Weddings and such

Ohmagawddd, everything and everyone is getting married…which probably means I should just quit my job to attend weddings professionally in 2015.  I was reading an article which says you should ditch friends who ask you when you’re getting married. I have one friend like that, but she’s Singaporean so it means she is perfectly entitled to ask such questions without being dropped from my contact list. I love weddings, I really do, even if lately I have been feeling somewhat cynical about the strived attempts at individuality which all seems a little too contrived for me. Meaningfulness is great, but too much meaningfulness is, frankly speaking, too sentimentally nauseating for me, the unwilling voyeur.

Anyhoos, I’m happy for those who are getting hitched, but for the sake of my annual leave, I hope they at least fall within the July /August period, so I can spend my weekends in summer of 2015 kicking back with bubbles and wearing pretty dresses.

PUHLEASE, WE ARE IN TECHNICOLOUR

So this world is strange. People change, things change, the world changes. We’re in the future before we realize the past has gone.

People have a lot to say. And not all good, not all necessarily thought through (just like this) but sometimes contains more insight than an opinion piece that took ages to agonise and conjure.

Thinking is good, but overthinking is not.

I recently read a piece about how Disney cartoons reinforced racial stereotypes by encasing it in subtle undertones through the casting of voiceover artists…an “issue” no one would pick up unless you’re one of those pinger seeking ships trawling the South Indian Ocean at the moment… or a massively victimized columnist. If a blue parrot is a blue parrot, how would you manage to tie the notion of race into …a BLUE PARROT? Then there is the op-ed who questioned if the Oscar Pistorius case would be seen in a different, less favourable light, if a black person was the victim instead. I have never considered the case in the context of someone’s skin colour and it struck me that the very act of raising this question, with all its good intentions, was ironically very racist.

I’m not trying to ignore racial sensitivities or even try to pretend the problem of racism doesn’t exist. But seriously, in this over politicised climate of everything, this over-reading, over thinking of racial representation is far more damaging to the cause that it claims to serve.

The problem is… that we continue to see race as something that is real, when it isn’t! It’s merely a social construct and by seeing the difference, we are playing into the very limited confines of this construct! I’m not saying that discrimination is a myth and that we are all treated equally, but I also think it’s time to unshackle ourselves from the mental chains that hold us captive from viewing ourselves as true equals in this world.

So that is my brain vomit for this month…

On a separate note, I’m feeling damn lucky to have found someone as smart and patient as the boyfriend. He is truly the best, apart from the times he successfully stops me from ordering more food than I can eat.

THE END.

The Death and Resurrection of Self

So I’m currently on a quest to figure out my sometimes apprehension and distaste for communications technology… whether it is based on ill founded fears or misguided notions of what this turn of the century game changer actually embodies.

Personally I own a smartphone by chance , an iPad by design and have recently acquired several social network accounts (i.e. Dayre, Instagram) through a degree of self perceived social duress.

Now that I’m all signed up, connected and ready to share my voice with the rest of the world… sadly I find myself with nothing to say. Unless you care about what I have consumed/purchased in the last 24 hours or have some genuine interest in the amount of alcohol I have imbibed and with whom I shared the dubious honour.

When I turn to my page feeds, I am informed, by the way of a heavily filtered instagram photo, of the fabulousness that evades me, somewhere in this universe as I type these words.

I guess I really don’t have a problem with being fabulous…but my real concern lies with how these channels have served to become a giant mouthpiece for consumerism and over-consumption, as well as a magnifying glass for the ego.

whatevs…

No longer are we content with a mere photo upload from our phone, thanks to technology, we can now share highlights of our life (i.e. lunch or the new pedicure) through the wireless wifi function in our digital cameras.

I gather that’s what all these new advances and the birth of yet another social media outlet appear to be geared towards; feeding the image of the self and the glorification of its (unwarranted) importance.  Since the word “selfie” made permanent inroads into our everyday vocabulary, never has vacuousness been so celebrated on this scale…

I guess for all its intents and purposes, technology is undoubtedly and inherently faultless. But whoever’s out there, dreaming up yet another way to show off our lives in its staged glory, please stop feeding this epidemic of narcissism and fueling the race of vanity induced consumption… because at the end of the day, you are going to be making a whole bunch of people more miserable than we first started out.

the offenders…

Do words mean anything when language is dead

So I was just thinking about words this morning and how its kind of interesting how we are conditioned by language. Perhaps how certain emotions we don’t feel, because it does not exist in our vernacular?

Like waldeinsamkeit… only because Singapore is a forest of buildings. Or how “thank you” is non existent for a tribe in Borneo only because communal sharing is expected.

So sometimes I think poetry is a great medium for smashing the gravity of words… rearranging the orbit of meanings…

Intractable

Words.

Are So Useless.

Forming things into shapes, into concrete

Slabs of perception

Which would otherwise melt or fold or altogether

Disappear

They never

Adequately capture the

            Wholeness

Which spans from the dregs of the depths

Or the heights of an unimaginable summit

Serving

To limit the imagination

            and experience

Of mine to yours

ARRGH!!

