V e r i t a s . S o p h i a . I u s t i t i a

My self-imposed exile is almost over. Next week I return to school for the first time in almost four months, and I'd be a liar if I said I wasn't the least bit nervous. There will be the unavoidable questions, some genuinely concerned, others patronizing, and of course plenty of that stilted awkwardness that comes with any conversation that tries to ignore the whole matter altogether. It's not going to be easy, and my hide is not as thick as I'd like it to be. I'm told it's best to be humble, to act humble in any case, but I know that I'll go for the jugular the moment anyone tries to take a snipe. And there will be piranhas who, no matter what their opinion of me, are instinctively drawn to blood. I don't know how well 'humble' will sit with me, arrogance has always been my better suit, but nevertheless I do resolve to be dignified, at least. Things have fallen into place far better than I expected this week and I am thankful for that. A stupid e-mail bothered me a little. Already someone wishes to use my condition to his advantage, but he is a mere annoyance, that's all. A mosquito that goes for the far too obvious, right under the eye of its host, ready to be smacked into oblivion. I shall of course duly comply and dispatch him in due course.

Like walking a tightrope across two skyscrapers after downing a bottle of bourbon. No one cares, and who can blame them? When the symptoms are always the same, how many variations can you expect words of encouragement to take? Their patience is not endless. I must learn to endure my depressions on my own. We live in a selfish world, a world in which you have friends only so far as your happiness and your unhappiness are entertaining to them. And it is entertaining, and empowering, to offer comfort to friends when they are down. But when they are perpetually down, then you will realize these same friends will soon find your complaints boring, repetitive, they will tell you to get over yourself. You are no longer entertaining, you don't make them feel good about themselves. Their inability to pull you together spoils their own self-importance, your whining infringes on the gossipy mood of their concurrent conversations on messenger, and so they shut you off, and you are alone in your darkness. I will not deny, it came as a shock, how cruel friends can be. Especially those you had carved a place in your heart for. But it is only human nature, and I am still naive and old fashioned, for I drop everything when a friend is in need and I forget that the world has changed. I suppose I must change along with it, learn to be as ruthless as you are, Reader. Counting off what you have read, treating books as though they were victims of a serial killer. When my eyes are open, I see you, Reader, as truly feeble, checking them off, one by one. You, will never, experience as I experience, you do not have gifts as I have been given, your mind has not the agility of mine. I cannot believe I loved so beneath myself. Whored myself to the unworthy. Check.

I have half an hour to write this. Not that there's anything of particular importance happening at ten. Just time for the next movie on channel 5 to tide over the next couple of hours on another Saturday night in. Desperately need to find something to do, something that won't cost a cent anyway. Three days from pay day and forty bucks in the bank. Gotta do something about that too. I have absolutely nothing set aside for a rainy day... but then, everything will turn out fine. How? I don't know. It just will. That's the beautiful thing about life. My life, anyway. It always does. I've met with obstacles, but I've never failed to win whatever it is I set my heart on. Lately, I guess, I've been somewhat distracted. Come to a crossroads. Too many directions I could take, every road bound to lead to a pot of gold. It was bound to happen. It's insane to think that someone who can pretty much do anything can be forced to do just one thing. For the rest of his life. I'm being dramatic. That is a near fatal flaw. I just need some perspective. So, I am brilliant. It's taken a while, I've not always known what to do about it, but I accept it now. I do. I'm impatient to succeed, but life isn't short, no matter what they say. I'm gonna take one step at a time now, nail everything simply because I can, and to all naysayers, well, watch and learn how the maestro does it, bitches.

Too early. I shall wait.

I waited but nothing came, so I left. Took the escalator down, down. I left the building and crossed the road. Still early, but I enter anyway, I have naught else to do besides.

Looking at covers familiar from yesterday, I try to feign interest but fail. Even I can feel how vacant my eyes must look.

I lied. About nothing coming. I was invisible, that was all. A condition I have become wonted to, though not by choice. Very little I do these days is by choice.

I go back to the first building. I ask the staff for something. Cold comfort it is, but all the same momentarily I exist. I made a request. I savor the moment in sack cloth and ashes. Cold, comfort, indeed.

I stopped waiting after an hour. I held my breath. Those who are not alive have no need for passages of air to course through their finished lungs, fueling hearts that have no need to beat.

Of course it only made things worse. Quite against my will, my heart beat still faster, demanding to be fed. So eat, you fucker. I retch but nothing is regurgitated.

I leave as hideous as I arrived. Only not enough so I can surrender all hope of love.

The beautiful have troubles we can only dream to have.

