treinta de octubre

As promised on one of my previous posts, I did watched the play at the Esplanade called What Matters?. It was excelente! This is the second play I have ever attended and it was better than the first, its a privilege for upper secondary Literature students in our school. When the lights went down I screamed silently in my heart due to the excitement, it started off with a short video and 4 scenes depicting racial discrimination and disharmony. What Matters? examines the topic that most youths today face, Racial Disharmony due to much discrimination. We had a real interesting time being spec-actors, which means that I can intervene the play and act out my opinions and views. The reason being that it’s an anti-model play, where actors make wrong decisions leading to a tragedy. 

It was a blast to become a spec-actor, I actually get to act along with the pros, the experienced actors. However, instead of conquering the problem on a national level, I went into a more personal level, which was nearly off-topic. In the nick of time, I was helped by my friend to save the story. It was quite enthusiastic because I had to think on the spot and speak out while the other actors continuously acted, well, you know me, I kept hurling sardonic wit and sarcasm around the stage. I was almost getting physical, I do apologise. The parts I adored were the versatility of the dialogues and how transitions between scenes were executed smoothly with Singapore Citizens’ Pledge recited in all 4 local languages, plus the humour of the script. Overall, I say maravilloso a good 2 hours well-spent!

I was bored on the last period of school today. Yes, that’s my chinese name and english signature and no, you cannot borrow it.

And I went and hid at the back of the class
when I heard it was you who were there on the bus
cos’ my friends warn me of your status and crass
and I knew you were trouble all through till dusk

I knew your past was tainted beyond degree
when you gave me that stare just before History
and your purpose was plain, it was crystal clear
I had a dilemma for the rest of the year

you broke every single fragment of my heart
and whispered in my ears to never turn back
the moments would linger and never depart
4 years ago, you were the one thing I lack

cos I’m still gunshy
drunk and still high
fountains have run dried
yet, I’m still gunshy
 

I finally got rid of the fringe this morning. No more the need to flip my hair when it agitates my eyes like I’m in a shampoo commercial, no more the need to comb my hair with my hands when the wind blows and no more people bugging me to show them the length of my fringe. Eh, show how long your fringe is, come on, show it…show it, it’s like a glimpse of hope and wonder would suddenly flow from my hair to their life. My fringe was so long I could use my mouth to chew it, no kidding.

(If you haven’t, you ought to read this before proceeding.)

The barbershop was pretty empty today except for Spanish Guy who was snipping away when I entered. One day, I am going to bring my camera and take a few photos of the shop and post it here, for viewing pleasure. So I sat down on one of the couches/sofas and waited impatiently, my eyes going all over the place. That is when I spotted something peculiar. That hanging electric box, it’s not TV. It’s HBO. This barbershop makes me proud and now I will shed a tear for you, Home Box Office. This is what makes going for a haircut rewarding, you get a free screening of HBO(although it’s muted), nice radio music in the background, and a trip back to the 80s.

I like getting my hair cut by Spanish Guy, he was a nice guy and his leather shoes were smokin’ hot.(I sound weird on that sentence) So I sat on the barber’s chair and looked up at his face as he gave me a what do you want nod.

Me: Err…trim my sideburns, but don’t do the line thingys and just trim(this means to trim the entire head of hair), oh and cut, cut the fringe.

Spanish Guy: You want me to cut slope? (this means to have a sloped back, works best with profiles)

Me: Oh, anything, yar, you go cut the slope, thanks, up t…, ah, yar, most important to cut fringe. Cut the fringe.

That is how desperate I got to reinforce and stress that I need my fringe cut, so desperate that I sound like I am suffering from some speech disorder. At least he smiled back, I wanted to get sucked up by the chair into another dimension from all that embarrassment. He went snipping away and within minutes, my national forest transformed into a neat little garden.

Me: You’re done!?

Spanish Guy gave a smile and nodded. He don’t speak much. But as he removed the cloth with the collected patches of hair, he commented: You got a long fringe.

Looking on the bright side, at least now with the short hair I look like I’m 12. You do realise that the title of this post is meant to be sarcastic.

