Werk

I thought it was only three days or so since my last post but holy shite it's been a week!!! I'm sorry. I have been busy for I am a working woman now. I feel INDEPENDENT and RESPONSIBLE and EMPOWERED. Loljk my body is madafuckin exhausted. I've been going to work every day since the last time I wrote here (other than on Sunday, when I went for a wedding) and will be working everyday until Sunday and this waitressing thingy is definitely not kind on the feet. I still enjoy work, though. My colleagues are really cool people and my manager Anthony is fun to work with but he's so inappropriate.. Sometimes I can't really decide if he's a dangerous pedophile or just very fatherly LOL.

The customers at relish are generally nice to serve. A lot of them are super friendly and appreciative of the service and not intimidating. There are also lots of handsome French men and pretty women and adorable babies and sometimes there are cute boys too and I love it when they are very thirsty and I have to go to their tables to refill their glasses for them like, five or six times while they're dining and they give me their sexy-ass smiles and say thank you. It's very rewarding HAHAHA.

The 2+ hours of breaks between split shifts are also pretty fun. Yesterday, Dewi, Soufi and I had junk food from 7-11 and then got yummy ice cream from Island Creamery. Today was just Dewi and me. I tried the pear sake sorbet yesterday.....it was pretty good.... Dewi had the tiger one today.... also pretty good.... Price to pay: I am going to grow fat and then go to hell. Hahaha sorry la I was curious.

Hey. You know what? I think I will never fall in love. Hahaha I made a promise to myself at the start of the year that I will not leave secondary school without ever having been on a date. Lol 10 days to 2012 and I am still very much inexperienced. Kai Xiang told me I was pathetic for never having had a boyfriend. Hahahaha I don't know what to think.

P.S. Do I have new readers or something? Like literally no one used to read this and suddenly I have 940 views this month? Hello there.

19:52

Time is irrelevant when it is the holidays. My body now pays no attention to day and night and my sleeping hours are 5 a.m. to 2 p.m. I like it.

A few weeks ago I stumbled upon an artist named Mark Ryden's website. He does these really cute but terribly morbid and unnerving surrealist paintings. They scare me a lot. I like that. I also find his repetitive symbols quite interesting. You'll find Abraham Lincoln in lots of his paintings, as well as meat, Jesus and this one bee. I love his subjects. They are more often than not children, but they don't have a lot of that joyful, naive innocence you usually find in kids. Sometimes they look like they're in a slight trance to me. They have this vacant look (that's really quite creepy) that when paired with strange, grotesque situations, makes me very uncomfortable. A lot of the girls also have this very adult sensuality. It's like these children have known sorrow and emptiness and love and lust and sex and brutality and death... and they like it. Or are fascinated by it, rather. It's quite interesting. His Snow Yak show, though, feels a lot less.. dangerous? It still makes you feel weird inside, but there is a serenity in the mostly white colour palette that soothes that ickiness away and you feel a bit more peaceful. A bit. I also love the baby named Jajo that he's painted quite a few times. But all this weirdness does not mean that his works are not nice to look at, because they are. That's the problem. They're so pretty and cute and make you want to look at them, but it's really just a trap. Because after that you can't get it out of your head.

Fetal Trapping in Northern Carolina from 'The Tree Show' series

The Cloven Bunny from the 'Blood' series
(The blood clots are lovely)

Fur Girl from 'The Snow Yak Show' series

The Grinder (#95) from 'The Gay '90s Show' series

Little Boy Blue from the 'Bunnies & Bees' series
(This feels so sinister)
(I'd love to hang this on the wall directly in front of my bed and wake up to it every morning)

All pictures from Mark Ryden's website. I would really love to see his work in real life, with their ornately hand-carved frames and everything *-*

Nostalgic at three a.m.

I wrote this a little under year ago (7 days short of a year) (it was posted on 20th december 2010) in my old blog. It's quite nice to realise I still long for this exact same thing that I longed for back then. Such a dreamy post. I've always had my head in the clouds.

