topsy turvy

Yesterday during visitation rounds, I saw the weirdest sight - a fish still breathing, but upside down. My brother thought it was dead at first, but on closer look the fins were still moving, and its eyes were wide open. Apparently it was shocked when a magnified face loomed next to the tank, so it crashed right into the glass and fainted. It did revive for a while, spent it's time floundering around, trying to reach the surface, and then ended up flipping over again, and slotted its body into a corner behind the oxygen pump.

For a moment there I think I actually identified with the fish, as much as I thought it hideous and grotesque and impossible to look at without cringing 2 seconds after. I totally understood the "The-world-leaves-me-disoriented-I-just-want-to-hide-in-a-corner-and-look-at-it-inverted" feeling. Maybe it's just because Chinese New Year always passes in a whirl of activity and faces, and it's a visual and digestive overload. Or maybe it's just one of my many defense mechanisms to help me cope with rapid influx of overwhelming thoughts, not always positive.

It's all the socialising that makes you realise how many opinions you have about other people, but you don't show it, out of propriety, out of the need to be nice and not to hurt people; zipping up at the right time is, I suppose, a prerequisite of being a civil human being. But there really is a fine line between honesty and brutality, between constructive criticism and facing censorship. And as much as you flagellate yourself for having nasty (but hilarious) thoughts pop up at the most inappropriate times, sometimes it does make socialising less tedious, and makes your smile a lot more spontaneously, which some people might perceive as genuinely sincere.

I'm totally evil, but who didn't know that already?

gulf

In the fifth episode of the second season of Lost, one of the characters claims that you find the things you lose only when you're not looking for them. I think for people, the realisation of loss comes not just when you look and don't find them, but when you see them right in front of you but know you've lost them - to circumstances, to other people, to the inevitable dilution of feeling with time - it doesn't really matter to what/whom does it?

evil twin

After months of whining about my malfunctioning Nokia 6610, I finally got a new phone today. It was not a particularly joyous affair. It was raining - the weather reminiscent of the recent drenching spell we had. People were shaking themselves dry in front of the M1 shop.

The old phone was malfunctioning, but I knew which buttons to press harder on to elicit response, and it did work eventually although it caused a lot of frustration. I knew the limits of the old phone, didn't expect anything more; I don't want to expect anything of the new phone because I don't want to give it or myself undue, premature pressure. The old phone slept beside me and often went off at the most inopportune moments, evoking the 'leave me alone' verbal response though its owner made no effort to put it away; the new one lies in a far corner. I distance myself from it not just because I've experienced suffocating closeness, but also because radiation kills and I have no wish to use up my mini-death allowance for the year just yet.

The new phone is black, and it looks like an evil modification of my old one. The new phone has a camera, but the old one forced me to construct and remember my own mental images. The buttons on the new phone are hard, not compliant like the old. The plastic feels too clean, the size alien, yet aesthetically it's acceptable, and there is this slight anticipation of being pleasantly surprised by the things it can do.

This entry is supposed to help me complete the emotional journey of a phone switch, according to a book on therapeutic writing. I think it just brought to the surface other unresolved issues.

a quiet affair

On the 30 minute bus ride home, an Indian woman was puking in a silent but continuous stream, and her husband (I assume) was providing and endless supply of plastic bags. He looked almost like a magician, fishing out plastic bags of different sizes, and colours, from different pockets. I didn't know people keep plastic bags in pockets. What was more amazing was how cleanly he popped plastic bag after plastic bag of emptied stomach contents into an even larger Mustafa plastic bag, and put the seal back on without any fuss or mess.

And no this is not going to lead up to jokes about natural garbage disposers, I just thought his dispassion was awesome. No fussing, just sitting and looking straight ahead as his wife jelly-fished next to him.

zippered

The increasing reluctance to post comes from the feeling that everything I say will eventually come out wrong, or worse, contrived, forced out just for the sole purpose of "meeting quota". Blogs shall not be corrupted by corporate ideology. I've had too many Freudian slips recently, the latest most memorable one being the "Will you be my wife" addressed to the Prince in the latest act3 performance, which was, to put it mildly, shocking. I figure if I go around wearing a shirt that says "Too much talking is hazardous to health", it'll remind me to shut up.

But the fear of more Freudian slips is not what's causing the dearth of entries. It's more the lack of thought processes, the shutting out of feeling from the things I do. If you don't get happy, neither will you get sad. The warped logic of emotional equilibrium I'm trying to achieve isn't turning out very well though.

New year, same people, same problems, same lack of time, same workaholism. People don't change very much, I figured, though that is no excuse not to have new year resolutions. But I don't have any. The New Year sort of flashed by like a near-death experience. I figure I'll make them up along the way, pretend I made the resolutions at the beginning of the year, and in self-delusion get some sorry sense of achievement.

blow wind blow

Attended my first NUS Symphony Orchestra rehearsal of the year today, after having disappeared for one whole semester. It felt strange at first, what with having to talk and smile and do the things that nice social beings like humans do.

(I realised that wearing black does not inspire one to make conversation, and is a good person-repellent too..)

Other than that, there isn't much to say except that Brahms is a bitch to sightread even if you've played it some years back, but it helps having a good stand partner as always. Good stand partners are those who provide entertainment, whom you can carry out a decent conversation with, who manage to find their way even after getting lost, and whom you can hear make sounds. This new one's a German female doing stem cell research, fulfils all the above criteria despite the occassional Lost in Translation moments where frantic hand gesticulations replace the words that she can't find.

foolish

Recently developed a set of photos from the Kodak machine. Random shots of family in their element, random shots of people, all very mundane, non-sensational, normal, i've run out of vocab. My parents see the shots and go "Why you waste your money again! See, half the hair is cut off in this one.."

And I wondered, why the need to take photographs at all? To capture the moment in memory, yes, but sometimes I feel as if each picture is an experiment, to see if you can find anything different about the subject, literally seeing the thing through a different eye. This doesn't really apply to inanimate subjects or posed shots. Maybe posed shots do tell their own story as well, you just have to look harder. But the shots you take when people least expect it, or the shots you take when u press the trigger in reflex action when you see something nice - the shots are cruel in detail, especially when you shoot peoples' eyes (with the flash off of course).

I think i'm just an emotion voyeur, maybe to make up for the lack of it in myself. Even if looking at other people/myself smile in photos doesn't evoke a similar response, it'll still make me think ''hey, they/I managed the fool the camera that time, I can fool the world tomorrow. '.