scales off

Today i scratched the surface of haute couture

i can't believe

i never knew

what a wonderful world

it offered

My head is spinning

such genius

and craftsmanship

and vision

and beauty 

the watermill in pictures

holding a little tiddler fish in my hand
the cold feeling of a small body bumping against mine
such power such fragility and strange love

scene out of a movie almost

i was so happy, even though it was vanilla ice cream, not chocolate

  

-

The swan warned us not to go near it's babies

So intensely happy, an so intensely peaceful

i love my grandma's hands

also, that was a darn good lemon cake

flick it

going to try and learn how to use eyeliner

ignored. again.

So someone i know, that i care about and that I am (hopefully) friends with
has been completely ignoring me
can't even look at me
won't say hello
doesn't stop to talk
doesn't text

What happened?
Did i do something?
Or are you just being irrational and digustingly human and unreadable?

i can't understand

lost in transit//see you see me

So last Friday, i was on the bus on the way to visit Yingying and eat some ice cream

I was reading The Poisonwood Bible (pretty amazing, although strange and, in my opinion, unsatisfactory)
But anyway, as with all fiction books i got pretty deep in, and hardly noticed when a lady sat next to me

After about 10 minutes, the lady took out her phone and began talking on it
And i thought

That voice

I stole a glance up from my book

and saw

My Mother

(!!!!!!!!!!!)

She'd sat beside me without recognising it, and i hadn't noticed her either
We went slightly hysterical with laughter in the bus after i said uhm HI MUM and she sort of jumped and then looked shocked and amazed and then burst out laughing

(now i think about it, it's quite sad that we didn't, but i still see it as a funny thing, because we had so much to laugh at afterward. Apparently it's exactly something grandma would do)

strange nightsperiences

I'm kind of incoherent now
the sunburn and the fatigue and also the lateness has made me kind of incoherent

anyway
i was listening to the like crazy sound track on youtube cos i love their instrumental stuff (Dustin O Halloran) and suddenly some weird electronic thing came on

please save the good music


ok bye

i need to stop

AC games were full of fun

but

i have such a painful sunburn :(

AND I RAN IN THE POURING RAIN

Sometimes i feel like Estella in Great Expectations-someone not very empathetic or emotion-y. Or at least unable to show emotion properly. And because i don't conventionally show love sometimes i question if i do. Love, that it.

But then occasionally things happen that restore my faith in how much i love other people.

10 9 2013 for instance.

I'd just finished my last paper (history) and i was pretty tired, but i still took the train to meet Weixin like i promised.

I waited at island creamery (not very surprised that i had to wait to be honest) but after 20 minutes i wondered if weixin had forgotten

Unfortunately my phone was out of credit
Fortunately i met an ex-OG friend by chance and she lent me her phone to call weixin and i found out that she'd just woken up and so

i went to Macdonalds and bought 2 cheeseburgers, 2 milos, 2 packets of chips and an oreo mcflurry (i hope you've eaten it weixin haha)

And then i realised it was raining like crazy and so i hugged the food to myself, wore my hoodie (which almost covered my shorts) pulled up my shorts and ran through the silver sheets of rain to weixin's house

As i was running i thought how romantic this was and how i'd love for my future husband to be willing to do that for ME and also how stupid i was not to carry an umbrella and also how this was basically proof that I love weixin and i can show my friend-love and also that she is a lazy pig hahaha (only semi kidding about that last bit)

When i got in weixin scolded me and then her mum scolded me for not telling them that i didn't have an umbrella and asked if i needed a shower and gave me a nice warm towel and then we had a fast food picnic and talked about boys and work and the american government and life

Miriam Monroe

So yesterday i was walking home from pasarbella in my new cotton on dress which is perfect for summery Singapore days because it is very light.

I had Hannah's sunglasses on and i put my hair in a top knot because the sun was trying to fry the earth (sometimes i wonder if this earth isn't some kind of afterlife and Singapore is hell-all the fire and sinful heat.)

Anyway as i was walking, suddenly i felt a cool breeze and i thought 'thank god for the wind'

But then the breeze turned into a full on gust and, caught unawares, it blew my dress right up!

It was so humiliating because there were 2 construction workers there and thank god they didn't laugh loud enough for me to hear but after a brief struggle i managed to get my skirt down and then i kept walking with my hands clutching my skirt firmly and my head thinking 'Thank god i have these sunglasses on, or i would've closed my eyes because of the embarrassment and probably tripped and embarrassed myself more'

Anyway when i got home i thought it a funny enough episode of my nonsense life and so here it is

So actually

You know how in movies there's always some romance somewhere somehow?

Well i used to think it was perfectly justified

I mean the world spins on love
Love is everywhere
I'm made from love, I'm made to love, I am loved

But then i realised
Love is so diverse
There's friend love, hate love, romantic love, crying love, walking love, leaves love, sunshine love, child love, pride love...