"Sometimes when I am in a particularly dreamy mood, I plan to spend the whole of my 21st year of life backpacking across Asia with a family of strangers from all over the world. We will talk about nothing and everything and sometimes things that make no sense but we will laugh like we were the smartest, wittiest group of people that ever lived because we're all on weed. We'll have bonfires on the beach at night and dance, maybe topless and painted like red Indians, and sing and play music until dawn breaks. Then we'll sober up for a moment to appreciate the sunrise, and afterwards we'll pack up and set off to wherever our feet shall take us next.

We'll spend our days maybe surfing in Bali, or just soaking up culture in India, or getting high and just enjoying and appreciating life on this beautiful -so goddamn beautiful- world that we realise we've taken for granted all our past years of living. We won't really have money, but we'll get by. Sometimes we sleep on the beach, sometimes a friend we made on the trip offers to put us up in their homes for a few days, or sometimes, in exchange for a day's work on the paddy fields, a kind family welcomes us into their home, where we'd have dinner together and attempt to share stories despite language barriers.

We will distance ourselves from technology as much as possible, except perhaps there'd be a few photographers among us to capture this year-long trip through the lenses of their cameras. I will keep a journal, and immortalize the amazing moments and emotions and places and people I've experienced in ink and paper. I will also draw. And with so much passion and inspiration that by the end of the trip I will have a whole stack of sketchbooks to lug home.

It is also on this trip that I will learn to cry. Cry when I need to, or don't need to, or whatever. I will learn to cry. And I will learn to live. And I will learn to be humble. And when I return home my heart will feel light and love and peace and I will translate all that I have experienced into art, hopefully remarkable art, and I will know how to live, and cry and appreciate. And as I age, I will always look back on my 21st year with satisfaction and fondness. And on days when I feel like my life is mundane and pointless, I will think back to the 365 days I spent with my family of strangers travelling around my continent, and I will smile knowing that at least I did something so fulfilling and wonderful and at least, for one year, I was somewhat of a hippie ☮"

There is a heaviness in my chest that makes me want to dig my fingers into my skin and lift my heart out just so I can feel lighter. Why does emptiness weigh so much.

I have been

1. Staying up until 4 in the morning.
2. Sleeping in until 2 in the afternoon.
3. Watching TV.
4. Watching movies online.
5. Working (not everyday)
6. Craving stickybuns from the bakery next to Relish (every fuckin day)
7. Feeling very lost.

(8) And then yesterday I went out with Stella Ashlee Ng Pei Shan Petom So'od. I haven't seen her in so long!!! We went to town to walk around and have cake at Coffee Bean because I had a $5 voucher. I was looking forward to having one of the yummy christmas cakes but Pei Shan is allergic to nuts (which were in almost every single thing!!!) so we got this really girly white chocolate and strawberry meringue cake. But that's OK 'cause it was gooo00oOod.

As usual, we updated each other on all the stuff in our lives since the last time we met and it made me miss all our heart to hearts at school :-( We used to set aside days where we'd spend whole afternoons at the tables outside the NP room just pouring everything out and laughing at our lives. Sigh, gone are those days........... :'( It's really hitting me now that we aren't returning to TK at the start of next year. I feel very grown up.

Anyway, we window-shopped our way through orchard road while Pei Shan congratulated herself for practicing self-restraint. Ah, but she soon had to take that back because then we went to H&M and she ended up buying a sun hat (overpriced but so pretty), socks and rings sigh. She spends like crazy ok!!! You should see her two twitpics of the things she bought a couple of days before. Tsk tsk tsk. Haha but she's also very generous because she bought me this glittery little black wallet. Hi Petom, when I get my pay I promise I am treating you back! And then when I am a true hippie with my husband in dreadlocks who looks vaguely like disney's tarzan, you can treat me back with that caravan you want to buy me ;) Hehe just kidding please don't spend a few hundred thousand dollars on me! ❤ 


Hmm I hope I have work tomorrow. I want my sticky buns. I also would like to have something productive to do with my days. Most of all I just want my sticky buns. I keep dreaming about them. I'm not kidding.




