today i finally caught betrayal after first reading about it in the papers three weeks ago and i thought of closer and i wonder, if my faith in inscrutable love is fading. i think it is, and i know i am growing older.
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today, i read blog posts posted nine months back and i do not think i write with the same resonance as i did a lifetime ago and i feel an aching sense of loss. i am soulless, wordless, an empty shell of a body and i wonder if i could ever truly feel again.
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it is teacher’s day, happy teacher’s day mr perry mr burge mr miles mr barnard mr white. it’s been two years already and i thank you from the bottom of my heart.

finally met waikit for basketball in a gazillion months and we ran our legs off! hair to be exact because i dove/wrestled a ball off a 15 (i think) year old kid and in the process floor burnt off a large patch of hair. zzz. i feel old and thuggish and hairless and quite painful. but that’s not the point because i have to lament about my abject lack of explosiveness and the fact that i cannot eat as much as i used to before! these days i ate only two plates of noodles with damn lot of drinks and i m already full; what is this!!

this is very bad english with no form or structure and i am truly ashamed for the lack of quality management.

it s been an entirely screwed up week; i nearly got charged for something that wasnt entirely my fault, i got three extras for going to the toilet without telling anyone, i have an acceptance form i don’t quite know how to reject and yesterday i did guard duty and tomorrow i shall run 12km. foozle wozzle.

and that’s not the end; by the 30th of this month we have to inspect 8000m of stuff and they come in rolls of 100m. we take 20 minutes to sort out one roll, we are desperately short of manpower, it is 20 minutes of mind numbing stuff and we have a 1sg who s so gloriously inept that a conversation goes like this:

“are you sure you know how to roll a c*** d********?”
“duh. i ve rolled more c*** d********s than you have before you even enlisted! you don’t have to teach me.”

and he doesn’t know how to do it. and it is a fricking easy stuff to do, just rather mindless. but the tricky part comes when it comes down to the accounting (which was the thing i got into trouble for, albeit a different ammo. which is just as well because this one is 341234124123 times more dangerous, which means the repercussions will be greater.) so, he s amazingly fucked up, he s sluggishly lazy, we are short of decent manpower and how the fuck are we to clock 80*20 minutes of manpower we have bloody fucking no idea. and we cannot work at maximum speed either because all of us have to double check the stuff he does because if he fucks up two of us will be going with him to the detention barracks. whoopee.

i never felt a need to bring my army emotional work baggage home but jesus christ this has to be an absolute first. like what the holy fuck?! aarghhhh 8 more months to ord. six more to being an absolute slug. countdowncountdown.

I eat dinner at the kitchen table by the light that switches on
I eat leftovers with mashed potatoes
No more candlelight, no more romance, no more small talk
When the hunger’s gone

I eat dinner at the kitchen table, and I wash it down with pop
I eat leftovers with mashed potatoes
No more candlelight, no more romance, no more small talk
When the hunger stops

Never thought that I’d end up this way
I who loved the sparks
Never thought my hair’d be turning to gray
It used to be so dark, so dark

No more candlelight, no more romance, no more small talk
When the hunger’s gone
No more candlelight, no more romance, no more small talk
When the hunger’s gone, when the hunger’s gone

Never thought that I’d end up like this
I who loved the night
Never thought I’d be without a kiss
No one to turn off the light, turn off the light

I eat dinner at the kitchen table, by the light of the TV screen
I eat leftovers with mashed potatoes
No more candlelight, no more romance, no more small talk
When the plate is clean
When the hunger’s gone, when the hunger’s gone

I Eat Dinner (When the Hunger’s Gone)-Rufus Wainwright and Dido

rufuswainwright rufuswainwright and i think he has an absolutely gorgeous name; some perceptions of beauty never really change i guess. but sadly, others do.
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these days i am neither happy nor sad; there is nothing to feel joyous about while there always seem to be a lingering sense of moroseness around. but one can only feel sorrow for a period of time until it becomes normal, and i think that is certainly true in my case. rufus wainwright and dido sing a gorgeous duet but i cannot sing because i am fearful i would maul the delicateness of it all and so the only thing i can really do is just really to replay it ad infinitum.

and then i will get sick of it and push it to the recesses of my hard disk; i wish i won’t get so bored of things.
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yesterday i shaved my hair off again and i feel an odd sense of release. no hair! no wax! i can just run in the rain now and be absolutely happy.
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things are never really that simple are they.

from jesley, who told me about walt whitman’s leaves of grass, two stanzas from an epic 52.

2

The smoke of my own breath;
Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine;
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs;
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore, and dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn;
The sound of the belch’d words of my voice, words loos’d to the eddies of the wind;
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms;
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag;
The delight alone, or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides;
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.

Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much?
Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Stop this day and night with me, and you shall possess the origin of all poems;
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun—(there are millions of suns left;)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books;
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me:
You shall listen to all sides, and filter them from yourself

19

This is the meal equally set—this is the meat for natural hunger;
It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous—I make appointments with all;

I will not have a single person slighted or left away;
The kept-woman, sponger, thief, are hereby invited;
The heavy-lipp’d slave is invited—the venerealee is invited:
There shall be no difference between them and the rest.

This is the press of a bashful hand—this is the float and odor of hair;
This is the touch of my lips to yours—this is the murmur of yearning;
This is the far-off depth and height reflecting my own face;
This is the thoughtful merge of myself, and the outlet again.

Do you guess I have some intricate purpose?
Well, I have—for the Fourth-month showers have, and the mica on the side of a rock has.

Do you take it I would astonish?
Does the daylight astonish? Does the early redstart, twittering through the woods?
Do I astonish more than they?

This hour I tell things in confidence;
I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you

last night before i slept, statcounter showed 33330, and i decided that it was not to be, that i will not see the count of 15.
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jac flew off today, and so did dennis and i feel terribly apologetic because i couldn’t rush over to terminal 2 in time to send him off, but no worries mr yeo! you ll go to wharton and pwn them all.

i met jamin and bianca and tong chie on the mrt and it was a lovely train ride. to me at least.

nine more hits and it will be symmetry, a palindrome of sorts; will i be privy to statcounter’s display of a 33333? these days this blog seems to be heading towards a fading, certain death and it is only a matter of time, only a matter of time before everything ends.

today i met up with twenty odd plus members of the 2002 hcjc humanities batch and while it was fun, everybody was older and nothing was the way it used to be. i have gotten over the sentimentality of it all, and that’s what scares me; will i be able to love the way i used to, not passionate but platonic, the ability to treasure simple relationships and events? i told weilin and janice that we all eventually have to move on, but since when have i been so cold about anything? maybe, it’s because 2005 taught me things about two people, but what the fuck it’s over innit. we all learn from lessons. we have to.

anyway! this should be a happy post! because jac s birthday was, well okay la yesterday, so HAPPY BIRTHDAY YOU OLD THING! You’re like half of singapore’s age so that says a lot! may you be a happy lovergirl always ;p

hello there, singapore turned double my age over the past few days which made me feel amazingly old, i got my pay on the ninth and i ve spent almost half of it and i feel amazingly frivolent; there has been too many amazings over the past few days and yesterday i got turned out at three am; nothing really matters anymore and there has been such an utter sense of disregard for anything else but i am happy. it shouldn’t be like that, should it, i mean being happy’s all that matter, but no, it isn’t; there is never too much space in the universe for one person. today i was on the bus in a semi conscious mode when someone tapped me on my shoulder to tell me to take my bag off the seat for an old man and i havent felt so bad in a long time (but yes, i have been guilty of other worse things). i told my friend i wasn’t because i didn’t know but invariably one would feel so and i suppose it is good, because i have been too flippant these days. friends come and go, and i have learnt to accept that for about three to four people, but aiyah what the hell la.

too much thoughts these days, there should be more copies of justice league elite. or aimee mann.

yesterday i was doing guard duty at padang which was so tremendously exciting that i was half asleep on the terraces, and then there was this pink light and uh, funky music; i wasn’t really surprised because come on, afterall it IS national day so these things would be common, but what won’t be common would be a guy kneeling in the middle of the parade stage proposing to his girlfriend. “natalie, will you marry me? because i won’t get up till you agree!” and there was a certain sense of surreality and loveliness that i picked up the bag of explosive wire i was supposed to guard and carried over to my other prowler where i grinned stupidly. love! love! haha love on the 7th august 2005 and maybe some child will know that to be his parents’ anniversary in the future. and then maybe he will decide to pick up the tradition and propose to his girlfriend in the same way where another guard will watch them and maybe believe in love.
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oh wells yesterday i was the guard commander of my detail because my sergeant fell sick so it was like o_O, and i watched my dy commander plan the fireworks. i never knew you actually did that in the army and suddenly i felt so proud of my commander who’s like god knows how many ranks above me. “die little prunling i shall charge you till you generate enough electricity to power singapore!” aiyah i m too random now, but maybe not everything in army’s meaningless.

thursday, it rained in the middle of the biweekly ten km run and i haven’t had so much fun since two years back; it was a release of sorts, of joy and sheer elation and there’s nothing better then running through the forest with rain falling down upon you.
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caught willy wonka yesterday with ailin and thanks for the tea! i feel thoroughly british now. but johnny depp was throughly bizarre, and that’s not a word i’ll commonly use but in this case i was like o_O. went to timbre later to watch claire audition and she was incandescent as usual; let her perform mr chia! but revelation of the night was the discovery of a fitness programme with my neighbour (of sorts) where we will play basketball till 9, and gym till 10.30; fitness fitness and one can only let his body degenerate that much.

it is almost three now, and i have to do padang guard duty zzzzz but well, at least i ll be free the whole of tomorrow!