You know sometimes the absolute stupidity of this country confounds me… I kind of want to cry alittle bit because as a nation, we seem just obsessed with these little fucking issues that don’t mean anything apart from being a signifier of some super outdated social construct.

Class, Wealth, Race…. for fuck’s sake, get some goddamn perspective already!!!! Don’t even get me started on the deluge of retarded replies from Singaporeans (over the Anton Casey saga)  who turned their biggest chip on their shoulder into some fucking twisted superiority claim over foreigners..

I am even more angry that Ministers, of all people who should know better than to give their two cents worth over such a petty and trivial issue, have chosen to condemn AC publicly, just to score some trivial political points… which is all going to be forgotten in two months anyway after Singaporeans find something else to attack the government about.

AAAARRGGHHH!!!!! I feel like I need to do something more productive with all this pent up rage… Maybe I’ll find something to eat…

Seen today on campus

Is Singapore better off with or without meritocracy?

……………….

Some questions just begged to be asked…. like which bloody academic/department deemed this a valid question to be beamed out on every public television screen on campus.

So would you like to have an amazing all expenses holiday in the Maldives with a magical unicorn or bleed to death slowly with papercuts to your eyeballs?

WHO THE FUCK ASKS SUCH QUESTIONS?????

I kind of want to stab my head alittle.

Um, about Hierarchy

Funny how you really have nothing much to say when you are truly content.

The world does seem a little gentler, the people a lot more bearable and the life a lot more carefree. (disclaimer: this contentment does not apply on Mondays nor to the Singapore Post Office)

So today, we had some super important VIP visit and it was funny and sad watching people get rapped on seemingly minor stuff like order of names on a programme sheet. I have trouble understanding the concept of hierarchy, at least the Singaporean version. Over here, respect seems to be accorded and implied through a seemingly invisible pecking order, from names on a list through to your seat at the dinner table. And us, we are the mere serfs serving the feudal lords.

The worst part is people actually taking this hierarchical riffraff seriously enough to get affronted when their names are placed one notch lower than where they should be.  Its like, HELLOOOOO, aren’t we evolved enough to recognize that this social pecking order exists solely as a shared but mere symbolism of our egos and self-importance? And maybe…just MAYBE, we are really not as important as we are in our own little cranial cavities?

I cannot decide if people like that are just plain stupid or maniacal egoists. Both I suppose.

Okay I guess this is me on happy day…ranting, but without exclamation marks.

Life in Singapore

So I keep getting asked… How’s life in Singapore… what’s happening your end? Most of the time, Singapore for me is a super bloody long commute to work that involves two train changes and a busride.. then abit more. And super yummy sushi dinners at sushi train restaurants with the equally super yummy boyfriend. 🙂 And lately, there has been a fair bit of after work squash now that we both got squash racquets. My life now also includes regular trips to Dairy Queen and Cold Stone Creamery ice cream, though consumption has seemed to have tailed off abit lately. Then there is our favourite little Chinese restaurant where they try to stuff you on a massive table with 4 other googly eyed strangers or by the road where you get a whiff of exhaust fumes every five minutes a bus pulls up. Then there are the weekend jaunts to countries that do not require more than 2.5 hours of flight time, where we end up curled in bed with a book or walking around in the heat trying not to get fleeced by our south east asian neighbours. Then there are the weekends, the weekends I like the best, when we are in bed till 11, until either of us decides that a day in bed is not the way to spend a day. But sometimes we never come to this conclusion and that’s kind of where we stay the whole time until the next morning.  Otherwise you will find us in a cafe, sitting in silence either across or next to each other, with a book and a disintegrated iced coffee, reaching out for each other once in a while.  Its funny we don’t drink as much anymore, but when we do…its a Bailey’s just before bed, like the old people do.

But no , despite spending just over two years in Singapore.. I have never been to the infinity pool at Marina Bay Sands..

at work

at play!

Perhaps Tomorrow

She whispered into his forehead, just quietly enough so he couldn’t hear her. “I love you.”

Running her fingers through his dark curls, as she twined them into mottled clumps, she felt grateful for that balmy November evening, when she first picked up his penetrating gaze as he stood across her with a glass raised to his lips, hearing every second word the man next to her was saying.

She lowered herself and kissed his left cheek tenderly, carefully watching the creases that were creeping slowly from the sides of his pale blue eyes that glinted green as the yellowish cast of light fell upon them.

They sat quietly, leaning into each other in silence, on the single bed whose frame shuddered under the tell-tale creaks in the early mornings. Many times, they have laid side by side as beginnings of the morning streamed in though the crack of a faded batik sarong that hung limply from the cast iron grilles.

She interpreted his silence as quiet contentment and so she muffled her thoughts as well.

Sometimes as she walked home tracing the concrete pavements with her heavy footsteps, she wondered if there was any chance at all that this may all be insignificant one day, like a forgotten song.

She knew love like many could be as fleeting as a glance into a passing reflection and yet in this moment, she felt a feeling of regret that swept through her, almost violently and wished she had said something.

“Perhaps tomorrow”, she thought. Perhaps tomorrow

(a little piece written sometime somewhere)