Monday, March 27, 2006

Lilac, A Lighter Shade Of Purple

There are essentially, two kinds of nightmares one may have.

The first is the kind that we all grow up with. Giant spiders, masked murderers, rampaging dinosaurs, your mum singing "Hit Me Baby One More Time" while dressed like Britney.

These are the Law of Nature Nightmares, where essentially you dream of life but with some fundamental rule of nature warped beyond comprehension. Normally we take these simple rules for granted, but when they are bent the dreams get real scary.

You have the staircases that lead on to infinity. You have little children who move faster than you, but who always wait for you to turn around to spot them. You have the various creepy animals who grow to Gargantuan Post-Army sizes. You have clothes that inexplicably dissolve, leaving you naked in the middle of Orchard Road (and if you're lucky, to rapturous applause).

And everyone's susceptible, no matter your age, build, education, race. But these nightmares are kiddy stuff in the end. Even if you wake up bathed in acrid cold sweat, you smile at the pure foolishness of your nightmare, and dreamless slumber finds you again soon after.

Not so the other kind, the Morality Nightmares.

Here, your subconcious dregs up every past indiscretion or folly your pride suppresses and your honour denies, but which your conscience is very well acquainted with. You relive past mistakes, you are allowed little trips down What-Might-Have-Been, and long-lost friends and loved ones come back to let you hurt them all over again.

When the nightmare manages to fester viciously in your consciousness even after you awaken, and haunts you throughout the entire day, that's when you know you've had a real kicker of a Morality Nightmare.

Oh, toilsome is the journey of the man who has yet to make peace.

Friday, March 24, 2006

Sunshine From The Past 6: Notebook

I remember gripping my brown notebook tight, and I remember the soft yellow glow of the staff room.

I remember the soft whirr of the air-con, and I remember no one else around. Quiet, silence all about - a dying Friday afternoon.

And as I flipped through the pages, the memories of the past months leapt out at me. From the first few 'test' entries, detailing superficial likes and dislikes, to the middle months, when I discovered she and I had a meeting of minds of sorts, to the last few days, when it seemed I was rushing, every day, to write before it was too late.

I never wrote so much before, revealed so much before. A soul laid bare, ensconced within that notebook of mine.

It was the same routine always. A thought would flit across my consciousness, and I would snare it and pin it in my notebook, like a collector does butterflies. I would pass it to her, and amazingly, she would somehow see the same butterfly as I, complete in its image, and she would reply.

Reply in that beautiful script of hers, her own little thoughts and feelings, her own reflections and dreams. Electric words that would make me ponder, or laugh, or wonder.

A few times each week I would come here alone, and place my notebook in her pigeonhole. It would disappear, then reappear, sometimes a few days later, sometimes the day itself. Everytime it came back to me, I would sense for a moment that it was somehow alive, with our thoughts, our writings.

That day was my last trip. She would be leaving the next week, moving on to greener pastures. I reached the last page, a blank page, and there I wrote:

"I know we both thought your previous reply would be the last in this journal. But I thought about it, and I would like you to have this book. It probably wouldn't mean much to you, this collection of ramblings between us, but all the same I would like you to have it. "

"All the best, till we meet again."


And as bravely as I could, I placed it in her pigeonhole, and left.

I never saw her again.

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Cow From Hell

A quick post, to expunge this potent sickness that poisons me from within.

My household ran out of Milo this morning. No more tins of the brown gold, no more emergency quick-mix packets, no more ready-prepared packet drinks.

I am a creature of habit, and Milo is my morning sugar-rush that helps me avoid a nasty, messy death on the highway to school. When I learnt that there was no more Milo, I immediately soured, became grouchy, and lost my composure.

In my distressed state, I hastily agreed to the ‘next best thing’, X-Brand powdered milk. In retrospect, I would rather have slurped down raw eggs with roach eggs. That powdered milk… was… simply amazing.

In a very, very bad sense.

The following poem is meant to reflect the first 20 seconds of excruciating pain I experienced after taking a sip of the powdered milk.

