It had been raining for the past few weeks and it rained this morning, which dampened my mood. Woke up at 5 to rush to our 5-day East Coast tour. When I booked the tour online, I didn't know it was run by Chinese, not that it mattered.
The rain was so heavy--and perhaps so was his heart--that Meng wasn't in a very good mood. When we were at the Golden Bull at Wall Street, Meng didn't want to take any pictures anymore. At Madam Tussaud's, however, we cheered up, seeing all our BFFs being casted as wax figures. The tour brought us to the UN building, which I haven't been in my 3 years in New York and was rather excited, and to Intrepid, a maritime museum, which we didn't enter because we weren't interested. (The tour guide kept pronouncing "intrepid" as "intrepeg"!) We stood outside to take pictures and the bus went gallivanting and we had to wait in the cold for the bus to return at 4 to pick us and the people who went to the museum up.
The tour also took us to Empire State Building and to South Seaport to take the expensive ferry to Statue of Liberty. But we didn't do both because, for the Empire State, it was raining and you couldn't see a thing in the rain and we could do it some other time and because there is a free ferry to Statue. Instead we went SHOPPING. At South Seaport, Meng went crazy over A&F. At Empire State, my sister went crazy over Forever 21.
We were driven to a Chinese buffet in New Jersey. We were so hard-pressed to pinpoint our favorite dish not because they were so good but because each one was worse than the other. The food was so bad that it was funny. In the end, for the Best Dish, I voted for the sashimi. We wondered why people actually came here to eat (there were other customers!). I even took a flyer from the restaurant so that I could remember NEVER to eat there again.
A girl on the bus whom we nicknamed Ya-yi, a hideous girl who had a crush on me in high school, said to her parents, "Oooh, I've been to this restaurant before." Idiot. If I were her, I wouldn't step in the second time. More on Ya-yi in the next few days.
Then we were driven back to Crowne Plaza Hotel. The tour was so cheap and yet we got such amazing hotels because the hotels were so out of the way. We had to drive 40 minutes to each hotel from our spot. The Chinese and their hard bargains!
Meng and Mel came to New York for a tour. The spectacular event for the trip is that nothing spectacular happened, meaning that they are the few people I can travel with without being a prick, without a fallout.
Day 1: Went to JFK airport to fetch them; Taiwanese lunch; my sister and I shopped at Queens Mall, everyone's favorite mall, while Meng napped. We bought halal food back for dinner but Meng was still sleeping, slept till the next morning. He slept for 14 hours or so. I was so happy to see them again.
Look what we found on our way back:
For the underage, it's called a cassette tape. You put it in a device such as a walkman or hi-fi and music will come out.
- Music:cher - believe
Because the Snake and the Rabbit fell in love, the Snake went to the mountains to study under the White Witch for 700 years to be a vegetarian so that she wouldn't hurt the Rabbit in any way.
When the Snake returned, the Rabbit had changed.
The Snake asked, "Do you still want to work things out?"
The Rabbit sobbed, "Sorry, I'm so sorry. I've affections for you but they are not love. I don't know how to tell you."
The Snake asked, "You don't have to tell me. I've known you for 700 years, I know you so well. When you go out and buy breakfast for me every morning while I am still sleeping, are you meeting someone else?"
"Yes."
The Snake said, "I see things very clearly now. There is no one at fault here. It is just our circumstances. You're a very good creature. Your love is so selfless and generous. No one has loved me the way you do, you love my every pore, every stretch mark and even when I don't shave or have morning breath or am ill, sweaty, dirty. You love me for me, even when I am mean and bad. You love me so much you can give yourself up for me. It is your love that makes me want to be kind, to be a better animal. Your love makes me whole so that now I have the strength to stand and face the future alone. Thank you, thank you for the years you've loved me. I don't think anyone could have been happier than the both of us. I'll remember forever the time you surprised me when I woke up to find cut fruits and a post-it saying "Surprize!" on the fridge door. I still have the post-it, do you know? I'll remember every drive we took in your cart to deliver your carrots. I'll remember how when we were so poor we had to survive on $2 a day, so poor but so happy. But I haven't seen you smile for a while, smile so big that your gums show like in the photo with me hugging you from behind. I hope she can make you laugh and you must make sure she is worthy of your love."
"I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.
"A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling."
