if

if hope ever existed, it existed for you.

with a blink of an eye, suddenly before you and I, I have placed chance above all else.

if you mess this up, i'll kick your balls.

Polonaise

In the Science of Sleep, there was a scene when Stephane and Stephanie were riding a horse on cottonball clouds. Maybe it was drugs or schizophrenia, but at that point, their parallel worlds crossed. Was this just another idle thought in Stephane's mind or did Stephanie really manage to make her way thru all the cellophane and delusions to reach him? And if the former was the case, could Stephane invert his whole reality and live timelessly in this idle thought?

In 2046, before Lulu (who lived most of  her life with pseudonyms) was killed by her jealous lover, she was walking away. Who was it she was running from originally? Maybe she was not walking away. Maybe she had already left her heart somewhere, some place deeper than the mm thick photographs splattered with her blood. It was just a figure of someone we assumed we knew. 

When Kurt Cobain loaded his shotgun I wonder if he smirked thinking about Courtney Love. A woman that was supposed to make him feel better about himself cos she was more fucked up. If Cobain had comforted himself with novellas by Jack Kerouac, I wonder if he ever took the time to read any Bertrand Russell. With the shotgun to his head, death was also in his hands. Life was simply organs, organisms and energy. 

The tragedy of these characters is not that their lives were meaningless, it was because life, was thoroughly ironic. That surrounded by misery, they were the joke. 

xx  

witch or bitch?

Halloween parties are all about the grotesque, vulgar and scary. Joking about our fears and being outrageous and festive about the nature of life, death and the in between. Reputation can graft itself on your skin. Where snakes shed, humans only mould. I don't even need to open my mouth and someone has said a million words about me. I used to find it irritating but now I am quite gracious about it. Life is good and even if my reputation has a more interesting, more dramatic, more dangerous and alienating flavour than me, it's nice people spend the time creating this new costume for me. Life is like a masquerade ball, and let's keep it that way. Where would fun be without it?

let's not go back there baby

happy cakeday to me, twenty, and the most used word now is
'gross'
Do people just walk in and out of my life? Or do I walk in and out of people's lives. Maybe it's a bit of both.

Life is all about finding out how naive you can be. And maybe how naive you will be for the rest of your life. Sometimes, just sometimes you feel like screaming out at the top of your lungs and saying 'fuck everything'. Other times, your heart takes a leap, as you realise life is all a joke and you find yourself playing with fire or smoking like a chimney. And then for the times that life shocks you, that you sometimes take it for granted, be strong because no one should catch your tears and save you. Save yourself. 

And for those carry a knife trying to assassinate you. Chuck that machine gun of yours away because the fame is all yours and the people with scars are infinitely more attractive and real.

something in the air

walking in a field of flowers, 

I felt like nesting between the flowers,

hands rubbing the soil,

smelling the earth,

listening to the wind.

today as i laze about and watch the rain, I think about those happy times of solitude, those happy times wandering about the garage, the city, the parks and the museums. the times when I took pictures with hobos, the times I got mozzie bites trying to write stories at darling harbour (but was mostly staring at couples), the times I bumped into recurrent strangers on trains and dreamt about our fictitious life together. how he would fall in love with me and I would run away never to be seen again. Like a balloon flying into the sky, belonging to no one. my horoscopeis an air type. my carefree spirit, where shall we go next?

a human condition

I've always been entranced by quiet things. The way dust floats in my room and the way the rays of sunlight catch them in flight. The motion of steam circling my body in the bathroom. The scent of rain in the atmosphere. The rise and fall of his breathing on my neck. Sometimes it feels like I've never woken up and continue wandering in this world in a dream-like state. But this lackadaisical life is interrupted by uninhibited laughter, the rush of action, a warm, intoxicating belly of love, and the feeling of my feet running against all the invisible forces of fate. I used to believe that every decision I chose and every coincidence would help create the meaning in my life. Now it doesn't worry me too much, there isn't only one single meaning.