Got precious little done today, but little is better than normal, if you consider I've hardly emerged from beneath my sheets in the last week. I've started on a new book- reading, not writing- and its pastoral setting has had a settling effect on me, which is great, given how disagreeable I've been. Yes, I can be a cantankerous old grouch even from my bed and behind a locked door. Today I got out of bed and to the gym, and blimey, I had the kind of workout I wish I could have every time I step into the damn place. Key difference: instead of hopping from one machine to another, hence one set of muscles to another, I just did bicep curls for a solid hour. Amazing, the different ways man has come up with for a person to flex his arms... Nothing makes a man feel more like a man than having rocks for arms. Now I can retire to bed feeling better about myself. Tomorrow I shall work on my shoulders. Nothing makes a man feel... anyway, as God is my witness, as soon as I lose the 30 pounds I need to, I will never allow myself to get fat again. Me want to look like porn star. With many degrees from overseas. Yeah, smart porn star. Awesome. I think I just became stupid.

Let's see. I have nine weeks ahead of me. What can I do in nine weeks? I'm afraid of setting goals cos I tend to let whole days slide. Like today. I was determined to get something done today yesterday but so far I've slept through most of the morning and half the afternoon. I need something more concrete. Like, tomorrow morning at nine, I shall make my way to X and get A, B and C done. This is me writing after twenty-six barren days. I just can't seem to gather my wits around me long enough to compose a paragraph. Even now, I am kinda confused as to what I'm writing about. Maybe I'll talk about fish. Or the G-20 summit in London. Is that REALLY London? I've not seen crowds that big or that angry since Bush, Jr. visited a few years back. So far, all the pictures I've seen are angry mob scenes and world leaders posing with the Queen. I think we'll be in this recession for a while. Oh, no... blank again. I am not opinionated to write at length about anything. Let's face it. The drugs have really made me dumber than... no good simile. Sigh. I'm in a rut. God help me. I need to feel inspired. The sweltering heat is melting my brain. Am I gonna publish or junk this? Sigh, I'll let this be a living record of just how bad a funk can get.

Saturday morning. The neighbor's son getting married today. I was only told this morning. Same age, 29. Funny, I never even noticed him before with a girl. But then again, when have I actually paid any attention to my neighbors? It's a shame, really. My entire life spent here and I don't even know anyone's last name, or first, down this lane. Shy or just completely anti-social? A wee bit of both. Coffee in the morning, maybe a movie borrowed from the Esplanade library. Decent selection, I can now appreciate, which probably only means I'm sufficiently removed in memory to the library at Goldsmiths, with its hoard of celluloid treasures. Taste of Cherry or The Magnificent Ambersons? Maybe both. I have time to burn today. No, I don't, not really. There's always work to be done. Follows then obviously, why do it today? Photography exhibition at four at the National Library. Hit a hundred pages on Ulysses. Big fuckin' deal. The book's 900 pages long.

I went to the washroom. It was empty. I was grateful. I went to the farthest cubicle and locked the door. Then I cried. Quietly. When what I wanted, what I needed, was to howl. A primodial scream, an inhuman cry. Hold these hands please. They quake. Hold them please and stop their trembling. The pain, its grip on breath so vicious, last night I asked my mother to help me kill myself. She held me as she had done a hundred times before but I noticed, even she had not the heart to rebuke me now.

Back at school and immediately the demons return with rejuvenated fury. What passed before in near silence now seem incapable of moving without piercing cries. I howled in anguish yesterday but all that did emerge from deep beneath was a haunted silence full of despondent cancerous poisons. Unsolicited attention called by my trembling hands. Be still, my body. I sit alone now, all are gone, a short moment of reprieve. I have cried my anger and these my eyes are swollen from envy and despair. I wish to care no more. I pray, but do not know who or what it is I ask for mercy from. When gone, my heart is still. I do not have to hear my heart crumble into dust. Stay gone, then, stay gone.

It has begun.

A reprieve at last, and arising from such dire circumstances. I can hardly believe what happened a fortnight ago did truly transpire. Leaning my head against the window, my mum driving, I stared stonily at the rain trees that lined the expressway. Perhaps sensing something was on my mind, my mother said, isn't life beautiful. A far cry from what I was thinking. Myself, I wondered how the world would look without me in it, and realized nothing would be different. Them trees would still be there, the cars as well, the day sunny anyway.

When I awoke, it took me but an instant to realize what had happened. My mother and my sister were beside my bed, my mother smiling in a truly happy way I'd not seen for a long time. Perhaps I should have been shell-shocked, or at least surprised to find myself in a hospital bed in the ICU, but to be honest, I was somewhat relieved. The machines around me, the wires and tubes snaking all over my upper body, they were breathing for me, making sure my heart did not stop again. To be alive was, oddly, no longer my responsibility, and for that I felt a curious relief.

Something snapped in my brain. I recall thinking that the tablet looked so lonely there in the bottle by itself and the next I knew, I was emptying the rest of my meds into the bottle. T'was as if there were no rational faculty in my mind. I knew what I was doing and it seemed the most perfectly normal thing to do. My last thought, I remember now, looking at the myriad colors, bewitched, was how pretty they all looked. I suppose that's what some might call madness. I slept, then sleep became something else, every organ turned lethargic under its intoxicating spell.

*

"So."
"Is that so?"

