26/2/2015

Dinner conversation

Me: "Remember the OM performance?"

Mum: "Mmmm, what were you, a tree?"

Me: "... I was a Queen..."

Mum: [tries to stifle laughter, turning red in the face meanwhile]

Me: "And Chance, who was the murderer."

Mum: [Cannot hold it in anymore and is gasping with laughter]

A TREE?!?!?

Apart from that I have discovered that cashews with rice are amazing, and have eaten that for lunch, dinner, and lunch again. I hope cashews help with introspection because I am getting rather tired of writing about my strengths, weaknesses, achievements, failures, career goals, personal goals and whyIshouldbegiventhisscholarship essays.

I also did 50 laps in the pool today, despite the very distracting dongdongdongchiang of a lion dance performance in the background.

I was going to stop at 40 because I HAVE NEVER DONE 40 LAPS IN A POOL BEFORE so i was pretty impressed at myself.

Then for some strange reason the SG50 logo floated into my head and I remembered that poor old Mr Lee Kuan Yew is on life support and I had 10 minutes more anyway so I did another 10.

While I swam I alternated between imagining myself swimming deeper and deeper into an ocean, away from sun-dappled coral reefs and into deep abysses with strange, skinny, fluorescent creatures, and imagining myself swimming through an interstellar-esque space... I must have passed through whole galaxies in 40 laps.

I also tried singing under water (inspired by the poem below), but I sounded rather strangled.

Don’t Tell Anyone

Tony Hoagland

We had been married for six or seven years
when my wife, standing in the kitchen one afternoon, told me
that she screams underwater when she swims—

that, in fact, she has been screaming for years
into the blue chlorinated water of the community pool
where she does laps every other day.

Buttering her toast, not as if she had been
concealing anything,
not as if I should consider myself

personally the cause of her screaming,
nor as if we should perform an act of therapy
right that minute on the kitchen table,

—casually, she told me,
and I could see her turn her square face up
to take a gulp of oxygen,

then down again into the cold wet mask of the unconscious.
For all I know, maybe everyone is screaming
as they go through life, silently,

politely keeping the big secret
that it is not all fun
to be ripped by the crooked beak

of something called psychology,
to be dipped down
again and again into time;

that the truest, most intimate
pleasure you can sometimes find
is the wet kiss

of your own pain.
There goes Kath, at one PM, to swim her twenty-two laps
back and forth in the community pool;

—what discipline she has!
Twenty-two laps like twenty-two pages,
that will never be read by anyone.