The mad poet or rather the maddest poet of all, Sylvia Plath, wrote that. She fed her children cookies and milk, tucked them into bed, placed a wet towel covering the gap between the floor and their bedroom door and then went to the kitchen and stuck her head into the gas oven. A kind of system in chaos. "And... and! ... AND" is how madness begins, no "either/or," no "neither/nor."
What do a bar of soap and a gold band and a tooth cavity have in common? Nothing except linked by the madwoman. There is a logic in this madness but it is a logic known only to the mad person and so you must be mad in order to understand her/him/me/us/them/you.
How do you know if you are mad? You do. You will find yourself afraid that a tiger may saunter into the room because twenty years ago, when you were seven, your grandmother told you a lion escaped from the zoo and lay in the ditch, waiting to pounce on young tender flesh, to get you to come home immediately after school. No gallivanting, she said. That was the exact word she used: "gallivant." I've never bothered to check its meaning because I knew instinctively what it means and I know I said a lion in the room and a tiger in the ditch or is it the other way round?
When you wake in the middle of the night out of a nightmare, your catatonia is partly because of the daze and confusion of not knowing whether you are still incarcerated in compulsory conscription, or whether you are still in your university with no responsibilities, no bills to pay and no children to rear, or whether you're already on your deathbed, waiting, wasting away, and partly because you have the feeling that someone is watching you and if you move, they will know you're awake. There will be dire consequences.
When you sit in a train, you believe that the row of passengers facing you is your audience and critics, watching you putting on a show. They already know your play, your story, your pretense and your failure. You try not to cry but you mourn for the pulchritude of benzoic acid.
The difference between madness and sanity is you know it isn't a tiger even if you see it walk into the room, you know Norman Bates isn't at the window when you wake even if you see a shadow, you know that the only commonality the plebeian passengers have with the critics is their cruelty, and you know beauty exists with or without you. But sometimes, you or perhaps not you or perhaps I, I want to snap, want to give it all up, lose it all, imagine a lion where there is none. Or ghosts, aliens, gods, whatever your fancy is. The consciousness of waking and dreaming will become an uninterrupted flow. What is the point of struggling? What's the point of fighting a losing battle? Better to stick your head in the oven. End this meaningless existence early. Spare ourselves the long suffering. That's what I mean when I say I'm hanging on a thread of sanity.
But who are you? Or rather who am I? I am a man and a woman and a hermaphrodite. I'm white, yellow, brown, black and sometimes green. I'm heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, transsexual, asexual, polysexual. I'm the imperialist and the colonized, the communist and the liberal and the conservative. I am a hundred years of solitude. I would like to say I cannot resist anything except temptations although I am already Dorian Gray. I'm Wordsworth's Lucy and her moon (luna, lunaris, lucēre, lunar, lunacy). I'm Browning's last duchess painted on the wall, looking as if she were quite alive and at the same his Porphyria and her lover. I am Keats' truth and beauty for beauty is truth but not his nightingale for I'm already Yeats' mechanical bird, forged out of fire and gold, singing of what is past, passing and to come, three tones in a melody. I go when the evening is spread out against the sky, like a patient etherized, because old men ought to be explorers and women too.
What I am saying is I'm a repository of stories of times and languages and if I don't speak, I'll go mad or madder. There is no fairy tale in this story of madness. It is fragmentary and desultory like a Tsai Ming-liang's movie where nothing happens. Anne Sexton's therapist encouraged her to write to prevent her ascension to madness and when she dreamed of the My Lai soldier with his red penis raining on her, I look at my hands and it is green with intestines. Deleuze and Guattari argue that the schizo is the sanest person and so if you think what I say is insane, then you're the one who is truly insane and if you think I'm sane, then you must be insane. We're already poisoned by the text we read. We're three (wo)men in the same boat and one of us has the ridiculous name of Jerome K. Jerome. Don't rock the boat, The Waves are already doing a good job. Mrs. Dalloway said she would row the boat herself. Row row row your boat, gently down the stream.
It is midnight. Rain is beating against the window. It was not midnight. It was not raining.
Good night and good mornin', good mornin', we've talked the whole night thru'. Singin' in the rain and all that jazz.
But there is a competition (with prize money) for the best Victorian essay and the winner will be published in Journal B. Not that I think I will win, but ...
The Journals are equally prestigious. And the academic rule is I cannot submit to both at the same time.
