somebody has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by

I am chaotic ...

I want to jump into the ocean because I can't swim

I like you because you are eternal and perfect

the uncertainty is rising in waves and choking me again

I want to run away or I want to make it work

I only want to forget him .... and smoke my breaths away

This is not life. I do not want to live life

These sentences are so tenuously strung together

I am just very sad and my heart is heavy.

Hi 2009. Here's a recap of the resolutions you had:

1. I must quit chatting on MSN.
2. I must come home early and get started on work earlier.
3. I must not hesitate or procrastinate.
4. I will make good of my promises.
5. I must focus.
6. I must stay true to my goals and targets.
7. I must prioritise appropriately.
8. I will always be in control and know what I have to do at any point in time.
9. I must not focus on my feelings or stress and let it distract me from solving the issue at hand.
10. I must not take the easy way out.
11. I must win.

I hate working with alpha-male chauvinists. I hate them so much because they make me feel like the passive aggressive woman that I am vainly trying not to be. I hate being brushed against in a claustrophobic office space and my fat feminist ego is not taking this well. Inside my mind I am under duress and I keep thinking I will kill your fucking dog for fun, so don't push me! I will burn the hair off your hand with a ciggie and it ain't no biggie

I will never love you! What is it about men

I keep making these utterances, these wishes to go out and run away and backpack to Cambodia and bungee jump what do you not understand I am a bird a song a wind a flower! Go away and let me blow, you make me feel so low

here are some pithy one liners

the impermanence of desire, chance, matter
Baldrick advised me on a cunning plan
it must be the candy and the james, yeah I miss you too but here's to forgetting our names
well boys you make good friends till you want to get in my pants
when we're drunk and don't mean a thunk
tell me about the guns on the other side of this street ... tell me about the things that can't penetrate your skin
you're kidding if you think I'm yielding (just because you're alpha and male)
dreaming with my head on fire and nose-high in water

London is wet and cold in winter.

Why I have to make an emphatic statement like that is because it looks deceptively dry (at least to untrained eyes like mine) -- the trees are bare and concrete looks glazed rather than stained and darkened wet. There is wind and wet cold vapours rising from the relatively hotter sidewalks -- like unfurling cold fingers of moist iciness that penetrate the fibres of your clothing and cling on to you; first they attack your toes, then your feet, and soon your body will feel both wet and dry and warm and cold and you are unsure if this is what Eliza Doolittle meant when she sang about the "cold night air". The discontinuity between having no sweat but being very damp is odd.

Now I shall talk about the wind. The wind is both fresh and jarring. Suddenly one will realise that wearing many layers and keeping the entire body warm only heightens one's sensation of the cold at the face. My face felt like it was a snowy landscape of its own, what with my nose being a mountain and becoming snow-capped at the tip ... the steam rising from one's breaths condense at the nose and add to the icicle that is forming. It is very cold where I am small -- I am surrounded by very tall people here -- but my heart is a lark that needs no thawing.

I like New York more than London but that is because NY is younger and fresher and grittier. London is brown in the day and night.

...and why I seem unreasonable to you is because you are blind to the truth in how gender has shaped our judgement.

*

Yesterday at about 2am H smsed me to tell me that I had left my wallet with him during our work gig. I had scarcely known H for a day -- more like a few hours, in fact. What struck me was H's almost archaic, traditional, conventional, conservative world view. I was not particularly surprised -- he is not unique in this world, almost a stock character in the variety one meets in life. (I am always interested in people.) After meeting H somewhere in the centre of the oddly deserted city, I returned back to my room. H then SMSed me: "You reached safely right?" followed by SMSes along the line of expressing concern and offering protection. But what is it about men? Why do they do this? Is it courtesy, concern or quarry motivations?

As usual, I am thinking less of the incident and the people involved; instead, I am thinking about the incident. What is it about gender roles today? I thought nothing of walking in the city in the dead of night, but why did he -- if he did at all -- worry? I could not -- and still cannot -- decide if he is a male aware of his privilege, or if he is perpetuating the fears females have. You know, men, still as oppressors, but in disguise.

Does he expect me to be touched by the concern? To give him a +1 for being a Good Gentleman? If you think I, as a girl, hold control over boys, perhaps the truth is that by operating as a Good Male he exerts pressure too for my affirmation.

The midway point between the joy from accomplishment at work and the solitude one feels at the anonymity of being another yet another commuter is the fatigue. Both produce such profound emotional and physical fatigue that at the end of the day I cannot tell if I am even-tempered or have been robbed of any ability to get into a temper.

