The first on the first

"What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art."

      -- Virginia Woolf's journal                      

This year: more writing, more learning and more sight.

Cactus Tree

"You know, I think if I were so inclined, I would easily be a junkie," I tell my friend, Kit, over dinner.

"Me too!"  His eyes widen in agreement and I know he understands.  We're both one kind of addict anyway.  Worriers, chewing obsessively over the same thought night and day.  Kit's learned to compartmentalise but I'm not as intelligent.  

I have to make do and since I can't be a user, I find other manias to build my life around.  Unfortunately, unlike drugs, they don't always come in steady or reliable supply.  Nothing gold can stay, I found myself thinking on my twenty-minute walk to work today, as the smell of newly-laid tar and drying cement steamed up around me, and I felt an indelible sadness.  

After my ex well and truly taught me how not to cling to people, I started to cling to things thinking that they couldn't possibly ever mean as much.  Except, it turns out, they do.  And things, too, change and end and maybe I'm just too worn out for one more set of goodbyes.   

In recent weeks, I'd been up late at night playing a game in which one tries to memorise all the countries in the world.  Then I moved on to memorising all their capitals.  Each round, after the timer runs out, I find myself reaching to restart it, to get one more hit of soothing routine.  During the day, I carry the names in my mouth and head to stave off withdrawal: Honiara, Belmopan, Tegucigalpa, Chisinau.  I repeat mnemonics and create mental imagery and tell my friends and cram my attention with lists and lists of places because one who feels so full couldn't possibly also feel hollow.  

I'll be done with it eventually.  But you know what they say.  Once an addict, always an addict.

And lying in bed in the dark, I recite the names of capitals over and over again, just as if they were prayers.

Regularly scheduled programming

Now that all the big hurdles have finally passed, I can go back to clearing the massive backlog of photos waiting for me and reliving our travels.

For now, this picture that reminds me of a wonderful day on a beach in Nice with the scent of searing pebbles underfoot and nothing above us but the clean blue sky. 

All I needed

Life's been full of false starts and stops recently.  I'm not upset or depressed - far from it, in fact - but I am a little bit stressed with the O levels and A levels on my tail.  

The students are jittery and I remember, with sympathy, sleepwalking through those exams; so exhausted that all I did when I came home was fall into deep and dreamless naps and wake, horrified and guilty that I wasn't studying.  Now, I was starting to feel guilty that they weren't and the relentless grind wasn't giving any of us much chance to recalibrate.  

At the end of a week of a lot of running around and very little sleep, I was invited by my good friend Sindhu to her theatre showcase.  Sindhu (or Sid to us) was part of an incubation group for young theatre practitioners for a year and for their final showcase, the group put on an interpretation of the T.S. Eliot poem, The Wasteland.  

Before Sunday, Sid told Amanda, Bear and I that we might find the production too avant garde and experimental.  She needn't have worried.  It was pretty unorthodox, but we enjoyed ourselves and I was inordinately moved at points.  

At the door, one of the ladies told us that one of the ideas behind the piece was that the actors had discovered their meanings of life.  We were to try and find ours.  I was tired, having run down from eight hours of work, and not completely ready to think deep thoughts just then, but the doors opened, and we ran with it.  

The set, scented with a smoke machine and perfumed oils, was split into sections for the performers to build little nests within.  One fragment was hung with embroidery and knitted pieces and another had books and marigolds hanging from the ceiling.  One of the actors had even filled the floor of her space with grey sand and desert rocks.  Sindhu's corner, a velvet den glowing with candles, fairy lights and a mosaic of drapes and mementos, was at once beautiful and sad, a tribute to times and people gone by.  

We were allowed to walk around the set during the performance and Amanda and I found ourselves touching things and standing, fascinated, under fishing line hung with apples and naked bulbs that pulsed and glowed.  

Throughout, I kept feeling snatches of something unfathomable.  Sure, it seemed uncomfortably experimental and possibly inaccessible, but there was also something deep and real winding beneath the surface that kept slipping through my fingers.  It was as if the stories and thoughts of real souls were woven in with the acting and if you only felt your way, you would touch something incredibly poignant. 

Sid, dressed as a faded, desperate Cleopatra, sobbed on a chair under a rich canopy of silks.  She didn't appear to see us, that is, until the end.

As the performance drew to a close, the actors picked up brown envelopes that they had secreted in corners and started to give them to the audience.  All around us, people were unfolding white pieces of paper with various "meanings of life" scribbled on them - things about giving yourself away or holding on tightly.  The sound was rising to a crescendo and people were speaking unintelligibly, tasting lines from the poem on the incensed air. 

Just as I was feeling left out, I saw Sindhu coming in our direction.  As she neared us, we made eye contact and her face lit up with a smile that felt like it was meant just for me.  In character, she knelt before us and gently pushed a letter into my hand.   

