let em’ laugh

“ Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me. The presence of another person derails my thoughts; I dream of the other’s presence with a strange absent-mindedness that no amount of my analytical scrutiny can define. ” – Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Woke up derailed on thoughts of another city, another place. Consumed with strange desires and longing, memories of old paths and Belgian mussels in restaurants and dreaming of things to come, all in the 5am cotton wool lightness of my mind. I never want to have any conception of time and place in the morning – I want to live madly – as Walt Whitman declared – sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world – take off and live in another city – linger in night streets – snow angels – old friends like bookends – we’re sentimental so we walk in the rain, I go to the corner and end up in Spain –  stardust clowns, you and I.

So let people wonder

Let ’em laugh

Let ’em frown 

You know I’ll love you 

Till the moon’s upside down

Juliette on Tombstones;

It’s been a passage of time since the last entry – I use ‘passage’ as it seems as though so much has happened, romping through the good times like a little joyous foal! It is my country’s National Day and so I hear little children singing songs in the background, and I remember my childhood days swinging little flags.

I met up with S and A last week in Arab Street- and fell in love with the stranger streets, the way we could slip up to a random restaurant and find Morrocan lamb dishes with all sorts of tea that taste like the same apple concoction. A rendered us with beautiful stories of Nepal and trekking. She also introduced me to Yasunori Kawabata, a Nobel prize winner in literature pretty much unknown to me, but the poignant titles stir a little something in me of many things said in very little words. S’s conception of beauty is newly bound up in a mermaid, and we talked about living in Japan and hiding away. These are two of the people I love the most in the world – and listening to the soft curls of A’s laughter (”kikikiki”) and the clip of her bangles (Scottish, even if they are ethnic, she says) seems to stir something magical. It feels sometimes that the time spent in between meeting such people as A and S is sleeping time – and the secret part of me awakes again in a dream. There is a little of the past – Celine Dion plays in the background as I dabble in some source and observe the little plate of dates and the shopowner seems to have emerged from an Asterix/Obelix comic / and yet the feeling is modern familiarity, things have changed but I am not able to discuss how and in what manner, and all we can do is share a hint of stories that have shaped who we have came to be.

A says I follow her like le’ detective and I seem more curious about people moving through streets. But I love the soft warm orange highlights of the night and the streets which I do not know. The shadows mimic a little film noir adventure. So many things are closed at night and yet they run their own stories in the morning, and it has been this way for years.

J drove me past his old home, a little shophouse, recently. I imagined him as a boy, climbing up and down the stairs, and looking down from the window, of him running away from the vacumn cleaner. He has always told me that he felt that he had lost his childhood, and when I look up the window, I think of years passed with that impish face pressing against the window.

We trooped into a little shophouse because the shopowner told us to. There were little Aladdin-esque corners with rainbow cushions and elaborate carpets, and people smoking shisha in a decadent sort of way. You take off your shoes and lose yourself.

5th Avenue Candy

Vintage ads.

Snow on 71st Street, NYC /2010

It’s real for us

*“It’s real for us,” said Snape. “Not for her. But we’ll get the letter, you and me.”

“Really?” whispered Lily.

“Definitely,” said Snape, and even with his poorly cut hair and his odd clothes, he struct and oddly impressive figure sprawled in front of her, brimful of confidence in his destiny.

This year, I found Harry Potter in one of my downloaded kindle collections and decided to give it a read, just for old time’s sake, and became quite addicted and finished all the books in a week. They are awesome. I always had my tirade against fantasy writing but J.K Rowling made all the difference. I feel towards Harry Potter the way I do towards little cats. Little leaps of affection when I think of Veelas, the twins, the Nimbus broomstick, or Cho, really.

Coffee with company;

Today, I finished reading an old book by a girl who also had insomnia.

Plath, the growing-of-age everyone-read-when-15 book, Bell Jar.

Going through the motions, living on the high life, wondering which figs to clutch on, and so many things that she wanted to do. But I understand how she described that she would never know when the darkness came back to cover her one day.

Another night without much sleep, like the past weeks, but tonight is a little better. Every night I have woken up, pretty much – the mousey art of pacing around unsure of myself, not being able to work or do anything practical but listen to absent jazz and finish a last portion of Somerset Maugham. I have been trying to write, or rather as always, dreaming of writing – the same way one dreams of baking a frilly cake, with rainbow sparkly icing, in the midst of a cold, dark winter. At night, it is quiet, and there is nothing to do but to pace around muttering to oneself that one should really fall asleep.