That being said, I'm wondering why I've just thrown my life into a full time job. Everybody's telling me to rest, but nobody realises that numbing my mind from realising the intense meaninglessness and chaos of the universe is so blissfully relaxing.

I swear the moments are passing by, and I am becoming soft and small again. I am wrapping myself up in layers of tissue and cotton wool and padding and foam, carefully fastening the lid of the box tight, and waiting to be processed and relayed into the next phase of my life where I am checked, verified, stamped with approval, and lived. I don't really care for packing peanuts, but it's a good substitute for the amniotic embrace of ... infinity. It feels nascent and womb-like.

I am waiting to be reborn as an adult. I feel older than I have ever been. I have never been older.

But now. And now.

2 hours after my last paper I went straight to work. I was a zombie, gripped by school-familiar headache by 3pm. But my job is fantastic, it is a very cool establishment and people are great. (I love working for SMEs) Some regrets since I no longer have the vigour for hardcore photography, but anyway, working at the camera rental is great. Am liking my job immensely, just wished I wasn't so tired and diffident, everyone seemed so utterly at home and cool.

It was a bit like art school outside school, the familiar creative feeling (for a girl like me who now has to be told, by Mr. D, that "if it's not fun, don't do it -- or run away", it feels very safe. How interestingly Modernist, where unfamiliarity is familiar, newness is old, unorthodoxy is orthodoxy ....) and my boss seems very nice.

How do I shake off this student identity and gain a weighted sense of self? I am always introspective ... Why am I uncertain, I cannot rationalise it. Hence, I resolve to deliberate less and be more decisive than ever. Shit, or get off the pot. I shall not waste ink on blots

I smell change in the air, but the same force of change that renders order into chaos also does the inverse. Putting things into order produces an exquisite joy in my circular heart.

#1
victor:
KANASAI
i will be e first hokkien art critic
OMG
SO EXCITING

#2
Jasmine:
the huge theoretical baggage that some works have can hinder or facilitate engagement
victor:
gosh
engagement is jie hun
victor:
no no ding hun

I am still lost and angry, still alienated, still languishing. I need to make plans, take flight, be harried and not tarry, run and not be weary, walk and not faint

I have used so many verbs, but nothing about me is active.

Where do I go now? What do I do? What do I know? What do I want?

What's a girl to do ...

Why do we lead lives like lead, why am I worse for the wear when I've hardly been worn?

My hands, they have grown so long, they are starting to grow lines, they seem marked with their own personality. But what have I done with them?

I no longer wish to care. I no longer wish to see tomorrow. The days are mattering so little, they are passing too fast, who set the reel on speed?

I keep seeing the words float out of my mouth and before I know it all these exhalations have been sucked out from me, I am left with nothing, I cannot articulate anything, I'm asphyxiating! Soon I will be dead! Do you not see this? I am growing old ...

I am sick of travelling, of waiting, of nothingness, of fear and loathing,
yours truly, the commuter

I am becoming very dumb,
as it was adumbrated
when I became dumb
when words made little sense
where self restraint
went from intangible to improbable

I am turning into a vegetable
I have taken root, not taken flight
and I am nutritious
only because I store food
food for thought
and not because I make food
I am slowly becoming boring.

This is very weary.
I am not really weary
because I am drifting and restless
Hoping, dreaming, waiting,
I live my life in a fantasy
no, a pseudo-fantasy
one of carefully choreographed anxious tics.

Lots of incoherent thoughts.

why is our economy built on consumption?

well let me tell you why my child it is because
when eve took a bite from the apple
and God decided to punish everybody
she pointed to the snake and said
"he conned me!"

so adam heard it, and the evil that doomed mankind to eternity
without salvation
is now what we know as the
economy
("he-conned-me")

Image: Jeff Brunner

from here

I dreamt that all my eyelashes fell off. In clumps. My fingers gently pushed them aside, and I simply had no more eyelashes, as if all the inscribed words and their strokes that frame my eye were erased by myself, as if I had given them up. All of a sudden I could not recognise myself, I had lost some kind of great beauty that allowed me to be myself.

My eyes, despite their ability to see, could no longer express or articulate my visions.

I was terrified, not just because the dream felt so real, but because the dream is real. For the three papers that passed, I was unable to express anything, so real was my fear that my eyelashes had all dropped off, as a reminder to myself, over there in another reality.

Hi folks I just woke up

I used to be 8 hours behind, following good morning Britain.

Now I am on Eastern time (12 hours behind), waking up with New York, just in the dark here in Singapore.

I don't know how quickly I can adapt to being the same time again I hope it is soon.