This week was the busiest one of my entire 4 years in secondary school. I have never felt so traumatised by piling homework as before, so sunken in school workload and so like a worker in a high-end fashion industry. Rush, rush, rush, submit, submit, submit, work, work, work, panic attack. So besides having no life for the week, I remembered this quote, meant to be a bad joke:

enemies stab you on your back, best friends stab you on the front.

Teachers go all out and dig your eyes till they get your attention, hand in this, hand in that, by tomorrow, by Tuesday! Don’t give me that face! Very important! There will be a maths test next Wednesday, don’t stress! Wow, they go all out till the need for straitjackets arise. I don’t blame them, they even compete with each other to get the best spots during the holidays to conduct extra lessons. Once the English department’s meeting was over, the other teachers go rushing into the office to grab best spots in the timetables. I thought I tasted the air of liberation when the bell rang on monday, only to realise that I have science practicals after school.

I have no life. I was eagerly looking forward to a movie on Tuesday, however was utterly disrupted by school priorities. I was looking forward to getting the Liz Phair reissue of Exile in Guyville today, sadly disrupted by exhaustion from school activities. Hey, at least my eyes grow smaller each day from exhaustion, I’m just 3 days away from becoming a pure Chinese boy.

So since my social life is gone like smoke, I will now type about this one thing bothering me this week. I like to drink this apple juice with added aloe vera bits, anytime and anywhere, and I would usually buy one each recess in school for about 80 cents. It’s quite the value for money drink, and no, its not a concoction cooked up by the drink stall ladies, its comes with a proper brand. What I’ll do is get a straw, tear the packet slight open and sip gleefully like nothing else was going to bother me, not even global warming. What I hate about it was that because there were these bits of aloe vera, it jams the bore of the straw and I just sucked till the bit gets through and I would get all scrunched up and agitated. It was really annoying and I blame the stupid narrow bore of the straw. This was the aloe vera experience.

Hey, I just found out I am going to watch a play at the Esplanade next Thursday! I do have a social life.

Three things I find attractive on a man: Would you know what it meant if I answered this?
Three things I can’t stand to touch: Bugs, dead things, waste.
Three things I want to learn: Spanish, an instrument, dancing?
Three things I wished I’d never learned/had to learn: That the internet is full of creepy people and therefore the world is full of creepy people, that I wasted money on some lousy CD, physics.
Three things I want right now: Sundays, my tiger and a great song.
Three things I want out of life: Gratification, gratification, gratification.

taken from emmy cicierega who took it from bedizen. I’m so happy and rested today. It’s like I’ve skipped in meadow of roses and daisies with a flock of sheep and a couple of cows grazing in the meadow, with the hills are alive with the sound of music… playing in the background.

No, I’m not on any drugs or alcohol.

It was quite an unkempt day, I woke up to the sound of the phone alarm around 5.30 AM. Left the house around 7.45 AM to school, there was a workshop held for us and I dreaded to go, it was 13 hours long…in one room. The workshop was proclaiming some crap that I genuinely dislike, with topics like Improving Your Life, Setting Goals and lo and behold Wisdom Quotes. I went in knowing that I would exit with a bitter aftertaste, I couldn’t take such courses and it was forced unto me to participate or pay a hefty sum of $80 to school as a reimbursement trash.

It was slightly passable at the start, listening to the female trainer(who was young) talk about improving your revision habits. It was kinda useful with several methods of tackling revision and topics, I had enough attention to steer through the so-called motivational session. But when it reached the midway of the session, they switched trainers(to this guy who had experience) and topics started to get more deep. He was blabbing away about life and how it was so precious, and life and death, and stories about people who lost their lives and all that. His first impression was poor for me because he spoke about the good life and meeting some of his rich and famous friends, which I translated as a snob who earns a lot and is trying to impart his success formula to us. Pity.