Poll #1413966 Journal A or B
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All
What should Hansel do?
Be down to earth and concentrate on Journal A
4 (33.3%)
Submit to Journal B and ignore A 4 (33.3%)
Submit to both and hope that I get rejected for one and get the other 4 (33.3%)
I'm at the moment planning an itinerary for my sister and Meng's trip to New York. They will be here for two weeks but I can't seem to fit everything in! There are so many things to do and see in New York and I'd rather we take long lunch and dinner and tea breaks because I enjoyed myself that way in Greece. We're watching Diana Krall's concert at Carnegie Hall, missing Beyonce's at Madison Square Garden, and undecided on the New York Asian Film Festival in which Liu Qing Yun (who people say I bear a resemblance) and So Ji-seob will be there. But if we miss the film fest, we'll definitely catch a movie for the experience. We'll have picnic at Central Park and dine at Michelin-starred restaurants and attend the gay Pride. We'll have kosher food, Mexican, Ukrainian, Belgian, French, Italian, Austrian, and pizzas, pizzas and sandwiches because pizzas and sandwiches are everywhere. We'll travel to Washington, Niagara Falls, Boston, Philadelphia. We'll be children at Coney Island which is to be shut down after this year. We will also shop at Balenciaga, Bottega, Burberry and I need to get myself some shoes, a pair of shades, a wallet and some Diesel or Seven or G-star jeans - all at Woodbury factory outlet. Shenn is very kind and wanted to buy me a gift certificate from a Diesel shop but I told her why waste money at a boutique. Too many, too many things to do! I haven't finished the itinerary after a day of planning. Will continue tomorrow!
- Mood:
busy
My grandaunt, my grandmother's sister, was mad. They locked her in the house, allowed her to linger within the compound in a sleeveless girly thin white dress down to her ankles. One day she escaped and jumped headlong into a well in our garden. She was nearly 18. I have a photograph of my seven year old self leaning against the sealed well.
We had a well once. We were rich once, textile merchants, and owned a stretch of shops along Chinatown. Although we were shrewd and intelligent, we were not ambitious and adaptable and when the Chinese no longer made their own clothes but bought pret-a-porter from departmental stores, we ran out of business.
You would have thought the madness ended with my grandaunt's death. I would have like it to. But the first strains appeared in Aunt Shirley, the second child of seven of my grandmother, second to my mother. When her then-boyfriend, visiting our tiny flat, commented on the size of her thighs as she was mopping the floor on her knees in her shorts, she flew into a stupendous rage and ditched him on the spot. But in recent years, she has mellowed while my own mother's madness manifests. My favorite anecdote is the one when she locked my father out of the house because her soup was charred. Or perhaps the one she ran out at 3 am to contemplate suicide while sitting in our car. There are too many stories of her madness to tell.
I should have suspected she is mad from the magical stories about her past she conjured and told us in the late of the nights when we were children. She is the one who told us about our mad grandaunt and embellished the story with a doomed love affair. After the stories, my brother and sister slept soundly but I was a light sleeper even then. When my siblings slept, my mother would rock herself with her hands clasping the sides of her head, unable to sleep because of the terrible pain she was in.
I should have suspected I have inherited the madness when I am the only one who inherited the splitting monthly migraines since I was seven. I store my mother's stories in my mind. I almost lost my sanity on a night in my university hostel years ago. If you have felt a muscle cramp before, madness feels like a constant cramp in the brain, with the skull clamping in. The thoughts linked to one another without reprieve, I thought and thought and thought and could not stop, I tossed and turned and burned in bed until the madness felt like a bicep curl being held too long and the brain was about to implode. I only hung on a thin thread because I remembered in the morning M. would visit me with breakfast. In those days, M. was my life line and thinking of him, the morning eventually came.
Come, listen to the stories I tell. I am a mad man, am I. I only tell true lies. Listen, come.
Ah Girl was a white Maine Coone, born in 1995, with emerald eyes and was brought up by an officer in an army barrack where she was trained to catch mice. Given to Meng as a gift, she escaped nightly from his Bukit Merah flat through a window for her rendezvous and returned in the mornings, meowing at the door, waking Meng to be let in. From 2002-4, she lived at Meng's pet shop, along with many other cats, dogs and fish, and was the only animal allowed to roam freely. There, she was bitten by a crazy dog and lost the sight and hearing and two teeth on her right side, which accounted for her wry look. She was in turn given to Mel and me when the pet shop fell because Meng couldn't keep both a dog, a golden retriever, and a cat in his flat due to the objections of his father.
