I guess I should blog now before everything gets so overwhelming there's not enough time for anything... although I somehow always manage to find time to take three hour naps?

This semester of school, my last semester, has somehow become the worst semester there is. The workload is so unprecedentedly heavy, presentations all the time, essays, response papers, critiques... I can hardly keep up. On top of all that doing weekly readings is really no joke. The only thing keeping me sane are the people in school who are there to go through this shit with me I guess. Thank God for them, or else I'd be so tempted to do an LOA and come back next semester with Gus.

Speaking of which Gus has been working late most days and I've decided that I don't like, neither am I ready for working life. It seems like observations I've made here and there of how seemingly insignificant things change permanently once you start working have put me off for good. My relationship with Gus is one thing, which is not only that the amount of time he spends in the office equates to less time with me, but that he gets so tired that our time together feels even less. I feel like because he's so tired from work, he has no energy to put into being happy and excited to see me, which is completely understandable, and if I were in his place, I would be the same as well. It just pains me to know that this is what life is supposed to be -- an endless cycle of making money that you have no time or energy to properly enjoy. Neither is life about just spending money, of course, but if you don't even have the luxury to do it -- what is the point then? In fact, I can't even imagine living that kind of life. I feel like what would make me happy is a life that does not yet exist.

Which brings me to another point, which is that I feel my relationship with money is changing as well. It's something I've never really considered. I always thought that I had a decent grasp of the role I wanted money to play in my life. Something that was essential but not domineering. I never wanted money to be the pure motivation for anything, at least nothing that asks for a considerable amount of myself. But since Gus started working and while doing my part time internship, I can't help but wonder how much power money is eventually going to have on me when I find out I can/can't find a job, knowing how much housing and cars cost, feeling frustrated that I can't be happy with 9-5 jobs sitting in an office. In a sense, I find it difficult to search for motivation other than money in our society, where basically -- everything is about money. Even if I were to do something I loved, we still need to meet  basic needs. Gus told me that he doesn't like working late and being so tired (who does?) but it's something he knows he has to do to provide for his family. And I think that's such a regular and typical paradox you hear from men and women, who sacrifice their families in order to protect them.

I don't know but dipping our toes into the working world is making me question so many things in my life, how these things are going to change. Call me cynical but at the moment the future seems kind of bleak. I'm trying to change my view but I think the problem is that everybody who is already out there already feeds us this impression. Sometimes it seems impossible to think any other way.

Still, it's important to remember and enjoy the things in life that aren't subsumed into some grey, colorless horizon. And many things to give thanks for. Because Gus is so busy at work, the time we do get together becomes so much more precious. It feels as if the tiny things, being demanding about specific things or lazy things becomes so insignificant because you need the good times to start now before you don't get the chance anymore. Also, because I can't spend that much time with Gus anymore, I suppose I've spent a lot of time on my own or with friends, just learning to be. Even though school feels so unmanageable, I laugh till my stomach hurts at least once in every single class, I make new friends every week... makes me really upset that this took four years to come about. Meeting up with old friends for coffee, dinner.

That's another thing I want to remember, which is to make time for the people that matter. Recently I've felt so disengaged from my family. I don't like to talk to my parents about what's going on in my life. I don't even tell them when I have interviews to go for. I don't know why. I feel like an annoyed teenager at meals, like I should have felt this 8 years ago but I'm feeling it now. I suppose I'm glad it comes now since I'm older and more capable of knowing how to handle these emotions, and also to know that they're not worth acting on because family is important, especially my parents. I hope this feeling goes away soon. I think it will. But I tell myself that in the meantime I still have to make time for them and if I don't, I'll regret it.

Otherwise, I guess one thing that really failed to get off the ground is exercising!!! I don't know what my problem is but I just can't seem to get my ass off the bed. The only thing I've done this month is play tennis. Some days I feel good about my body, other days I don't. To some extent I think I'm having more days where I feel like I need to exercise because I'm deathly unfit, versus feeling like I need to exercise because I'm fat or need to slim down or something. So I feel more like playing tennis than running on the treadmill or doing squats that target my ass. I think that's healthy?

I guess I've been writing so much for work and for school, I forgot how cathartic writing for myself is. Some days I can write and write non stop to the point where I get bored of reading what I write but I still can't stop. I think people are mistaken when they think that you enjoying a certain skill or possessing it means that you will love a job that incorporates it as a primary function. On the contrary I find that what is likely to happen is that you add to what you love the labours of office fatigue, politics, deadlines, stress, authority issues -- it becomes something you hate if you're not in full control of what you wield your skills for. But on the other hand, you're told if you don't work doing something you love, you're not likely to be so good at it. So how?

