the best kisses are

the unplanned ones at 2am in the parking lot after a magic trick

all i can think about is WOW

(but then i got home and guess who i got a text from (M) asking me how my life is. my life is great! fuck off, you)

VIETNAM

nigey just posted this on youtube! all the memories just came flooooooding back.

mid-week dinners report

on sunday annie, yj, dx and i very spontaneously decided to have dinner together. caught up with each others’ lives, talked a lot about a lot of boys and two girls. at one point dx remarked that things are getting more and more complicated as we grow older. i can’t help but agree with how true that is.

i’m a very different person from who i thought i was going to be at ~20. we all are.

on monday my fellow cogls mark and kelly decided to drive to west coast plaza for dinner after a long meeting. decided on thai express and talked about many things. i don’t remember what was said exactly but i remember feeling very happy that i’ve met people i could enjoy dinners with. we subsequently had an even better lunch on wednesday with the other cogls.

i’m so happy i (think i) get along with them. mark just tagged me in a picture of a fluffy squirrel on facebook! i feel very included.

on tuesday i met an old friend for dinner at sapore’s before my beer date. i’ve known simon since i was 9. that’s almost eleven years ago. wow. he’s still with the same girl he was with the last time we talked. they’ve been together for nearly six years now. at some point i talked about how i couldn’t imagine being just with one person and not knowing how it’d be like with someone else.

at some point next i just felt very silly. i was being vindictive because he has what i thought i always wanted. i wish someone could love me enough to think they could still want to be with me after nearly six years. guys like that are just not attracted to girls like me.

i know he still has a shot to tell his kids their mummy was the only woman he’s ever loved like my dad tells me about my mum, but i will never have that anymore. i don’t think i will ever be able to be honest to my future children about my relationships.

it’s odd when you finally put your life in to perspective once in awhile.

on wednesday i rushed off after a long day of filming for dinner with my parents and the lavias. we had a seafood FEAST at red house in east coast park. drunken prawns, barbecued squid, sauteed jellyfish, squid-stuffed doughsticks, clams, chili crab, pepper crab with spinach toufu, sambal kangkong topped with a whole coconut. all that for five people and i almost went into a food coma.

went home and watched it’s complicated again alone. it’s SUCH a good movie and i really really like meryl streep.

on thursday (just now) i had dinner alone. finally this week. i brought mrs lavia around the whole day and i was feeling very tired. so tired i fell asleep on the train and missed clementi. although i was tired, i was very excited to have dinner by myself. finally i didn’t have to talk to anybody except to order my food.

a few years ago i was averse to eating alone and avoided it as much as possible. i hated the idea of eating alone outside. over time i became someone very comfortable with sitting by myself and having my meal in a restaurant or a coffeeshop or a hawker center.

sometimes someone would ask if he/she could sit at my table and i’d wonder why they were eating alone too. i’d think of all the reasons why they could be eating alone–did they fight with their spouse? are they just single and sad? did their spouse go on holiday? i’d wonder if they’re wondering the same about me and i’d wonder about what they thought about me eating alone.

i was thinking about taking a $7 taxi ride back to nus instead of walking 25 minutes back, but then i decided to just buy a packet of cigarettes and walk back while i smoked. i thought about a lot of things during that long walk.

i thought about how funny it’d be if my dad would one day ask me to bring one of his handsome promising engineers around and how i will almost surely have a big crush on one of those, especially if it would please my dad that we were together.

he will be someone who smokes. we will spend half the time making small talk and the real conversations will only begin after i ask him if he smokes and he say yes. we’d laugh and start smoking together and i’d tell him not to tell my dad i smoke. we’d fall in love after many more long conversations and a few smooches and i’d always be insecure thinking about the high possibility that he only loves me because i’m the boss’ daughter.

