and half glued to the ground by his command. The red car came from the right, slowly, driven by a geriatric. He collided with the 20km/h car and wobbled about unsteadily for a few tender seconds. He fell forward, hitting his forehead on the edge of the pavement. The red car veered to the left and ended up on Mrs. Watson’s lawn.

When the ambulance came, they took her away too. She had bloodstains on her shirt from cradling him in her arms. They thought she was injured. They took away elderly Mr. Simmons as well, he had a heart attack at the very thought he hurt someone. Mrs. Watson felt faint upon seeing the accident, but then her first aid training kicked in and she furiously dialed 911 before running out with her kit.

They cleaned her up at the hospital, gave her some advice on how to remove blood stains from clothes, and told her the bad news, he was dead. She fainted.

-----

At the first day of the wake, she was the first person at the door. His mother greeted her wearily, weak from a full fledged day of crying the previous day. She wanted to say some words of comfort and assurance, but one glance at the woman and she realised she was a dam ready to burst – and she didn’t really want such an outpouring of emotion to deal with. As she looked around the room, she noticed to her horror that some of the pictures of her and him were up. Then she realised, almost immediately, that they didn’t know he had left her just moments before he left for good.

For the sake of not making the situation more screwed than it already was, she decided to keep mum. Let them think nothing has happened, she thought to herself, than to further aggrieve them. She sat in a dark corner of the room, next to a window with the blackout curtains drawn, staring mutely at the coffin. She was the last person to leave that night, and this continued itself for the next day.

She drifted like a boat tethered to a dock - till the funeral.

At the funeral the next day, she played the role of the good girlfriend. Sitting in the pew at the front, she sat at the rightmost corner of the left pew, ignoring the people that came to pay their respects. They, in turn, tiptoed around her, a massively petite black elephant in the middle of the painfully beautiful chapel – inappropriate orange and yellow hangings of the last wedding ceremony still up. Amidst the noisy wailings of a mother who lost her beloved son, she cut an almost scarily rigid figure showing no emotion.

At the burial she continued to maintain her silence, watching with barely noticeable glazed eyes as the mahogany coffin was slowly lowered till it touched the bottom of the grave. When it rested and the straps were removed, his mother’s wailings started to rise an octave and from piercing hearts it shifted to piercing the ears of the mourners.

At the funeral reception later, the few friends that dared to venture and ask how she felt were quietly sucked in to her aura of quiet despair; a great feeling of hopelessness and muted pain overtaking their thoughts and feelings. The moment they parted from her however, her aura would quietly fade from their thoughts; a self imposed unconscious amnesia in order to keep one sane.

One such braved soul who dared walk into her aura asked her cautiously, “How do you feel now, with him gone?”

She gave a half smile and laughed a liquid laugh – the kind where one tries to keep back tears and they flow down the nasal cavities – “At least I don’t have to torture myself with the thought that one day he’ll come back to me.” Her friend laughed nervously, and quickly excused herself. She half smiled inwardly at her wittiness.

After the reception was over, she left after hugging his mother. Walking back as the early winter sun started to set; she wandered past the bare skeletal branches of trees, swings abandoned for the warmth of the inside.

Her line had finally become untethered and she was drifting in the open ocean.

Stepping back into the cold emptiness of her house, she switched on the thermostat and put down her bag on a counter. Closing the door behind her, she stepped out of the house and sat on the pavement, watching the last remnants of the sun slip away from the horizon. Slowly one by one the streetlights lit up, controlled by some unseen hand, bathing the empty street in an artificially warm glow. This spot would have been one of the last edges a living him would have touched, she thought, running her gloved hands over the gritty tops of the cement.

She stood up on impulse and wandered over to the middle of the street, shadow trailing behind her apprehensively. He got hit about here, she thought. Standing still, she closed her eyes, trying to feel his presence around her, cold air swirling around. She thought she felt him for a second; however the feeling passed and he was gone once more.

Opening her eyes, she beheld the pavement on the opposite side of the lane. As she slowly advanced, the dark patch on the edge of the pavement grew larger. Presumably a neighbour with good intentions and short patience had tried to clean up the mess - for the blood stains were much smaller than she had last remembered. She could see him lying there, like he had that day. Peaceful, serene, perhaps feeling himself fade away.