Oh Lord in Heaven, thou hast forsaken me
With this powdered, disguised monstrosity
It lulls your senses and tricks your nose
It knocks your judgment out comatose
You believe it to smell faintly sweet and inviting
When in truth all that it’s concealing
Is an inexcusable ratty stew of milk
No more potent a poison you’ll find of this ilk

It stings! It scalds! It even bites!
As it flows down, my gag reflex I immediately fight
It burns! It throttles! It’s like spoilt sauce!
My eyes by now must have certainly crossed
I think of the animal from whence this came
Surely that’s where I’ll place most of the blame
For surely no hand of man can distill
A morning drink as this without the intention to kill

Yes, yes, that’s it, that’s the answer -
A diseased cow racked with cancer
Skin all peeling with multiple sores
Run over by a tractor the night before
Udders turning a light shade of green
That any reasonable man could have seen
Yet refusing to give up this tenacious grip on life
Before yielding one more bucket of milk to the farmer’s wife

What plagues me is what I must do now
Now that it’s in me, this discharge from a dying cow
To break down and hug my parents a final time?
To bear it stoically and overlook this gastronomic crime?
If I had an option to bury the milk I really would
But my parents have brought me up to never waste food
Therefore the thing that’s crushed my spirit and left me bereft
Is that there’s three quarters of the bloody cup left

I finished it all, like a man. Who would die. Within the next few hours. Whilst screaming for mercy.

On the way back from school that day, I stopped by the local grocery store and bought two big tins of Milo, as well as 60 packets of instant-mix. The lady cashier noted that no one had bought so much Milo at one shot before.

Lady. They ain’t tried X-Brand milk before.

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Criterion

My friend in primary school once rattled off a list of criteria a guy had to fulfill before he could be her boyfriend.

Though I thought, even back then, that judging eligibility by the fulfillment of a list of attributes was a silly and fundamentally wrong approach to finding love, I still made a note of her criteria in my diary that night.

Just to have an idea of what girls wanted, you know, since almost all the girls then made lists.

And the list was composed of:

1. He must love me
2. He must treat me nicely
3. He must treat my parents and Shandy (a vicious demon in the guise of a dog) nicely
4. He must love swimming (she was so fanatical about swimming, I swear sometimes she would unconsciously tilt her head to the sides to breathe)
5. He need not be the most handsome, but he must be good-looking

And strangely enough, I added a little footnote later on that diary page that went something like "Die. I can't swim well." It wasn't even as if I liked her, and I interpret this afterthought as indicative of my relative insecurity then. (Though I notice I never worried about requirement 5)

In any case, it wasn't long before the backlash against having a list of criteria for potential boyfriends occurred. Suddenly, upon surviving to Primary Six, the whole lot of us was miraculously bestowed with maturity and wisdom beyond our years.

The girls issued a press statement asserting that finding love based solely on a list of criteria was too myopic an approach and more importantly, passé. The guys proclaimed that not only were we never affected by such hogwash, but also that we never made lists of our own.

A lot of paper was hidden or thrown away that day.

The most common sermon delivered was that you couldn’t be so calculative with love, given that love was something more than just a certain combination of attributes in a person. Furthermore, rejecting someone just because he/she didn’t match up perfectly, reeked of chauvinism.

To hear a statement like that in Singapore, a country where the lines ‘We are very, very practical’ and ‘No time for Love, Singapura’ fit right into the National Anthem (and they do, try it), is very jarring indeed. It’s almost like this undiscovered tension in our society, between the practical mentalities so prevalent and the undercurrent of instinctive notions of what love ought to be.

Test it for yourself today. Meet a friend for lunch, and then suddenly announce a list of criteria you have for your potential life mate, and assert forcefully that unless a core number of criteria are fulfilled, interested parties need not apply. Instinctively, your friend is most likely to disagree with your ‘heartless’ and ‘passionless’ approach.

Against the oppressive public opinion that listing criteria was bad, people still made lists in secret. Over the years, however, I noticed that the lists generally slowly changed in character, becoming more precise, more demanding. Naturally, this is reflective of the amount of introspection people have paid to the concept of relationships.

