her wedding

***

weddings now invariably remind me of funerals, the order, the structure, how some things necessarily have to be done in a certain manner, at a certain time. the void that fills the room once the girl is married off, furniture stripped of character, of a room no longer imbumed with the scent of someone living in it. dust that fills the room a month after it has been void.

***



***

in other news, i have been having torrid dreams. a dog and a chequered human keep haunting my dreams. it was in a dark bar, not unlike the one in the city of blinding lights and i was seated opposite the pair of them, next to a female who was part of them, trying to attribute what was said to a particular motive, and they were all against my perception. what does that tell you?

***

i dreamt of someone else today. drinks at a hawker centre, choosing to go to a second stall further away instead for some palatable reason i've forgotten. the person i was having drinks with was as usual thinking that i was having some impediment of some kind, for choosing to go to a stall further away instead. making sounds with her lips to bring attention to my apparent impediment as i walk towards the second stall, as if saying, you no longer matter to me. your opinions no longer count, i am my own person.

***

i also dreamt of lieutenant mamiya's story, ala in a singaporean context? or rather, my dream context, but the eyes frozen in shock were still the same, the body white of flesh, as every piece of skin is tenderly peeled off, strange though that no red flesh could be seen. burnt till white, perhaps? i'm not sure. the car crashed through glass windows, and burned.

***

and i woke up thinking of the girl who burned to death in her car, screaming while people looked on helplessly.

***

oh. i suddenly know why i dreamt that dream.
because i was watching police story, and some guy burned in the car, while anthony something wailed around the car, fire extinguisher in hand.

an anti-climax.

but the sky will always darken

and people will leave one by one. let me walk with you once more.

how ironic that on the last day of school - today to be exact, this song is being played at 9:30am in the morning. i don't find this song to be particularly beautiful, just that the lyrics seem particularly pertinent and poignant for the moments that i always find myself in whenever i listen to it.

i'm contemplating whether to buy macdonalds for my entire class as a mini celebration and as a reward for them being such darlings - most of the time, anyway. this class will really be special to me, because unlike the amount of time that most teachers spent with the class, i spent more time with them, and i daresay that i know them all fairly well. two months with them from feb-april, and a long break in between when i left, mid april- end may when i returned. things that i did during the hiatus included going to bangkok (which i'll be going to again in early december) and the induction programme that saw us going back to boon lay for talks that for the life of me i can't remember, simply because whatever time we had, we spent on stoning, planning where to go and sms-ing. ah, and who could forget that lovely week (in June though) when i went to Genting, Colmar, KL and came back to singapore and promptly flew to taipei impromptu? but the lovely june holiday slid quietly away after that and i was soon buried knee high in work. by september you could say that i was dying to keep my nostrils above sea level. but anyway. it's all going to be over today. glorious.

i really will miss this class, for the times that they have seen me through. happy times in march and april, marking their tables and graphs worksheets on the MRT while half drunk and trying to keep my mind straight and sane, quiet days when i simply worked, taught, marked and went home. the dreaded thursday when i slept at 2am, woke at 8 for an art workshop (the other half of which i will attend this coming wednesday)and had the math HOD walk into my class halfway. i smiled ironically at the whiteboard while giving mental sums and everything went ok. they were so quiet and responsive at the right times that i loved them so much then. muahahaha.

so today's the last day of school for my darling p4s, and the prize presentations for the 1st, 2nd, 3rd in class, pupils with best conduct and best progress. my class has the most number of prize winners since 3 pupils tied at 3rd position, also 11 parents are coming, so maybe i have to mingle. or maybe not.
today will pass quickly, but hopefully not too fast. prize presentation starts at 4 plus and looks set to stretch towards the end of school.
tomorrow will be the prize presenations for p5s and p6s and the outstanding pupil award for the p6 pupils, one male, the other female.

friday is a short day and will end by 11. my plans for the day include going for a hair cut and shopping for that white dress that i need for the cousin's wedding. yes, the same cousin that i spoke about. and i feel like curling my hair, but i don't think so. maybe just thin it out so that it looks wavy.
maybe.

next week is filled up with work again, but it looks set to be easy going ahead. meetings on monday and tuesday, monday for the heavy academic stuff and tuesday for the non-exam stuff. wednesday- communications and craft workshop, and thursday is my volleyball training for 8 hours. will stay and tidy up my cubicle. ironically also the release of the psle results so i'll stay and do some k-po-ing, asking my 6a girls how they did.
and after that, goodbye school for a month. i swear i'm not going back unless i'm coerced to.