Lying down on the asphalt, she shifted her body till her forehead rested on the blood stain. There she lay, savouring the moment. She breathed him, felt him here, but it was nothing but a faint presence. It was here that he had well and truly left her. She lay so still that she soon drifted off to sleep, only to be awakened by a neighbour who had let out her dog. Gathering herself up, she sat on the street and brushed off the bits of asphalt on her clothes before getting up and walking into her warm house.

After a warm shower, she snuggled under her sheets and closed her eyes. It was then that she really felt him, covering her and holding her tight like he used to. But she opened her eyes and to her immense disappointment there was no one there. For once in many days, she sucked in a lungful of air and started to sob on her pillow.

-----

The next few days were marked by nothingness as she drifted about the house, watching meaningless things on the television and sitting on the pavement blankly looking out at the street. Her parents had offered to visit, but her mourning was not yet over and she wanted to be alone with her thoughts without intrusion. She coped with the food concerned neighbours brought over, eating just enough to take away her hunger. Every night she shed a few tears, for she never missed him more acutely than she did when she returned to an empty bed and lingering memories.

Soon early winter melded into winter itself and all around the neighbourhood wreaths and colourful lights were tacked onto doors and roofs respectively. The magazines she usually freelanced for were hounding her with requests for articles; they filled out her e-mail inbox along with offers for penile enhancements and cheap Rolexes. She replied with polite refusal to the would-be surgeons and watch sellers and ignored the petulant requests from the editors. The tears at night were quietly replaced with sleeplessness and a deep longing from within her, one day she had no idea how to fill.

A fast diminishing supply of groceries forced her out, back onto the streets – for once in a few months she was forced to interact with beings that weren’t extra cautious around her, kid gloves taken off. As she drove downtown to the supermarket, she felt like a stranger in her own city. Colours seemed more bleached and darker at the same time and nightfall had further turned the apartment blocks into looming towers, creating shadows on the streets. The people seemed more unfriendlier than she remembered, each rushing off and oblivious to the darkness around them, some plugged into other worlds. She shuddered involuntarily and continued driving.

Reaching the safe fluorescent bright white lights of the supermarket, she headed in and slowly picked out her groceries and other essentials. Making her way past the people in the aisles without the slightest social interaction, she continued till the cashier and settled for a slight smile of thanks which went unnoticed by the woman.

Mentally and emotionally taxed by her jaunt into the city, she sat in her car to rest with the heater turned up, before deciding to head back home. She closed her eyes and pretended it was last Christmas, next to the fire. Just as she thought of him a car horn sounded in the distance. Gripping the wheel, she stepped on the gas and drove off.

This time she opted for another route though the city, which was faster and took her through the ghettos. There were more people out on the streets, some roaming in groups and others sitting outside their homes. She could hear loud music being played outside, reduced to a passable level in the interior of her car. As if triggered by the heady beats, the idea of returning back into an empty house and another night of sleeplessness suddenly came to her; it scared her and unsettled her very soul.

A wave of fear came over her; she had been content to drift for the past few months but now she felt so lost. The hole in her soul began to tingle again, and a feeling of immense loss hit her once more. She continued to drive, though slower and taking more frequent shallow breaths.

Just as she passed a woman dressed in the skimpiest of clothes, on a winter’s night nonetheless, a reckless thought passed through her mind. Before rational thought could take over, she wound down the window on the right hand side of the car and called out to the woman, “how much for a night?”

The woman, startled by a distinctively female voice calling out to her hesitated a few moments before walking over and standing as close to the warm car as she could. “$50 sweetie, I don’t really do women though, but I know someone who’s good for women if you want.”

“It’s okay, I don’t really need a specialist – I just need someone.” The woman raised an eyebrow skeptically, opened the car door and settled herself in front of the heater.

“The name’s Dionne, as long as you’re paying I’m game”. The car started to increase in speed and they headed for the suburbs, Dionne’s inane chatter slowly dying down as the warmth made her drowsy.

When she turned into the driveway and parked the car, Dionne woke up groggily. Getting up from the passenger’s side of the car, she followed her slowly into the house. Inside, she switched on the lights and opened her purse to search for her wallet and withdrew the right amount of cash. She turned to Dionne who was now rubbing her eyes and handed it to her without a word.