*

I remember, once in therapy, being made to re-enact our deaths so as to be resurrected, to be alive anew. I guess I took it a little too seriously this time. But oh how alive I do feel, right now! Suddenly it is as though the beating my body underwent has caused my mind to finally drop its own poisoned shackles. I have canvases sitting ready. I have words again. I have taken a trip to Bountiful via a pitch-black tunnel and better than having my canvases ready, I, I am finally ready. I have lived more in the last two weeks than in the whole time since I returned to Singapore so many years before. I love it. I cannot have enough of it. It is not life of which I speak but some charge in my mind that had been lost, lost, but found then while my body was slowing into a permanent sleep. Forced back to wakefulness, suddenly I realize I have emerged with it from depths unknown.

I am ready now.

It's not easy, living these mood swings. Mostly it's hard not to talk about them without appearing needy of attention. Please, this isn't me. The real me is nothing like this. You'd like the real me. Some optimism there, I guess, I still think of the less frequent as the real. But the real is what is there. And the real me begs. Begs for scraps of sympathy. Eliciting pity. I turn into a leech the more this condition spirals farther out of my control. Sheer, utter desperation to belong in the society of man. I don't want to be alone, God help me. And for that, I hate and loath myself. I have often wondered if this is how a man who knows how to swim feels as he tries to drown himself. Complete and unmitigated self-hatred draws him like a siren to swim to exhaustion into deepest waters, but that base animal instinct to fight to take in air, it makes him kick, kick to live. Let me die. Let me live. Two wills in a single body wage war upon each other. Self-mutilation. The smell of blood. It's no wonder I am alone. The uninfected have their instincts as well. They see dirty blood for what it is, even the vampires know better. They keep a safe radius. Jealously I take swipes at them. They walk past me in nonchalance. I have no weapons and my attempts to draw them into my circle is so easily fended off as to require no energy at all. I am simply a ghost. My heaviest blows are as useless as a small gust of wind. They move on, the pedestrians. My bitterness takes no one down but me. Me myself and I. I. I. shoot myself in the foot each and every day with this consumptive jealousy. Am I as obvious as that? I love you. Bang. I love you. Bang. Bang. Bang.

I don't want to do this anymore. It is altogether meaningless to me. I nod and nod as though my head were attached to a spring. I sit here in my cubbie hole and know I should be doing something but I can't get out of my seat, my arms are weighed down by manacles of noxious lead, they corrode into my flesh and burn apart my nerves. My hands are either shaking or they are paralyzed. One or the other. I am on an island and joy would flood my heart if I could sink or drift far away from here. He is looking at me, to me, and I have nothing but a dull emptiness to impart. I don't know why I should care so much what he thinks of me and shamed for how little I care to change anything anyway. It's a struggle everyday. Despairing, it is a constant struggle. I need time to do it well, to line up to take my shot, but the short balls catch me flat-footed. I move like a buffalo in a rice padi, thick hide bearing whiplashes that pour some pain, shame, yet I am too stupid to actually move. One foot in front of the other. Raving mad inside. Searching for satisfaction where it doesn't exist, making it up. All good denied so only pointlessness is left. I don't care enough anymore. It scares me, pains me because I want to care about what I do. I want to be a person who cares about what he does. I never imagined I would be who I am now. Shiftless. I suck. I get worse and worse at what I do and I can't bring myself, feet dragging, drugged, to do better. I want to and I don't want to. Most of the time, I just want to die. I am listless, vacant, let-down, letting down. I want to leave this place but fear what dreams may come. I am scared to stay and lose myself. Scared to run away. I will lose it all. My spirit, my desire to live, live as fully as I should unless I arrest this falling. Spent. I don't. I can't take one more day, week, year. Spent. I am finished, approaching an age, oh my God.

Energy levels are so low… I can’t seem to bring myself to wakefulness. It’s a bad day for it too, with classes till 4:30pm today. It’s exhausting enough putting on a chirpy front for a couple of hours, but god almighty, the whole damn afternoon?

Sweet angels, give me strength.

It's gonna be a long day. I've got only one class today, but I'm supposed to assist in a Batik workshop for some kids visiting from China, plus there's a Parent-Teacher Meeting this evening for the Year Ones. I haven't been to the gym all week; am seriously becoming self-conscious about my double chin. Definitely gonna have to hit the weights tomorrow to make myself feel better. I've started and stopped The God of Small Things, and started instead on Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture. Determined to see it through. Have also planned a movie marathon tomorrow- hopefully I'll be awake and alive enough to go for my workout and then sit in the dark from 10:30 till 19:20 or thereabouts. Phew. Gonna watch Changeling, Milk and Rachel Getting Married. Yes, the Oscars will soon be upon us. Real glad that Slumdog Millionaire stormed the Golden Globes. Good to see a film set in a recognizable Asia (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon thus not counted) being recognized by the mainstream and wonderful to finally have perennial nominee Kate Winslet winning not one but TWO awards. Can't wait to catch Revolutionary Road. Loved the book, can only hope the movie is just as devastating.

