29 Tuesday May 2012
Posted in passenger seat diaries, travel
from april 2011: marathon 13 hour train journey. fell asleep to sacramento steel and amber street lights burning against the night, but when i next opened my eyes, tree fronds were brushing against the glass against my cheek, and all was black, white and untouched. another nap later and suddenly we were racing against the willamette river in a warmer world!
20 Sunday May 2012
Posted in happy lists, style & dressing up
#1 Getting crafty: Figured out my way around pliers and played with an accumulated stash of gold & brass pieces to create some minimal, graceful gold things for my fingers and wrists. also visited my favourite local designer, Pris of Ong Shunmugam, for some scheming with lace and fabric swatches, and to learn the ropes behind…
#2 …assisting with the Ong Shunmugam booth at the Blueprint trade show. My shopgirl dreams come true! Instead of regular customers, we were there to present her new collection – a lush array of batik, brocades and prints woven into reworked Asian silhouettes and dresses – to retail buyers, bloggers, magazine editors and writers, and it was a great glimpse into the industry. The business of fashion and style is cut-throat for sure, but it was inspiring to be amongst entrepreneurs and witness how true talent and genuine personalities can outshine the advantages of money and marketing any day.
#3 The constant joy of friends, old and new: we are little girls in blue pinafores in one instant, and in a flash we are freshly minted graduates, still the best of friends. And then there is Sam, whose hands fit mine perfectly, who always knows what to say to lift me out of a dark place. There have also been impromptu dinners and suppers by the water, with a friend who i’ve come to regard as my rock & listening ear, and another who is one of the freest souls i know. On wednesday we were going down the long stretch of yishun avenue 1, and then finally found ourselves on a narrow strip of road straddled by rocks and water, and ate our sandwiches and wraps by the light of street lamps, private jets and industrial flame. Friday saw us at west coast, legs stretched out under the moonlight with the night breeze in our hair. Friends make life easy, and make us whole.
12 Saturday May 2012
Posted in style & dressing up
after enough baby-steps practice with feisty new yorker nails and a tomato-red blush, i’m summoning up the courage to wear lady danger lips this week. what would joan holloway do? wish me luck and have a glamourous weekend with the beautiful mothers in your life! mine always reminds me to love life unabashedly and be unafraid to do. your. thing. and that is one of the many many reasons why i love her. happy mothers’ day!
05 Saturday May 2012
Posted in food, happy lists, reading & writing, shopping & finds, singapore spaces
1. Feasting with friends.
(photo by tan wan lin)
We had the mezzé at cafe le caire before languorously sipping on beers elsewhere, and it’s $16 for plentiful portions of hummus, tahina, olives, salad, babaganush, chickpeas and feta to be scooped up with flatbread. Also, the fluffiest falafel I’ve ever had! This incredible photo is by my talented friend wan lin, who is ace at capturing sunsets with practically any kind of photographic equipment.
The poached eggs at Group Therapy cafe were perfectly smooth, covered in hollandaise and crushed black peppercorns and served on light, thick toast.
2. A georgette blouse I want to pair with dark denim and gold accessories every day
3. The gift of words
Sam bought me this book I’ve been stalking at Kinokuniya for years — a collection of (love) letters exchanged between Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé. Here is a section that made me melt:
Now I am closing my manuscript folder: the Visions are in it, the 12 novellas, many of which I will some day read to you, letters, pages filled with notes, and Ruth. Did I not myself write these lines once in some dream filled with presentiments?
“…until the whole world dropped away from me
And nothing of all that life remained
Except a boundless gratitude
And a love stretching on forever!…”
If they had not existed, I would have written them now. How wonderful that they do exist. For hence this strange exchange: I can express my happiness in your words. –And thus you in turn will understand my happiness. Is it not so?
He caught me sitting on the floor by the shelf, swooning and lost in its first few pages, and I felt like a guilty voyeur. I’m not very far into the book, but my favourite little detail so far is how Rilke signs off — it starts off formally with his full signature, but by his third letter he is René Maria, and then very simply, René.
5. My parents, Lauren and I are headed to Malacca tomorrow for what’s left of the weekend! I haven’t been there for ten years, but I’m looking forward to trying satay celup for the first time, visiting a man who restores antique jewellery, a popiah skin maker and a red paper cutter, and just wandering around with my dusty but trusty camera!
01 Tuesday May 2012
Posted in love & life
1. outram for impromptu tea with wans 2. exam time means chipped polish 3. wonderfully blue sky 4. another day another sunset
i’m fresh from my last official day of undergraduate life, and in the past four days alone, people have asked “what does liberation feel like?” at least ten times, and here is my answer: it does not feel victorious, as younger versions of ourselves would have liked to believe. yes, days are displaced and heavy with anxiety and shades of desperation, but they are also vast, and this time we get to choose what we fill them with. and choice is not ‘i studied business so i can either work in a bank or be a social media marketing guru’… one day i will look at my sisters, young cousins, nieces, children, kiss their foreheads and say — you can be anything you want to be. don’t think about choosing careers or chasing a grand but blind wanderlust. instead, choose happiness, chase meaning, and stop long enough to spot stories in the clouds.