Now just before I sleep, my body rather than my mind is exhausted. 

familiar strangers

[picture: credit to wayne yoshida @ yoshidaweb]

Spread your wings and share a drink. The world has just awoken, and so have you.

xx

escape the boredom

Imagine this on my right shoulder blade (:

So this is the tattoo I will hopefully be getting this year (maybe this winter break in less than 7 days!). It's an illustration designed by tiffanycheetah (hong kong based artist). I was researching the pros and cons  of tattoos after I had the spontaneous hallucination of myself with one when I saw the illustration. I've researched all the tattoo places in Sydney and have decided to go to IVT (InVision Tattoo). I know I might seem trashy, but Angelina Jolie said "A tattoo is something permanent when you've made a self-discovery, or something you've come to a conclusion about." Funnily enough, it reminded me of Shelley Jackson's really inventive work, called Bodywork. It's a story with each word tattooed to a certain part of the body of a participant. Only the participants know the story. Jackson said she'd even attend their funerals, saying the story is then diminished with every death. A little morbid aye?

Anyway, I know the reason why the illustration struck a chord with me. All I'll give away it's something about alter-egos hehe. 

xx

the rainbow serpent

[bigger picture]

As a child, the library was always my hiding place. Worlds within worlds were waiting to be read by my eager eyes. I was the special exception who got to borrow more than one non-fiction and fiction book [I thought I could have been a budding environmentalist when I read about deforestation and how it took over a million years for plastic bags to decompose]. Relationships with people were quite the opposite, they were difficult to construct and easy to decompose. The art of storytelling was my saviour when friends were hard to find. Characters were the only ones that were truthful to me. 

I remember reading about the Aboriginal Dreamtime in a Children's Pictorial Encyclopaedia. Particularly, the story of the rainbow serpent with all its vivid colours slithering across the page. I had no understanding of what the culture exactly was but I was always curious. They say curiosity killed the cat. 

While living on campus, you meet a great number of people from around the world. Recently I met two korean guys, one 23 and the other a 26 year old at the masked ball. It is strange to see the hierarchies and the way they choose to interact with my friend and I. Sometimes, when we talk we miss out whole chunks of sentences [as long as you recognise a couple of words and keep on asking questions the conversation lives] and other times, while mr 23 is conversing in another language it's as though he's got a split personality. It is difficult to go beyond the superficial stuff like exams, plastic surgery and the entertainment industry. Although we meet halfway in between, there seems to be an irreconcilable gap. And that gap is crucial, it is the crux of what becomes either meaningful or meaningless. Stories that last a lifetime are the ones you've lived in and reread through the conversations with lovers, strangers and friends.

[photoshop: me, photo credit: wayne yoshida @ yoshidaweb.com]

the placebo effect

In relationships, the most common feeling I had was that lump in my throat. Things I always wanted to say, feel and do. In [in]opportune times, I would do things I had romanticised in my imagination. My verbose imagination always left me off guard and often on recounting those experiences, I would blush and slap my head and scream in my bed - all alone. At seventeen, I remember I really wanted to put my head on the shoulder of a nineteen year old boy I liked. We were in the karaoke room with his buddies, they were belting out their favourite korean songs and the smoke from the cigarettes looked like dry ice. He was blowing those smoke circles, creating a dirty halo that lingered above his head. He was my tragic, reckless hero. Placing my awfully pink mui mui bag on his shoulder, I rested my head on my handbag (indirectly on his shoulder). That was the closest I could ever get. I remembered that day like a photograph for over five months, constantly reinterpreting the nuances of each gesture.

At eighteen, my curiosity gave way. I had my first boyfriend and I was so traumatised by all the hand-holding and hugging while waiting for the pedestrian light to go green. I fell into a deep coma on the monorail with his hand on my waist. I could hardly look him in the eye without feeling a little awkward and stupid. I remember the only time I saw him cry was when the chilli was burning his throat from the genkikara ramen. He was never one for many words, and when we parted ways, I took on that characteristic of his. I was mute for many months.