I feel like going overseas soon, living overseas I mean. I wish I had my own apartment somewhere else, somewhere with less heat and less humidity. This doesn't mean Singapore isn't my home, because it is, and I will always come back here, but sometimes you need to escape a little. (I find that anyone who says un-patriotic things and makes stupid claims like 'I don't want to be a Singaporean anymore' without any valid reason (e.g. political exile, can't get married, etc), and merely on the basis of 'disillusionment with the Singaporean society' needs to STFU and give thanks that they even have a home. We take nationality as what is entitled to us, but we never realize that it is a privilege more than anything. And a Singaporean nationality, no less, is a great privilege.) I feel like France wasn't exactly the experience I wanted... it's something else and I'm not sure what it is. That sense of temporary displacement.

I think I know my youth is leaving and I'm desperate to capture whatever's left of it, whatever that means. I know you can always remain young at heart, and I hope I do, but I can't help but feel like time is running out. Quarter life crisis, ha ha, it sounded so stupid at first but now I can understand.

(Another thing I've been doing is experiencing a disconnect between my mind and my hands when I type. Just now when I wanted to type 'but now I can understand' I wrote 'but I know I can understand' and didn't even realize until 10 seconds later. It concerns me a little because 1) it isn't a typo and 2) doesn't feel like something freudian. One thing I think about sometimes is if I have a neurological problem somewhere. I told Gus the other day it amazes me how long I take to register and process certain things in social interactions, like someone handing me something to hold.)

I think my blog posts always come to an abrupt end. Oh well. Might as well keep up the tradition!

all the things i shouldn't have forgotten

forgot to talk about all the things that happened in december. for posterity's sake.

hung out with this bunch before leaving for shanghai with the family. pics from all our last few meetings. extremely happy that all of us got to know each other and that next semester won't be so lonely anymore. i only wish we made our acquaintances sooner! but still, i'm grateful that at commencement there'll be people to take pictures with haha. first outing, drinks at emerald hill. then jumping around at amped.

counted down to new years on noreen's roof. drank, shouted, laughed... people got drunk. it was really fun. twas a great way to ring in the new year, am looking forward to a great 2014 with everyone above :)

pics from shanghai and korea. all i know is we were so excited to get to korea that everything in shanghai slips my mind. thankfully i found this picture of shanghai's skyline along the bund. to be fair i went to shanghai with a very confused mindset of what china was and is (it's my first time there) and i'm glad to say that i was pleasantly surprised by shanghai. i know its the most modern chinese city, and i can't say for sure what i expected to see, but it was really lovely, even just walking along the roads, listening to buskers play the guitar, admiring the driving skills of shanghai's cabbies... i'd come back i think. 

my birthday (17th) morning was celebrated on the night of the 16th. Gus had run out to buy me a bouquet of flowers and i'm so upset i didn't get to keep them because we had a flight to catch. my parents rang up a bottle of champagne and wine and a cake from the hotel concierge and i made my sister drink so much that she puked a disgusting amount of wine-laced puke. i felt bad so i blow dried her hair after she showered. i'm always overseas on my birthday. i wonder what it'd be like to celebrate in singapore? 

by the night of the 17th we were in Seoul!!! idk we were just looking forward to it so much. had an awesome kbbq dinner for awesome prices relative to korean restaurants in singapore of course. stuffed myself full of chadol baegi. downed 2 soju bombs with Gus and my brother and Karina. went off to noraebang at night which was really fun as well. singing gets so incredibly tiring. you don't even think singers get tired from singing do you? it doesn't occur to you but i guess anyone who's been to ktv will know haha. insane. ended my night dancing and singing to big bang's 'bad boy' in korea haha pretty awesome stuff tbh 

we also went snowboarding at yang-ji resort which was only an hour or so outside of seoul. SO FUN. i miss snowboarding the most. reminds me of boarding in France one year ago. finally started to carve nicely! sad we only had so little time there. nowadays all i think about when i'm bored is snowboarding. i want to plan a ski trip in july to new zealand or one of the australian ski resorts. before i die i have to make it to the whistler mountains in canada to snowboard. def one my favourite sports!

and lastly a narcissistic photo of myself once we came back home. seoul withdrawals, impending commencement of work... all this shit has begun. it's 10.30pm and Gus is still at work. don't really enjoy this life. wish we could do something that would let us stay the way we were. wish we didn't need money at all. been struggling to get up every morning for work... struggling to come up with ideas that are useful and relevant. nevertheless i'm grateful for the opportunity. everyone at work has been really nice to me and really helpful.

