Thursday

Rebecca and I spent this Thursday taking pictures of Amanda and Ben for one of the (many!) pre-wedding shoots they are planning to have.  We used it as a test shoot and I have to say, I made a few mistakes but learnt a lot!

Plus, it's always nice when the subjects are photogenic and sporting.

More photos soon!

Hello Flowers photoshoot

I've been taking so many photos lately that I'm hard-pressed to find time to edit them all.  Last Thursday, Rebecca and I went to the Hort Park to practise taking photos.  Rebecca's friend, Annie, from local company Hello Flowers provided us with four gorgeous bouquets and we had a blast shooting them!

Because it was our first ever proper shoot and we wanted to take advantage of the wonderful morning light, we made plans to meet at six in the morning.  On a work day.  

I awoke to the sound of a massive monsoon storm at 3am and a frenzied text from Rebecca saying that it was pouring.

Eventually, I dragged myself out of bed at five, forgetting to put on work shoes in the process and only realising that I was still in house-slippers when I was speeding down the ECP with the sun rising in my rearview mirror.  At Telok Blangah, Rebecca, blearily holding the box of flowers, greeted me.

Once we got over the lack of coffee in our systems, we made it to the Hort Park and started setting up.  

We decided to keep it simple with desserts and patterned bolts of cloth and let the flowers speak for themselves.

Rebecca spent the previous night wrapping random things for presents and to my great amusement, I peeled back layers of coloured paper to reveal decks of cards and boxes of tea.

These roses were so lovely they needed very little dressing up.

Pretty as the set up looks, the reality of the shoot wasn't so glamorous.  We were inundated with bugs and when we realised that the teacup would be empty, I suggested unwrapping the tea bag "present" and making a cup.  When we figured out that the tannin wasn't going to infuse into our cool water, I got down on my haunches and basically squeezed it out of the tea bag.  Classy.

By the end of the shoot, I was covered in soggy mud from where I had lain down to take shots at eye level and our legs were stinging with grass itch and mosquito bites.  But we were pretty happy with the product!

While my partner-in-crime packed up, I messed around a little with the macro extensions that my brother had lent me.

This big ant with only four legs was fighting the little ants for the iced gem.  I love how clearly everything shows up, right down to the tiny bristles on its abdomen.  This is hard-hitting National Geographic style wildlife photography, yo.

And just to show that dreamy, tranquil shoots are anything but:

But I think the thing Rebecca was most amused by was me turning at her doorstep in my house-slippers at the break of dawn and saying, "What's your shoe size?"

Because when a friend with slightly bigger feets lends you leather sneakers and nerdy white socks on the day that you planned to wear a dress, the result is this.

Conversation piece

My best friend Bec just sent me a TED video in which a woman talked about how she had managed to crack the code of online dating, find and marry exactly the kind of man she was looking for.  Amy Webb created an algorithm and point system to narrow down the men that she would go on dates or even consider having a relationship with and each time they fell just a few points foul of the 900 required, she said sayonara immediately.  

She's feisty and I really admire her discipline, but I while I fully intend to be as careful as she was, I'm just not built that way.

The truth is (and I wish it wasn't) that I'm too soft-hearted and I can't bring myself to be so regimented about it.

Of course, I'm getting better at this.  

When I first started online dating, I talked to everyone who wanted to talk to me with the idea that I shouldn't rule anything out; that maybe I should be as open-minded as I could possibly be.  "Babe!" Bec said one day to me after I'd told her I was considering someone patently unsuitable.  "Stop making exceptions!"  

Now, I am quick to cut things off at any lazy, casual pick-up lines, inappropriate conversation or any hint of a possible dealbreaker.  But I still find it tough.

Getting to know people that you meet at school or at work or through common interests is a delightful process.  Effortfully trying to get to know people who could be bots for all you know is altogether more painful.  It's tiring, so much so that I'm sometimes tempted to stop weeding the duds out with so much vigour and just give in to chatting with the people who want to chat with me.  