i thought about how i romanticize everything i do. every choice has a deeper significance. the clothes i wear, the people i talk to or not, the things i write, the places where i publish the things i write, the books i read, the way i feel about my 762 thread count sheets and the way i feel about a first date in a library.

i like to think that i’m an artist and should find significance in insignificance, that means i must overthink everything and the potential insanity is what i’d risk for my art. i know i am pretentious and i think being aware of that makes me less pretentious.

i thought about how much i absolutely HATE whatsapp. how it stresses me out because i feel like i have to reply messages immediately. in various modes of exchanging text, the slower the better because i want to have time to think about what i write.

snail mail is good but too slow because we’re accustomed to something a little faster, e-mail is perfect, SMS is okay and whatsapp is deep down at the bottom of the hierarchy. i feel rude if i don’t reply immediately, but i feel obsessive when i reply too fast. how terribly convenient it is for text communication is terrible because it pretends to be something that can replace face-to-face contact. i think i’d rather see somebody once in a month than to have whatsapp pretend conversations with them constantly.

and then i got back after three sticks on cigarettes, just enough for me to slot the lighter into the packet.

i wonder how friday’s dinner will turn out.

tuesday nights are underrated 2.0

the days leading up to that drink on that street in that bar next to the other bar we were at the last time

that moment i caught your eye as you walked towards me to where i was sitting

when we started talking and you told me i look really good that night

2 coronas, 1 cider and 1 mojito, not as much as the last time.

conversations punctuated with sudden pauses of glances and impish smiles across the table

the way you looked at me and the way i couldn’t hold your gaze for too long

something about the way you looked at me throughout the night.

me asking you everything about anything. you telling me everything about anything.

you telling me that you really like it when i do something i didn’t even know i did

laughing about how your colleague pronounce chicago as chee-cha-go, laughing about other silly things

conversations that ran around how you and i are not a ‘we’ and never will be. i like that a lot.

lazily mumbling cities and the name of their capitals. canada? ottawa, and so on.

you browsing the book i read excerpts out to you from. i snuck a picture.

…

…

(for my girlfriends, this is about the one starting with j.)

sunday night

after 3+ hours of catching up/ nonsense/ lots of laughter

(more than a year ago when we sat at the EXACT same spot in marche before the boys enlisted!)

the day we graduated.

LOVE.

breakfast for lunch at hatched on evans road

one of us looked over to a table of four older women sitting and chatting near us, pointed at them and asked the group if we think we’d be like them five years from now. i remember someone saying ‘more like ten years later’ while all of us turned to look at them at the same time.

i wonder if they once looked at another older group of women when they were younger the same way we were looking at them. i wonder if they noticed our conspicuous behavior. if they did, i wonder what they said about our apparent youthfulness. i wonder if we’d catch four younger girls looking over at our table ten years from now. i wonder what we will say about how they remind us of this time when we were so young.

today i kept thinking about how perpetual loneliness feels so imminent. how much i want a family someday yet how little i’ll be able to trust someone else–anyone, to stay faithful to all the things we’d agree to want.

but i realized that girlfriends are golden.

the night before saw a spontaneous midnight drive out to the country club with another group of girlfriends. i’ve known the three girls for 12 years, 7 years and 5 years respectively. while all of them are currently in really good relationships with good guys, i thought about all the people we had relationships with over the years we’ve known each other and how many of them become insignificant over time in our lives while we are all still sitting together drinking canned milk tea and eating chocolates by the pool.

i’ll always be there for them and i know they’ll always be there for me, whether one day as each others’ bridesmaids or as fellow cat ladies.

“you can get addicted to a certain kind of sadness”

what kind? do tell! 

being foolish. there’s something beautiful about not knowing things, whether by choice or not. the “certain kind of sadness” i’m referring to is the kind that one chooses to act on a thought despite knowing it’s bad for them.