She walked off towards the bedroom, removing her boots and coat on the way and Dionne followed her apprehensively. Reaching the bed, she climbed up and curled into a ball and closed her eyes. She felt Dionne standing over her, then moving to the other end of the bed (though the creaks on the warped floorboards) and climbing on.

She felt him there, his presence, with her on the bed again; and his arms wrapped loving around her body. She felt tears prickling at her eyelids but refused to move and wipe then away and thus it was in that position she drifted off to the most comforting sleep had had in months.

She dreamt of him, he was holding her and laughing. He said he loved her, he said he was sorry and he said he would never leave her. She smiled in her sleep. She cried silently in her sleep. She felt the hole in her heart get filled again in her sleep.

The next morning she awoke to find Dionne gone.

Falling back on her bed, she closed her eyes and recollected the entire relationship, finger firmly on the fast forward button. She pictured him walking out of the door, that faithful day, door slamming sound ringing in her head.

She inhaled, exhaled, got up and slowly walked the first few steps of her new life. For the first time in months, she smiled blissfully to herself, at peace and at one with the world (she liked clichés, besides, magazine writing always called for clichés!) and drifted into the kitchen to prepare a cup of chamomile tea.

Outside, Mr. Simmons was taking a walk in the frosty morning air with the help of Mrs. Simmons. They waved to Mrs. Watson next door, who was out on her lawn, planning her spring garden (and surreptitiously trying to cover the frozen tyre track gouges with dirt.)

suicide?

For many years, Frank never quite saw the need to draft a will. However on a rather ordinary day for this ordinary churchman, he woke up with a sudden epiphany and rose rather cheerily. Should Mrs. Frank have seen this, she would not have failed to pass a comment about how he looked younger, but as always she lay asleep with her back facing her husband.

As Frank started out the window, watching the raindrops pelt the windowpane on yet another dreary English day, he felt freer than he had in months. Worst of all was the pretense he had to put up for his dwindling congregation that yes, all was well with the Franks. Thankfully, the eyesight and hearing of the parishioners had grown so bad that they now could neither discern sarcasm from actual happiness, nor a blatantly forced smile from a real one. Their eyesight had also spared them the agony of seeing Mrs. Frank sneak Mr. Williams into the parish house, which is what a rather distressed Frank saw one day in a security camera he had installed on the church grounds – to stop the theft of the church’s prize winning roses.

The next blow came when he saw who the thief of the roses was, none other than his son, Frank Jr. As if Frank Jr. didn’t upset his father enough, the video camera also captured him giving the roses to another boy and a gratuitous make out session ensued. Such debauchery! Frank felt sick to the stomach and head and dirty all over. He leaned over and puked into the paper bin and started to cry. Perhaps this is how God feels like, he thought, able to see every single sin we carry out, rendering him sick, as his tears washed the puke off his mouth.

The final blow came a few weeks later when because the rose bushes were too bare of roses that they were disqualified from the annual county competition – for Frank was the sort of man who had a marked disability in confronting loved ones and Frank Jr. had literally deflowered the bush in addition to being deflowered in front of the bush.

Frank soon started to think rather dark thoughts, which all too often drifted to suicide from the ‘manlier’ thoughts of killing his entire family with a chainsaw. However he was a man of the church through and through, he could not possibly take his own life for it was against God’s wishes, it was a sin! What was the point of living such a Godly life and leaving a sinner? Besides, he told himself, there’s so much suffering in the world that I should at least try to alleviate some of it before I go or else my life is a waste. At that very thought, he drifted off to sleep and dreamt a dream of a land far away where he would be able to die soon without sinning and awoke the next day with a grin.

-----

Frank got into his rather small and economical car after preparing breakfast for the entire family and set off for the nearest town where the family solicitors were located. Parking his car, he headed straight for Bingham & Botts; Advocates & Solicitors. He drafted his will, leaving his wife and son the princely sum of 2,000 pounds each and willed the rest to Adulterers Anonymous and Help for Homosexuals. Feeling pleased with himself for being so witty, he then headed to the travel agent’s to book a one way ticket to Iraq, economy class, thank you very much.