Good morning. I am at my desk in school. It’s a quarter past nine and I’m having a coffee. Obviously I am not doing any work, as the existence of these lines can attest to. I am simply not in the mood. This “not in the mood to work” mood was one of the biggest contributors to my nervous breakdown last year. I let it eat into my paranoia; let it become something bigger than it ought to have been. Not again. My feet feel as though they are trapped in concrete. Last year, I tried to reason with the unreasonable. Force myself out of what I thought was a funk. I’m having none of that this time. I have a lackadaisical attitude to my job, so there. I am often bored, so there. I’d much rather be asleep, so there. I admit everything. I confess to all of the above. And I am not doing any work and not feeling bad about it. I didn’t dare to stop moving last year even though every part of me begged myself to. I was on a express train to a crash inevitable. A goner without even knowing it. Until I was so far gone I was crying by the side of a busy road. Today, I’m in the mood again. Fuck it all. I shall emerge from it when it happens. Ladida. I’m perfectly happy being so fucking goddamn lazzzzzzzzy.

1 Jan 2009:

1. Kick ass at work. Enough is enough. I am brilliant, but I've been inconsistent thus far. There is no reason for me not to take down 'em rockets in flight at will. Enough is enough. I'm keeping my head in the game now. I'm so tired of seeing minions ranked above me who have no right to be in this, my order of the universe.

2. Create. I am an artist. I answer to no one, I listen to no one but hear the shuffling of quick steps in my mind. These years of self-imposed exile has served incubation enough for my potential to truly transform into a genuine phenomenon. I am no longer the precocious young genius, I start with nothing again. Except my exceptional hands, my beautiful mind. I will make things, and they will be great.

3. Stay sane. No more crashes. I am ripped asunder by hurricanes. I no longer control my body entirely. I must be more aware, more alert, to make sure the madness does not pounce on me again. I will not be afraid. Fear does not become me. Go for the lines, hit with enough topspin for margin of error. Blast 'em cannonball.

31 Dec 2009

i

The monster, fire-breathing gargoyle, slain, fallen idol into its own sulfurous smoke, and lifting my head above its evil stench, at last I'm see a former greatness smashed, in broken pieces, ground into a fine dust that clogs the breath, that has yet to settle but will, and what a wondrous sight it is, such buds that blossom from the utter annihilation of that which towered and cast its hefty shadow, over on days directly under, across when faraway, like jagged dagger to needle point from nigh to eternity.

ii. The best beats, yearbook 2008

1. The Killers, 'Human'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d97XFGR_IP0

2. Beyoncé, 'If I Were a Boy'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3811N79n_R4&annotation_id=annotation_959262&feature=iv

3. My Morning Jacket, 'I'm Amazed'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzdoOGUsEKg

4. Coldplay, 'Viva la Vida'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvgZkm1xWPE

5. Santogold, 'L.E.S. Artistes'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CtzFEAGHcw

6. Beyoncé, 'Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mVEGfH4s5g

7. Beck, 'Gamma Ray'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4o3IYGZD-lQ

8. Estelle feat. Kanye West, 'American Boy'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6dFZF1-bcE

9. Pink, 'So What'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bNDr1A6dTU

10. Leona Lewis, 'Bleeding Love'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-ctIC65PV0

Oh, I can't believe I forgot this glorious number by TV on the Radio...

TV on the Radio, 'Golden Age'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXq0z1mVfzQ

Our new Year Ones will register this coming Friday and I've been tasked to speak for five minutes about the school's special art program. At least it's something to do... Strange, I've simultaneously and paradoxically been bored to distraction and loathed to do any work. Uh well, something's gotta give.

Shopping spree after receiving December's bonus. I know I should be saving, but hey at least I paid off all my debts before I embarked on The Rape of Orchard Road... bought a pair of Evisu jeans, a dress watch from Cerruti , a shirt from Calvin Klein and a pair of loafers from Tod's. Christmas sales. Love 'em.

Trifecta of R&B-slash-hip/hop CDs- Ne-Yo's Year of the Gentleman, Beyonce's I am... Sasha Fierce, and Kanye West's 808s and Heartbreak. So far, very satisfied. Reading going very slowly... Roberto Bolano's 2666, a mega- and meta-detective novel containing five separate narratives that converge on an apocalyptic scene of mass-murder in a Mexican border town. This from the blurb of course. I am barely 150 pages into its near 1000 pages...

Feeling like a zombie today. Slept through the whole of yesterday. LITERALLY. Bad, bad move. Woke up hourly through the night and got up eventually at seven this morning with fingers and knees that couldn't stop shaking, sheets and all scattered all over the floor... and vaguely remembering a dream/nightmare in which I was watching some twisted version of Hitchcock's Psycho with a black Anthony Perkins (with an Afro) making off into the sunset carrying his mother who gradually grows (regresses?) into a wrinkled nymphet flirting incestuously amidst girlish giggles. Ugh.

No more whole-day sleep-ins. Gym today and tomorrow. Most definitely.

