Scratchpad

Les Vies Amoreuses de la famille Guillotines
(LES GUILLOTINES)

When i was learning how to ride a bike in Japan ...

Did you hear about the Korean businessman with the beautiful wife who had an ugly kid?

Retrospectorant drips – it’s peaches and the pits

I've instituted a practice between my parents for both within our home on Jalan Jerusalem and elsewhere (West Bank analogies do not stop there) of looking into each other's eyes for at least 5 minutes a day. You would think that a pretty facile exercise for people 33 years married, but actually it's quite and quietly radical. We are known in "Asian" culture not to look people in the eyes; thinkers are known to walk with their heads forward and eyes down; my father and my mother after all this time still have difficulties recognizing each other for who they are, and not who they expect each other to be. So sitting as the early-dinner crowd in an otherwise empty Chinese restaurant (post-movie matinee, everyday senior citizen's discount), my mum and dad sneak little raised eyebrow peeks at each other, playfully, guiltily, and never for too long. Calling out to our kitten garden guests later that evening for their nightly meal, I see the same curiosity and eager hesitation in feline faces; this is the first time in my writing life that I have found cause to use the phrase, "furtive glances."

It's baby steps, it's difficult, it's brave and horrifying, it's not glamorous. It's eyes that see too much. It's eyes that see too little, receding back flat into the head and not rolling around in their sockets to get a good 360 degree bearing: ah. here we are. we're at the top. top of what? we're looking outside. we're looking inside. inside of what? what of inside?

As a youth, I used to relish every morsel of the past I could get: stories of when mum got tricked and abandoned at the top of a mango tree (another time when she scaled solo and was stung by bees) and when the same trickster brother poked the eyes out of her only doll; O-ma chasing chickens and children. Stories of when I was born, when I was locked inside the apartment, when Sue was forgotten, and found her own way home; stories of our house at what was then the end of the road and of our excursions into the vast empty field adjacent. This image of a young, simple couple and their sweet, happy children being raised in the "marital home" in a sweet and happy Singapore.

Now to hear these stories peppered between slurps and exclamations ("the cod is so fresh!") makes me realize how much I have been old before my time and simultaneously just how much I relinquish by choosing the Not This. These stories are tired. They are not intrinsically mundane or, on the pancake flip, romantic. They are just what has happened. When all the forces of fortune and convention get plastered onto the headlights of the car that drives backwards, the stories get tired, literally (um, inside of this metaphor), mowed down into the soft mud that is human will in the course of history. You only get to drive the car, maybe, occasionally getting off the beaten path for short secret jaunts to piss epithets in the sand.

The journey stops and you're done driving around the world in 80 megabytes and you end up in the home you are lucky you ended up in and that would be much too inconvenient to abandon or even change. You squirrel away baby books and children's toys neatly in ziplock bags into not-so-secret nooks awaiting unborn grandchildren while the organization of your daily needs and the hoarding of your material treasures from travels to so many countries you can't remember pile and scatter and colonize your peace. Your hope springs eternal and you will wait for happiness as you dreamed it or you will die waiting. But what if you don't get to live out that dream? What if you don't get to lose yourself to and suspend yourself on the web of your family? What if you no longer get to take group photographs with the birthday cake? Whose house will you visit when you are in the neighbourhood?

Who will remind you that you are beautiful? Who will remind you that no one will marry you if you eat the last piece of jambu? Who will keep it for you? Who will keep it for somebody else what you no longer want? Who will take your mail? Who will take your boys? Who will take your shit?

As usual, I end up talking to myself, primarily.

The comfort zone is a den full of food and snakes -- it's peaches and it's the pits. Retrospectorant may keep you smelling peachy, but it doesn't stop odour from oozing out your arm--
Pity the repatriate, who with wits and beseeches, pleases and appeases each,
but all her own.

Scratchpad + reading list

artist:
the business of being yourself as deliberately as possible

“By giving us a framework for marshaling our thoughts, language does a lot for us,” Professor Gentner said. “Because spatial language gives us symbols for spatial patterns, it helps us carve up the world in specific ways.”

Immersing the face in water produces a protective action in humans similar to that in dolphins, seals, otters and whales. Called the mammalian diving reflex, it quickly lowers the heart rate and then constricts blood vessels in the limbs so that blood is reserved for the heart and the brain.

“THE STUFF OF THOUGHT: Language as a Window into Human Nature,” by Steven Pinker, Viking. The author uses language to examine how the mind works, in perception and thought.

“FOUNDATIONS OF LANGUAGE: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution,” by Ray Jackendoff, Oxford University Press. Ideas about how the brain stores and processes language.

“BASIC COLOR TERMS: Their Universality and Evolution,” by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, University of California Press. Originally published in 1969, this was an early investigation of color terms in different languages.

“LANGUAGE, THOUGHT AND REALITY: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf,” by Benjamin Lee Whorf (author), John B. Carroll (editor), M.I.T. Press. This work, first published in a different edition in 1956, reflects Whorf’s view that a language affects how one thinks.

“SPACE IN LANGUAGE AND COGNITION: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity,” by Stephen C. Levinson, Cambridge University Press. How the language and conception of space varies among cultures.

“LANGUAGE IN MIND: Advances in the Study of Language and Thought,” by Dedre Gentner and Susan Goldin-Meadow, The M.I.T. Press. A collection of articles on linguistic research.

(not) a lo-mo, (but) an end to hope and fantasy

i didn't want to be the one who looks back.
i wanted to be the one who turned away and never looked back.

every day that i am here i watch myself disappear to myself.
every day that i am here i watch the self that i like because i earned it evaporate to make space for the self that i was given as a hand-me-down. 
and i kept taking it! 
glutton! cruiser! free-rider! lame duck!

what is our we?
why do we have to keep reasserting our we?
what does it matter if someone has been there every holiday and every major meal event since you were a baby?  does having seen you as a baby make a we?

it gets better and better over here, easier and easier to be a singaporean.  and maybe there was a beautiful cusp where i wanted this and i made myself belong and i believed i belonged and it hurt to extricate me from my we -- she knew this, she must have known this. but she took my we. and now i can repeat the same habit to force myself into situations and to try to enjoy, but i am left with this, like this, incomplete stunted sentences -- no wanting. summer 07 echoes: want want back. is the land of no wanting peace?  or is the land of no wanting death?

who cares right, but i cannot explain otherwise these feelings, the complete ineptitude of being, becoming ridiculous, unbecoming, becoming unbecoming, not having will but having force.  i don't like it.

it's all not so bad but i have to understand why this desperation never gets any better, only the distractions do, to help save my days.

Me being Singaporean is like my parent's marriage. We don't really understand each other. We don't intrinsically like each other. But we belong to each other and have to make the most of what we've got, because at the end of the day it's better to not be alone.