for some strange reason-- completely inexplicable-- my days have been sort of off-kilter. i can't find a word to express it, except to say that, happy and full of dance and friendship and leisure time (and legitimate work in the form of typing for my dad or of HOURS of laundry. by hand.), sometimes at the end of the day i'm curiously dissatisfied: 有一种很莫名奇妙的失落感。 is it in our natures-- in my nature-- never to be completely happy? and it's not something i know how to speak to anyone about. or even write about, sometimes.
and i have no alcohol tolerance. my sister-- my SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD SISTER-- handed me the tailend of her glass of white wine after dinner and i stupidly drank it. now i'm feeling incredibly warm and uncomfortable. she drank about 2 glasses and didn't bat an eyelid.
well alcohol's supposed to free inhibitions, isn't it? right. write.
sunday: painting the town pink
fell dead asleep-- on the couch! i didn't even make it to my bed-- after mum forcibly made me remove my contact lenses when i stumbled in like the walking dead after sundown duty. woke up later than i would have wanted and foolishly spent time blogging and mousehunting (THAT THING WILL BE THE DEATH OF ME) and so obviously left the house at, oh, about the time i should have been at ue square. sorry ellen! :S and thank goodness for my mum's extensive wardrobe with its surfeit of pink clothes.
party was very good-- i adored her fruit salad!! it had raisins mixed in, and the apple contrasted so wonderfully with the potato. why am i gushing over the food-- the birthday girl was absolutely delectable: slim and statuesque in a smashingly flattering, figure-hugging tube dress. yeah that sexy sexy sexy. i thought the hot pink and black structured detail was very arresting-- as did *ahem* several other people! HAHA. but ok la what to do erren v hot.
conversation scintillating as always: choice gems apart from clement&liren's faux pas which may or may not have been (heee), there was also the whole debate about spouses with prawn heads and chii tarng wanting weina to have more hair (on her face?!) because of the old wife's tale that the meal plate represents the face of your future spouse. also, when i asked thomas if he'd drugged the drinks since he'd brought them over (why so nice!), he said "you'll know. see you in the morning, poon" with an evil grin. i carefully proffered my drink to karen, who said, "i've drunk it already. see you in the morning, too."
in the middle of the presentation of our drawings to ellen, i randomly wondered where soozey was and turned around only to catch him darting into the room in an incredibly furtive manner. strangely enough he was no longer in the spiffy pink shirt he'd been in earlier (and no, soozey, it does not match your shoelaces). he saw me eyeing him and made a rather-alarmed-looking shushing motion. hehh! ellen got her very own surprise birthday dance which was incredibly entertaining and lovely and sweet; as always xuzi's choreo is dope :D was completely torn between trying to capture the dance on video with my sister's camera, which i did not know how to use, and just watching and enjoying the show. chii tarng's expressions were hilarious and i especially adored soozey's pointing at ellen-- and dancing and looking straight at her :D:D and yes, fred's beatle-hair is apparently quite a hit hee.
lovely cake, lovely party, lovely after-dinner walk and conversation even with unfortunate light-bulbing at macs. thank you ellen!
i can't talk now, i gotta catch another flight
sending wh off later that night/morning (four freaking am!!) was strangely awkward; i think we're at our best with each other when there's no one else around-- no misunderstandings to be engendered, no worries about later gossip or whatever. the thing is that we're easy friends and will probably never be more than that, but with all the typical eagerness of our human natures to misconstrue and matchmake the most innocent of exchanges "assume unforeseen significance" (slay me, i just quoted an equity case. oh gods). i hadn't known jz was going along or i would have bought stuff and/or a card as well. in any case he-- wh -- had stuff to do, whereas i just hung around waiting for him to finish packing and check in and all. no wonder people usually go in groups to send friends off.
still, i finally fulfilled my innate unexpressed desire of wanting to drive in the wee hours of the night/morning (going home from school does not count. there're usually still cars on the road even at 2am which is the latest i've left campus). on my way to the ecp for the first 3 minutes or so i swear i was the only person on the roads. it was kind of creepy in a christopher-pike-whisper-of-death kind of way: the protagonist drives back from out of town with her boyfriend, seeing only a hitch-hiker along the way whom they do not pick up. upon arriving in town no one else is seen except for 3 other friends. and in that world there are only the 5 of them left... and the hitch-hiker. one of pike's better efforts. in any case, midnight driving wasn't all i had thought it would be :( maybe i just wasn't in the right frame of mind.
monday: nothing ventured, nothing gained
shopping with yuko, a day that yielded all our goals: fitted white shirt for her work as an angel :), slinky black dress for her photoshoot, strappy black towerblocks masquerading as mphosis wedges (which i am in two minds about zhnging-- to stud or not to stud??) and dance shirts from bossini. the new wordblock tees are very likeable!
