Memories - an intriguing existence in time.

Places have memories.  The feeling that something was slipping away from my hands, first came from the realization that I truly cannot hold back time itself. Time slowly but surely propels us to new places to generate new experiences and memories.

When I was an undergraduate, I savored each day knowing that I will never come to the same place of being once I pass through the moments. Yet, a part of me remains enamored with the thought that by living vicariously, I could somehow capture each moment forever.
Looking back, I realized that whether one hated or loved college life, forever only meant those four years. 365 X 4. No more, no less. We have all moved on and left the memories behind as mortar boards cut through the afternoon horizon. No matter how slowly or how fast we try to move along, forever remains only in the present moment.

Should I have chosen law school in those moments of uncertainty? Was i moving in the right direction in life if no one else was heading that way? Have I always been the lone ranger because I never bothered to follow, do I regret it? Would I have done anything different, given another chance? 

Some friends I know have chosen to retrace their steps in order to make abrupt turns in their journeys, to pursue something seemingly altogether separate from their life trajectory. No one is truly a slave of their past decisions, and the opportunity cost of missing out on an alternative universe have pushed the more daring into new territories. Two of them have quit their jobs after three years to pursue post-grad law degrees. Another to medical school, yet another plans to, in a couple of years after her Masters scholarship bond expires. An ex-colleague quit last month to do ancient Chinese history in Tianjin, that she might fulfill her dream of being a curator. The unknown scares her, but she chose to take the plunge, to figure out if what she ever wanted was truly what she really wanted. 

Am I done with my own exploration? Hardly so. But I am no longer pressed for time, that restive spirit that implores one to move out recklessly and experimentally had been tempered with a new patience, a new understanding that getting to the right destination simply means to take the next right step now. It's not the execution of a grand plan to reconstruct your house from a brick, or to tear down everything you had ever known about yourself. It's to slowly excavate the parts of your dream that you had been to afraid to leave unburied. Perhaps some of my friends understood that, and their seemingly abrupt decisions are really the next best steps towards all they ever wanted. As for me, my next best step is here. 

No regrets, no retreat, just endless remembrance when we sit in the place of memory, once again.

poster girl

Week 3 of being back, still positive, happy to be where i am. Lots of space to write and read, with a decent physical space to call my own, awesome. It had been a rough two weeks of hearing stuff about my return through the grapevine, but I chose to overcome with my head held high, with all the poise of that woman of class in heels. The woman that I always wanted to be, at least on the outside first. The little girl will always be lurking on the inside, but she knows when to surface and when to hide behind that demeanor of quiet confidence and be utterly impervious to the rubbish of other homo sapiens. I like how strong I feel compared to three years ago - and I have to say that the wardrobe and porcelain skin matter. Much as it is a chore working towards perfection, the external is just as important as the internal. I always thought it was great being a woman. There might be others who hate the trouble and limitations, but I embrace it through and through. It was colourful being me. 

A rude reminder recently, however, of why we could not be. Basic human respect dictates that one should not be calling another names, when one does not agree with a certain viewpoint, no matter how diabolically opposed those views are to one's own. It's just not cool on a human level and it violates my basic values of being welcoming and open to all kinds of views and perspectives since everyone has imperfect information upon which to form their opinions. I'm very much a democrat when it comes to information and ideas, even if I have strong opinions about certain things. I desist from dismissing another's viewpoint, even if it irks me. I  tend to challenge and pick at loopholes, I admit, but never dismiss. It would be pure intellectual blasphemy. 

Have the guts to put up your beliefs for scrutiny if you are confident it's the only logical conclusion - and be man enough not to resort to name calling when you are losing ground. 

I'm surprised how strongly I react to such things; to a point where I find it difficult to be friends with narrow-minded people or to tolerate bigotry; it's the cornerstone of my belief system upon which I choose to understand and navigate the world and if my partner cannot meet this baseline, it would be  fruitless. Even if we were (and still do, from time to time) utterly, blissfully enamored with each other's childlikeness and love for life. It's not a sad thing i suppose, just an inevitable one.  