Going to go for breakfast now ... my sister bought dinner.

what's wrong with me? why can I get so emotional on the verge of tears
simply because my mother as usual let me down by buying the wrong soap refill
(body soap instead of the hand soap)
so the fucking foam won't pump and what is up with my obsession with plumbing
and sanitation

I am really just upset because I wash my hands about 100 times a day
and because it's me who uses the hand soap

I am so upset with the BODY soap in the HAND soap MASQUERADING as HAND SOAP
soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo anngrrrrrrryyyyyyyyyyyyyyy
what am I going to wash my hands iwth now I left my disinfectant bottle in schooooooooool

This is, as it is, the infinite nature of malaise, written and coded into the human race. With only sadness we are complete.

A bad time for circles,

to circle around the topic like sharks (submerged, swimming but wishing to drown)
the circle of the flat trigger point on the landmine (like a happy button)
the circle of within and without
the circle of the new moon, imagined (but one persistently scours the sky, perhaps the clouds are obscuring it)
the circle, once drawn, never perfect (with each circle layered over the original in an attempt to correct it, only grows more deformed)
the circle, repeated, of intersections and divisions and never unity
the circle is a whole (a hole)

my mind is raining...

a circle, casually misspelled (Circe)

a circle. hold four beats (hold four breaths)
Miss Wong told my five year-old self
it is a semi-breathe

I could not hold that circle (along with its five lines, my five years)
a circle of air
a circle of life

I could live life in so many ways but what grips me is the failure I will be if I fail to be happy, or convince everybody that I am, that I am not the image of success (the only image: having attained happiness). You are unhappy? you are unsuccessful.

a clock has twelve portions
a circle has three hundred and sixty degrees
we know that time is circular, history repeats itself,
a day in the shoes of the Earth would be a pirouette

you are unhappy? oh, you will tell me to deal with it, because this is a bad time, there is no time, no time to be unhappy, you are perpetually unhappy. I want to un-be un-happy, so even if I am, I must hide it, so I may not be, or at least appear not to be. So there will be no time, never (what will I do at the end of my life when I have done everything I have to? To finally be happy? to learn so, when I have scarcely been?) To put everything behind a temporary marker, to pace myself, to delay it for a better time, wait for it, because it will be sweeter, hold back the climax, she will savour it more? Time for you and time for me, time for waiting, waiting for the holiday, the end of this year, when the kid grows up, when I retire? but life waits for no one, and it terrifies me, there is no time to be unhappy, soon you will be dead!

I love you, he had said to her.

What does one say when one is loved?

She hesitated, she did not know what to say. Perhaps she should thank him. But thank you? Does that assuage the thirst of someone who desperately needs to be loved?

No, she thought. She could not thank him, because love is not a gift, because gifts change hands; never can the giver repossess his gift. Love can be revoked at any time, or even lost, and here he was waiting for her to return it. She could not thank him. He had to keep his own love, because no one can live without love, especially not without self-love. She could not thank him. Putting love in its right place is a thankless task.

He was waiting for her reply. Did she love him, too?

How can she speak of loving someone with these three words? Three -- an odd number -- so sketchy it hardly defined anything. The devil is in the details, she thought. When will you love me? Why do you love me? What am I worth loving for? To speak of loving him would speak of a love of both timelessness and eternity, of perfection in imperfection, of everything and nothing. If love was a miasma worthy of the universe, what matter if she did not make that utterance? Why define what cannot be defined? How could three words promise so much more than it could explain?

I love you, he repeated, this time softer, with less conviction. Did he think he had lost her? Was she ever his to lose?

She thought of the words, steeling herself not to say it. What difference did it make if these words were made to be repeated, to be embellished with increasing intensity (I love you truly, madly, deeply), such that the meaning would be forgotten by the last time she would whisper it to him? And the three words came along with their permutations: I am in love with you, I loved you, you loved me. Would she say these carelessly? Would she put as much thought into them as she did now?

His voice had sunk to a hoarse whisper. Do you love me?

From their confidences and secrets, he had taken everything she had to say, leaving her with a three-worded reply. And now the ultimatum: just one word. Yes or no? How could he take so much by giving his love? How could he take away any grounds she had for loving him, paradoxically, with his own love?

You just don't love, he muttered, pushing away the sheets. You don't know what it means. He stood on the other side of the room, watching her eyes stare into the white expanse of the ceiling. She did not move.

Someone had to say it first, and I'll be damned if it was going to be you.

He was pulling at her like a drowning man, and he would pull at anything (at her heartstrings, instead of unravelling the knots) to elicit a response. But what could she say to a man who only loved and loathed, pulled and pushed? Who would give love to take love? Would her love undo anything (undo her) or would it be her undoing?

