Google says my site “might harm your computer”. And apparently so does Firefox. It says the same about my hostess so I suspect it’s not specifically my subdomain. I’m not sure what to do to fix it if it’s true. I’m sorry if you’re having trouble clicking around here. I obviously did not make this website malicious. There are other, more creative ways to inflict malice.
A conversation I had with a 12 year old.
Me: Look, I have a pimple. I’m not supposed to get them, I’m not young anymore!
Her: But I don’t have any.
Me: You’re too young. Just wait. Maybe this means I’m young at heart.
Her: If you’re too young for pimples, does that mean you should be getting wrinkles?
Me: …
Me: There must be a grace period in between, I think.
read either a. or b. that is, either
a.
I feel like I’ve exported my head. I’ve been staying more at my mother’s house lately. The place I grew up. I haven’t lived at home for a little over four years now, so my room isn’t even my room anymore. My mother mentioned once about wanting to clear it out and make a home entertainment theater for herself. She hasn’t. Now it is a cat den furnished by my childhood. Recent developments have made my apartment feel like a shell. I used to treasure its height and distance from the world and now the elevator ride up feels like maximum security confinement. I know it’s not, but I drive a little more than I should. To the house with the cats, and my family, and where there’s always something to eat in the fridge. I’ve been engineering every inch of myself towards a certain goal. I know I’m putting too much into this. Some uncertain future, an application, a possible rejection. But I want so much for the opposite to happen. It would mean that I would be pushing the limits of my home displacement, but I would rather do that, the extreme, than to live for days and weeks at an end in this grey area I’ve made.
or
b.
Consider a set of matryoshka dolls. The general consensus is that the treat is in the center. It parallels the tradition of opening something that has been giftwrapped. So the designated goal is deepest in, and an almost endless succession of dolls are halved to get there. But consider what it is like to be the smallest doll. Perhaps she has been in there for 21 years. If the thrill is highest for the one who has reached furthest in, imagine what it must feel like to be the doll, and finally be out.
I’m afraid I might not be able to catch up with my headnoise. So, while waiting, here’s a recording of me reciting one of my all-time favourite Shakespeare soliloquies (Hamlet 2.2).
For those of you who don’t know, this is how I sound like.
I also like making Hamlet sound like pissy estrogen.
I like your silence more when it is around.
You flew yourself off and dropped a week of loss on my lap, and if I thought your silence was bad
you left me in the room with your non-silence
and I felt our relationship cave into itself like a bad cake in oven heat.
A week of floating around in my own skin and mess without your interruptions. What else could I fill the spaces with? Our relationship was left with me, on the first day of my period, with no bookends for my weekdays or weekends except me, on the first day of my period, too lazy to sort out my hormones so that it wouldn’t eat my week alive.
It ate my week alive.
In fact, it must have eaten more.
Because all I remember of it now, and of us, was my voice; a puppet strung by angry organs, putting syllables on the chopping board, a knife held high by an arm that has never been wound up so tight. The word ‘taut’ could be shorter, yet even abbreviated the shortcomings of my silence, non-silence, anti-silence, and post-silence could span the distance between any two countries, eg. where I am and where you are.
If only you could have heard.
My phone rang today unknown, I picked up with the voice I save for unknown, which happened to be running on empty.
It was your silence, but I couldn’t recognize it.
It was your voice your hello, but I said “Who is this?”
Suddenly, there was plenty of time
To be reacquainted with your silence.
the laptop has been deprived of me for over a week down. Serves it right for having unexplained random keyboard death.
Okay, i admit i miss it like a monster. But there’s little i can do until it returns.
(Thank you, for the brainsex.)
I’ve never done this before, so let’s see what happens:
my birthday is coming soon. April 6. I’ll be 21 years old.
and this is my wishlist on amazon.
If you have liked anything I’ve written from 2003 until today, do consider buying me some brainsex.
Make your mailing address visible to me and I’ll send you something in return. (someone suggested putting up my maybank account number too, which I won’t do, but interested people can email me for that)
thank you for letting me plant that thought in your head.
I was in Singapore on Monday to perform at The Arts House (it went really well), Tuesday evening I arrived back in KL, wrote out my psychology assignment to submit Wednesday, sat for a microbiology exam on Thursday, celebrated my mother’s birthday at midnight, took a morning bus alone on Friday to go back to Singapore to see Sondre Lerche live at Mosaic Music Festival on Friday night, took a morning bus back alone on Saturday from Johor Bahru after crossing the border to make it back after lunch hour for Sunburst Music Festival at Kiara Saturday evening onwards, where I proceeded to cry at The Roots performance.
Obviously I died all of Sunday. but worked at night.
Today is Monday again, I had classes from 9am to 6pm. Tomorrow I am helping out a friend at the poetry workshop+performance for children of the Australian International School, after my chemistry lab in the morning.
—
this has been just a simple report.
—
I am exhausted physically almost all the time but am relieved to still be running. And eating. But above all, my proudest accomplishment is that I managed to finish a book and a half (Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, & Steel, and halfway through Collapse by the same author), and still write a throwaway poem every day. They might not have developed into anything I feel comfortable sharing with you, but I am happy they could still happen. It would be nice to ultimately be productive without isolating faeries in my coffee. I am still very fond of it.
(I am also very poor at the moment, and although it is crippling, I am still trying to eat laugh read and write as always).
I spent the best RM10 of my year last week. Granted, it is only February, but I would like to see that challenged. He calls it disposable fiction but it has never left my bag, and magnetizes my fingers to it whenever I reach in for something to hold.
So I hold his stories. First with my eyes and then with my sleepless aching head.
They stay there.
(but some words trip on my tongue when I read out loud and fall flat, embarrassing me with the verbal fluency of my Bahasa Malaysia. I’m just glad I can read, get it, & laugh at the funny parts)
I’m not exactly sure how their author looks like, to be honest, although this city is small enough for him to have photographed me a few times. I have no idea why he would want to but he did, which makes me wonder; how does he knows me? Then again, what kind of a thousand words do a picture say about knowing something. A handful of stories say so much but no one can claim to know someone from those either. Tangents aside, I have been inseparable from his book. It encompasses a vague idea of I’ve always hoped I’d grow into writing.
I’m not sure what the price to pay is for that, all I know is that I spent the best RM10 of my year last week.
(although now I believe it’s RM15, since I bought it at the launch)
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