Then in a deep greeting of peace, Sid pressed her palms together and with tears streaming down her face, whispered against the backdrop of noise, "Shantih.  Shantih.  Shantih."  Startled, I felt my own eyes start to well, but before I could say anything, she sprang up, catlike, and was gone. 

In the silence that followed, with Amanda looking over my shoulder, I peeled away the envelope to find a solitary word:

And just like that, I understood.

Contemplation

"You know how sometimes you know nothing about someone, really, and you don't know if you could sit through a dinner with them or see yourself hanging out at their house regularly; or you don't know if they would like you at all or think you were massively ignorant and lose patience with you or enjoy your idiot sense of humour; or in fact if you could ever end up even remotely getting along... but... right there and then in the moment, you just really, really want to kiss them?

Yeah."

Hier

Among the random things that are making me happy recently are a very girly, spontaneous manicure and round two of French lessons.  

The nails, well, I'm enough of a magpie that looking at something sparkly every day makes me smile.  And French?  Well, apart from loving the language and enjoying the daily interaction - every lesson is a revelation -, as a teacher, I relish three hours of not being the one at the front of the class.

Instead of exercising the eyes in the back of my head, I'm quite content to open my books, lean back and let someone else take the reins.  

(Plus, one of the teachers is pretty funny and I have an entire secret sidebar in my notebook for his daily jokes, for example, "When you use the reflexive, you are doing something to yourself.  Like I bathe myself, or I dress myself, but there is one verb you are not allowed to use on yourself: to argue.  Because you can't argue with yourself.  Unless you're Gollum."  Oh, you!)

Hey, tonight

Earlier this week I finished reading The Secret History (I almost wrote "Shitstory" by accident) and had mixed feelings about it.  Tartt has the rare gift of making me forget that I'm reading and I fell in love with the characters, flaws and all.  I kept reading just so I could spend time in their company but plotwise, I thought it was a little self-indulgent; I can only relate to expensively debauched shenanigans so much.  

I think this book will be better though, taken beyond the confines of the university.  

I'm tired of grading essays and thinking about work and feeling sore from my latest plod.  For now, there's time for a little mustard bird.

If you can't beat 'em...

Last month, in all the heat and rain, the garden was filled with little critters.  Rebecca was at my house when I took this photo of a rather sizeable grasshopper next to the fish trough.  At first, I'd recoiled - horny, bristly grasshopper are not my favourite animal - but then I grabbed my long lens and we pretended briefly to be Nat Geo photographers.

A few mornings later, as I was stumbling around getting ready for work, I saw a Lyssa Zampa the size of my hand chilling under the storeroom eaves.  (Singapore's been swamped with them of late!)  The long lens was still lying ready on the table so I blearily wandered into the dark to grab these.

Damn, nature!  You scary!

OOTD #2

This was the day the barrista gave me a cup that said "Book Power" on it.  (My name is Shuli and as a joke, he wrote it in very similar-sounding Chinese characters that mean something completely different.)

As if I weren't already nerdy enough.

Projects

So far, it's been a pretty quiet month and now that the weather is getting increasingly rainy, I've been really enjoying my quiet days off at home.  I love hanging out with friends, but sometimes, I'd rather be knitting and watching old episodes of Buffy.  Can you believe I've never watched the season where Spike falls in love with her?  Yeah, neither can I.  (Thanks, Gail!)

This is the longest scarf I've made to date.  My brother, Shen, decided to dress up like a hipster to model it.  He took it to Sapporo during the winter season so that he could use it when he was out and about for work.  He's a lot taller than me and I made it long enough to go round his neck twice and still hang at a decent length.

I made it using a truly beautiful 8mm yarn that I got from Spotlight.  The yarn has a tiny bit of wool in it for warmth, but otherwise is made of a material that's almost silky to touch.  It's already woven in a braid so that even with a simple 3-by-3 rib pattern, it had a great deal of texture.  I loved that the yarn felt complex and high quality when I was working with it and it knit up pretty quickly.

A couple of inches from the ends, I knit the rib pattern in reverse to create a bit of a border and interest.  Because the rib stitch folds like an accordion, I'm quickly learning that it is always a lot more narrow off the needles than on, and that I have to cast on a lot more widely than I think.

In between, I had time to celebrate Melodie's and Sid's birthdays!  (There may or may not have been drinks.) 

After an evening of hysterical laughter, I stayed over at S's house and woke up to the beautiful light in her room.  Every time I spend the night, I have to take a photo in the morning because it looks so interior design catalogue worthy.

Now, I'm working on a straightforward garter stitch scarf with colour blocks so that I can practice joining new colours.