And in the same cavalier, brisk movement he made pulling his trousers up, he carelessly uprooted himself from her life.

1. we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size.

2. Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond imagination. It is our light more than our darkness which scares us

3. We can forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light


What meanings and contradictions do they make when juxtaposed?

unpacking racism


Queenie II
Duane Hanson

1988, polychromed
bronze, with
accessories
life size

1. Is an act racist, even without racist intentions? Need something have racist intentions to be racist? If yes, racism is in the eye of the beholder, then what is the difference between racially aware, racially sensitive, and racist?

If in a hypothetical situation, a white woman complains about her black neighbour's poorly kept house responsible for the low property price of the neighbourhood, is it about being white or black? Or is it about wealth and poverty, pride and hygiene, tact and offence, social responsibility and individual freedoms? Is there any merit in recognising race, if it is quickly and inevitably conflated with the multitude of associations we make?

2. We understand that peace requires effort from both ways. But the imbalance of numbers and power begs the question: is it at greater expense to the majority or the minority? Whose responsibility is more significant in reconciliation?

The majority (be it the whites in Western countries or Chinese in Singaporeans) are often accused of racism. So some whites argue that it is ridiculous for them to have the racist name stuck on them, when in predominantly-Muslim countries, the Other religions and races are viewed through xenophobic lenses.

Should we question if we have double standards (for whites and non-whites), or rather, can we even have a single standard? Will it ever be right for us to accuse, say, Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denials, or Egypt's refusal to build a Jewish Museum, or Singapore refusing to allow Malay schoolgirls to wear headdresses, equivalent of the same term that is associated with slavery and the Holocaust?

3. Or is racism a white concept -- a heady mix of white guilt and superiority? Is it a patronising, high-handed white notion to feel guilty for slavery and desire for the world to operate by their utopian, anti-racist ideals?

If we can accept that racism is here to stay, but not to be encouraged, then the question is, how can we unpack the concept of racism? Does it have distinctions of high-level and low-level? Absolute taboos, benign tolerance, collective amnesia; hate crime, job discrimination, lynching ... unseen privileges, race jokes, Sooty and Slitty, yellowface and blackface.

Waleed Aly of Australia described his home to have a "fairly high level of low-level racism". This brings us to ask, what levels are acceptable? How can we negotiate the thin line we walk between tolerance and ignorance?

4. In Queenie, Hanson assaults us with our own prejudices. We encounter her in an empty gallery, and are more likely to be confounded by the lack of an art object than to register that the humble, unsung cleaner standing there is the work itself. Our lack of a gaze and her lack of visibility is the first engagement. Even before we make a conscious attempt to engage we have processed and dismissed her.

When we confront her, she gazes balefully back with a mix of deer-in-the-headlights surprise and resignation, as if she is not used to being seen at all. She looks uncomfortable, and in the silence of our encounter we know what we saw: she is not just a cleaner who feels that she is obstructing us, she is a fat, middle-aged, poor, de-sexed black woman. We are also now painfully aware of our assumptions -- not only those stereotypes, but also how we did not accept that a subject like Queenie could be worthy as high art.

And yet the magic of Queenie is that she is superreal. Being a sculpture, an object, yet one that forces you to register her subjectivity, we take her eyes as one that casts an unwavering gaze. While we use our gaze on her, she is able to reflect it, and gaze at us. We are suddenly conscious that she must be aware of our dismissive behaviour, and probably even processing us by our own markers. We are aware of our race, sex, age, size, wealth, class. Does she look at us with derision? Is she guilty too of these same thought patterns?

The beauty is also that Queenie occupies multiple realms: the social realm of the stereotype she represents, the art realm that an art object is surrounded by, and the physical, spatial realm of the gallery. We respond to her complex presence in many ways. When she is Queenie, the black cleaner woman, we consider her an intrusion into our presence. Yet as Queenie, the art object, she possesses the 'aura' and is desirable. In the spatial realm of the gallery, where Queenie is simply Queenie, and is a double agent if you like, we interact with her with such candour that the clear demarcations of society and artworld melt away.

Perhaps this is the way we should learn to see: considering our lenses and prejudices, similarities and differences. Hanson juxtaposes Queenie with the average, middle-class gallery visitor, along with the Everyday and art, a clever reminder to pay attention to people and real issues. What better than doing it with art?

[Update: It just crossed my mind this could be a modern-day Sartje Bartman. Or is the link simply intolerable?]

we have no time left!!!

reminders are not going to work for me.

every time I get stuck on a question the entire leaf of paper becomes a huge drawing

hello circles hello beautiful women hello girls hello poetry

what are you trying to do, negate the beneficiary effects of mathematics on a young mind like mine?