I cannot have a conversation with my mother without it turning into a full-fledged war of words. I am smothered by all the accusations of ingratitude, insinuations of incompetence, silken sighs of resignation that only thinly veil her contempt for all the ambitions and expectations I haven't met. I cannot live with a mother who cannot hide that she needs to steel herself- a tiredness, an agitated impatience fleets across her countenance, she inhales sharply- whenever I open my mouth to speak, as if in anticipation of the stupidities that I will utter shortly. I cannot stand having conversations in which she hears what she wants to hear and not what it is I am saying. "Will you shut up and listen to what I am saying?", I grimace in the end, when I can take her chiding my invisible alter ego no longer, and that she hears, and that I realize is the person she has been speaking to for the last, what is it, 20, 30 minutes? I don't think she can even see me anymore. I know I must leave this house, leave this country, leave a mother who no longer knows me and a father who openly despises me, not only in order to save myself but to keep together what shreds of family ties remain, be as far away as possible from the noxious fumes that are smothering all of us. I count the days. I have two more years of this purgatory to live through. "Help me", said the note pinned to his chest when they turned him over.

K has a shelf of 91 unread novels. The books are ordered alphabetically by the name of the author. Here are some of the books on K's shelf: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Berlin Novels by Christopher Isherwood, Under the Net by Iris Murdoch, Goodbye Columbus by Philip Roth, and Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh.

If K wanted to, he could re-order the books according to when he purchased them. He knows why each book attracted him, and why each has not (yet) been read. Take Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence. It was snapped up as soon as K had finished Lady Chatterley's Lover. Browsing through Lawrence under 'L' at the book store, K read on the blurb of Women in Love that it is considered the author's masterpiece.

The same principle of purpose follows for most of the other 90 unread novels. The Remains of the Day followed Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Libra followed Don Delillo's Underworld, The Swimming Pool Library followed Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty. One of K's greatest frustrations is that he tires of a writer's style very quickly. That is not to say he has no wish to revisit the oeuvre of the author at a later date, but K has never read two books by the same author consecutively. Which begs the question, why must K immediately possess Women in Love after Lady Chatterley's Lover, Libra after Underworld. K cannot quite fathom the reason himself.

K despises his own literary tastes sometimes. He is well-read but he knows he is something of an elitist snob. He reads masterpieces. He reads Booker Prize winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, Nobel prize winners. He has no sense of adventure. He couldn't tell if a book were good or bad without a critic's review, and even then, K only goes by the New York Review of Books or the Washington Post, sometimes The Guardian.

K convinces himself he is a busy man and the reviews and awards help "distill" the bad from the good, but still, K wishes he has a mind of his own or at least the time to develop such a mind. Today, K begins to read Home by Marilynne Robinson. He read Gilead in 2006. It won the Pulitzer Prize. Love, K

It's been a good week at the record store. I decided not to get the Kings of Leon, though from the way I've been obsessing about it, I'd probably not to an "if" but a "when". I hate that good music comes out all at the same time. A little like the Oscars seasons, when you spend a whole year watching 'Wedding Crashers II' and 'Hollywood Chihuahua' before *cue breath for God* they shower out cineplexes with the likes of 'No Country for Old Men', 'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly' and the best picture I've seen since 'Brokeback Mountain', Paul Thomas Anderson's 'The Will Be Blood'.

Anyway, I digress. It's been a good month for music, especially with Miley Cyprus and the Jonas Brothers going off to hybernate while us true rockers peel back the blue-screen to discover Sigur Rios was behind that loopy soundtrack... the Kings of Leon are knocking back a few to the tunes of Kid Rock and right across the street on soundstage, The Killers are strumming Mr. Bojangles with Nina Simone. The Cure's teaching Madonna how to play the electric guitar, it's right laugh, man. Katy Perry's picking daisies for Pink. Who has a thing for Sergio Mendes.

Life is beautiful.

I am angry, frustrated, bitter, tired.

I feel betrayed by the propaganda of my youth.

I feel as though I was blindsided into leading this miserable, worthless existence.

I am a passionate human being. Or I was. All that intensity of feeling is slowly and painfully being sapped out of my being.

I feel so empty. Wasted. I have so much to give. Or I had. I've thrown it all away, going down down down.

I am helplessly stranded in a country ravaged and contaminated by the mutations of its own disease.

Vampire.

It has stripped me of everything that made me a human being. The things we do to each other.

I see through your trickery. Broken, but still living, you bloodsucking bitch.

I am sick and full of hate.

I go to church every Sunday. I know a lot of people have problems with the doctrines of the Catholic faith but to those detractors, I simply shake my head and always think to myself, who am we to question the unerring wisdom of our Holy Father in Rome? Like the Pope, I think abortion is wholly immoral and homosexuality an abomination to mankind. Women who are pregnant must give birth. That is God's law (thanks be to God) and even if the child is begotten not of its mother's choice, she should simply bear her cross as our Lord Jesus bore his cross on the road to Calvary. As for homosexuals, their sex act is quite simply a grotesque act of violence against the natural order of the world for which there is no excuse.

