With these lines I tether myself to the fact of my existence.
J – chugs a whole bottle of stout right before bed, spends the next morning releasing a cacophony of thunderous farts, then wonders aloud in the shower why such flatulence plagues him so.
Managed to haul ourselves up for a short morning run (J tooting like a trumpet all the way). In spite of last night’s rain it was still an annoyingly hazy morning, and we ran slower than usual to avoid getting too much smoke in our lungs. The leisurely pace gave me lots of bandwidth to let my mind wander, and for no discernible reason I thought about a preacher in the church I’d attended as a teenager who had cited Gossip Girl as a bastion of immorality, a beacon of bad influence amongst youth. Fair enough, I suppose – a good amount of soft-core debauchery does go down, though its intensity is significantly negated by some truly horrible acting (Nate, looking at you). This preacher can surely be scarcely impressed with the kind of shows made for young people today, and they have probably driven him to a lifetime of prayer and intercession.
Decided to cancel my pre-booked yoga class so our little family can go out and do something nice; it’s rare to have J home on weekdays, and perhaps we can explore the world in a slightly less manic state than it’s in on weekends. We’ve decided on the museum.
My baby, sweet cherub that she is, tends to begin each day in high spirits, with lots of laughter and smiles. This store of good cheer and amicability depletes rapidly after her second nap, subjecting us to 4 hours of an increasingly grumpy baby with strong lungs and a penchant for dramatically expressing her angst, existential or otherwise. She also has uncannily strong limbs and it’s no fun trying to reign her in while she’s trashing wildly and howling like a banshee. Sweet cherub.
J’s dad, my father-in-law has the interesting habit of carrying out 50% of a conversation in his head, and only verbalising the latter half of it. For example, the other day over dinner he suddenly declared, ‘After 10 days of it my borderline has dropped from 4.5 to 4.3.’ J and I sat in stupefied silence. 10 days of … what? Borderline … what? After some probing it emerged that 10 days of subscription to a plant-based meal plan had led to a drop in his blood glucose levels. How he imagined we would flesh out his original statement with this essential information, I will never know. This tendency to obfuscate key elements of a conversation could, perhaps, be attributed to his more advanced age, but I think it’s likely just a hilarious personality quirk. Further along the meal he launched into a gripping description of someone who had committed criminal fraud. I looked up from my chicken to ask ‘who is this man?’, to which the reply, with no further explanation or exposition, was ‘Peter Gui.’ I emitted a blank stare and a feeble ‘… who?’ but it was too late. The dear man had continued thundering along the tracks of his broken narrative, leaving much bewilderment in his wake.
Spent most of our free time at home today assembling a veritable army of pot-sticker dumplings from scratch. When we eventually cooked them up for dinner, they decided to live up to their name with such great fidelity and ferociousness that in trying to pry them off the steamer basket and each other, we essentially undid most of the wrapping work we’d done in the afternoon.
It be that way sometimes. Back to watching a film with J now – A24’s Eternity, which is going very well and has been full of laughs and sweet moments so far.
Having taken a year off, I frequently get asked what I intend to get up to with all this time on my hands. The question frustrates me a little because while I’m off work, my days aren’t exactly devoted to leisure. There actually isn’t a great deal one can get up to while concurrently functioning as a 24/7 security camera and safety net for a small, fragile creature who spends most of her waking hours trying to wobble into a sitting or standing position, and who finds irresistible any piece of furniture with a surface her hands can reach – which of course perfectly overlaps with the sort of furniture that she can fall and bump some part of her head on. Case in point: I found her the cutest low table and chair. J assembled it this afternoon and placed it in the middle of her play mat. She crawled over at top speed to investigate, was delighted, and promptly slipped from the chair and hit her mouth on the edge of the table, sustaining a small cut.
So all this is to say that, basically, I’m kind of at work, just that my boss is small, pre-verbal, and shits herself. I enjoy it – there is nothing quite as gratifying as lying in the middle of the play mat while she uses me as a soft play area, her personal Everest – but I do sometimes lie in bed at the end of the day lamenting the absence of anything particularly accomplished. I’m freed from enacting constant surveillance in the 2.5h or so in the day when she naps, but in these periods I am so weakly compelled to do anything besides watching ASMR vlogs on TV.