I'm using three different 4mm yarns and even though two are made of wool and one is acrylic, I'm happy to report that I can't feel the difference so far.  The blocks aren't any particular number of rows; I'm just knitting by feel and it's lots of fun to just let the colours run until I feel like it's time for a new one. 

Oh, and I'm on the last package of my favourite cookie - the one that you can't get anywhere else except once or twice a year when a certain fair rolls round into Isetan and they make it on the spot.  It's sad, but they've been such a treat to look forward to.  

Goodbye, delumpshious Hokkaido biscuit!  See you next year!

That is all.

Rascals

For privacy reasons, I don't talk very much about work here but it is one of the few things that makes me happy these days.  Today, I came in to my most energetic and noisy class to see the fourteen 12-year-old students sitting morosely in complete silence.

"What's up?" I asked, worriedly.

"We're upset," the most outspoken girl said.  "We can't think of any trick to play on you for April Fool's."

I laughed out loud, oddly touched that they'd thought of doing something and grateful that they wouldn't.  

"Doesn't anyone in class have anything fun, at least?" one of the boys at the back yelled.

"Actually," my littlest boy said to me, rather solemnly, "I brought you two fake cockroaches today.  I got them for fifty cents each."  My classes know about my cockroach aversion well and we have a little discussion about Blattodea every week. 

"Well, then, we must have them!  They can sit up front and be the class mascots."

He produced two awful-looking critters from his pencil case and poured them into my palm.  They even felt sort of real and bristly.  With a shudder, I brought them to the front of the class and we spent a very cheerful five minutes arranging them realistically over the projector and poking at them squeamishly.

"What are they called?" I asked their owner.

Without missing a beat, he said, "Charles and Carrie."

And for the rest of the period, the kids silently passed Charles and Carrie around, making them sit on shoulders, pencil cases and worksheets in a ghoulish-yet-friendly sort of sharing that gave the class a decidedly festive air.

At one point, something occurred to me and I turned to the boy who had produced the bugs saying, "You know what a really horrible prank would have been?  If you had told me you brought me two fake roaches and then..."

His eyes gleamed with sudden understanding as he caught on, "... and then when I put them on your hand one of them started crawling?"

Oh, dear god.  I love my students very much.

The first hundred

via: http://oursoleintent.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/just-as-far-etsy.jpg

Last week, I clocked my first hundred kilometres in my new shoes. 

Before this, I never thought about the distances that I plodded - for all I know, I've done thirty or three hundred.  My focus was simply on getting out of bed and getting moving.  Recently though, I decided to start keeping a very simple log in my filofax, just for fun.  

My whole family thinks I'm nuts.  Wei texted, demanding to know who I was and what I had done with his sister.  And I'm not surprised.  I've always hated running.  I hate it every morning that I lace up my shoes and I hate it every breathless, achey moment.  But now, I feel weird without it. 

I slowly and painfully limped, walked, plodded and very occasionally sprinted my way to that first century mark and you better believe I was chanting "Fml, fml, fml," in my head the whole time.  In between, each time I timed myself on my 2.4km run, I felt like I was literally going to die. 

But my feet don't hurt anymore, and I'm probably the fittest I've been since my school days.  I feel much more comfortable climbing stairs and my clothes fit better.  

On balance, I suppose I call: worth it.   

Instant gratification

I've always wanted to rock a pair of big ass headphones and after my third, or fifth, pair of cheapo earbuds conked out yesterday, I marched to Popular and gave in.  After getting Mel's go ahead (the girl is a professional musician and knows these things), I bought a pair of hot pink Audio Technica whoppers for the princely sum of $48.

At first I felt a little guilty about not doing more research or sitting on it for longer, but then I put them on, and - oh!  I was locked in an achingly sweet cocoon of soaring opera music where no one could touch me, for just as long as I wanted to stay there. 

Sometimes, happiness is just that easy. 

Commitment

I am one of the most unfit people I know.  I'm flat-footed and bow-legged.

I spent years avoiding anything that remotely resembled exercise while my friends swam and scuba dived and played rugby and ran marathons.  I never wanted to be an athletic person (except when I wanted to be Michelle Kwan).  On P.E. days, I would run 200 metres and end up with violent stabbing pains in my chest.  The doctors couldn't find anything, but it hurt all the same. 

Some time ago, I left a comment on Grace's blog (I think) about the diffculty I had breathing and Holly, a coach and very sweet blogger, replied, telling me that it was probably because I needed to go slowly and let my body adjust.

And so, I started "plodding" regularly - moving around the neighbourhood at the slowest possible pace without walking.  It was painful.  At first I could only plod for about 500 metres without feeling winded.  And then maybe a couple of 500 metre stretches along a much longer route.  Somewhere along the way, I started plodding for longer and longer bouts until my chest didn't hurt anymore.  I woke just after dawn two, three, sometimes even four times a week and let the morning air and sunrise wash over me.