She was so gentle that when two kids pulled her by the tail she did not even scratch them. She would never hurt anyone physically but was rather vindictive. When I refused to allow her into my room (because her fur itched my eyes and skin), and whenever she could sneak into my room, she would pee on my books and shit on my bed. Those were the good times. George Eliot was a victim of her incontinence. She had also ruined the expensive sofa of Italian leather (as pictured above) by peeing, shitting, vomiting and scratching on it. She had good taste.
Every time my mother was angry at me or my sister, she would say to give Ah Girl away or send her to the SPCA. This is how I learn not to depend on my mother because she would use it against me someday.
In later years, Ah Girl would follow me everywhere I go in the flat, even to the toilet. Depending on her mood, she would respond (or not) to her name. Sometimes when no one was home, I would tell her my troubles and believe that she understood because we were in many ways quite alike. She was the only one who could keep my secrets and indulge me in my emo-ness.
May 31, 2009. She was put to sleep because she was too frail and in great suffering. I wish I had been there during the euthanasia to see her one last time. I wish I were religious so that I could say she had joined Provence the Hamster. She was 15 years old, or 70 cat years.
- Mood:
melancholy
The reason why I poll on what you would do if you meet the LOYL six months into your marriage is because I've just watched the Jane Austen Book Club, which left such deep impression on me that I watched it twice. This is what happens in the movie:
Whenever I have a problem, I would also ask: "What would Jane Eyre do?" She always does the right and responsible thing. And the poll results concur with 18.2% saying to divorce the spouse and marry the LOYF while 54.5% say to stay in the marriage and cut the LOYF out of your life. But I'm also a die-hard romantic and I wonder how much loneliness and longing a person can take. This is a bitch of an unsatisfactory situation. :(
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All
If you meet the Love of Your Life 6 months into your marriage, what would you do?
Divorce your partner and marry the Love of your Life 2 (18.2%)
Stick to your partner and cut the Love of your Life out from your life 6 (54.5%)
Others (Write in comments) 3 (27.3%)
2. Speaking of books, Muthu, who is to ship my books back to Singapore, sounds highly unreliable. He's now only charging me $1.40 per pound and forces me to fill up 320 pounds. He said, "I'm not earning a single cent at all. I just want to prove to others that I can do it." What does that mean?!
I'm hopping with anticipation!
The last time I ate at a Michelin Starred restaurant was inLondon, doing dim sum, served by a very young and dashing White head chef. We ordered almost everything on the menu and the food was mind-blowing! Better than sex and chocolates combined.
I've made reservations for Perry St for Jun 24, lunch at 1 pm and Allen & Delancey for Jun 26, dinner at 7.30.
Poor Singaporeans. I heard that despite how amazing the food in Singapore is, no restaurants will have a Michelin star because the meat are imported frozen, not fresh. If you have a chance to visit countries with starred restaurants, go. It's worth the money!
1. Ethan Hawke and his dog (a German shepherd) went on a walk with my dog, a border collie, and me down one of those boulevards with designer shops in L.A. I don't even like Ethan Hawke, German shepherds and border collies!
2. I was part of a troop of artificial intelligent machines with some Jedi powers in a battle royal against other denizens such as wizards/witches, warriors, true Jedis, genetically improved humans, monsters, etc. The different groups lined against the three walls of a large banquet hall. When summoned, one group would fight against another for a certain time and after the time, the survivors could retreat to their spot until the next match. I remembered I was speared in the stomach but since I had healing powers, I could cure non-fatal wounds. From that match onwards, I got better and better at killing.
I felt strange when I woke up because I couldn't explain why I didn't belong to one of the human or sub-human groups.
3. Didn't dream of Jim Carey--in fact, I pretty much hate his movies--but I just watched the amazing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Although Charlie Kaufman is the genius, does anyone else find Jim Carey dreamy in this role? I wish he takes on more serious roles like this one.
- Music:MGMT - Electric Feel
- Music:black eyed pea - boom boom pow
Queer Theory and Film (12-20 pages): DONE.
Fin de Siecle, Darwin and Oscar Wilde (15-25 pages): 12 pages done.
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