Things I should probably get up to:
Get my driving license. It’s been on my agenda since I turned 18, and back then Gangnam Style was still at the height of its popularity.
Make more art. I’ve seriously considered reopening my small commission-based art gig, where I do drawings of people’s pets. I ran it for about a year sometime back and the income, while insignificant, was enough to cover some cab rides and overpriced coffees.
Write!! I should really submit something, anything, to someone, anyone, this year. Short story ideas toss around in my head pretty much all the time, and if I commit to sitting down and finally typing them out I’m sure I’ll have something. Not a winner, perhaps, but at least a worthy competitor. I should also write more right here to keep the practice alive. I’ve discovered that the most effective way to maintain a blogging habit is to write whatever comes to mind when I open my laptop, rather than ‘saving up’ topics of interest that are too tedious to recall in the pockets of time I do devote to writing here.
Things I have in fact been getting up to:
Going to the market every morning, which has long been a dream of mind. I’m a big fan of buying groceries to cook daily (rather than storing up from a one-time-good-one shop run) and very much enjoy the more human touch you get at the wet market as compared with the cold, big-corp feel of a supermarket. I bring the baby along, which is nice as a morning activity but in her case I do actively try and avoid the human touch, which is difficult as the shoppers are mostly elderly folk who are attracted to babies like moths to a flame.
Making pressure cooker Big Soups with whatever spoils we harvest from the market. Delicious. Healthy. Much joy.
Observing my baby top to toe, minute to hour to day to week to month. She’s so fun to watch, it’s like being completely mesmerised by a firefly bopping around in a jar (a metaphor I hope is used only by the observer and not the subject …). She has been doing the funniest little bit where she pulls to sit, then immediately claps for herself. Yes little honey be proud!! So are we!!! Clap clap clap clap clap for you.
At barre today I ran into an acquaintance who’d recently suffered a late-term miscarriage. Equal parts sad and awkward, which culminated in me saying ‘sorry for your loss’ while bowing. Mortifying behaviour, and even more cringey to recall. I think it’s an unfortunate leftover habit from the many years I spent in a Chinese school, where 90 degree bows to teachers were the norm. Nowadays I can barely wrangle eye contact from students who breeze past me in the corridors and stairways of school. Not sure if I should get with the times or wallow in despair for the next generation.
Oh, another thing I’ve started with this ‘free year’ and am already struggling to maintain: 6am runs with J. We kept it up for 6 days straight, then had to enforce a hiatus because I went for my first pilates class in years and my body promptly said ‘nope’ and went into hysterics for two days. We’ve been spottily trying to get back on it, with some success, but we really should keep going. At 6, both our alarms start to chime and tingle. I hear mine and turn it off, but also shut my eyes immediately and continue fusing with my pillow. Can I return to sleep? No. J doesn’t hear his own alarm, which seems to be at either a decibel or tone that completely escapes his ear drums. It rings. For an age. My eyes flicker open with difficulty. I flail an arm at whatever exposed skin of his I can see in the darkness. He spasms. He rolls over. He turns his alarm off. We are now both semi-awake but continue lying silently beside each other.
Then it’s 730am and I say ‘I went back to sleep because you went back to sleep’ and he says ‘no I went back to sleep because you didn’t wake up’ and we plod along through the day and the cycle repeats itself in 24 hours.
Well, must remain optimistic, though the trickle of hope I sip from is fast drying up as this late hour marches past 11pm and slides toward midnight. Goodnight world!
