If you wanna be my friend

You want us to get along

Please do not expect me to

Wrap it up and keep it there

The observation I am doing could

Easily be understood

As cynical demeanour

But one of us misread…

And what do you know

It happened again

A friend is not a means

You utilize to get somewhere

Somehow I didn’t notice

friendship is an end

What do you know

It happened again

How come no-one told me

All throughout history

The loneliest people

Were the ones who always spoke the truth

The ones who made a difference

By withstanding the indifference

I guess it’s up to me now

Should I take that risk or just smile?

What do you know

It happened again

What do you know

Misread – Kings of Convenience

it’s been so long since i last wrote anything here but these are bleak times and i already miss the intensity of studying, of knowing the artesian and architectonic poets and how heaney troughed through the ambiguity of it all. i write these down because words are immortal and unlike the human soul they won’t fade away with time; at the same time i question myself, will love last, will it permeate us, will it last forever and ever and ever.

Through the alleyways to cool off in the shadows

Then into the street following the water

There’s a bearded man paddling in his canoe

Looks as if he has come all the way from the Cayman Islands

These canals, it seems, they all go in circles

Places look the same, and we’re the only difference

The wind is in your hair, it’s covering my view

I’m holding on to you, on a bike we’ve hired until tomorrow

If only they could see, if only they had been here

They would understand, how someone could have chosen

To go the length I’ve gone, to spend just one day riding

Holding on to you, I never thought it would be this clear

Cayman Islands – Kings of Convenience

i may be jeremiah de saint-amour, because we both do not want to be old, because we will kill ourselves at the age of 40 and 60 respectively and i may go the way he did, breathing in gold cyanide which smells of bitter almonds. oval, elliptical, infinity, once you set on a path it never ends and i think dying with a fixed date in your mind is so final. 24.7.25. 21 more years.

i wish i had a voice like erlend oye or eirik glambek boe.

a year and a month ago, my burge would laugh at me “pak! pap for the dispossessed!” thirteen months later, i will read heaney’s ministry of fear and remember my former tutor’s irish accent as it floated through the class and i wonder why was it that i never really paid attention in class because now, i have so much to ask and so much to learn and the notes he gave us were simply not enough. but regrets are a thing of the past, and it should remain that way, because antaeus’s elevation is his fall, his hubris.

it is but seven days to the month of december, the month of christmas, but at this point i did like to say love actually is all around, in the gentle falling rains from the sky, and across two universities 13 hours behind us. maybe in the month of december love will bloom, while 780 minutes later someone will ponder on the closure of things and in the 12th month of the year, and the negative month of the new year, he can finally smile.

i just had a dream where i was trying to get karl malone’s signature when he announced his retirement, and it was only on the last page of my folscap that i had a fresh piece of paper. how apt, i would think as i passed it over as he penned his last line of statistics down. why was it you never won a championship when michael jordan retired? there was still stockton and you and you continued running the pick and roll and functioned splendidly as a team; you should have won it four times! he looked at me sadly, smiled and walked away.

then i woke up and i remembered i had never met karl malone in my life.

2.30 in the morning, and sinatra plays in the background as a hyperactive pale brown moth flutters around the white panels of my cupboard.

Raptus regaliter

it’s almost certain to be my favourite word.

pilfered from bernie. and maybe good things come in threes (and maybe they do not)

THREE NAMES YOU GO BY

pak pakkie pakky

THREE THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF

uh being nice? loyalty and sentimentality.

THREE THINGS YOU HATE ABOUT YOURSELF

sentimentality sloth and insecurity

THREE THINGS YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND

physics chemistry f maths.

THREE THINGS THAT ANNOY YOU

fickleness immaturity (haha!) hypocrisy

THREE THINGS THAT SCARE YOU

love not being as great as i imagined it to be, total hubris and comp crashing.

THREE OF YOUR EVERYDAY ESSENTIALS

music vitasoy nba.com

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITES SONGS

1 shadowman – k’s choice

2 the scientist – coldplay

3 waiting for nothing – sparklehorse

THREE people/or set of PERSONS YOU SPEND THE MOST TIME WITH

mom myself myself

THREE THINGS YOU CAN’T DO

forget the past.

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE HOBBIES

reading basketball track

THREE THINGS YOU WANT REALLY BAD RIGHT NOW

new glasses because my current pair’s like utterly ravaged from basketball, contacts to replace the ones in the bottom of a swimming pool and a discman/ipod.

THREE CAREERS YOU’RE CONSIDERING

hotel management journalism chef

THREE THINGS YOU WANT TO DO BEFORE YOU DIE

write and eat play basketball for half a day.

i was bathing at 2.00 a.m and i thought of my primary school classmates.

1. hello chyan ying, how are you now? we took part in a science competition in primary 6 with chun kit and we nearly made it to the finals. i was ranked fourth in the individual round and haha i thought we would win a medal in the finals for pei tong! almost, ifs, 7 years back and last i heard you took science in raffles and you may be in america now.

2. how goes you ms dai, i’m sorry i stopped talking to you in j1 but i was just exhausted by everything. and then it was the promos, and then it’s history.

3. i met sharon a year ago at suntec and she didnt feel inclined to talk to me.

4. teck lun how yandao you are now!

5. jingsheng ran last year for njc at the nationals and remains the only person from the class to be in a finals for track.

6. hello abdul rahman, we were friends for a period of time because you were the only person in primary school who would talk to me.

7. hong ye, are you still with mingwei?

8. meiling was colin’s and keith’s classmate.

—————

today i didnt feel particularly whimsical but i spent a hundred dollars anyway.

anticsperiodictableripcurlrumandraisinstleaven

and sometimes you have to know when you’re coming up against a brick wall; there’s really no point these days is there. things aren’t the way they were a year before.

i always thought kwame brown was soft and pampered, but i suppose there’s more to the way he was treated than has been commonly let on. i know this is basketball and it seems irrelevant, but basketballers are as human as any of us too.

Michael Leahy – Kwame Deconstructed