Of Moons Birds and Monsters. Probably my favourite MGMT song. I love how deep Andrew's voice gets in the verse and I luvvvv the instrumental bit at the end *_*

my knees are cold

I have been feeling so shitty this past week. We had to call the cops in to take my mother to the hospital for her mania on Tuesday morning. We had a terrible night. She was up the whole time and I barely got any sleep because she kept singing at the top of her voice and shouting at the whole house to "PRAY! PRAY! I AM THE THIRD MOST IMPORTANT YOU MUST LISTEN TO ME! ALLAH IS NUMBER 1, MUHAMMAD IS 2 AND I AM THE THIRD! ALL OF YOU ARE STUPID!" And then she screamed the Azan as loud as she could and banged on our bedroom doors. I had my hands over my ears the whole night.

She spent the morning in a lingerie-like slip that barely covered anything, shouting out the door at frightened neighbours and singing some more to the song that is her favourite every time she is high: I Believe I Can Fly. Sometimes her voice would go so high that she would choke on herself and start coughing and it was so fucking hilarious but I couldn't possibly laugh. Everything felt so twisted, including the things I was thinking. I know how horrible this sounds but when she was singing out to the neighbourhood, I kept chanting in my head, "Please really believe you can fly. Please just.... jump." But of course she didn't. The policemen came, my mother flirted (as always) (still in that godforsaken slip) and my next door neighbour who is a good friend tricked my mom into getting ready to go to a 'club' at 9 in the friggin a.m. They took her away, albeit with a bit of struggling and shouting downstairs and that was that.

I don't know what to do anymore. Technically, my mother has already lost it, but she's seriously losing it now. Even when she was first diagnosed with Bipolar her relapses only occurred at worst once a year. Now she gets manic every couple of months. It is so fucking taxing and depressing and distracting for the rest of us. I ended up having a meltdown on my second day of work, which was Tuesday, because my manager kept asking me to smile and I just couldn't. She talked to me for a while and asked me to go home early that day. I spent the rest of the afternoon at Haji Lane by myself, sitting by the window in Pluck, drawing and eavesdropping on other people's happy conversations. My workmates slipped me really sweet cheer up notes on Relish order forms on my way out.

Yesterday was my third day of work and my first time on the night shift. We had a pretty busy night but it felt good to have something to do. I ended up leaving the restaurant at 11.50 after all the cleaning up and reached home at close to one, but it was okay. I also met Syadza for a while before work and we had Ben & Jerry's and shaker fries and lots of nice walking around. I realise we always sort of gravitate towards Suntec City even though we know there isn't much to do around there.

Today was a haze, interspersed with lots of exasperated groaning on my part. Talked to Syadza for a while just now and I feel better and I hope she does too. Hi Syadza, I love you and everything will be OK <3

Saying nothing, that's enough for me.

Bon Iver will always give me the shivers. The opening bit of Holocene, oh my god *_* I have grown to love Bon Iver, Bon Iver very much. I really love Michicant and Perth :') I kind of hate how he's become popular for Skinny Love now. I don't know, I can be irrationally territorial about the stuff I listen to. Before, Bon Iver's music just felt a little more.... personal.. to me. Secret. Special. It was my ethereal 3am music. My quiet Sunday morning music. It always felt like Justin was whispering to me and it was always so heart-wrenching because there is so much emotion in his voice. I used to be so sure that Bon Iver would be one of the best-kept secrets of alternative music, but.. they've got four nominations in the upcoming Grammy's, don't they?

I just watched Vincent Moon of LaBlogotheque's Pitchfork Music Festival video and this man is such an artist. I love his Take Away Shows. I remember first being introduced to his work when I started getting into Lykke Li in '08. I didn't pay too much attention. Then I couldn't stop watching The Kooks' Take Away Show in Paris. Then I fell into obsession with The Morning Benders' Virgins performance, and that is probably the start of my love affair with Mr. Moon's amazing work. It was so beautifully filmed. I love the feel and atmosphere in all his videos, the intimacy with the musicians as well as the immediate audience watching the performance.. I love how his camera moves and I love the colours and the setting of the performances.

*Wrote that last night. Today, I shall write a bit more about Vincent Moon: He's gonna be at the UpToTheSky festival tomorrow, right? Soufi is working there!!! And today she got to talk to him!!! And since she's working there she gets free entry for the festival!!! Haha hi Soufi I am fucking jealous of you. I wanna go for the festival but then I've got work at night and no $50 to spare for tickets. Maybe they'll need another volunteer somewhere? Damn. I've been wanting to go for this thing :-(