I am very thrifty. I never buy books. I borrow from my friends or the library. Oh, about my friends, I should probably mention that all of them are Catholic or have the potential to be converted. They wear very modest clothes- as do I, never drink, swear or smoke, come from sensible families, and they have a knack for never appearing to be in any romantic relationships until the sudden announcement of their upcoming nuptials. Forget about holding hands and kissing and going on dates and I shudder to think what else. We play badminton on weekends. We all love tennis, but badminton racquets are so much cheaper so we compromise. And we always play mixed doubles, so we can interact with members of the opposite sex in a safe social environment.

I watch PG-rated movies. I don't own an article of clothing that's not bought in a second-hand shop, on sale, after an hour of haggling. I don't believe in looking good. That is vanity. That said, I'm always impeccably turned out. Obviously, gorgeous just happens. I work 12 hour workdays and never complain. I am so good at work I am promoted every second week. After two years of work, I've saved enough to buy a sensible car and earned two Teacher of the Year plagues which my dad has had framed in gold-colored plastic. Oh, and I earn a little on the side by carpooling to work. Always looking out for chances to make money, that's me. Have I mentioned, I get on with everyone at work? When I come home at the end of the day, I'm always chipper. I watch TV downstairs with my family, we all enjoy the mandarin soaps, we laugh. I don't lock myself up alone in my bedroom from when work ends till it begins tomorrow.

One of those days when you feel as though everything that could possibly go wrong will. The phone rings and you know there will be nothing but ill tidings. I've switched it to silent mode but the messages are still coming in and as expected, nothing but banalities and disappointments.

Disappointments at every turn. Can't seem to catch a break. Paranoia courses through every nerve in my body. I'm half expecting myself to drop dead at any moment. Cold bullet in the back. That's the way to make an exit.
I have nothing to say to them anyway. You come back from a set down, storm through the second and then lose your serve at 5-all. I feel like I wasted two hours watching a comeback turned letdown.

How bad is it? TV, music, books, basically all my night life- seriously, do nothing but depress me. I'm five episodes into 'Lost' and beginning to wish everyone on that damned island would just go Takeshi Kitano on each other.

Woke up, sent my nephew to school. On the way he told me, in that three-year old way of his, not to work so hard, to be home early, cos, in his own words, when he comes home from school, he "look here look there but cannot find duaku".

Got home, checked my mobile. Don't know why I did that. I know I've shrugged off all responsibilities irresponsibly; I guess I'm checking for repercussions. Two missed calls from my reporting officer.

Screw it. If I'm gonna crash and burn, I might as well go up in a ball of flames. Who knows, they may hit me so hard I finally break and cut through all my niceties and give 'em the kinda shots I vaguely remember having.

It's nine in the morning. I've already had a beer. I'm gonna wash up, take a shower, change my clothes, maybe head somewhere where I can read The Name of the Rose and think, oh yeah, baby, this is what I'm getting in a hot can of soup for and I'm loving it, hell, yeah.

I feel like a fool.

To think, I used to believe that school was fun. It certainly looks more pleasant when you're a student.

Rules are meant to be broken. Honest, they are.

School sucks when you're a teacher. Before I became a teacher, I didn't have a clue how much BS teachers had to put up with.

And I'm not talking about BS from students because you expect that. That's what makes school exciting even.

I'm talking about the BS we get from the management, its bureaucracy and inflexibility.

It is completely incapable of seeing people as individual beings. Each child, they try very hard, must be nurtured to his/her full potential. Differentiated learning, they cry. No two children are the same.

But it's a completely different matter when it comes to teachers. One size fits all.

We have to come to school and sit on our hands for two weeks after school's ended for the kids.

I close my eyes and see these shady figures- the Management- discussing what to do with the teachers after term ends...

"give 'em their holidays?"

"but we pay them..."

"we do"

"but school's out..."

"there's nothing for them to do here"

"they can find something..."

"yes... if we let 'em loose, who knows, they might..."

"... have fun..."

(quiver, quiver)

"they won't like it though..."

"we pay them... we must get our money's worth..."

"if we see them..."

"... it means they can't be doing anything else..."

"even if it means they're doing nothing..."

"... they'll still be doing nothing because we want them to... because..."

"... because we make them..."

"because we pay them to"

(collective evil snickering)

Anyway, I'm not in school now, though I'm supposed to be. I figured, hell, I used to sneak out of school as a student when there weren't classes. I'll be damned if I'm gonna sit around for hours just to clock my number of hours.

Brave new day. America has spoken and its collective voice is clear and resounding...

Old Master Yoda: Wisely for once, you have chosen.

Commander Adama: Thank the frakking gods.

Some people are blessed with boundless energy. I am not one of them. I am easily tired, constantly sleepy, and forever bemoaning the fact that I can’t do whatever I want, whenever I want to- which is, of course, to sleep.

The art and music teachers have it tough. Our lessons are scheduled for after two, but we have to be here at seven in the morning like everyone else. Why, why, I ask, only to be referred to a rulebook. See clause 5.2 sub-clause 2.4 sub-sub-clause 3.1 All Employees Must Report For Duty Every Morning At 0700hrs.