Travelling

Hi!

Sorry for the procrastination, I keep forgetting that the Turkey souveneirs have been sitting in my cupboard for a while. Turkey was fun, I believe everyone should go at least once in their lifetime! The mix of culture, food, scenery and history was amazing. I enjoyed climbing on top of (and walking through) ancient ruins, especially in Ephesus. I met nasty people, but also super nice and friendly ones. It was an eye-opener and re-defined travelling for me.

That one does not go as a tourist, but as a sojourner who lives for a while at a place, to understand and soak in the culture and way of life. I once read a quote, that travelling makes the world seem like such a big place and yet so small at the same time. I read it (in my experience) as the world being big as it contains so many types of culture and yet a history so rich that one one people group can fully experience in their lifetimes or generations. At the same time, the world is so small because we can try to understand and experience that wealth of being alive, through our travels simply by virtue of being human.

Travelling, can make us understand what it is that makes us human :)

Keep the wanderlust burning!

Ps. An article on Why you should travel young

people-pleaser

Years of people-pleasing have caused me to not know how to damn-what-they-might-think so as to navigate my own existence and happiness. damn. i can only bemoan my lack of guts here in the solace of my writing. damn. at least now i feel bold enough to say the "damn" prayer and allow myself some exhibited angst once in a while. and to allow myself to feel angry and let down.

day three of my break -and irritated at the unpredictable moods and weather i have to deal with in my boredom. actually, the weather's okay; i just have to shake the bad habit of trying to please her all the time and making the effort to make small talk when she stares off into blank space. that blank space which she locks herself in, unreachable or unreasonable, if she decides to come back to reality once in a while. i have given up on convincing her to pursue her happiness, to stop micro-managing everyone around her, to stop following that damned militant regime she called her preferred lifestyle. how can you call it "preferred" if you've never tried a happier alternative?

i think being angry reminds me who i dont want to become, how pointless it is to try and please someone who can never be pleased.

cosmic war

The usual ghosts haunt my nights, with taunting and whispers to disturb my sleep. I've taken to reading before turning in, and a good book miraculously makes the lump in my throat and heaviness in my chest subside to an acceptable load; light enough for me to float away to sleep.

Is the friend of your enemy, your enemy too? Do we take sides simply by the acquaintances and friends we choose? I used to call it a childish game, more out of a preference to treat each human being as innocent until proven guilty (and wide margins for innocence i grant them) than utilitarian diplomacy. I avoid labelling of any sort, and would likely be a green activist or campaign blazer for Obama (or any figure who represented the abolition of biases, prejudices, dividing walls) had I be born and raised in a more liberal country like the US. Yet even in my little conservative cocoon of Southeast Asia I tried as much to nurture that in-built tolerance for bullshit and bad behaviour, in faith that everyone is capable of doing much good.

Yet the recent events of the past year have been teaching me otherwise. There were bad guys who take advantage of you as soon as they got a chance, leery men lusting over upskirts and cleavages (yours included) calling themselves your friend, well meaning people who give incredibly bad advice (and believing they are right no matter how things turn out for the worse), people who make up stories about you over tea, friends who fail terribly at being friends.  Further from my personal woes, there had been a whole host of corruption cases unearthed in the same city state - amidst glowing reports of how millionaires flock to live here and more muted and sanitized reports of how foreigners were "falling off" MBS. yeah. nothing to do with the casinos of course. the twin necessary evils were instituted to give our economy the turbo boost, so what if a few people kill themselves over losing their money? everything was crashing, it seems. 

And so i'm tired. religiosity taught me that men are born evil,with sin, into an imperfect world that was also marred. That much i still agree. Yet my belief in Man's will (and ability) to do good still burns in me, even if it's been reduced to embers. But what of that? What am I to do with those embers? I think I just need a good long rest, shutting out this world with its incessant chattering. Recharge needed.

head or heart

Is it really as simple as this? I have a much better heart that's for sure. But it doesn't mean that a good heart is not foolish or naive. Food for thought. 

bucket list

Wanna see my bucket list? I think my love for art museums started the moment I stepped into the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. That love had been transformed into an almost-maniacal zeal.