Errands done, he went off to the grocers and bought the weekly groceries, giving himself a little treat by buying his favoured Polo mints. Popping one into his mouth, he loaded the groceries into the car boot and got into the car and set off for home.

He found Mrs. Frank and Frank Jr. at the breakfast table eating the breakfast he had nicely laid out earlier and he greeted them cheerily, receiving guttural grunts in return. He decided there and then to announce his plans to his family. “Can I have both of your attention please? I’d like to say now that I’m going to Iraq for a trip this Saturday.”

Mrs. Frank paused from drinking her tea. “Isn’t it dangerous my dear? What if you die there? What will happen to Frank Jr. and me then?”

Frank smiled, for he knew his wife too well, “I’ve already drafted a will with Bingham & Botts, so in the event I don’t return, I have already made provisions for you two.”

“Oh”. Mrs. Frank then returned to the morning papers and her tea. Frank Jr. didn’t even say a word and continued devouring his scrambled eggs.

Unable to contain his excitement further and eager to get away from the degenerate lot, Frank headed to his room and started to pack the things he wished to bring along to Iraq. He held each article of clothing dispassionately, old fond memories forgotten in anticipation of the future.

-----

Saturday morning came and the Franks pilled into the car, Frank Jr. quiet as usual and Mrs. Frank prattling about how it was quite unfair the parish was disqualified from the yearly rose competition. Frank himself kept quiet but smiled and nodded, acting like he was listening to Mrs. Frank.

At the airport he hugged Mrs. Frank tightly and ruffled Frank Jr.’s hair. As he walked towards the immigration counter, he shouted out for Mrs. Frank to take care of herself and Frank Jr., and with a wave disappeared from view.

On board the flight to Dubai, he promptly fell asleep, awakening later only for the on board meal and then proceeding to fiddle with the amenities provided. Waiting at the Dubai airport, he couldn’t resist calling home just to hear Mrs. Frank’s voice one last time (for he did still love her as much as she didn’t love him). As Frank said that he loved her and would miss her, he could hear Mr. Williams in the background asking where the toothpaste was kept. Still having a little time to kill before his next flight, he explored the airport a little, playing with the automatic sensor taps like the little child he felt he was.

Upon reaching Iraq and clearing immigration (he told the immigration officer his occupation was as a paedophile, a pea collector), he found the directions to the market square he had seen in his dreams and took a cab to the vicinity. Getting out of the cab, he was assailed by the punishing heat of the Middle Eastern sun and headed off to find a drink from one of the many stalls there.
Finishing his route around the entire market, he walked to a corner where he continued to gulp down his bottled water. Saving a little still, he closed his eyes and emptied the contents on his person.

Around him, the sounds started to evolve from the chatter of people to the more animalistic screams of terror. Frank opened his eyes and saw the source of it; a convoy of large militaristic-looking humvees were speeding into the market square, kicking up magnificent clouds of an ochre dust – in pursuit of a dirty blue car filled with men. He turned to look behind him and saw a woman (or possibly a cross dresser) dressed in the typical black burqa, eyes shining with fear and holding on to two young children by the hand. The younger one started to cry, sensing the tension around.

As the car shot through the market square knocking over various wares, Frank took a deep breath and thought, this is it – this is my dream!, he couldn’t help but give a completely situation inappropriate grin. He popped in a polo mint as he half watched and half anticipated as the car, now a few meters away from him, failed to make a right turn for it was simply traveling at too fast a speed, slammed into a building right behind him. The car now cut Frank and the woman off from the main market. The humvees were almost within firing range. Frank turned and ran towards the woman and the children and tackled them to the ground, covering their bodies with his rather large one.

The last things Frank experienced are as follows: Felt – Wet from being peed on by one of the children; Heard – Wail of a child mixed with the sharp ratatat of the guns; Saw – The woman crying from the little window to her eyes; Smelt – Jasmine perfume that originated from the woman; Tasted – The polo mint he had been sucking.

On my left hand there is a scar.

It's tiny, a mere dot.

It was where the needle once was, mis-poked and quickly abandoned. It was where goodness and life were supposed to flow through and enter me, nourish me. Instead it opened a passageway for me to escape, little droplets of blood leaking out.

Now, the hole has been plugged by a mixture of platelets, plasma and suicidal red blood cells. But inside? Oh it looks like it still bleeds.