At nineteen, a couple of unfaithful boys came into my life. One of the boy's favourite phrases were 'pull my finger!' and 'you cheat every time we play scrabble!' The last time we saw each other, he threw rocks at my second floor window. Another once said to me, 'Do you think there will ever be a place for me in your life in the future?' and then said 'I drank a six pack of beer, hoping that what I said to you I didn't mean. It was just a slip of the tongue.  That it was all a mistake. But after the second, I fell asleep. I'll never know, and don't think I should know how truthful I was.'

There was a morning when I woke up with panda-eyebags, and someone said to me 'you look twice as beautiful in the morning.' I choked for a couple of seconds and burst into laughter. That lump in my throat was benign after all.

end as beginning

fallen angels, wong kar wai

The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? what is true for writing and for a love relationship is also true for life. the game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end. 

- Foucault

the dust-speckled window

The library was her nesting place. There was a musty, bookish smell attached to libraries: her second skin. She lugged her heavy bag up the stairs, step by step and approached a table with etchings all over it. Etchings made up of initials with no identities to match, S.C & A.F = 4ever and others which tried to strike a comic value, anal is in Constitutional law. She would make occasional glances at the people around her but dared not stare. She always wondered what lives they lead and what they were searching for in their lives. As she rested her chin on the palm of her hand, she gazed out at the city with its monolithic bloc of skyscrapers. It was sort of funny she thought, to think that this brilliant view was covered with years and years of dust which the students treated as just another wall; too busy to ponder its worth while chatting amongst their peers.

Suddenly, her table too was filled with friends old and new and simultaneously, she felt the distance grow. Their voices were soft, crashing waves you could hear in seashells. She had felt this way before, the feeling of being abandoned. It wasn't until her adolescent years she realised that this fear parasitically lived inside her. She had always been a dreamer with a shadow that never quite followed her. Her friends were ambitious and strove to build new lives, throttling away into the future while she stared at the dust-speckled window. She was the type of girl to swipe her finger against the window and examine the dust. Considering all the minute particles with her magnifying glass, listening to all their stories about couples in dark corners.

She could never really see the big picture. When she finally did see it, her friends were the ones waving from the city and towards the library. Without noticing, they all had left and she was the one still dreaming.

whatever lola wants

1. Have you ever experienced an ‘instant attraction’ situation? If so, describe the more significant/memorable part of it:

Yes, several times. Essentially to me, people’s lives are quite ordinary filled with small quiet moments. Yet there’s an innate desire when we are in a crowd to meet a mysterious stranger. Someone that catches our attention, someone that we catch the attention of. It’s a part of our desire to be different and to be noticed. So the first part of ‘instant attraction’ is the aesthetic part of it, a glimpse of someone who could lift us from our ordinary lives and into something magical. The most significant part is that, through my experience, those exchange of glances evolves to verbal communication. This is the crux, it either gets ruined or you are pleasantly surprised. When you find out they are smart, dark and handsome, it’s a situation that’s worth romanticizing about over and over.

nightmares

in the waiting hours

sipping interlagos, russian quaalades, mata hijaus, bellinis...

...hearing live music, with the chandeliers hanging dim and the fans brushing against the heat,

i imagine you tapping my leg to the beat and falling asleep on my shoulder.

cables, technology, satellites, postmen, whatever it may be, our lullaby travels to you in waves that coincide with your heart, and our secrets hang and meander through the whispering air where cicadas might eavesdrop,

you might not even know this, but i fly to the moon every night trying to peep through your window to see your sleeping face. it seems like you've climbed the stars and nothing sky to rush up from behind and wake me up in the morning.

the sun's rays tingle on my eyelids, and a gentle kiss is all i need...

...to know this dream continues even into the day.

blur, noise, colour

eternity is dizzying, spin, spinning around with experiences, laughter, noise, quiet tragedy,

and yet how somehow internally, the centrifugal force does not engulf you.

only one thing can make you feel timelessness and infinite space.

thankyou santa, your present was unexpected, and lovingly unwrapped.