Argh! The Royal Ontario Museum in Canada ranks 59! To think I was right there in front of that crystal pyramid door on a Monday, sulking over the fact that it was closed. I could have made it in for a brief half hour in between sightseeing and work the following day of course, but it wouldn't have done it justice.

Istanbul Museum ranks 82, but i'm quite sure there's no "Istanbul Museum" in Turkey - they must mean Topkapi, Hagia Sophia or the Istanbul Archaelogy Museum, all of which I had covered.

National Palace Museum in Taipei, check. The next one i'll really like to go is the British Museum - the Reading Room looks phenomenal.

The other bucket list in progress ;)

kindled

I have made it quite a point to buy that one thing which my heart lusted for, on every trip. Something substantial, fascinating yet functional - those things that made a trip memorable. I never quite expected my purchase of the North America trip to be a Kindle keyboard but boy am I happy. It re-Kindled (it's more poetic than a pun, really) my love for reading, which had quietened down quite a bit since I left school. And now it's singing melodic tunes to me once more. It's truly wonderful to be able to bring my library wherever I go; bye to those dilemmas of "oh i want to read this again, but how about that one for now?" whenever I stood in front of my bookshelf or the public library. I could have it all! Even good websites for study of the classics like Johnstonia could be converted into ebooks for reading wherever. And the inbuilt dictionary made it easy for the aspiring wordsmith to learn new words and concepts at the touch of one key.

I am fighting the tide that threatens to silence my love for reading, my ever-shorter attention span with the invasion of video, youtube and all that mindless entertainment. The dearth of book reading in our generation represents the death of knowledge and birth of frivolous snippets of information invading mindspace and virtual reality. The internet may have made news, bits of information and convenience fast-food-like forum answers available to all, but it's really through books that real knowledge could be gleaned, mulled over, incorporated into one's worldview. No shortcuts and no googling to skip over the necessary time-consuming pain of following through a complex idea or theory. Even fiction is usually better represented in a novel than a two hour mind-numbing session in a darkened cinema.

Of course, one might say that e-readers take away part of the reading experience. The book lover in me rejected e-readers/tablets for a long time. I love the smell of new books, thumbing through my favourite pages, tracing an intruiging line with my index finger in a mock attempt to dissect it physically. But the Kindle proved to be a worthy substitute when I first laid eyes (and hands) on it. It mimicks a real book, and fulfills the book lover's fantasy to bring her entire collection with her, so she can fish out her favourite passage whenever she wished. It even has page next buttons situated at the side of the reader like a real book. Love it to bits. Just wished I had a bimbotic white one instead of the sturdy oldish graphite one. Oh well. One pays for real knowledge not aesthetics :P

adulthood

The freedom milestone seems bigger and nearer as time passed. People come and speak to me about my impending departure, out of curiosity rather than concern. And as they asked about the possibility of transfer rather than departure, i share with them information and decision points to varying degrees. Yet I haven't bothered to explain all the facets of my career decision, for it was of no point. No one was in my shoes experiencing all that I do, no one else in the world. I had the sole right to decide what to do with those experience, emotions, feelings and thought processes that belong to me alone, in career as in life.

A friend and a well meaning stranger commented that my lost love was only 8 months long, as if time was an accurate measure of how invested the heart could be. They have no idea, how intense love could be, an intensity that has nothing to do with the passage of time at all. That there was a kind of love that seared its indelible mark on your life, that you could never and would never want to forget it all. Perhaps I would feel less as time passed from this point on, but time can never wash away the memory of passion. I have loved with all my heart and no one can tell me it was nothing because it wasn't decades old.