As you probably would have realized, lists are also influenced by the personal experiences of the person. Take, for example, this list I got from a JC friend, which, should I say, was influenced somewhat by her relative desirability.

1. He must love me whole-heartedly, and in his heart there can only be me
2. He must treat me nicely, shower unexpected gifts upon me, cheer me up whenever I am grouchy, be there for me whenever I need him, and be fully telepathic so that he can read my mind without me telling him
3. He must treat my pets nicely, and also treat my friends, my relatives, my colleagues, my bosses, my business associates all with kindness, respect and fawning affection
4. He must love everything that I do. Period
5. He must be cute, and have a cute butt and sturdy legs and broad shoulders and six-packs

Yes, it had occurred to me that humanity would probably evolve an extra arm or leg before we found a male that fit her requirements.

Compare with the following list from another friend, whom I suspect has not been treated too kindly by her ex-boyfriends.

1. He must love me on his sober days
2. His looks don’t matter
3. He must treat my parents, at the very least, as functional human beings
4. He must not take out more than two insurance policies on me with evil intentions
5. He must not beat me until I lose consciousness

Don’t even get me started on the wholly materialistic lists. They irk me to no end.

My belief is that as people grow up and are increasingly empowered, so will their lists get more stringent. Yet, most ironically, get too powerful or independent, and you will find no one capable of matching up. Potentially, this is how an over-achieving, rich and beautiful single girl in her late 40s would construct a list:

1. Anything that is warm, male and moving.

Astute readers would have noticed by now that I have yet to product a single guy’s list of criterion. Contrary to public opinion, it’s not:

1. She must have nice legs
2. She must have nice (random body part)
3. She must have nice (random body part)
4. She must have nice (random body part)
5. She must love me

Guys, in case you haven’t realized, are more than just the hulking masses of muscle that lumber around. They are emotional creatures as well, and some have lists that would really surprise you with their emotional complexity, despite their rock-solid alpha male appearance (hint hint)

There might well be public disgust associated with the concept of criterion-making, but I think it best to actually do so, and to abide by your list faithfully. Through the relationships we have we slowly discover what it is that we want, that we need, what can sustain a relationship and what cannot.

You know as well as I do that when emotions come into play, logic goes out the window. I’ve seen friends, normally completely logical and rational, finding themselves attracted to people who really should be prevented from contributing to the human gene pool.

Because, really, that’s what love does. It’s a lubricant of sorts, that eases the process of people coming and staying together. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a romantic at heart, but I recognize that’s the power of love. Once it kicks in your list of criterion gets a huge discount, and you’re often willing to overlook many shortcomings for the perceived overall good. Though this is good sometimes, it might not always be the case.

When love wanes or wavers, what are we left with?

Sunday, March 12, 2006

Samantha

Do you remember, back then
How you so gently took me in hand?
When those who could understand were so few
When loneliness was the only friend I knew
My guilt and pain you washed away
You remoulded my spirit like a potter does clay
... you breathed meaning into my life.

I am thankful for those precious moments
So much more than my sins did warrant
You gave a caged sparrow a chance at flight
But though free by day, I was trapped by night
This cancer in me you could alleviate but never resolve
For eventually giving up, all blame is absolved
... you were right to leave to love more truly.

So here I am at this junction once again
Mercy to winds of change and limitless pain
I only pray that this little life in me will forgive
A weary girl with an evaporating will to live
You will understand I have no choice won't you?
My one chance to reset a life gone askew
... you...

... you were a brief dream in this violent nightmare of a life.


Samantha Seow, a fictional girl of 21 in a class assignment handed out almost six months ago, has woven her way into the deepest corners of our lives. If she had more time than she did, I would have liked to think that this is the farewell note she would have written.

Although we've never seen a picture of her, in my mind she's forever tanned with long dark hair, emaciated, dishevelled, skittish and with two-inch red perforated cuts on her wrists.

I do not deny that Life often throws up seemingly insurmountable challenges. But you know as well as I do, that all you need to do is reach out, and you will find someone leading the way.

There's a solution to every problem.