ok bye

feels odd i haven't been writing a lot at all but will commence a job tomorrow that involves a lot of writing, albeit about things that i'm hardly an expert in but i feel like i want to do my best, honestly, for myself, just to see what i am capable of. i can never feel like this in school, sometimes i feel like school is so impossibly hard, and it's so impossible to achieve anything in school that i can be proud of. even though looking back i recognize that is a bad attitude to have, i'm glad that this job makes me feel confident, and excited, and capable... i don't really remember the last time i've felt this way. if it goes well hopefully some of this good feeling translates to the new school semester

gus starts work as well. for 6 months. after which he goes back to school and i start work for good. feel like this is an important milestone. today, actually. the moment we both go to work the wheels won't stop turning until forever. feeling uneasy about the way we've sort of sidled up to the Monday without really acknowledging what it all means. am unsure if we've been avoiding it or it just doesn't seem like a big deal. i hope it's the latter. am going to call gus soon  to talk about this i think.

tomorrow is new years eve and then it will be new years day and it will be 2014. what i've resolved without writing down but has become ever more concrete in my mind because of the idea of 'work' and a 'job', like ok this is the time to get my shit together

- drink more water
- exercise more
- sleep earlier, wake up earlier, also sleep less
- moisturize haha
- talk less shit about people
- work harder in everything
- make time for myself
- make time for the people who matter
- cook more
- less procrastination

i met rachel the other day and we ate ramen and talked about many things. i don't know if this ever happens to anyone else, but when a certain topic weighs heavily on your mind, it keeps coming randomly in conversations without any prompting from you? seems strange to me, it always happens. anyway, tammy told me the other day about this book called 'quiet' by susan cain, which explores the power of introverts in a world where extroversion is the ideal. i picked it up today and in the first few pages i felt so strongly what she was writing about, how much i feel the pressure to be happy all the time, to be able to speak up and hold a memorable conversation, to use body language to convey a sense of power and dominance, when in all honesty what i want to do is lie in bed and read a book, scroll through humour blogs on tumblr, drink ice milo with just 2 or 3 people and talk about non-awkward things... yet everyday i try to convince myself that i am this crazy, happy, outgoing sort of person who is capable of making a million friends and being liked by everyone. it made me feel really sad and really fake. i haven't come to the end of the book, but i have a pessimistic outlook on this. i know the pressures of the world will continue to force me down this energy-draining path.

but anyway, i met rachel, and i like it when we meet and talk about books, we always somehow happen to pick up and read the same books. it happened with:

a tale for the time being
taipei
mr penumbra's 24 hour bookstore

given that we meet very rarely because she's in the UK most of the time and i'm here, i feel warm and happy inside knowing that we have the same tastes and have things to talk about that don't drain me. i also sort of feel glad that we don't run in the same social circles, in the sense that the people who irk me and i always feel like bitching about it wouldn't know her and she wouldn't know them. so i don't bitch and the gossip is limited and it just paves the way to better conversation i think, that's what i like

(what i was saying about the things u think about randomly appearing: tammy told me about the book, it came up in conversation with rachel, came up again today during dinner at jamie's)

i think it's time to sleep

back from shanghai and seoul my mind is just buzzing with so many things good and bad, but mostly bad. it's like the moment you reach home you breach the border where all the bad, stressful, unnecessary things have been straining to reach you. suddenly everything goes wrong. i hate it so much, having to deal with shit i don't want to deal with, things i feel make no progress or growth to the personal development of anyone involved. feels like this shit involves just closing the door to a circular pathway, in that i will inevitably have to open the door to this same shit again in a few months, a few years, idk. i've been pondering if perhaps some things are meant to exist in a constant state of misalignment, never to be fixed. i wonder if you aren't meant to fix them, if they're meant to just be a constant thorn in your side for god knows what reason. if this fucking suffering is supposed to be normalized, and that i'm just putting too much worry and too much stress into something that should just be considered normal. when i look at the situation there are so many people to blame, who should shoulder the actual blame, but for some reason i end up feeling guilty because i'm so helpless in my ability to do anything about it.