And this realization that no one else can truly understand, that only I can make my own decisions (and live with the consequences alone) over the past year has caused me to be lost and wandering in the wilderness of my mind. For having no one else that I can trust to give the ULTIMATE "right" advice, I was left to my own devices. Perhaps that was what pre-adulthood was all about; preparing your foundation for future decision-making. That our personality, motivations, notions of what is good./bad/right/wrong had been continually shaped, up till the mould that represented us solidified into adulthood. The more grounded you become as you grow, the more solid that adulthood mould becomes. The more open and fluid you are as a pre-adult, the longer you take to reach the stage where you can be sure of all your decisions because your mould for decision making has not taken form and too much whim and fancy cloud your perception of current situations and future scenarios.

And so my plight. I feel truly that I am an adult now. A lost, wandering, not so well formed adult. The price of my whim and fancies, openness and thirst for new experiences in life. Yet it was me, and it might be me for the rest of my life. I can only hope that the consequences I am living with, gives me the confidence to make firm decisions in the future. I find it difficult to ascertain if leaving is a pull or push factor. I'm pulled and pushed in all directions simultaneously. And I've long abandoned the whimiscal "pray and ask God where" approach ever since the supersitions of a well meaning friend had overwhelmed me and stomped all over my feelings. I can only go ahead in the direction I am headed, till the next roadblock or crossroads, while learning, albeit too late, how to read the map and navigate through life, using a whirling compass as my guide.

gossip

gos·sip   /ˈgɒsəp/ Show Spelled [gos-uhp] Show IPA noun, verb, gos·siped or gos·sipped, gos·sip·ing or gos·sip·ping.


noun

1. idle talk or rumor, especially about the personal or private affairs of others: the endless gossip about Hollywood stars.

2. light, familiar talk or writing.

3. Also, gos·sip·er, gos·sip·per. a person given to tattling or idle talk.

4. Chiefly British Dialect . a godparent.
5. Archaic . a friend, especially a woman.

murmurings, speculations, hearsay that's likely to be spiced with half truths and biases. I've always hated gossip of any sort (especially those about myself of course) and the act of gossipping. It was to me, a reflection of lack of consideration for others, as well as a lack of class. Yet it was altogether impossible to remain gossip-free, because people talk about you all the time, even if you pass away. I've a colleague who had mentioned his deceased ex-boss and his deeds at least three times in the past six months. Every time I hear him recount the same story I cringed inwardly and made a mental note of how pointless it was for me to hear stories about someone I've never and would never meet in my life. pointless. perhaps in the old old old ancient era where storytelling was the only form of entertainment and excitement to the imagination, there was some moral value. Now, it just seems like regurgitation of some textbook material in an obscure subject.yawn. 

But I cannot stop the tide of indignance rising in my chest whenever I hear some form of gossip or speculation about my personal life. Why should I respond to your query of my job status and give you fodder for teatime gossip and speculation of why, when and how? Whoever who had passed on that inkling of news to you had nothing better to do but I do. It takes all of my willpower to remain amicably silent. If I were in a more self-righteous mode I would have given you a piece of my mind about owning my privacy.

my new love



Taksim Square, Istanbul. One of my favourite areas in Turkey - European and Asian at the same time.



I made my mind up about three things during my Turkey trip in April this year:

1. I am proud to be an Asian girl.
2. I am learning Japanese.
3. I am going to take awesome photos.



Japanese Script - Katagana

And so after I came back from my 10 day trip (albeit 1.5 days of work included), the first thing I did was to sign up for a Japanese class. Loving it. Part vanity, part curiosity drove me to this decision. My time in Turkey was charming, mysterious yet violent in a quiet storm kind of way. So much happened and yet I brought back with me the fond memories, blocking out the disastrous. There was alot of attention on me as I travelled around the country, alone for a while and later with a companion, and my Asian feminity was complimented upon which made me proud to be Asian. Of course, most Turkish people can't tell the difference between Koreans, Japanese and other Asian people  and I was on many occasions greeted with enthusiastic "Konichiwa"s. I corrected them gently that I was "Singaporean" (that drew a blank for most people of course).