The train at lunchtime was surprisingly quiet, until at Downtown station the doors slipped open and in gushed a flood of office folk, homogenous in their collared shirts and polyester dresses and little pouches filled with, probably, phones and credit cards and cigarettes and maybe a mint or two. In a few seconds, the hiss and drone of the static carriage was completely drowned out by a chorus of chatter and shuffling feet. It was so sudden and jarring that I put my book down for a minute just to take it all in. It reminded me of something, but I struggled to think what. That’s it – this scene brought to mind another: one of a flock of birds descending noisily upon a large tree, returning home for the day from the roofs and pavements of the scorched city, drowning out the rustling of leaves with a cacophony of shrill cries. I noticed the middle aged office lady in front of me was wearing a rather unusual bangle, comprising largish, watery spheres of emerald, onyx, red ochre and the sandy yellow of a peanut shell. The crowd stood in small groups of twos or threes with arms folded and immersed in conversation for just two stops, then, as if led away by the pied piper, they all amalgamated into a single creature once more and flowed back out the doors, doubtless returning to near-identical office setups.
As for me, I opened my book where I’d stuck a finger in as a bookmark and sank back into my own little world, happy to be back in my own peaceful bubble.
Through the veins of every tree rush sunlight, water, and a little magic. These meld and mix till they mould tiny shoots, peeking their little green heads out the sides of ancient branches to bask in the same sunlight that led to their creation. From the moment they enter this world, however dull be their welcome, these leaves enact the dance of nature, a series of perfectly organic movements that are both mystery and marvel, but often slip in our minds toward the mundane.
They grow – unfurling, darkening, reaching upwards and outwards to the sun. In the caresses of the wind they flit or flurry, depending on the season. They grow dutifully, obediently, under the weight of tropical raindrops that thunder down, colliding with the leaves and exchanging messages from the heavens. They move with life and beauty, every seemingly random gesture fluid and enrapturing in the fullness of itself.
As the shadow of death approaches, these leaves no longer crave light, for while it nourishes, it also burns. Soon their lush green will tint brown, the brown creeping across the papery surface, and their healthy smoothness will wither to a brittle crinkle. Their grip on the branch will weaken till at last they take flight, dying but free. Everything has its time.
I’m sitting at the dining table waiting for my baby to finish crying and drift off to sleep for her nap. I’ve got a half-eaten plate of fruits and Bon Iver playing in the background and as I scroll listlessly through Instagram I happen upon a comic about being in the car with a parent through the years, a short but wrenching comic about love and loss and dreams and sacrifice and the stupid things we do when we don’t know what to do with the unnameable feelings that knock around inside us like mints in a box. And the next thing I know I’m sobbing and my face is drenched with tears and oh? The baby’s stopp ed crying.
The sadness got me thinking again about an idea and image that’s been brewing inside of me – that love is a fearful little thing. I think we tend to think about love as a gushing river, wide and full and honest and true, but increasingly I feel like love is less like the waters and more like the little fish that gather in the still, silty little pools by the shore, frightened and flighty and powerless against the torrents beyond. It’s fear of losing them that makes me lash out at my parents when they make questionable life choices or don’t take enough care of themselves. It’s the terror when I zoom in on the baby monitor and think I don’t see her breathing. The fist tightening around my heart when I see my husband shut off because I’m being careless with the mints in my box, laying brick after invisible brick till his fortress is impregnable.
The little fish, I keep seeing them in my mind. They are a boring brown and have anxious, doleful eyes and little fins that flap relentlessly to stay in the same spot. When did love and fear become two sides of the same coin? Perhaps it has always been the case and I just never looked carefully enough at the coins when it was time to pay up.
I don’t think it’s an over-exaggeration to say that Haruki Murakami’s writing was the fulcrum of my twenties. I started when I was at university in London, after I picked up ‘A Wild Sheep Chase’ from a box of books in Portobello Market. It was a beguiling mix of mystery, magic and romance, with elements of both historical drama and the occult (Years later, I would discover that this was the first full novel Murakami had written, and was therefore a serendipitously fitting place to start.) I was hooked. Over the next few years I hunted down everything he had written (and was writing – he is after all, still very much alive). The pile of Murakamis on my windowsill followed me back to Singapore and continued to grow. Fiction and non-fiction, I read them all. I wore my favourites thin, weathered from countless dog ears and being lugged around as reading material for my daily commutes. When I couldn’t sleep, I would crack open a book of short stories under the tungsten glow of a nightlight.