26th is the wedding, after which i am free to go to KL. and early december sees me in Bangkok, as said previously and after that, who knows? maybe phuket?

we'll see as we explore the vibrant possibilites of life. :)
today, life is good.

any given saturday

me and the wild sheep chase - we are finally going somwhere. i finally got to the part when they actually meet the Sheep Professor, someone who lives at the top of a building all alone and has meals placed outside his door daily, meals that he finishes in half an hour and then he leaves the soiled cutlery outside.
i realise how rare it is that i begin hammering on the keyboard from 8 to 9 but today is special, most probably because i had a smashing headache in the morning that reduced me to sleeping again, an hour before i woke for the day. i lay down and switched on the air conditioning once again and under the splitteringly hot sun, it began to pour and that's perhaps why my headache began. i watch the raindrops fall from the open sky and think to myself that when it rains while the sun is out, the raindrops seem to move more slowly through the air as if in slow motion. or perhaps it is simply because the morning light makes us all see things more clearly and with more perspective and then we are able to better actually see the raindrops fall. as usual, we always see but never really see. really how sad.
anyway i reached school late today and horror of horrors, a stack of result slips awaited me. i had to spend the next few hours signing on them and then slotting them in, one by one, along with their PFT results and their CIP records. and there's more to do, but as usual, i've not brought work home to do.
i'm glad that the last day of school is thursday and that it's prize giving day. the rest i don't really care. next week's monday and tuesday will be for overall reviews, wednesday is for workshops and then i'm free.
i swear to go to KL and then in early december, there's the trip to Bangkok. soon. soon.
and soon christmas will be upon us again.
i just saw the new beer ad on tv, the one with a santa falling down the chimmney and then snitching a glass of beer from this surprised guy. and i was thinking, what would i do if it were not christmas? yes, christmas, come quickly, but not too quick or that would herald the end of december. i think a slow pace from now on would be just right.
so we went to orchard the other day and was at borders at 10pm and it was as if it was the sky was still light, given the number of people milling around. then again, it was a saturday night.

the sparkles of lights all around failed to make my eyes hurt as my eyes drank in the festivity.

must get out

must get out, had to get out, and get out i did. must get out soon again, for a meeting has been called at 11am and i need to get there early. to complete forms, to complete the process of selling myself (so to speak).

i got out. the queue was initially long, so i took a jaunt along the lazy bars and empty alleys, like some damn cat on the prowl. and on the pavement opposite, i noticed that the granite tiles were uneven and really impossible to walk elegantly on.

i walk up the pink stairways again with the thin steel metal bars- not conducive for drunkards to hold on to, possibly, i wonder about how many have fallen down these stairs and i am reminded of a woman whom i saw earlier on in the day who chooses to palm the wall to steady herself, rather than to hold on to staircase railings. which brings me to conclude that most of us never use the railings, we skip down the stairs as kids, walk properly down when we reach adulthood and only realise the presence of those dusty bars when we are close to incontinence.

but away with those thoughts, for we are young, "what do we here, in this land of unbelief and fear? The Land of Dreams is better far, Above the light of the morning star." by W. Blake.

i dreamt of an essay yesterday, a literature essay which was graded and i thought about how lost things and lost words can never be recovered.

i went up to cityspace too yesterday. the lift was a shade of (i dont know what-ish) a myraid of silver tones and the lift sped up easily as before.i sat near the bar counter as many times before and recalled that i had not been there for 4 months and counting. the crowd this time a little different, expatriates and a more mature crowd. so i watched the city sleep again, playing the identify the buildings game and looked at patches of black and wondering what they were like in the day.

and in the end, ten minutes after passing me the menu, the waiter remembered me and came to ask what i wanted. a shirley temple, i said, and waited a while for the drink. when it took more than a while to come, i took my bag and slipped off into the night.

amusement and sardonism

i amused myself yesterday by digging up archives of the past and reading about my dreams. they seem so clear, yet in all clarity, they have been forgotten. this seems to echo some parts of my life. we mostly live in the present, think of mashes of the past, of history, of some things that linger more than others in the mind for spots of time and then silently slip away, to be erased, to be forgotten. how sad, and at the end of it all, when life makes monkeys of us all, what have we left in the end but transcient memories, scraps, scratches and snatches of what we used to have and in this thread memory becomes a curse, of a rememberance of things that we once used to have, that we no longer have, mocking at our current state of holding on to nothing, after all, we are born with nothing and leave the world with nothing.

the stupid ASOS dress did not arrive in the mail and so i have to begin scouting around for another dress to wear as an accompaniment to my cousin, the bride, on her big day. i shall be slightly more than a wallflower since there are several other bridesmaids and i shall content to just fade into the background and wane with simple, mundane tasks. "oh you look so pretty!", "congratulations", "you can't get into the house unless you give us a red packet".

i wanted to get out of the house yesterday. how sad that we should already feel blue on monday, the taxing 4 days before the weekend still hang there, like a dreary and gloomy pall that we have to go through before the end of time. i wanted to get out of the house, but there was a cover charge at the bar, how sad. having a quick drink does not equate in monetary terms to paying such a hefty cover charge so i rotted at home. am still brushing off the maggots now, okay, my bad. it was a lame attempt at humour.

in more than a sardonic mood now. i dream of school yesterday and the computer lab. it was funny but in the dream i couldn't recall for the hell of me why the school suddenly morphed into another school altogether. it was only upon waking up that i realised the school i dream of was one that i had not entered since i left in 1998. that's 7 years for you. i feel old already.

so, when will the bell ring and end our misery?