Even bigger than the inertia though, is the fact that despite everything I've been through, all the heartbreak and lying and cheating and pain, I still want to see the best in people.  Maybe it's naive and gullible, but I always wonder: what if the person on the other end is just like me?  Maybe they're shy to start with, not particularly eloquent but with the best intentions?

And so, despite what some people have warned against, I do my best to engage people, to give them a second chance because if I thought that I might really like someone, I would want them to give me a chance too.

I am very possibly wasting my time.  But if I accidentally said something stupid in a moment of folly or stuttered with shyness and failed to have a sense of humour when it mattered, it would break my heart to be written off.  Besides, as a former journalist, I've talked to hundreds and hundreds of random people on the streets and I firmly believe that most people are more interesting than they seem.  I suppose with that in mind, I'm willing to take a chance.

So I'm talking to a couple of guys consistently now.  I'm not necessarily sure about them, but unlike Amy Webb, I can't just put a sudden stop to it.  Eventually, natural attrition takes care of the people that aren't a good fit, but I have to admit that each time another contact crashes and burns, even as I tell myself it's just one person closer to someone that matches, I feel a little sad about it.

It makes me wonder how many such small endings one has to encounter before they find someone.  Or give up.

At one point, I was texting a guy I'll call George.  Initially, he seemed decent, smart, hardworking, fairly mature.  But a couple of days of conversation quickly revealed that things weren't going to get off the ground.  He had a couple of stock phrases that he would reuse in every conversation, stopping it dead in its tracks.  

One of his favourite lines was "Someone is working very hard".  

"What are you doing?" he would ask me, and when I told him I had just gotten home from work, he would invariably respond, "Someone is working very hard."

When I told him that I was making a powerpoint presentation on governance one weekend, hoping it would slowly ignite some kind of a conversation, he simply said (you guessed it), "Someone is working very hard."

In an attempt to be interesting, I sent George a picture of a Batman stamp I had carved out of rubber one day (my colleague Wan Ping gave us a wonderful lesson on stamp carving!) and all he had for me was, "Batman is interesting."  I suppose it is.

Contact between us didn't last for very long, but while it did, during that small window when I thought that maybe this was someone I would enjoy getting to know, I told Amanda about it.  

BFF that she is, she listened excitedly, asked lots of questions and then said, "Oh, George!  Come on, George!  I'm rooting for you!!"

And it was at that moment that I realised that no matter how much some connections missed the mark, I believed that most of them were just regular people like me, drifting around on the great Interwebs, looking for someone they cared for.  

And the truth is that I am sad when things don't work out because amid all the craziness, I am rooting for them too.

Japan: Crazy cat ladies

While on holiday in Japan, I kept a detailed series of notes in honour of Nanowrimo.  All posts about Japan comprise excerpts from my journals. 

"... This morning, I wake up thinking that I must have had a terrible nightmare.  The misty sky is slowly lifting over the city to reveal a helipad and spiral staircase on the roof of the building next to us.  My mother is sitting by the window, taking it all in.  My throat feels dry, but I am more well-rested than I have been in a while.  I slide around under the sheets a little more, then tumble into the showers and out onto the streets.

The air is cool but not too crisp and the plaza where we walked last night is bright and soft with the sound of trickling water.  In the autumn, the leaves are a delicate yellow-green.  We eat at Cafe Doutor - coffee over a marble cake and Baumkuchen.  I love the Baumkuchen, I would eat it every day for the mild fragrance of its sweetness, the fluffy way its layers peel apart.  The coffee is simple and delicious.  We eat in silence, watching men in suits go past; a boy in plaid and jeans slowly pick his order off a laminated menu.

After breakfast, the first place we go is the Calico Cat Cafe.  