University was an extraordinarily transformative time for me. Most things I knew or assumed about life and the world were being systematically deconstructed, in the rubble of which I had the opportunity and freedom to put together experimental new versions of me. I slid headlong into the identities laid out like clothes on a rack, discovering the spaces available for me to inhabit in the different worlds I revolved through. Art school was the ultimate playground for identity – anyone could be anybody and anything, as long as it wasn’t boring. This kaleidoscopic state of flux was perfectly complemented by Murakami’s intrepid exploration of the self, full of suggestive but vague symbols for the complexity of an inner world. Through the lens of his (often nameless) narrators, I felt like someone was sticking a gloved hand deep into the messy whirlpool of my consciousness, extracting shreds of debris into the light and examining them for meaning.
I can’t pinpoint the exact moment when the charm of it all began to fade. From the vantage point of my late twenties, the vagueness of the plots that I’d found so enthralling and mysterious became convenient ways to avoid the need for more consummate resolution. The recurring tropes got old. It became clear that most of the female protagonists had serious mental health issues. I wondered if my disenchantment was a function of blossoming clarity, or the death of something from my youth. Or both. And I’m not sure if I liked this new me or not.
Despite all that, I was already stuck in pretty deep, so in the name of being comprehensive I kept up with my record of reading everything Murakami wrote. There were gems, mostly non-fiction. A beautiful and poignant piece in Granta about taking a long walk through his hometown in Kobe. The fiction in recent years, however, has all been quite disappointing. The quietness and isolation so integral to Murakami’s worlds suffer in the light of the constant and unbridled connectivity of contemporary existence. Even the short story ‘Drive my Car’, which became enough of a hit to be turned into an extremely long film, was bland for my taste.
Ever the optimist, I started ‘The City and its Uncertain Walls’ – Murakami’s latest – with some eagerness. J is my great ally in Project Murakami – he found me the edition of Granta with the walking piece, and he bought me this book too. I’m not done, but so far it just reads like a poor amalgamation of stories he’s written before. Most obviously, the ominous and near-desolate town of ‘Hard Boiled Wonderland’, with its shape-shifting wall, library of dreams, and herds of unicorns (or ‘beasts with one horn’). The troubled young female protagonist of ‘Norwegian Wood’. The disappearing act of ‘South of the Border’, ‘Sputnik Sweetheart’ and bits in other stories. The dry well and walking-through-walls of ‘Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’. It feels lazy. I’m more than halfway through and I’m still waiting for something new to happen, much less to be gripped by the story like I used to be.
Perhaps this is a premature and unfair assessment, and the second half of the story is wildly exciting and unexpected. The odds are low, but it’s hard to let go of something you loved for a whole decade, so I’ll fly the flag of blind hope and carry along down this increasingly overgrown path. And for all my complaints, if I woke up tomorrow as my 20-year-old self, I wouldn’t hesitate to do it all again, and surely that’s worth something. Onward!
When did dust become the devil? This is a question for me more than anyone else because I am quite the germ freak and a stickler for cleanliness. The baby’s sensitive skin has sent my already frenzied nerves into overdrive, generating a latent anxiety which manifests as a constant need to keep things as clean and dust-free as possible. Perhaps that is all well and good and necessary. Today though, while I was making my rounds across the house dusting all horizontal surfaces, I happened to recall reading Mary Douglas’ ‘Purity and Danger’ at uni, in which she famously posits that ‘dirt is matter out of place’. It’s one of those concepts that are so simple, yet powerful. Soil in a garden is a-ok. Soil that clings to your shoes as you leave the garden and subsequently dislodges itself onto the kitchen floor is not-ok. It is dirt. It must be removed so that a state of cleanliness can be restored. You didn’t mind it in the garden. You didn’t mind it on your shoe. But you very much mind it on the kitchen floor. I remember finding the idea very profound, and still did today as it floated back up from the depths of my memory, but it didn’t change the fact that I continued to fervently hunt down every last speck of dust in my house anyway.