Which still doesn’t answer the question.

My colleagues in the department seem to cope with this inane rule fairly well. They seem to be able to find work to do out of nothing. There’s always marking to be done, the shelves can be reorganized, the ceramics room needs to be hoovered… I just stare into space.

Or write rubbish. Like now.

I suppose I should take my job seriously. I am, after all, being paid to perform this charade- title of performance: Professionalism. But it is, to me, just that, though. A job. How does one take a job seriously? You couldn’t pay me enough to be professional if I didn’t depend on your pay to feed and clothe myself.

How did we get tricked from being hunter-gatherers to becoming serfs to the paycheck? Oh, I can’t even get away from my life turning into one tired cliché…

I feel like my life is a sad cocktail of Eleanor Rigby, Help! And Let It Be… blended with a Dolly Parton.

“Nine to five, they got you where they want you
There’s a better life
And you think about it, don’t you”

I want to go to Rio and spend my mornings selling Christ the Redeemer figurines that I make at night out of a clay mould. I’ll spend my afternoons at the beach soaking up the sun and surf. When the sun sets, I’ll go to a nice bar with great Samba music, smoke weed and flirt outrageously all through the night with anything that looks vaguely human in my intoxicated state.

Of course then my figurines won’t get made…

I'm trying desperately to find my groove back, by which I mean the overwhelming desire to devour books as if my life depended on it. Lately it's just been so difficult getting my head into a good book. And they ARE good books. A friend of mine reassures me that One Hundred Years of Solitude is a tough one to get into, but I still feel abnormally out of it. I can't seem to get through three pages without thinking of giving up, it's a wonder I'm sixty pages into it now... I keep looking up at my bookshelf but all I see are books that I've gone three, four, five pages into. I end up going to Kino to get more books, but they all end up within days, sometimes mere hours, joining their predecessors' fate on the shelf. The dreaded shelf. When I lie in bed and look up at it these days, I keep imagining the books flying out at me, shrieking like sirens for the injustice I am doing them. It's all very The Birds or The Exorcist, but it's true. I feel the guilt of a lover who has fallen out of love, trying to rekindle a passion that's just lost... temporarily, I hope. It all results in making my life these days an utter misery, since reading is the only thing I do when I'm not working. Now I just find myself staring into space like an insomniac when I'm alone in my bedroom after dinner.

It isn’t nine yet and I’m done for the day. How’s that for efficiency? Now if only there was a way I could sneak out of school and to the gym… I’m sitting in my oddly spacious cubicle (odd because I’m the newest and most inexperienced teacher here and yet I’ve been given a space roughly twice as large as my reporting officer’s… but hey, I’m not complaining) feeling both guilty and triumphant. Triumphant because while every other teacher is now frantically marking, rushing for the two p.m. deadline when our marks are due, I am, well, done. I was done yesterday at seven yesterday.

In three days, I’ve had to sit through 30 graduating students’ viva voce, mark their coursework, mark the art history essays of two levels, and I just grit these teeth in need of whitening, narrowed my blinkers, gave the occasional fist pump (and an imagined “c’mon!”), and kept on at it, plugged and plugged and I’m done. I Am Done. I am so frigging efficient I feel I should march to the principal’s office to notify her of the existence of such an exemplary member of staff. Hey everybody, mind if I take my book out and read, ’cause I really don’t have anything to do today...

I know, I know, I’m a smug little S.O.B. but I’m only like this ’cause I know this feeling ain’t gonna last. I know I’m fast but I also know I’m careless, and be it as I’ve checked and double-checked my calculations, I am so ready for one of the clerks in the G.O. to come marching up to me on Monday to enquire how one can pass through 28 years and still not know how to add and subtract (actually more likely the mistakes will come from division… always my weakest link). So, yeah, methinks I’m entitled to a little cockiness today. Muahahaha. I’m going to the gym as soon as the clock strikes two and the intranet’s jammed with teachers desperately trying to log in their marks and I am going to pump some serious iron today!

How many more of these "what's there to say" posts am I gonna churn out? I'm completely out of whack, body and soul seem to be dislodged from each other, and my sense of humor is AWOL. I am so bored and boring. I am boring myself. Are you as bored as me? Have you even read up to this sentence? Poor you. My very, very deep felt apologies. It's alright to waste my own time, but what if people actually read this? That's two minutes they could've spent doing something more useful... you, you could have smiled at your dog and watched him wag his tail back at you, you missed a Kodak moment because you were reading this cannon load of shit. You could have squeezed a zit and had more fun. You could've frolicked in bed. You could've, you really, really could've. My life is an interminable bore. Where have all my friends gone? Oh no, I'm not going down that road again. Where did my life go? I could have, I really could've made a mess of my life... I could've decided not to take the damn scholarship, go to London on my own funds, waited tables to make ends meet, palled around with "the wrong sort", failed my exams and come back to Singapore in disgrace! I could have been a Singaporean Failure and actually LIVED!!! oh god damn...