1) they resemble our blast!ard shirt alot
2) i like proverbs
3) they have Chinese translations on the back for those seeking their roots, in suitably small font for those seeking to escape theirs
4) they're incredibly comfortable to dance in
5) plus-- and this is a big plus-- they don't look cheesy, and the cutting isn't weird.
also yielded great insights into yuko as a person; and i'm very glad that we DID go out, 4am sendoffs or not. :)
a display i particularly liked:)dashed off for ayg practice and ran helter skelter all the way from the engine stop to ucc. we. have. no. stamina. stayed late to practise a leetle that night and wound up singing aerosmith and bon jovi and "this is the time, this is the moment" down all the darkest pathways of nus after i failed, epically, to walk her back to RH (she ended up walking me to the bus 10 stop instead). our journey included cost-analysis of renting hall rooms as well as shadows of security guards and completely uncalled-for self-freaking-out on my part: i'd picked up a 20 cent coin and chanted "penny penny bring me luck because i'm the one who picked you up" over it, only to tell yuko how the chinese would exorcise ghosts into coins and throw them away. when yuko agreed with a "lu bu shi yi" i shrieked a little-- JUST a little-- and then flung the coin away. -_______-
tuesday: grasshoppers
our much-delayed-and-postponed ktv session finally came to fruition when huiwen, edeline, sy and i finally converged on teo heng's rooms determined to wreak vocal havoc. hi alesha dixon is impossible to sing on karaoke. especially when edeline is rapping in the background. and i handed sim yee the tube of potato chips and she sang into it, apparently thinking by reflex that it was the mike. we were 伴舞s to the grasshoppers of yore and later hollered tuch mah barreh along the streets before taking a ride on the wild side-- sort of-- in huiwen's car to the bus stop and heading for home.
and in all seriousness, for all that i mauled mariah carey that night by literally miming the following lyrics, i think they make a lot of sense to me, suddenly:
look inside you and be strong
and you'll finally see the truth
that a hero lies in you
yes-- i do need to be stronger. then again, don't we all?
wednesday:
i suspect i am an incredibly perverse person, because i love it when i am woken up by phone calls in the morning-- telling me that i can go back to sleep some more. stolen fruit is always the sweeter; i guess the same goes for stolen sleep. HEH. eisen's call woke me up and for a moment i was horrified thinking that i was incredibly late: turned out he'd just woken up too, so oh wells. raincheck!!
ran for ayg prac at pomo and met ruisi who was as lost as i was before finally spying the studio on the SECOND, not the first floor. i like the studio's open-ness (always felt kind of claustrophobic in studio wu), although the people walking around outside are a distraction and sources of sporadic pressure. can't remember the choreo. burn me. PRACTICE.
walking with ellen and yuko to studio wu after that we chanced upon an exhibition at the national library: unpacked?
i would LOVE this for a blogskin. it's a bath, in wilderness.
as always, words are my poison-- even more so than images.ellen and fred signed up for studio wu packages! whee. and tracy's supposed to sign up SOON. reggae was okay but much slower-paced and easier to follow compared to the previous two weeks, but i might have preferred it if i'd left completely wrung out. as it was i felt vaguely tired, but not the exhausted i like to be. and WHYYY does everyone there seem so flexible? i swear they've got rubber for joints.
starving by the time i met my mum at tang's and headed to pick up my sisters. mum treated us to spaghetti takeout dinner, in the midst of which we had an unexpected visitor:
apparently she used to hang around my house when she was the tiniest of kittens and i christened her Socks.
communing with my dog. i found it very disturbing that he kept circling us and drooled incessantly, and every time he brought his head closer to sniff her i worried that he would bite her head off and i'd be holding a headless kitten-cat with blood spurting out of a severed neck.morbid.