A small hole, minuscule. Underneath the skin a small amoeba shaped bruise like colour. Blood flowing, but blood trapped. I think it wants to run away, just like me.

I want to touch it, perhaps the colour will dissipate if I do, but it looks too much like a bruise. I don't want to make it worse. The prick spot looks like a nucleus of the cell of this newly foreign spot on my body - one of many.

I opt to kiss it instead. A gentle grazing. It feels lukewarm to my lips. I look at it again, no, nothing has changed, the colour remains. I wonder if anyone has ever kissed that spot before, had it ever been loved before someone came and rudely stuck a needle into it?

I wonder if it still bleeds, like me - or has it managed to move on faster than I have?

Libération

The moment he stepped out of the door, leaving it to close agonisingly slow and deliver an ashamed click, she got up and dried her tears. Jumping to her feet, she raced to the bathroom – an uncontrollable urge to see her face as if it had been drastically altered within the last hour since she’d last checked her hair.

The same face she had beheld for years appeared before her sight, eyes slightly redder, hair messier, lips puffy from the collagen that was tears. Slowly lifting her hands to touch her face, she traced her fingers over the gentle contours of her face, recalling the places where he had once occupied – he and the others before him, staking their claim on her but soon relinquishing their ownership. Then she had an epiphany; it was her, this hateful detestful face that brought her downfall every time.

Every single one of them, the silver tongued fools – they never loved her, instead they loved her. Oh how they spoke about how beautiful she was, the thoughts choked her like a string of cursed pearls: every single bead a compliment paid in return for something. Suddenly seized by an overwhelming hatred, she looked upon her face with great distaste, you are my undoing, she thought. The more she began to consider her thoughts rationally, the more they began to build up momentum and take a life of their own. Every single self pitying phrase, insult, insecurity rose up and joined its ranks – marching onwards in a great movement.

No more no more she cried out finally, great passion and hurt flooding over her person. Quietly slipping into the mode when passion has completely overwhelmed reason (or perhaps reason itself has fled), she grabbed at a razor blade sitting quietly on the counter top and started to tear into her face. With every cut she made, with every slice into thin skin, she felt the burden from her heart slowly slip away. The pain made her freer – the tears she cried stung the wounds and the sight of the streams of blood and tears dropping into the once pristine white sink liberated her further. Her mind flashed through a thousand days, every man that she once loved – every little thing cutting her inside and being repaired simultaneously by the cuts she was now making.

Finally exhausted with emotion and physical pain, she made her last cut into her cheek. Letting the blade fall into the sink from her now bloody hands, she ignored the small clink it made as she once more beheld her face. Lines were scored into her face, bare red flesh peeping out, and what remained of her face caked in blood, she was finally gone. She smiled and she sank to the floor and started to drift off to sleep on a puddle of blood. She had never felt so satisfied and at ease with her spirit before.

For no more would she be undone by man, for they would no longer want her.

Is it better to love or be loved?

There’s a famous song, popularised by the movie Moulin Rouge which carries the line “the greatest thing is to love and be loved in return”. Perhaps to a dismissive cynic, that line would be thoroughly scoffed at and swept away under a cloud of criticism of naivety, surely you jest, they say, some people prefer money to love, you poor innocent child. From a romanticist view however, love is everything in the world and more. However this isn’t meant to be a discussion on love being great, but rather when love fails (for it can be said it is not true love unless it is truly reciprocated) in the true sense of the word, when it becomes one sided.

I’d assume that most of the people who read this would be at least be adolescents or older (or else I’d be kind of afraid due to some of the content on this blog), and we’ve all gone through situations where we’ve fallen madly in love with someone who won’t give us the time of the day, or to that effect. More uncommonly is the situation when someone falls in love with us and we are unable to return the sentiment. I personally have been on both sides of the story, and both are unpleasant enough for me to want to dismiss love as being the stuff of pink unicorns and flying spaghetti gods. Unfortunately I haven’t been a hardened enough cynic to close off my mind to the widespread evidence that romantic love does exist. Perhaps one day, but not to-day.

