:)

i am feeling rather good today in spite of the - on hindsight - horrendous Asian American lit paper i just had to usher in the beginning of my exams. i think this positivity has everything to do with my recently collected essays and the discovery that i actually did pretty decently for two modules i had given up for dead for various reasons, which included me not finishing reading most of the novels of the module, and losing books and notes the night before the exam.

i just do think that these two modules which have suddenly increased in my estimation will have to make up for my potentially dismal 20th century lit paper. according to the lecturer, people did quite well for the test in general, in which i had obtained the extremely disgusting, poor grade of B-. so if everyone did well and i did mightily shittily, where does that leave me except in a dire situation. then the essay - i don't have a good feeling about it at all, it being the last essay i turned in this sem, the result of it being the last is the extreme lack of motivation with which i wrote it. as i have discovered, there seems to be some sort of positive relationship between motivation and performance, ie: with greater motivation comes greater performance, so the inverse would also then be more or less true.

but okay i shall stop whining because i have an nm paper tomorrow - and that A is completely mine to lose. so work hard i shall, instead of playing around with and troubleshooting my webcam which was probably the highlight of my night last night.

i'd rather take the blow, at least then i would know;

but baby don't you break my heart slow.

evaporate into sweetened milk

the hot, humid sticky December rains, & i will evaporate into sweetened milk. 

nothing pains me more than illogicity and irrationality, and if i could slay that scaly fire-breathing dragon, i would. 'cept that i'm a maiden with a coronet in my hair, so theoretically i'd need a Sir Lancelot to come charging through the golden eaves, his coal-black hair glinting in the sunlight and his burnished shield raised. unfortunately, i live in Singapore, so all i'd have is perhaps a Mr. (insert-typical-Chinese-surname-here) to whisk me off in Comfort cab if i'm lucky, drag me on the mrt if i'm not.

i'm craving for mango with dripping condensed milk, for swamplands and crocodiles, for deep fried oily crispy things that would shorten my life by 10years. i see the white crane spreading its wings ready to take flight, the striped tail of the fat tabby nonchalantly falling off the concrete step in its nap, the leopard and its spots yawning in the afternoon sun.

i see deep blue crystal waters that glisten azure and turquoise, purple swatches of the twilight sky smeared with strokes of deep crimson, gashes fierce and soft. i see the velvet midnight sky cloudy and thick with humidity, hear my breaths, see the shaft of light from the open door, Yellow Light.

betrayal among lilies.

it's funny how i see it, i feel it, and i hate it - and then i don't see it, don't feel it, but still hate it anyway.

i've been betrayed by logic, by the absence of logic, and the very presence of presence. 

spirals of smoke swirl up from the chimney, but no fire burns in the fireplace below. all there is are the glowing embers from the night before that refuse my stamping to transform into cinders. die, i say, die. and yet, green shoots sprout out from the hard winter ground, between the non-existent cracks and up into the polluted air - dying the moment they came alive. thorns are enmeshed with the roses until all that you see is brambleweed and poison ivy that stings and sweetens with calamine lotion. i taste the sour odour of garbage in the air at the back of my throat and gag, bottle caps falling from the sky. tin cans are crushed every day, buttons pop, threads snap - and i am glued together like pieces of a broken china teapot that has been flung from the top of the empire state building. soft linen, silky and fresh, cover the table with the bowl of steaming chicken soup, labours of love. 

rifles at point-blank range go off, i blow out your brains, you kick me in the shin, i embrace you and stab you from the back - again, and again. and pull out the knife in my own back. then, white light, red light, green light, golden. poppies in a field. i've been betrayed, and i've never been more alive or dead at the same time.

the siberian express.

with all my essays slain and all that's left for me to do on that note is to pick up the carcasses when they start falling back to earth in the form of Bs and Cs, i have nothing more to look forward to except endless mugging for the next one week of exams. one week, and it'll all be over. then it's hellooooooo Canada and if everything doesn't go well, hello to four months of freezing loneliness. of course, we don't go into things anticipating the worst, so here's to four months of good cheery fun, the only kind of fun you'll have in school as an exchange student - with no care for my CAP for the first time in my uni life since i flounced my first sem in NUS. 

there're so many things i want to do now as i sit with Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior before me - i want to look at clothes online, level up my character on wow cos i'm trying desperately to catch up with Trina so we can start doing things together, plan my itinerary for NYC, read some poetry at my own leisure instead of rushing through them like the Siberian Express enroute to Russia.

so i was thinking today, that if i could relive my life again any way i wanted, i'd still have chosen to end up here with you today.

okay as i am typing this, i am all-too-aware of the extremely precarious state i am in at the moment. my 20th century essay is due tomorrow at 5pm, but i am not even half-way done, and the half that i have done is very very bad.

i am really in a state of panic now.

i am having a terrible case of writer's block. it's like, i have no idea what to say at all.

that being said, the luckiest thing ever just happened to me. i received a rather decent A- on a paper that was missing one whole page. i can only say that God loves me very much because he probably knew that another B (or C, for that matter) would kill me beyond any hope of redemption for the rest of my uni career.

6 things in search of a point.

several things happened today that are worth mentioning. some perhaps more than others, but still worthy of mention nonetheless in my rather boring life.

so. here are six statements in search of a point. any point.

1) i am REALLY going to Canada! the Uni of Guelph has finallyfinallyFINALLY confirmed my place there. finally, after all the months of hypothetical planning, i can actually look forward to something concrete. that being said, i kinda can't wait to get the heck out of Singapore, but at the same time, i'm reluctant to leave all that i love behind, if only for a few months.