I could be the girl with insomnia without love, or the girl with insomnia with love, and both are essentially very different. It has struck me in the past week how a simple 3 days can change everything. One moment you are living your mundane excel-posterity life and the next moment you are shot up in a type of dream cloud and talking about substantial dreams with someone and having your feet hang in ski lifts (the Singapore’s version, the easier-termed ‘sky-ride’). It pretty much describes the whole of my life, where I have been caught unawares. I understand how Plath could sit at her table and pay so much attention to spreading caviar on her sandwich, and remember it. Then, in a strange, irreverent way, as all these substantial things begin to grow bigger and overcome you, the little moments (like caviar on a sandwich), start to eclipse them. They become somehow more real. A cavalier type of security, a simple moment of reading a book in front of a window (where the lights shine on a river). I don’t know how happiness lasts, how it begins to start, and what I think of it, anymore.

“If it’s a change in which you’re seeking, I would move you to the beat of a drum.

If it’s a push that you are needing, I would hold you parallel, for you’ll never be alone.If it’s truth that you are missing, I’ll persuade you until you don’t leave a mark.

And if it’s distance that keeps you waiting, three-thousand miles ain’t all that rough.

There’s no home for you here. ” – Christine

Pyrenees

So, WS and I were discussing on the Tour de France which is going on now, which is a 3400km bike race through France. Part of the race takes place at the Pyrenees, which is absolutely gorgeous. But it also reminded of this little snippet of greek mythology:

“In classical mythology, Pyrene is a princess who gave her name to the Pyrenees. The Greek historian Herodotus says Pyrene is the name of a town in Celtic Europe. According to Silius Italicus, she was the virginal daughter of Bebryx, a king in Mediterranean Gaul by whom the hero Hercules was given hospitality during his quest to steal the cattle of Geryon during his famous Labors. Hercules, characteristically drunk and lustful, violates the sacred code of hospitality and rapes his host’s daughter. Pyrene gives birth to a serpent and runs away to the woods, afraid that her father will be angry. Alone, she pours out her story to the trees, attracting the attention instead of wild beasts who tear her to pieces.

After his victory over Geryon, Hercules passes through the kingdom of Bebryx again, finding the girl’s lacerated remains. As is often the case in stories of this hero, the sober Hercules responds with heartbroken grief and remorse at the actions of his darker self, and lays Pyrene to rest tenderly, demanding that the surrounding geography join in mourning and preserve her name: “struck by Herculean voice, the mountaintops shudder at the ridges; he kept crying out with a sorrowful noise ‘Pyrene!’ and all the rock-cliffs and wild-beast haunts echo back ‘Pyrene!’ … The mountains hold on to the wept-over name through the ages.” Pliny the Elder connects the story of Hercules and Pyrene to Lusitania, but rejects it as fabulosa, highly fictional.”

 

Old Disney

Oh the sparkly, sparkly memories!

庸人自扰

我们都是彼此的过客。
尽管你使劲牢牢地握住手里所拥有的一切，
它也会在你没留意时悄悄地溜走。
有时，是在你完全不知情的情况下发生。
更多时候，你自己潜意识中大概早已料到，
但却没有力气，勇气，能量去阻止它的离去。

我们都是彼此的过客。
聚在这生命的舞台上，编写着自己的故事。
能在拥挤的舞台上相遇是一种奇妙的缘分。
能遇见一个人，不管过程有多煎熬，都是一种福分。
如果大家都能这样想，在落幕时我们就不会有丝毫的遗憾。
我真的珍惜和我一起编写我的故事的每一个人。

Winnie the Pooh

I am a fan of A.A Milne’s Winnie the Pooh~! And was thrilled to discover the trailer for the movie which will be coming out possibly end of this year! Will definitely be re-watching to relive the memories. More people will learn how to spell the word ‘hunny’, properly, now.

Also the old-fashioned version of the song, which I absolutely love more. I think Christopher is so handsome in the new movie, not how I imagined! And I love Eeyore. I think Eeyore’s my favourite in his despondent gloom. I can’t stand Tigger even if Irving says he is like D.

A callback to some of my old favourites from Milne!

“Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. “Pooh?” he whispered.
“Yes, Piglet?”
“Nothing,” said Piglet, taking Pooh’s hand. “I just wanted to be sure of you.”

I’m a bit like that. I like to be sure of someone, too.

“Sometimes,’ said Pooh, ‘the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.”

For the good or worse. I choose to look at the better!

“It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn’t use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like “What about lunch?”

Please teach this to more lawyers.

“One of the advantages of being disorganized is that one is always having surprising discoveries.”

Like the time I found a $50 note in my library book.

“It’s snowing still,” said Eeyore gloomily.
“So it is.”
“And freezing.”
“Is it?”
“Yes,” said Eeyore. “However,” he said, brightening up a little, “we haven’t had an earthquake lately.”

Positive thinking.

“Wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.”

Buttermilk blue

Images from thehoneybear, viaoncherie, vogue weekend, buttermilk blue,1923 we heart it