The session was a lousy act put up by the trainers. First things first, they’re psychologists, which I despise A LOT. I felt uncomfortable with the second trainer most, he was experienced and was analysing our body language and I did not like people doing that, with the fact that it was also without permission. There was a point in time during the session where we were all joking around and in a split second he started screaming at us. About how he could have done better things, how he was trying to improve our lives, how he was still in jet lag from his arrival from USA, how lucky we were, how he wanted his dead friends back etc. etc. I wanted to shove a chair down his throat and tell him that if he wanted to improve my life, he could give back my 13 hours wasted on listening to him. The best thing was, it was such an abrupt moment I could tell straightaway it was put up, 80% of it.

Immediately after that scolding, he turned all depressed and moist, telling us to cover our eyes and imagine how we were in a dark room, a door opens and we met our parents, and we chat a little with each other, and how our parents were then sucked into a vortex of nothingness, and how we were running through a corridor of locked doors and we entered a room and how dusty that room was, and how there was a mirror and we see the most important person in our lives(which surprisingly was ourselves) and we chatted a bit and the end. By the end of that portion of the session, everyone around the room was sobbing, sniffing and tissues were handed around and I did not even shed a single tear. But that trainer who told us this fantastic story above spoke in a dramatic manner of melancholy that I had to give a thumbs up for his act. Drama queen.

So that was the highlight of yesterday’s programme, not to mention the worst 13 hours wasted. That particular trainer kept on stressing on how lucky he was on experiencing death beside him, and that we were all lucky folks and steered our lives on a whole new direction. Besides the whole read it and weep moment, meals provided were vile.

Ya know, motivational speakers/psychologists should undergo a drama workshop to improve their acting skills.

I came back from my recent trip to St. John Island this morning and I intended to type out a simple summary of it. However, I was not feeling very well and am also a little lethargic today. Trying to recover and get back to the usual cycle, I watched a bit of television, went to get myself cleaned up and listen to Coldplay’s new album Viva La Vida. I’ll start posting naturally tomorrow or a day later, or else bags will form under my eyes.

Oh and yes, I did get the Coldplay album. I bought it before coming back home.

At a certain point in your life you realised that we are all alone on this earth, and it’s really important to have good friends and to maintain those friendships and to keep connections alive because when you are young, you have so many connections and the most interesting thing seems to be to break them apart and strike out on your own. When you get older, it’s much more important to your identity to feel loved and known. I striked out most of my friends and I have new ones and they just keep coming. Well, with all that I’m turning the tables. Currently, the tablecloths on these tables are stained, the plates are kinda yellowish and scratched, the goblets are blunt and the cutlery have a slight bent. So I’m bringing the tablecloths to the laundromat, taking out the tableware as trash and going to IKEA to get new ones.

I will not be in Singapore tomorrow, I’m going for a getaway. Right now, I’m standing and staring at the mess in my bedroom and just reflecting. I’m going to tear down posters that say “I’m Fat” and “I Avoid Taking Responsibility”. Meanwhile, in my heart I do the same thing, leaving behind a “Save the Heart” poster. I’m trying to restructure my life by cutting away old strings and unfolding the dog-ears which once was a road block between my acquaintances and me. I have been covering up all my insecurities by keep myself busy, while avoiding tackling my issues head on. I hope that I can reach and gain what I wanted for a long time now. How do I expect change if I don’t change myself?

Anyways, I’m packing my suitcase and and searching for clothes to bring along. I always get this feeling like always wearing your favourite tees and not wanting to let go. I would always rummage through the laundry basket for this particular t-shirt and yes, its tight, and slightly faded, and frayed at the seams and some stitching might have came off, but I’ll still bring it. And wear it. And at the end of the day, I’m happy. First step of my journey of leaving the past behind me.

The worst change I undergo-ed was losing my childhood soft toy. My tiger. He was lost in Hokkaido and I could sleep the entire night, just worrying about the non-living creature. Next morning, the tour guide did an amazing job of locating it. So it’s sent to his house and he is sending it over here. it’s been a while now, and I lost a friend of mine, abruptly without saying goodbye. It had a lot of sentimental value and now it’s probably lost in the mail around the world.

So tomorrow when I get on the cab/taxi, that was it. When I come back, things will be different. This is my big break. I’ll take a leap of innocence.