2) i fell down today upon missing a step on my way from FASS to the biz canteen. it was raining, the ground was slippery, i fell. two boys walked right by me as though i was a snail crawling on the ground, even though i yelped fricking loudly cos i twisted my ankle while falling and landed on my knees. and the book in my hand flew out to land at least a meter away from me. i have nothing nice to say about men in general after today, but i will say that the only thing keeping me from wishing that all men would turn into frogspawn at their sheer uselessness and ineptitude is that i know a couple of really good men. boyfriend included.

3) i am done with my stupid Asian American lit essay, which i produced very very painfully. all i'm hoping for is a B+ for it. i can't believe how low i've stopped. i might as well be hoping to "just pass" on my exam and just graduate next year.

4) i am not looking forward to starting on the 20th century essay due on Monday. i am thoroughly thoroughly sick of writing when i don't feel like writing. the only consolation is that nothing can be worse than what i've already done so far.

5) my Hopkins essay is ready for collection tomorrow. at the mere thought of it, my heartbeat shoots into overdrive and i feel like i'm going to faint. as you can perhaps tell from my reaction, i do not expect joyous news regarding that particular piece of work.

6) as a result of the previous three points of the above, my CAP this sem is going to be extremely bad, is going to crash before my eyes, and there goes any hopes of attaining any semblence of a 4.0 second upper anymore. damn it.

& i never believed that the multitude of dreams and many words were in vain.

my birthday last weekend was a total blast. i feel a need to reiterate that point over and over again because it seems somehow to make up for the shitty weekend i'm having, what with the two final exams i had on Monday and Tuesday - the Tuesday one being absolutely ridiculous with me losing Middlemarch the like very day of the exam, and misplacing half my lecture notes the night before - and the two papers i still have left to do which i have absolutely no desire to begin on.

i really need to get out of the house and supper, shop, whatever. i can't wait for Monday to come cos that's when my last paper - the 20th century one - is due. i can't wait for Monday to come cos it's reading week, which would mean i get to breath a little, if only a little, cos i have no more school and can concentrate on studying once i've gotten myself perked up again.

on one hand i'm glad you tell me untruths to protect me cos you know the truth would hurt, on the other i think it's perfectly useless for you to not tell me the truth when i - being somewhat intuitive about things like that - am able to sort of grasp at what really happened. it borders on paranoia and i don't like it, but fact is: you can't change it, i can't change it, and we have to live with the consequences of things that happened unseen in the past, now many years later. i think i'd rather know things rather then to guess at what may have happened, cos the imagination is cruel and it supplies more vicious, hurtful thoughts than reality may actually hold. 

...I re-enter

the city in which I love you.

And I never believed that the multitude 

of dreams and many words were in vain.

i am screwed big time. there is a bloody big Romanticism test tomorrow morning at 9am, and i have only covered about half the material in the course. either i am dead, or i am dead. i dunno what to say anymore. i am beyond upset and i am pissed off at how this is turning out. 

and i have a horrific ulcer on my tongue, which i gave myself a day before my birthday, that's keeping me from eating properly, talking properly, sleeping properly, and swallowing properly. in short, it is ruining my life.

my life seems to be in shreds at the moment. but i am contemplating just going to sleep and praying my heart out because there seems to be no point in trying to cram anything more into my already frazzled, panicked mind - which seems to be able to only concentrate on panicking and panicking and panicking.

so much for the lovely birthday party i had over the weekend. this is what it has come to.

sick.

i am falling sick, and two days before my birthday, too.

what can i say besides this sucks?

enough.

everything seems to be slipping away from me now, everything's going so horribly. it isn't supposed to be like this, i'm not supposed to be struggling so badly, i'm not supposed to be so crushed. i've come to a point where i'm beginning to think this all just isn't worth it, where i'm ready to raise my puny white flag in surrender just so that all this will just stop. maybe it's time to stop trying, time to stop fighting. maybe i'm overreaching, and as we discussed in lit tutorial today, overreachers seem destined for failure, by virtue of the very word "over" in "overreach" - implying that i am reaching beyond my limitations. i don't understand why it's all suddenly become so hard, and the possibility that i have come to this sad situation because of my own actions pains me more than you can imagine. it is one thing to be a victim of fate, to be a marionette of some puppeteer greater than yourself who controls your actions and determines your eventual outcome. i would really have no agency in such a case, no responsibility for my actions; just swept up in the tide of time that ebbs and flows in mundane and epic scales alike. however, realising that i was probably the very cause of my fix, realising that the consequences of all my past actions have finally come back to haunt me when i thought i'd gone off scot-free, it makes me indignant, disappointed, and just really angry with myself for letting me down. if you know how hard i push myself, you would understand the depth of my disappointment and exhaustion now, when it seems as if nothing i do from here will make anything better, besides making me feel like some sort of tragic Romantic heroine who trys and fails but who inspires admiration anyway for fighting for lost causes.

well but who am i kidding: i am no Romantic heroine, no fighter of lost causes - i am merely a girl who's been let down by her own devices and while staring at the dark abyss of sheer mediocrity, is contemplating the role that she has played in this pathetic tragicomedy that her life has become.

i am suddenly at a loss for word even though ironically, i have been producing massive amounts of words for my essays lately. my emotions have been going out of whack, so much so that i'm at a point where i'm choosing to freeze anything else other than the motivation that drives me to continue working.

all the feelings in the world, i cannot even begin to write about them. how finite language is indeed, that it cannot capture the infinite, can only provide a blurry snapshot.

i like to chew on my rulers.

i don't like to write my essays.