The Gagging Reflex

I was sick to my stomach. Completely sick.

When my eyes cursored over the words, I swear I felt the bile of disbelief rise to the top of my throat in a burn.

No, this isn't rage. Anger has its liberating effects. This is something else.

This is disgust.

Maybe she got one thing half right. I'm not going to do anything and just drift along if, for the rest of my life, I have to pretend to be happy shelving everything that ever was important to me.

Because the real Dani has other ambitions beyond dollardollarbillYall.

Because your remarks should stop where your business ends. And where this is concerned, it ends with who I am.
Because you don't know me.

Throw Away Your Fly-Swatters and Baygon Sprays

I omitted this opening paragraph for an article I had to write on Mentorship. I obviously got carried away.

In it’s most vivid portrayal best accessible to the majority of us with a predictable ingestion of Hollywood fare, mentorship is a diminutive bearded Asian elderly (preferably Japanese or Chinese) who teaches lightning chops and kicks to an unassuming fourteen-year old, so that the latter may overcome (in style) the trials of growing up. Spoken often unintelligibly and with a suspect air of indifference, the mentor reveals his aged wisdom through adages that are seemingly simplistic, abstract and entirely irrelevant. But when scrutinised and embraced by the discerning, the lacking sophistication in phrases like, “Man who catch fly with chopstick can accomplish anything,” bears an engineered genius that makes it easily applicable to almost any circumstance.

in This / Fate

A weekend in a rhyme /A year of sweet romance
A snapshot of a lifetime /A diamond in the hand

This Greek intoxication / Decreed by Fates it seems
A place in constellation / Our coupling of the seams

Preordained

I came across an amusing quote.

"How? to make God laugh.
Tell Him your future plans."

- Woody Allen

Whole

(I) half-angel.

She otherhalf.

Meshy Meshy

[Permit me a minute of uncool.

Sims 2 on my mac is working brilliant! Can't wait for the add-ons to finish downloading, but they're taking longer than summer in Singapore. Goddamit!]

Spiriting Home

I'm flying home in a couple of hours. I'm leaving behind what seems to have impressed on me to be a sort of...parallel universe.

My presumptions didn't fall far from thinking I would look into this world from a glass door. It's not my embarrassingly rudimentary grappling of the spoken language. Or the fact that everybody seems to have the same fashion taste when it comes to outer wear to shield from the now fading cold. It's the way people live their lives. Their typical thoughts and emotions. That's something I don't think an alien could really learn or comprehend. It's like one of movie storylines where in somewhere someplace someuniverse outwardly different from your own, there is someone someother just like you, just living in a different context. I hope the local version of me has cool hair too and doesn't spit in people's way like people do here.

This place is rough and crude. The cutthroat circumstances that plague this place like they were once disease that has now laid to rest and become mainstay because it's just been too long, bears an ignorance amongst its people. A kind of ignorant and self-serving attitude that has hardened them into a certain kind of trivial mercenary. Yesterday, I boarded a bus and took seat in front of two visiting caucasians, one German, the other Brit, I think. About getting on the bus, the German commented that he was so relieved to see people finally so civilised. They usually don't queue and wait. They huddle and riot.

In all the crudeness, people are pussies here. The other day whilst in a two-and-a-half-hour-queue to scale the 3rd tallest mountain in the country, this bitchy looking woman started rambling off in this part of the world's trademark animated tone. She ranted in a fast-paced shriek that could have inspired the Banshee, towards my brother who must have inadvertently done something to offend her. I shouted at her and shot a hard stare. Then she avoided my gaze, eyes-front, feathers outstretched, in that signature I-live-for-myself-and-everyone-else-in-the-world-I-don't-care-about-should-die posture. People here know how to hold a quarrel. They'd beat down anyone I've ever known in Singapore with their verbal assaults. But they're pussies.

They had Lord of the Rings on TV...dubbed in the local language. And I would never have fathomed Elijah Wood's mastery of Chinese being better than mine.

I think about people. People in their own universes living out their own lives the way they understand life to be, the way they're used to. Then I think about her.

How has she been living her life the past ten days without me? How has she taken to the spaces that I'd left behind? Does she still think of me like an instinctual habit? I feel a soft-voiced nervous trepidation creeping over. The thought of going home to a girl whom I have to hug with a brick wall built in between. That kills.

I know her like I know where the moles on my body are. And I pray to God that tonight, I will still know her.