I keep starting to write and then stopping because I know what it is I will be writing about, inevitably, inevitably, even as I pen these words, I know it's coming, and I think all my readers must be so weary of hearing it all the time- I know I am- over and over and over, it's always about poor me, my sad, lonely existence. I read what I have written and already I cringe at how stupid I am... to even think I have "readers"! Shameless! What am I bitter about? I started a blog to nudge myself back to writing, I still tell myself this is for me to write whatever I please, so why do I care about "readers", unless I am the "readers" and I truly cannot bear my own wimpish whining... well, of course I cannot bear it! I don't want to keep going on and on about not having friends and being so unnecessary to others so that I can die tonight and not be noticed by anyone but those who have a vested interest in my being alive. I am trying to get myself back on my feet again, but I don't have an ounce of confidence left in me, no belief that I can honestly one day shrug off this piteous neediness to actually, god, do something worth doing! I don't even have a proper train of thought right now. Should I can this post? Or leave it, even if it's absolutely pointless? I can want to have something up here again, words, even if they do nothing except show me up for the no-talent hack I am. Yes, fine. Yes. And now I'll shut it. Yes, shut your face. Yes, fine, now I'll shut up.

Don’t. Did you like it? Do it.
I won’t if you don’t want me to. I guess I did. No.
I don’t want you to. You guess? Please. Do it.
Thank you. I did. I don’t want to.
How about a drink? Good. It’s easy.
I can’t. And you? It’s not about that.
Okay. I did. Then what?
I’m sorry. Good. I just don’t want to.
No, no, it’s fine. So, I guess this is it. Shit.
I guess I should be leaving. I guess so. I’m sorry.
You can stay if you want. Alright then. Doesn’t matter.
It’s late. I’ll see you again. You alright?
Yes, of course. Of course. ’course.

I have trouble putting ‘Teach Less, Learn More’ into practice. Obviously I have been vigorously indoctrinated in NIE and afterwards in school to believe that this is the ideal form of classroom instruction, and I do believe that, even though the chief reason I find this pedagogy appealing is not so much for the benefit of more students’ learning as for my getting more free sleep time.

I suppose if the Ministry’s proselytizing had been completely successful, I should be patting myself on the back for a job well done. I have after all, just completed a lesson plan for a three-hour art history class for which I do not have to prepare any materials besides guiding questions and the kids will go fish for answers themselves in the library and on the internet while I “supervise” proceedings.

Why do I feel so guilty then? Because I am not bent over my laptop now creating two dozen slides as teaching aids, because I am not doing any research into the topics the kids are supposed to learn. All I’ve done is arranged the scheme of work into a list of questions that the kids have to find the answers to themselves. Hey, they’ll learn how to be independent learners. So I tell myself. Shoo, guilt, you have no place here. I’m just following the orders of the management.

A: No, that’s not possible! I saw it with my own eyes. She was lying there in a pool of her own blood, like, in a mess...

B: … well, where is she now?

A: How the hell should I know? Like I said, I saw her lying there and I freaked out, okay, I just ran!

B: You didn’t think to go get someone?

A: Well, you’re here, aren’t you?

B: I meant, like the police or an ambulance…

A: Are you stupid or something? I might’ve killed the damn bitch…

B: So you called me here to do… what?

A: I… I don’t know… clean up the mess or something.

B: Jesus Christ, you sick bastard. You kill my sister and expect me to help you get rid of her body? Are you out of your mind?

A: Fuck, you were the one you called her a cunt so fucked up she deserved to be…

B: I didn’t mean it! I didn't... God, how can anyone be such an idiot?

A: I… I… well, I don’t know if I killed her anyway. I mean, she’s gone… she could have...

B: What? She could have got up, mopped up her own blood and left, you fucking moron?

A: I don't know. I don't know. She was here, God damn it! Where is she?

B: You tell me. You killed her.

A: I don’t know that! We don't know that!

B: Oh, fuck you!

A: Jesus, she came at me, I pushed her and she just fell over the… the thing.

B: The pipe.

A: The pipe. It was self-defense.

Let this be the end. Let this be the beginning.

The period of sixteen books is over and tonight I start at one again; it is both one and seventeen, a break away and an adhesion that is all part of one and the same finite circumference. No, it will not be drawn again, this path, but history repeats itself, over and over, even in, especially in a single lifetime.

So there is both a casting off of a splintered shell, snapped off in bits at first, then the motion accelerating at a breakneck speed, teeth grinding before, cautiously, finally, once the raw flesh beneath is truly exposed and ascertained alive, human and in utter agony, the shell is allowed three months for its regeneration.

At both one and seventeen, there is no full rehabilitation, only a thin membrane is formed, alongside the realization of a naked truth, and its grudging acceptance. At seventeen, the realization that there will be no new beginnings, nothing to replace the diseased limp amputated, the first of three months, a period of wishful thinking. At the end, a beginning- resigned if not reconciled to an endless uncoiling of a life whose future will be plagued by the arthritic throbbing of the past.