Somewhere along the line, someone decided that one-sided affairs should be romanticised. From the pages of Cyrano de Bergerac to the myth of Echo (sorry my knowledge of contemporary literature has failed me this time), the ones who love with no affirmation are regarded as the heroes, poor tragic heroes. They are the ones who goes to great lengths for their loves or die from sadness. Even today we always tend to pity the ones who cannot stop loving, and curse the ones who cruelly refuse this love. But what does it really feel like to love with no hope of reciprocation? (Oh how the mind is such a twisted tool when overwhelmed with the feeling of love.) We hope against hope that one day the person will come around and love us back; we vow to sacrifice our lives and everything we hold dear just for the happiness of the other; we despair when the person is so out of reach; we are overwhelmed with happiness at the slightest sign of reciprocation. We are fools, truly fools in love, but romanticised figures nonetheless.

And on the less reported side of the affair, there’s the lovee (the target). Often the lovee doesn’t even have the slightest inkling about the lover’s intentions at all, as much as the lover fears he/she is overtly obvious, so such experiences are much less than that of the lover. I personally hated being a lovee. There were no highs, only lows. I felt like a bitch for not being able to return the affection, and indeed I was villainised as such by the people who were friends with this lover. On the other hand I was filled with a paranoid fear that this lover would stalk me and hurt me, though that was quite an extreme case. The worst part being a lovee is that it is often a fight between one’s conscience and one’s heart. We are often compelled to try and force ourselves to return the feeling out of obligation while our hearts are screaming no no no! We are the villains, who unthinkingly hurt the heroes of the story.

The problem for both sides though, is that love is not something controllable, you can’t change the way you feel, it just happens on it’s own. You can’t force someone to love you; you cannot add ingredients and expect it to just pop up. You cannot shower someone with love and expect them to love you back if they don’t. In some cases love can be cultivated slowly, like in arranged marriages, but that it quite a moot point in today’s modern society. You can however, fool yourself to think that you’re in love, but that’s not love is it? You’d just by lying to yourself. Similarly as a lover you can’t change the love you feel. There is no wrong and no right, there is only a mess and sadness.

Bottom line? Love stinks, yeah yeah.

The Sea Green Gang of Justice

Once upon a time in the land of Sillypore there lived a girl who commuted to work by MRT.

This girl was by no means a morning person. In fact she hated mornings. Mornings were meant for sleeping, not for moving about. Still nonetheless this girl got up everyday to go to work, somewhat druggedly. In fact her brain didn't really start functioning till after about and hour after she woke, approximately the time she was dropped off at the MRT station.

It was right after the weekend, the dreaded MONDAY and her she was feeling even more braindead that usual, if that was possible, however she still felt a little cheerful in her heart, after all it was yet another day to live - right? Today was also a special day, as in her hands she held her special SEA FOAM GREEN FILE which she intended to bring to work. From the outside, the file looked relatively normal, it said 'Ikoma Language School' in Arial font, inside were a few papers, however the file and the girl both held a secret - they were THE SEA GREEN GANG OF JUSTICE!

As the girl had a small smile on her lips, a woman passed by with a fearsome scrowl, making the girl angry because she was scrowled at for no reason! Within a nanosecond the girl zipped forth with her MIGHTY FILE OF JUSTICE and whacked the evil behemoth onto the train tracks. Just then, the train came by and squished the evil denizen, it's screams ending suddenly. The girl chuckled to herself and patted her file lovingly and walked on board the train.

The train was snug as usual, and it was a pretty uneventful ride. The girl was happy.

At her station, she got out and walked towards her office, stopping at the junction when the lights were green and the cars were a-going. Then a horrible sight met her dark brown eyes, it was a man, smoking! Worse still, the wind blew the smoke right at her direction! The girl dodged quickly to the left to avert the noxious cloud which drifted her way. Alas the effort was wasted as the evil scent of nicotine and various chemicals entered her system. She became furious again!

Out whipped her file and out the man flew and landed in the middle out the road where the cars rolled over his tar filled body till all that remained was a sickly dark red stain. The lights turned red as the girl laughed merrily to herself as a few crows flew down from their high perches to feast on the mulchy remains of the man.

All in a day's work, riding the world of evil!

As promised though a wee bit late (:

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Nerd Geekson
Once upon a time, there lived Nerd Geekson. Nerd Geekson studied hard and went to Harvard University. In his free time, he would spend hours cooped up in his garage laboratory, attempting to invent a substance that would hold the follicles upon his scalp at the exact 45 degree angle.