Why should only human love be emphasised in movies
Why can't there be a movie about walking love or my mum or water love?

I used to think romantic love was possibly the most glorious thing
Something headlong easy and empowering

And i still think it is, i still believe it's incredibly powerful

But i don't think i need to have it just right now
And i think walking love and leaf love and watching how shadows fall love is much more suitable for me right now

Someone in school keeps playing the cloud atlas sextet on the piano in the candeck

I love it it's beautiful

whenever i hear it pierce through the clutter of conversation i always stop and listen

the science behind kissing

So after the GP paper

the first thing Claire said to me was

"Why do people kiss?"

So Claire shicheng and I spent a good part of our break discovering the science behind kissing

1) Apparently, kissing releases Dopamine, a chemical in your brain that gives you a rush and makes you feel like the queen of the world

2) Kissing is a reflection of breast feeding (because of lips sensations i guess) so we associate it with love, attachment and warmth (and nourishment? all you need is love)

Other stuff i found out later was:

3) Kissing lets you smell your other person better which can help you know how great or not great they are

4) Eskimos kiss with their noses (i used to do this with my mum, when i was a kid and she put me to bed. Or sometimes there'd be the butterfly kiss which meant fluttering your eyelashes against someones cheek like a butterfly's wing)

5) It burns calories!

6) it feels good (that was my initial answer, and i guess you can't argue with it haha)

Peel and perfect

Did you know?

that the correct way of peeling a banana
is not from the stem like we normally would
but form the bottom?

You pinch the bottom and if you do it right,
the peel comes of neatly in two halves!

That's how monkeys do it

Did you know?

Did you know?

If you freeze banana chunks for about 2 hours and then blend them,
it becomes yummy scrummy banana ice craeam?

Did you know?

Banana tastes gorgeous with milo powder

Did you know?

My banana had a sticker saying made of sunshine

i thought that was pretty neat
Bananas are pretty neat

Pancake picnic

This was an awfully long time ago but it was such a beautiful glorious morning that i just can't NOT write about it

So, riding on the cooking high after making the quiche for beth's dinner party (this was mid September i think, September holiday week) i invited my trackers round for a spontaneous pancake breakfast at my house the next morning (I don't know why i call them my trackers although they aren't mine per se i suppose i just feel like they are intrinsically part of me, just like family is part of me)

Spontaneous might not be the word because it gives this air of carefree and lumpfree ease.

Always the last minute planner, i asked them round at approximately 10 pm the night before the breakfast.

And i got home at around half past 11

to wake up the next day at 7 ish to whip up the batter (thanks niki for the best ever recipe) and fry probably about 50 palm sized pancakes (or more)

Ben, Becky, Chun tat, Lauren an Xingyuan came round, and helped set up the mat and carry down the juice and the plates and the condiments and stuff
and then we just sat around and talked, and found out about xingyuans peanut butter allergy, and we laughed so much i don't see how we managed to eat as well but after a while we did manage to finish the ginormous stack and headed back up, where we just flopped on the sofas and i showed them the magic coin swallowing box

which they very cleverly de-mystified very quickly

and i also managed to crop the box causing all the coins to spill everywhere but they helped me fix it together again (and i finally know how to open it hahaha)

anyway after reading this you are probably bored and after writing it it's frustrating i ca't translate the magic of the morning here effectively oh well this emotionless documentation will have to do IT WAS A GREAT DAY I SWEAR

Cities

I've noticed that lots and lots of people look down when they walk

I used to do that too
Walking alone sometimes makes me nervous, so i look down, or bite my lip, or twist my fingers in my hair of my skirt or round each other for lack of anything to hold on to
sometimes i take out my phone and just tap my fingers on the screen although i don't do anything
or i look through pictures and relive my past

But how sad it is to walk through this beautiful world and not see it

maybe it's to do with city living, because apparently new yorkers also look down
(how ironic, a city of sky scrapers and downcast gazes)

anyway, i have resolved to not look down when i walk anymore, unless i am walking in a field of beautiful flowers or balancing on something (like that concrete pavement side on the way to the school toilet)

I tried it on the way home today.
I looked at houses and people going into the MRT and the roof above the escalator and the construction workers and the cranes and the trees and the sky and the people in cars and the children in the swimming pool

oh i did actually look down a few times (Habits are hard to break), and once when i looked down i stopped myself from crunching a dead lizard that had decided to die in the middle of the pavement

But aside from that

looking up is a magnificent thing
you walk taller
you feel freer
apparently when you change the way you walk you feel happier
you do feel happier

4 words

If i hear the words 'you did your best' again this week

i will seriously blow up

(in other words. promos are one way to make you feel discontented)