I met a number of fellow Japanese travellers during the trip and their dry humor and polite manners charmed me so. One traveller, Tanaka-san was a surgeon from Tokyo, who offered my companion and me his friendship - I've got a 5 Yen coin from him to prove it. There was also a Turkish guide with him who was fluent in Japanese and according to his colleague, spoke more Japanese than Turkish due to his work. The whole experience made me feel closer to my North Asian counterparts and I resolved to be able to converse in a number of Asian languages.

So many interesting things happened on my Turkey trip but I shall address them in bits and pieces in my stories. It's one of those trips which change the traveller's perspective in such a myriad of ways that it's never possible to chronicle all of it in one post without feeling like it isn't complete. I am dying to talk about my climbing atop the ruins of the temple of Zeus and Athena, my Egyptian friend Amr who might or might not have had designs on me, getting lost on a Turkish road and meeting a Turkish boy who called after us to speak to us in Mandarin. Or the poor but shrewd Turkish little boy in Kusadasi who had a weighing machine as his livelihood. Or the violent way in which my innocent wish scribbled at Virgin Mary's house was immediately fulfilled. But those for another time. Back to my life-changing decisions back home.



Wonderful scientific invention. Muack!



The second thing I did when I came back was to buy a Clarisonic from Sephora. It's giving me the most perfect skin ever, sans makeup. I've made up my mind never to share the secret of my undying youth should ageing friends ask me years down the road, and this is the only time I'll reveal it. So there. You can't be too generous with information. My quest for eternal beauty never stops.



My Sony Alpha 57 is a real babe - inside out.

 The third exciting thing that I did was to buy my first DSLR over last weekend. Love at first shot, and I got a pretty good deal at MS Color with an additional Potrait lens included, on top of the basic kit lens. Wonderful pictures with every shot! I can barely contain my excitement and trigger-happiness. My travels and memories shall be recorded beautifully and artistically from now on. Moved by beauty, I seek to recreate and grasp her at every turn. Not too obsessively of course, just enough to bring me joy and satisfaction.

Without love, or a true friend in the world.

View from Ciragan Palace hotel, Turkey

Kusadasi, Turkey

The view from the Bosphorous was one of the things which was supposed to make the job, the trip and experience worth it. But I had taken too few photos on my own. in part due to my own laziness and a queer, mild distaste for photography. The act of phototaking always seemed to frame my view and memories artifically, as if it were someone else's travels i am capturing. Alas, it was a pity, for my memories become faint too quickly, and only photos can give me a little solace, a little remembrance of my travels. I must remember to take more photos. i must remember every detail and every emotion. 

Hello NYC, once again. 

Paramount Hotel, NYC. Right beside the Church of Scientology.

I have decided to give up the official globetrotting life, in exchange for stability and freedom of my mind. My travels shall belong to me alone, and no one else has the right to demand of my time or energy just because the company paid for my flight and first class hotel. The luxuries were intoxicating, the opportunities to see so much in so little time a godsend, the all-paid-for travels so to-die-for. Yet it was not mine to have. The corporate world reeking of profits and loss, opportunism and phony exchanges leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. For my sanity, I had to leave. A mundane existence, dotted with my chosen colours and unlimited personal space is more welcoming than the shackles of the glamorous corporate world. bye riches and glory, bye slavedrivers and corporatespeak. I appreciated tasting all of it, thanks for the chance. 

 Along with the new life I sought, I lost another person in my life. And so here I am, lost. Without love, or a true friend in the world. I've loved much, lost much and experienced much  in the span of six months. And now I do not know who else I can love and depend on, what else there is to lose and when I can experience the comfort and joy I'm thirsting for, again. I only have my writings to bring me a little solace and comfort that my emotions can take some legible form at last, and yes, the silent, tearful musings that come on unexpectedly.

Was it all meant to be? I hate to be (seen as, mostly) superstitious of any kind, but it was the only way I can convince myself that this heartbreak was not something I could have averted. The alternative is too destructive to bear.