He was still working on it. There was just something sorely lacking in his formula.

Nerd Geekson was a nice chap, however he was completely and utterly clueless to reality and lived in his own domain of Geekdom. Even the nerds on campus shunned Nerd Geekson; just that he didn’t care and didn’t pay attention.

However one day as Nerd Geekson was strolling about the gardens on his way home, his face buried in a book of Quantum Physics, he crashed into someone.

As he fell backwards and landed on his ass, he watched the blur of the person he ran into grab his arm and lift him up. As he dusted the dirt off the seat of his pants, the other person spoke up.

“Oh my, I’m soooo sorry!” Nerd Geekson looked up and started to squint, where were his spectacles? Everything was just a blur to him without his other set of eyes.

“Why are you squinting at me? Ewww, pervert!” Nerd Geekson saw a blur of flesh race towards him and seconds later felt the hand of the stranger make contact with his face.

“Oww! I was squinting because I lost my spectacles.” Nerd Geekson rubbed his tingling cheek, “Can you help me find it? All I see are colours.”

“Oh my! I’m sooo sorry. Wait, what are spectacles?” Nerd Geekson got down on all fours and starting running his hands along the gravel path.

“They’re… Oh nevermind, I think I’ve found it.” Nerd Geekson got up and wiped the filmy lenses on his woolly jumper before placing the thick black frame on his nose.

He mouth fell open and saliva started to drip for the corners of his mouth as he scanned his eyes up and down the gorgeous specimen of womankind. A busty blonde girl stood there in front of him, decked out in the all too familiar cheerleader togs of his college.

“Hehehe, that’s sooo gross! Are you alright?” Nerd nodded his head silent, using the back of his palm to wipe the drool off.

“Me? Oh yeah I am.” He started into her eyes; they were as blue as copper (II) sulphate. Her lips, a shade of beautiful burgundy like Bromine gas her skin as white as Magnesium Oxide, what a resplendent figure of beauty!

“Ohh, If you’re fine then I must be going! I have cheerleading practise! See ya!” And with those words goddess pranced off. Nerd didn’t even catch her name.
Nerd Geekson Reached down and grabbed his book of Quantum Physics off the ground, he examined the creased spine carefully before looking in the direction the goddess has disappeared off to. He tucked the book under his arm and continued his journey home.

For the next few days, Nerd Geekson spent more time on campus quietly watching his fellow students and the professors go about, keeping a sharp eye out for the goddess and her flouncing flaxen hair.

Finally on Friday afternoon, exactly 3 days since he had walked smack into the goddess, he spotted her in the distance, wandering about. He quickly got up from his spot under the centuries old oak tree and straightened his bow tie and readjusted his suspenders. He licked his lips and started to walk excitedly towards the goddess.

As she got closer, Nerd Geekson suddenly froze up. The goddess soon waltzed past him, in her own world of happy pink bunnies and candy growing on trees and he caught a whiff of her perfume, ahhh, what a delicate scent!

The perfume went straight to his head and knocked him out of his stupor. He looked about a little dazed when he saw goddess strolling further and further away from him. In desperation, Nerd Geekson ran towards her to keep up.

“Goddess, goddess…” He cried, almost collapsing on the tarmac from his little bit of physical exertion.

“Huh? Oh my! It’s you again!” The goddess stopped and helped Nerd Geekson to his feet.

“Oh thank you… You smell nice” Nerd Geekson looked at his shoes and blushed.

“Really?” Goddess started to giggle, “I didn’t use any deodorant today and I just finished a two hour cheerleading session.”

“Oh, erm, would you like to go for a coffee tomorrow?” Nerd Geekson looked at goddess’s face hopefully.

“Sure! See you at 4 at the Valley Coffee Shop!” And goddess pranced away from Nerd Geekson yet again.

Nerd Geekson floated all the way home on Cloud Nine.

As Nerd Geekson’s feet touched the pavement outside his house (his cloud had slowly vaporised off) he was suddenly stuck with inspiration! He dashed to his laboratory and threw all he required chemicals with the extra missing ingredient together and waited impatiently as the mixture was being heated up on a Bunsen burner.