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCKING FUCK

"The Hungarian-born philosopher Aurel Kolnai gave the horrifying qualities of bugs some serious thought. Kolnai ultimately decided that what upsets us is “their pullulating squirming, their cohesion into a homogeneous teeming mass” and their “interminable, directionless sprouting and breeding.” That is, it’s the quantity of crazy ants that’s so destabilizing. As the American psychologist James Hillman argued, an endless swarm of bugs flattens your perception of yourself as precious and meaningful. It instantly reduces your individual consciousness to a “merely numerical or statistical level.”

This is what’s soul-crushing about crazy ants: What wafts off them is the same faintly nihilistic feeling that comes the moment you realize hammering the pound sign won’t connect you with a human being and only funnels you back to the same automated instructions. It’s what drove Mike the Hog-a-Nator to grab an assault rifle. And it’s also, apparently, the feeling Tom Rasberry has been left with, having watched his alarm about these creatures be sucked up into an unintelligibly massive system forced to juggle lots of other, equally terrible problems, and then quietly disperse into the goop.

Insects, Kolnai wrote, unsettle us, existentially speaking, because they “arouse generally the impression of life caught up in a senseless, formless surging."

- via The New York Times 

lately i have felt an exhaustion in my body like no other time in my life
have googled 'chronic fatigue syndrome' on webmd like other paranoid freaks
am afraid that this is what i have because it is essentially untreatable

have been thinking a lot lately about how much your body can betray you
it is everything that is you on earth, that sustains your own perceived sense of living
and how others perceive you as living
the litmus test of a life on earth is a body part moving at the will of an autonomous mind
the only thing you can control
but the only thing you also can't

if you think about it your body is your biggest responsibility
you have just this one thing to take care of tbh
i keep thinking how shitty my physical body is might be related to my emotional health
hormones and whatnot
still i have a fear that there are cancer cells in my stomach
or a tumor pressing on a nerve in my brain
it's weird but i feel like these arbitrary catastrophes happen all the time,
it might as well be me

was watching a movie in bed with gus, and he fell asleep, and i saw him fall asleep halfway through the movie and i paused it, and he opened his sleepy eyes and insisted on continuing because he wanted to watch it. pressed play and he was asleep in 10 seconds. looked at him snuggled up under the covers and felt reminded that we, us, we have something special that exists right now that has broken down the barriers of two strangers to the point where i feel myself breathe a sigh of relief, physically relax when i am with him. i think it's sad that i cannot say for sure where we will be in a few years. but i suppose this uncertainty only compels me to appreciate even more whatever special thing we have together now.

recently i have been thinking about a few things, like exercising, taking dance classes, cooking... the other night i cooked lasagna and potato salad for dinner because i did not do anything for gus on his birthday (circumstances). at the moment i felt disappointed that i put too much mayo in the salad, annoyed that the top layer of cheese browned too much and the sides were too crispy. but when i think about it now i think i should give myself more credit and cut myself more slack. for someone who has cooked a grand total of less than 8 times in my entire life i think i did a decent job. as long as nobody went to the hospital i think i have things to be proud of. process > destination

another thing i have been thinking lately is that to progress as a person is a tiring thing. you have to constantly be thinking about thought processes or actions that you can take to better your life or make it worse. actions are far more controllable than thoughts, but the moment you rein your thoughts in, i think you begin to make significant differences. the difficulty is that thoughts come at hte speed of light, and you're usually caught off guard. thus, you have to be vigilant in protecting yourself from certain thoughts. i feel like you literally have to be constantly observing your mind from as objective a perspective as you can get, and arresting bad thoughts the moment they arrive. some thoughts you can't catch in time and you can actually notice the marks they've left behind in their wake.

what i mean is it's scary to let your thoughts run wild. imagination is a good thing but not when it dives into the realms of what hurts us most. i feel interested in how our parents have shaped our mental health, but also feel a little scared at what i'll find. i can't stand the idea of putting my parents at fault for anything ever.

apparently actions done consistently for 7 days become a habit. you can't hit a perfect 7 days with thoughts, it's such a long process. constant reminders, constant checking yourself. it's not easy, but i also feel like i have never been faced with such a task before. i've never felt the need to check my thoughts, use pure willpower to push through emotional pain. it's a funny feeling -- using your mind to conquer the doubts & fears produced by the same brain. just goes to show how everything is in your mind really.

Feeling drained today because I started doing my applications. Felt ridiculous but at the same time felt like it was a rite of passage... Don't feel particularly excited for anything I've applied for. I constantly feel upset that I haven't found that one thing in life I'm desperate to do.

If you want to feel like a failure just start searching for a job.

Still, end of the night, comfy in bed, Gus' arms around me as he snores lightly. Things could be a lot worse I suppose.