23 Monday Apr 2012
Posted in food, singapore spaces
Detoxing with plenty of fruits, vegetables and soup today after a semi-indulgent weekend, but there’s no denying what has top-of-mind prominence in food memory today…!
The burrata appetizer at Galbiati Gourmet Deli — plump pillows of fresh burrata, resting atop strips of prosciutto di Parma, green and black olives, ripe tomatoes, artichokes and toasted olive foccacia. Be still my beating heart.
Galbiati Gourmet Deli, 400 Upper Bukit Timah Rd, Singapore 678050
22 Sunday Apr 2012
Posted in daily, singapore spaces
the day was too golden to spend inside the lab, so wans and i snuck off to meet kenny for plain vanilla bakery cupcakes and the usual tea/dinner hybrid. i thought it would only take an hour at most, but by the power of wan lin’s trusty pink car, as well as our unyielding appetite for richer, sweeter afternoons, we ended up moving on to a bench in the pandan valley barbecue area with three forks and two slices of pie, pondering over the benefits of a graham cracker crust, and engaging in pie politics over who gets the last piece — a game i’m happy to play! later on, a golden retriever picks up slippers with his teeth and gives them to us as an invitation for a tug-of-war game, and wans and i go sun-chasing at the park i’ve never known of. a little boy shows me the shell he’s found by the breakwater and scampers off to find more. we walk on, and find clouds that look like hockey players, pest controllers and smoke.
not quite sure i know how to make sense of days like these. they are beautiful, no doubt, but they are also thick and heavy — with summer heat and the promises (or threats?) of the formless future. can we continue to devour life by the forkful when it doesn’t have a shape or name?
top panorama – west coast park; pies from windowsill pies at pandan valley
09 Monday Apr 2012
Posted in daily
Tags
scenes from my weekend: a city burning black and gold, smoke and stingray under skyscrapers, waiting for a tow truck after our first accident and watching the mini creep away later, hoisted by a forklift. in between: rainy afternoons with my roommate from davis and her boyfriend, the lingering taste of salted egg crab, museum-hopping and being tongue-tied on local history, clips from adele’s royal albert hall dvd.
on saturday i sat with a boy. we picked at a salad and played draw something for twenty minutes, but separately, and twenty minutes after that i was seated across another boy — he made a mess of his peanut rice balls in sweet beancurd, and his mother was helpless, only armed with a tissue and a reprimand. i don’t want to complain but perhaps there might be more than this? if discontent is the mother of ambition, i hope i’m on to something amazing
04 Wednesday Apr 2012
Posted in love & life
“everybody! post-thesis faces!!”
Writing an honours thesis taught me many things, but the most ridiculous one is that I somehow prefer a hectic life as compared to this feeling of floating — spent last evening in front of the television with a dinner of fish soup mee sua, when on any other night I would have been glued to my chair, sitting down by MS word and just bleeding sentences. This morning saw me rushing to school, but not for a meeting. Instead, I caught up with suyee over late plate’s corned beef hash, had the pleasure of taking an hour to hand-write (gasp) points for tomorrow’s presentation script, am having a muffin for lunch, and just found the tiniest chocolate chip smear on the inside of my left ring finger…? What the what!? WHAT IS THIS FEELING I DON’T RECOGNISE?
Though this transition is the strangest yet, I would do it all again. No hindsight bias, promise. The past year of work on this thesis has shown me the limits of my patience, politeness and working memory (now proven: will lose train of thought somewhere around the 14,000 word mark) but it has repaid itself many times over with good, good people and the pleasure of having their lives overlap with mine. We get by with a little help from our friends.
01 Sunday Apr 2012
Posted in happy lists
#1 This appeared on top of our hanging plant about a week and a half ago, first noted on my twenty third birthday:
A very stylish, method-to-the-madness bird’s nest! None of the humans in my household has seen Mama Bird yet; she’s shy and flies away every time we try to get closer. The most we’ve seen of her is her long, mushroom-brown tail feather that sticks out of the nest while she sleeps.
How do we know she’s a mama bird?
.
.
#2
From the speckled egg surprise, of course!
#3 The video below is what came out of the previous post. The wonderful POSKOD.SG was featured in a Channel NewsAsia documentary, and I was very fortunate to be included alongside David and Priscilla as we re-staged our cheongsam story. I wish we could have heard more from the editors and the creative team, and seen more behind-the-scenes footage, but this was a crazy, fun first for me and I am grateful. Thanks to my father for procuring a recording.
Even crazier? Seeing my sisters go bananas over seeing my face on the television screen! If you have not hopped over to POSKOD.SG yet, please do! There is a beautiful photo essay on the old Capitol Theatre right now by Philipp Aldrup and David Ee, with captions and words as incredible as the photographs:
“For decades it was filled with stories, with films from Asia and from abroad….It became a big part of how people in Singapore saw the world, what they dreamt of and where these dreams could take them. But how about the dreams of people today? Have people been asked what they dream of, for their city?”
#4 I am done with my thesis, or at least I have decided that I am done. I had thought that I would want to celebrate when it was over, but more than anything I am ready to bid it a hasty goodbye, and take a long holiday from Microsoft Word and crossing off markup changes, one comment at a time.
What I need: silence, sun, and some non-scientific words. Will you come wrap me up with love and a poem?