I've been secretly dying to go to a cat cafe, so secretly that I didn't even know it.  I read about one somewhere online a long time ago, but the memory stayed with me.  Today, I woke up announcing, suddenly, that it was on the itinerary.  My mother is nonplussed, but agrees.  After all, we didn't make any plans this holiday and the only rule was that nothing was off limits.  

We walk down the road to the nearest cat cafe.

The whole time, my mother is grumbling about the plan.  "Fur is going to get on my clothes, so you pet the cats okay?  I'll just sit in the corner."  We get there and recognise it from the drawn silhouettes of cats plastered on the 6th floor window.  Apparently, this is one of the more popular cat cafes in town - we jam into a tiny lift with two other Japanese people who are on the same mission.  A third lady, pressed up against the wall, rolls her eyes at us and mutters something about "Neko".

On the sixth floor, we are given a rapid fire introduction by a man at the counter.  Do not wear your shoes in.  Do put on slippers.  Do wash and sanitise your hands.  Do not use flash when taking the pictures.  Do not wake up sleeping cats or drag them into your lap.  And see that black and white one?  He points to a "Wanted" poster.  Of a cat.  Do not touch her.  She bites.

My slightly asthmatic mother is already freaking out.  She grabs a mask and slaps it on.  We get ourselves cat-ready and someone opens the door to the two-storey cattery, and that's when, hoping to make a break for it, a massive grey and black cat with beautiful markings all over its back bounds out of the room.

Several things happen at once.  The cat unconcernedly sits down and starts washing itself.  The staff clap and laugh - "Oh that mischievous one!  Always trying his luck!".  But the most amazing thing that happens is that my mum goes nuts.  "Oh!  He's beautiful!  Oh, look at him, Shu!  He's beautiful!  You're so beautiful, yes you are!"

And one of the most blissed out hours I've ever spent with her commences.

I love animals, yes, but I've never quite gotten the concept of a cat cafe.  Looking around now, though, I am starting to.  The two floors are filled with all kinds of awesome ledges and boxes and cubby holes and although I only see a few cats at first, I am starting to realise that there must be more than twenty.  And they're all exceptionally good-looking from the grey short-haired tom and a permanently surprised-looking Scottish fold to the fluffy, tri-coloured beauty draped over a hollow box and a sleek, almost Egyptian feline with bright eyes.

There are shelves of books and magazine and comics, and cat toys to use on the inhabitants.  Some people clearly come here all the time to relax.  One girl totally has it down.  She's brought her own blanket, books and iPod.  As she reads, a slim, tawny cat actually snoozes in her lap.  I feel myself starting to calm down.  Every corner is a new surprise cat - a rusty tortoiseshell or a grumpy-faced Crumbs lookalike, but everyone talks in hushed voices.  The cats are beautifully clean.

My mother is going to town.  "Oh, look at you!" she is crying at a leopard-stippled grey beast.  We find a spot near the sunny windows and start taking stock of all the cats around us.  They all have names.  The little Singapura cat curled up in a basket is called Asari and it likes its paw stroked.  On the floor, there's an enormous ginger Siberian cat, twice the size of my Jack Russell, Chip.  It is raggedly majestic.  My mother finds out it is called Hatoro and starts patting it and cooing at it.  It starts purring like a phone going off and my mum looks as if she's won the lottery.

Over the hour, she keeps ripping off her mask and making me take pictures of her with various cats saying, "Quick!  Quick, this one!  I am going to make it my Whatsapp profile!"  She tells each one, "You're beautiful," and then as if afraid the others will get jealous, continues, "You're all beautiful."

I spend the last twenty minutes gently ruffling the fur of a snoozing cat of an indeterminate brown colour.  Every time I rest my hand on his flank, he sighs and sleeps deeper.  Eventually, we leave and my mother muses, "This could work in Singapore, you know."

As we step out into the sunshine, she seems to shake herself and snorts at me, "The things you make me do!"

I smile to myself.  After all, she petted more cats than I did."