–

benefit of doubts for people you know don’t love you. let your hopeful side blind any doubt that they may not be interested. let them fool you. bask in their cruelty. choose not to believe your head, choose to think they can be the person you imagine them to be.

packets of cigarettes over and over again before you get addicted. tell yourself you’re only a social smoker, but find yourself smoking alone outside the house in at 4am after 3 months because you needed it so much.

drink copious amounts of alcohol. start with shots and vodka-whatevers then whiskeys and champagnes in clubs. feel hungover and shitty the next day and tell yourself never again. find yourself drinking leftover red wine straight from the bottle alone 2 years later.

be mean to your mother. know that she sacrificed her entire life for the family but feel yourself getting so annoyed when she constantly points out how ungodly you have become although that’s the way you were raised and know that she’s right. find yourself disliking her and disliking yourself for that.

never talk to that sister who never talks to you. think a lot about starting a conversation but feel too afraid to do so because of the way she bullied you when you were young. be unable to let go of that completely because she was unable to let go of the way your parents treated her. feel afraid when you see glimpses of her in yourself. find yourself being quietly haunted by her presence.

think about doing things to hurt yourself physically that will hurt your loved ones emotionally if they know about it. use your body as a vessel for delivering sadness. fantasize about all the burns and cuts and bruises you can give yourself. find yourself thinking about doing them for the purpose of hurting those people.

talk to somebody who you know only wants you for one thing. find yourself hating yourself for really enjoying that.

be sad quietly, but put on a big smile when you see people. think snidely about how they don’t know things about you until they read your fucking blog. put all your insecurities out on that blog. be vulnerable to their judgement. find yourself not caring if they do because they should appreciate your honesty.

and et cetera.

in short, knowingly do things that hurt yourself. know that happiness does not last long. happiness that lingers is too good to be true. know that a person like you deserve sadness.

defend yourself like a stubborn mule when someone tells you you deserve happiness. decide that you should be sad, and you should make yourself sad before anyone can make you sad, because that externally-inflicted sadness will be more painful than your self-inflicted sadness.

be free with your emotions, particularly fall in love with sadness. experience it profoundly alone and know it can never be ‘halved’ like your ex-boyfriend told you it could be when shared. embrace how badly damaged you are as a person but write about it in order not to go crazy.

be seduced by the wonderful inspirations for the aesthetic experiences that sadness provides for your art. think about writing about your sadness, think about the paintings of your self-portrait image of your sadness, think about the conversations you can have with strangers around different types of sadness, think about the possibilities of relating to the sadness of others by having your own sadness.

there is a reason why there is the cliche of the tortured artist. live that cliche, be that girl.

sit curled-up on the plushy couch by yourself in those poignant moments of sadness and swirl it in your mind like you would red wine in your mouth. think about how enchantingly beautiful it is to be so foolish and sad. think about how beautiful your sad gaze looks in the mirror.

think about new ways to damage yourself emotionally so that someone else will never completely possess your soul. not because you don’t want to give it to them, but there won’t be much to give because you have willingly and foolishly thrown it away to the people who played around with the parts of it like it was a toy.

simmer yourself in the sadness and enjoy the way it bites your heart and makes your chest tighten and your entire body sick and makes you crave more self-destructive, sadness-inducing acts.

understand why coldhearted bitches become coldhearted bitches and feel sad for them. wish that and wait for one day when someone special enough would come along and crave your stories about how you became a coldhearted bitch but still somehow find some way to love you.

–

on a more positive note, find comfort in the knowledge that knowing sadness means a basis comparison for any future happiness.

because being a happy girl all the time means you have no stories to tell. collecting sadness in all parts of your life gives you stories to tell as the filtrate. i want to be a girl with many stories to tell, and being addicted to different certain kinds of sadness seems to be a good way to do that.

know that knowing to be sad means knowing not to be sad. learn to respect your mind for its resilience to withstand the sadness so far and then flush it out every once in awhile with waves of inexplicable joy from the smallest things. find increased faith in the sadness when it always inevitably ends.

XX