The instant the mixture boiled Nerd Geekson grabbed it off the fire with his bare hands, the pure anticipation blocking out the pain that was shooting through the nerve receptors in his hands and slathered the piping hot gel upon his scalp.

Unfortunately this time, the pain had caught up with the overtly eager Nerd Geekson and he collapsed on the cemented floor screaming like an MGS girl and clutching his scalp in agony.

The world around him started to darken considerably and fade as he lapsed into a state on unconsciousness.

When he finally woke up it was already night and the pain was almost gone except for a tingly sensation in his scalp.

He got up and excitedly raced inside his house past his surprised parents and ducked into the dimly lit bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror, only to be hit by a way of disappointment as he saw his hair in its usual limp unruly mop of nerdy hair.

He sighed and felt the tears well up, so close yet so far!

He walked out of the bathroom dejectedly and sat himself down at the dinner table.

The next day Nerd Geekson rubbed some ordinary hair gel into his locks and spent an hour examining every aspect of his reflection to ensure that he looked perfect for his date with the Goddess and left his house early for a leisurely stroll to the Valley Coffee Shop for the first date of his entire life.

As he neared the Valley Coffee Shop, Nerd Geekson smelled the scent of freshly roasted coffee beans wafting through the dry autumn air and his taste buds watered in anticipation. Nerd Geekson quickened his pace.

At the same time, Goddess, or Deborah to her parents, was making her way to the Valley Coffee Shop on foot from the Shopping Mall opposite the road.

She examined her nails whilst waiting for the traffic to clear when something pink and glittery caught her eye.

The pink glittery bunny stood in the middle of the road watching her quizzically and cocked its head to one side.

Deborah stood there on the pavement mesmerised by the pink glittery bunny. Just then, the bunny started to hop away!

Aghast, Deborah ran off the pavement and started to chase the little rabbit down the lane, her blonde her flouncing with every step she took, oblivious to the speeding and honking cars around her. Bunny bunny bunny!
Nerd Geekson was just about to enter the Valley Coffee Shop when the sound of screeching tires, excessive honking and yelled expletives caught his attention. He took a step backwards and twisted his body at an angle, not letting go of the doorknob, to see what the commotion was.

To his horror, he saw his goddess running in circles in the middle of the road, arms outstretched as if to catch a pet. Cars swerved in all directions to avoid her and as Nerd Geekson watched, two cars collide amid a flurry of vulgarities from both drivers.

He had to do something! But what? He was Nerd Geekson, loser extraordinaire. He was the guy who was always last to be chosen for a team during Gym, the guy who crumpled under the weight of a medicine ball.

Suddenly he felt energy course through his veins and to his astonishment, biceps, triceps and all sorts of ceps started to grow right before his eyes! His shirt started to strain against the growing muscles before finally ripping at the seams and throwing buttons everywhere.

Nerd Geekson let go of the door and flexed his new found muscles, half admiring his new psyche in the reflection cast by the Coffee Shop’s tinted windows when he finally saw it.

He was so happy that he started to cry as he lifted his hands to touch his hair. It was no mirage; his hair was indeed at a 45 degree angle!

He turned around on the spot and ran off the pavement towards his darling goddess, ignoring the cars around him and scooped her up in his arms despite her vehement protests.

He stretched out his right arm, his hand balled up as if preparing to punch someone, just like he had once seen Superman do in a ‘80s flick. His feet started to lift off the ground and he was soon coursing through the air with goddess in his arms.

Nerd Geekson turned to gaze at his goddess. She sat there in his arms quietly, looking back at him. She had long ago shut up when she noticed that they were airborne, shocked more than anything else.

Nerd Geekson smiled at her and she smiled back shyly.

Nerd Geekson diverted his attention away from Deborah and looked for a suitable landing place and started to descend to the Valley Park.

He gingerly set the goddess down and watched as she brushed some dust off her skirt. She gave him one last smile and turned to walk away into the distance as the sun started to set.

As he watched her walk off, Nerd Geekson smiled to himself as he felt the power sap from his muscles. He knew that he was now a superhero, there to save silly (but pretty) girls from their psychotic trances of pink rodents. He was GELMAN!

Nerd Geekson raised his fist into the air and set off for home.