Why does acquisition feel so good? Pondered in context of eyeing a pretty little Sezane handbag but wrestling as usual with the thought of parting with a slightly painful amount of cash. Just the thought of owning something new and coveted is enough to stimulate feelings of joy – why so? Not just with things, either. Acquiring time. Clout. Relationships (people). Experiences. We are all so greedy for more of everything, but in a way that feels perfectly human. Is this because capitalistic tendencies flow through our veins? Or is the drive to acquire stuff simply primordial instinct? It’s worth noting here that midway through the pedicure I went on Shopee and bought 3 pairs of lace socks that I absolutely do not need.
Been spending a few afternoons in the CBD area going to and from barre classes. I usually have just enough time to grab a quick lunch and a coffee before or after class, which coincides with the whole world’s lunch hour. The CBD is such a strange place. It’s crowded, and what a homogenous crowd it is. As I sweep my gaze around Amoy Food Centre, every young office chap in a collared shirt and black pants with spectacles and a lanyard draped around his neck blends into the next. The women are mostly well-dressed, but all in the same way, in polyester Love Bonito dresses and with long brown hair flowing down their backs. Every other person’s face illuminated by the mobile screen they’re staring into. The crowd moving in pulses to navigate a traffic junction, each person’s speed mitigated by the person ahead of them, shuffling along in a manner that suggests that nothing about this is new or novel, that they’ve been heading to lunch in this way everyday since time immemorial.
As a teacher, I used to envy friends who worked in the CBD – envied them their air-conditioned offices (which meant you could actually dress nice and put make up on without either being ruined by a deluge of sweat) and fancy lunch meetings and plethora of food options. Unless you step out or order something in, lunch options on a school day can be dismal, to say the least. However, after a few days of eating extremely mediocre (and expensive) hawker food at Amoy, I think I can confidently say that I would much rather eat the yong tau foo from the school canteen everyday than this.
The coffee options are far better in the CBD, of course. And I’ve discovered – much to the detriment of my barre efforts – that Fat Kid bakery and their delicious donuts are just round the corner. What is work without sweet reward? I hide in shame from my weighing scale. Goodnight!
Not hard to imagine the brainstorming session that went into the naming of this clinic.
The baby has started solids, which was exciting for approximately 2 hours until we realised that the shock to her gut meant waking almost every hour through the night from discomfort. The poor thing – seems a little early to learn that sometimes what you love can do you dirty.
Anyway, there’s only so much banana and avocado that a very small person can manage, which means I found myself with about 3/4 of an avocado and some bananas on the speed train to rot-terdam. Yesterday I decided to dust off my baking tools and spin the leftovers into avocado banana muffins – a great idea, in theory. As I tossed the ingredients together I felt very healthy and winsome and motherly and resourceful, even (perhaps especially so) while spooning vomit-coloured batter into a muffin tin. Only a sprinkle of sugar, no butter, all the good stuff – yes yes, in this household we shall eat clean, and antioxidants shall course through our bodies while we are busy living to a hundred, and our gut health shall be the envy of many. Health, wealth, hwealth – all ours to enjoy.
Perhaps the beginning of the fall was that 6:30am, pre-caffeinated me had spooned not baking powder, but baking soda into the mix. I realised this about 5 minutes after chucking them in the oven. Somehow or rather, they still managed to rise beautifully. Encouraged by their formal perfection I eagerly tucked into one while it was still warm. It tasted green. Not inedible, but definitely questionable enough to get a good grimace out of me. If I were to tackle these again, I would add 5x the amount of sugar, sub the avocado with butter, and basically make a whole different recipe.
Well, at least they looked good on Instagram. Not all that glitters is gold, friends. ✨
When the moon hangs like it does tonight – a shimmering sliver of copper floating on an indigo sea, the ends of the sickle sharp and fine enough to draw blood – what comes to mind is always a piece of jewellery adorning the night sky, adorning the whole world really, something precious and fine that the heavens gave us to share.
Medium Delirium 