i'm wondering why things have been the way they are lately. i note that i have strong anti-social tendencies, and want nothing more than to be alone, yet contradictorily, I also feel very lonely when I am by myself too long. I haven't started on work even though I've said I would in a long time, and am behind readings for English and Law. This is not completely atypical of me, but I'm afraid because things just feel so unsettling.

I can't rest enough because I don't sleep early enough. Maybe it's true that I do need to be guided or supervised. Oh well. Should I do the 30% optional assignment? I don't know.

The Wednesday of Wednesdays

No, I kid. There is nothing exceptional about this Wednesday for all intents and purposes, apart from the fact that it is the first in a while that I have had to myself. By which I mean, it's the first Wednesday in a really long time I haven't had to work. It's the saddest thing to be sitting in your own room, feeling like so much needs to be accomplished, but not knowing how to go about doing it, or what needs to be done. In more ways than one, this Chinese New Year has been sobering - no longer in that suddenly shocking sort of way - but in a rather inconspicuous way; I feel like I've gotten to know my extended family members so much better, understood the many dimensions to them and their experiences so that no longer are they mere faces I see once a year, but fully living and dynamic entities. I might be putting this a bit too strongly, I realise, but I never knew, for instance, that my cousin had been in gang fights, or that he had done insanely dangerous things. I know my writng is trite, but bear with me. I'll make a point in a while; I just need to be ceremonious and circumvent the trivialities, as has always been the tradition for me.

So, suddenly, I feel like the world has changed - except that it has not. Only my understanding of it has. My cousins remain explicitly and singularly unchanged in any way, except in the way I perceive them. So it's shocking, really, to see them in this new light - even more so to see them as a reflection of myself, and to acknowledge how markedly different we are as people. No, I'm not being pompous or suggesting that I am superior to any of them (indeed, I am not) - but to have lived life with such reckless abandonment, I believe, is a luxury, which I have never afforded myself. I have always found it difficult, while they have always thrived on the living on the edge. True, I am the only law undergraduate from this side of the family - but, perhaps, that exhausts the extent of everything that is unique and different about me. And, that, beyond everything else, is truly sad.

I run from invites to parties because I worry I might say the wrong thing; I get anxious about possibly becoming anxious, or not knowing what to say in return, so I recycle formal niceties and fixate on the evidently mundane so as to seem pertinent and engaged. If I didn't, I wouldn't know if I was following the conversation correctly. It worries me/scares the shit out of me to be amongst people with whom I don't believe I can speak/communicate, and this happens so much I should be used to it. But I'm not - I get more frightened.

I read copiously because it is the most innocuous way to engage with the outside world. A reader is infinitely wound up with the population of readers who have read, or will read, the same book, whose thoughts are led by the flow of this earlier writer. It is a written world in which readers become extensions of the same population, although it is true that we all read differently. Maybe, for me, this difference affirms something of an identity for me - which is why I love doing literature. It helps me believe I am unique.

And so, it is with this heavy-heartedness that I worry that the world has almost passed me by, and that if I let it, I will always be remembered only as the one who did law.

it's strange how little is needed to be consumed by your own desire for desire.

and cha's endless whims and quips, asking if 'i'd let it too early on?' or 'if it was purely physical? and now that it's good and done, there's nothing left' - they resonate with the emotional foreground that keeps confronting me. with what little you know, and like, about a person - am i not just groping in the dark?

what am i doing; what is being done to me?

the morality of romance

of which there is none, but we find ourselves where we started.

thinking about the same things, wondering if the same failures will repeat themselves, and ultimately considering how far we've gone in all this time. abstinence has been an utterly sobering experience for me, knowing that i can be without this reliance on the tangible to reassure myself of my own existence; or has it really been my own existence I've needed to prove?

what is it i reach out for, in the dark?

Saturday, 31/07/2010

I thought i'd start this entry with a picture, although for what purpose i have included one - or, more specifically, why i have chosen this photo - remains a mystery, even to myself. nonetheless, with that out of the way, i suppose i shall begin this entry properly: it seems an unspoken tradition amongst international students (or singaporean students who pursue an expensive overseas education) to talk, in depth, about experiencing singapore, after a prolonged period of time away from it. there is much to appreciate about singapore as a tourst destination, which, i suppose, i could justifiably refer to it as, since i got lost in so many malls, so many times, this visit back. without the element of familiarity, i find the notion of home difficult to reconcile with - or maybe the sense that i belong to this city-state which refuses to let me ground myself in it, or find my bearing, in life, or geographically, more than mildly disturbing. Singapore is epic in so many ways, particularly within the regional context of southeast asia - but these achievements only go so far in making one proud of singapore; the quality of being proud of being singaporean is altogether a different matter.

what does it, then, mean to be proud of being singaporean?