It was really difficult; everything hurt, from my thighs to my calves to my shoulders.  But my feet, over-pronating and sliding around in £10 shoes from Tesco that I'd bought on a whim, hurt the most.  The further I plodded, the harder and longer my soles ached and I limped around the office for the rest of the day in agony.  Two weeks ago, when the rubber on the heel started flapping off in bits, I finally gave in to buying a new pair.

I talked one of the fittest people I know, my friend Dawn, and she suggested I try Running Lab at Velocity so that I could get proper advice on what shoes to get.  They would be expensive, she said, but worth the price. 

Back in the office, Edie (very sporty) and Shirin (very sensible) agreed. 

"But it's a lot of money, " I said doubtfully.  "What if I wake up one morning and just decide I'm done plodding?"

"Don't be ridiculous," Shirin said, "you've been doing it for what, six months already?"

I sat there for a minute, stunned.  Surely I hadn't consistently been engaging in regular, entirely voluntary exercise for half a freaking year.  But she was right.

So I showed up at the Running Lab last week, tried not to flinch when the man looked horrified at just how flat my feet were and plodded for two minutes on the treadmill in the store while Edie filmed a video and giggled.  Lots of consideration, negotiation and lip-biting later, I was the owner of a neon yellow pair of New Balance shoes with the best socks I have ever had the pleasure to know. 

And so far?  I haven't quit.  Just taken them for a couple of long, slow plods in the vicinity and enjoyed the support and cushioning that they provide.  My feet still hurt a little but in a good way- feet that are trying to get used to an inbuilt arch where there was previously none. 

It's still hard.  I still struggle while people I know knock out amazing workouts with alarming regularity.  But the one thing I am enjoying is this new commitment to my health and to my body. 

Maybe it's the relationship I've been looking for all along.

Magic

Being awake when everyone else is sleeping - either in the light pink haze of the morning, or at night with a perfect, crisp sliver of moon peeking through the curtains - is magic.

Bromance

A couple of weeks ago, Rebecca bought a secondhand 5D.  It's huge and heavy and takes amazing pictures with beautiful colour and so I figured that I should probably start working on trying to use slightly better gear at times as well.  

Over Chinese New Year weekend, my brother lent me the 60D that he hardly ever uses so that I could try to get used to it and see how I like it.  The whole of my Chinese family came over for the holidays and I had tons of fun snapping photos of the family and trying to get used to the camera's (rather finicky) controls.

I thought I'd do a layman's review at some point, but ultimately, I think it takes great photos too!  The first ones I'm sharing are from when my brother, HS, spontaneously decided to shave my cousin, Yen's goatee.

They were having a conversation about shaving while we shopped for toiletries in Mustafa and HS, an ardent advocate for luxury shaves, offered to give my cousin one on our balcony.  I don't know what possessed Yen to say yes, but I really enjoyed taking pictures of them giggling through what turned out to be an oddly tender, masculine moment.  

After nearly slitting Yen's throat, HS switched from a straight razor to a safety razor and we all stood around, watching with bated breath as Yen laughed and squirmed through foamy clouds of soap while occasionally grabbing HS's shirt in panic.

We only get to see our Malaysian cousins once or twice a year, but each time we do, some crazy shenanigans always go down. Hopefully next time, I'm around to document them as well.

PS Yen was really pleased with the results and said it was one of the closest shaves he'd ever had.  Pun intended, I imagine.

Gong xi, gong xi

Happy and auspicious Chinese New Year, everyone!

OOTD #1

Rebecca has been teasing me so much about my "OOTD" poses that I started wondering if I could post them again without actually having to appear in front of the camera.  I got to some silly scribbling and...

Voila! 

Yesterday/Today

Yesterday, I was a bridesmaid at my dear (and very beautiful!) friend Ann-Marie's wedding.  She looked so radiant and happy and I was delighted and very grateful to watch her walk down the aisle to a wondeful and very caring man.

Today after work, I hunkered down with a new scarf in graded yarn, tea, good herb cheese and Buffy.  Delighted and grateful once again, even if in a very different way.

Rising sun

I'm just back from a holiday in Japan with my mother and I have to say: it was one of the best holidays I've had in years.  I ate a lot, rested a lot and got a ton of photo practice which will find it's way onto here eventually. 

This is the first time I've travelled with the aim of practising photography and I've learned several lessons.  My mother said to me one night as we were strolling in the sunset at the bay of Yokohama, "You know, sometimes we forget that we are so privileged to be able to even travel." 

And so we are.  I would love to go back one day and see all the other beautiful parts of the country, but even if I never do, I will always hold this experience dear.