anew

I am back. Again. I hope to stay. For my dearly nearly departed. If until now we've been part of what's keeping each other here, perhaps it's time we looked for more ways of sharing our lives. This here may be all that we shall have of each other in the not-too-distant future. Thus, I must reclaim this space.

I've found what I've been looking for. I'm doing my best not to let it go to waste. It's hard to think about anything else but I need to figure some out on my own.

Start with me and go to my mum and then to my mum's mum. Beyond that I have neither face nor name to put to any of the immeasurable line of women who are, each one of them and all, the cause of me. As far as I know (admittedly not far) or dare say (not unreasonably), none of them has had much (if any) earthly possessions to her name - her sole name. Is it, then, a biological imperative for me, who's at the end of the line and who may well end the line, to own more things?

My mum and my dad, each to their family, has gone further away (across the Earth's surface) than anyone else. They brought me to a place with nice weather and serene landscape and great healthcare and relaxing living, and all I want now is to leave. Will they ever understand? Not that their support or otherwise bears upon my decisions; it hasn't for so long. But I don't like to make anyone feel bad, and they are going to feel bad. So at least one of us needs to get past this and it might as well be me.

on the last day of being a child

I left, not knowing that I was leaving.
When I realised I'd left, I didn't know when or whether I would return.
Here I am, not knowing for how long.

As a kid - wherever be the demarcation nowadays; let's say in the days before I used words like "demarcation" or troubled myself with mid-sentence qualifications - to a kid, people fell easily into two categories: kids or grown-ups. For a time I didn't know how I knew; I just knew. Gradually however, numbers took on more significance so, hungry for structure and consistency, I surveyed the ages of the people I came across, and pegged out an arbitrary cut-off on the child/adult continuum. Naturally, the point got pushed back and back as the years wore on - whereas at age 6 it might've been 16, at 16 it became more like 21 - but at some point, I must've known all along, I was bound to outrun the clock as well as my capacity for denial.

That point is nigh.

It is coming up to another great divide: in some 4 months' time I'll have lived in this country for as long as I had in my first. Rather than nostalgia for the lost or appreciation for the present - though there is that and that - what dominates is an urge to take flight once more. This time on my terms.

There are choices to be made. If this be a gateway, do I leave all my baggage at the door or keep lugging it around with me? Do I heed my utilitarian learning or succumb to my hedonistic leanings? If I shed all that weighs on me to be grown up - the whom, the what, the wherefores - will I then, finally, grow up?

trial and error

I was only in a childish way connected to the established order;
I was terrified of oysters and glanced distrustfully at guardsmen;
And not a grain of my soul owes anything to that world of power,
However much I was tortured trying to be someone else.
Osip Emilievich Mandelstam

[An over-dramatic lead-in if ever there was one.]

My first ever trial this week, Monday to today. By my I of course mean a trial to which I've contributed my unparalleled p/copying know-how, a few evenings and half a weekend, and next to no cerebral input. By first I mean the first that actually ran its course; the one before, which had tied me to the p/copier for even longer, settled the day before it was scheduled to start.

Educational value: ++++

• watching two Senior Counsel (the anti-Monarchists' substitute term for Queen's/King's Counsel), Boss D, and another senior practitioner (with a menacing British accent) go head to head


• finally getting the big picture of what the bloody case is about: it's amazing how much work can be done (and billed for) without any grasp of the central issues

Physical rating: +++++

• pushing a jam-packed three-tier trolley up and down the Terrace: equality between the sexes has gone too far when the male (solidly built) instructing solicitor feels un-obliged to offer his muscles and allows the female AC (however strong and progressively minded) to get a wicked upper body workout 4 times a day for 4 days


• brisk (make that frantic) walking between the courthouse and the office to fetch things forgotten or newly arisen, in a suit (thank fudge it's spring), in a sustained state of panic about leaving something behind: it didn't feel lawyerly, it felt like a nightmare that was about to repeat itself ad infinitum

Culture shock: +++

• one instructing solicitor was dozing off by the morning of day 2, right there behind counsel and in the judge's direct line of sight: sure, probably exhausted from the late nights, but c'mon


• another (female, middle-aged, sloppily dressed (yes, even by my standards) ... - ladies what do we gotta get some self-respect around here?!) was doodling / playing with her mobile phone


• aforementioned unhelpful male instructing solicitor and I were only slightly disgraceful – we kept a list of Boss D's colourful expressions (for which he is known and feared): "fairly floss in the wind", "a drowning man holding on to a corpse", "a three-level building with no foundation", "a quagmire", "the worst penalty [interest clause] in living memory", ... (all of which, for the avoidance of doubt, were used to describe opposing counsel's arguments)

back to the future

... as where I've been, I suspect, can lead to no future.

Been quiet here 'cos writing elsewhere - somewhere I'm not sure is good for me, but it feels good so far, so we'll see. There are no plans to abandon this place altogether, however. Where else could I inflict my crap verse (of which there may well be more to come) on the world at large?

all pried out

Want crap verse? There's more than 1 place to get it.

Whereas Zhou Muyun found a tree with a hole
You found me
I am a keeper of secrets
Some not my own
And of those, few solicited, fewer savoured

Well I am no hole in a tree
It knows not to soothe, distract, make light of, …
The way I do
Why else would you have insisted on sharing
When there are more trees than there is me

Yet I would be content as a tree
To be used once and forgotten
Amidst a forest of more like me
But no rest for the wickedly gifted
For as your plight is chronic, mine is on shuffle+repeat

Measure success by the company one keeps
Then I'd feel far from accomplished
Either you want something I don't have
Or I need something you can't give

Too long I've been a dumping ground for all emotional garbage
My heart a wasteland

For every weight lifted
Every crisis averted
Where are you when I'm weak
True I do not let on, seldom speak
But if you delight in my reading your mind so much
How 'bout a little mutuality

Of course not everyone need covet the privilege
This mind isn't for all to poke and peek
Think what you like if you don't hear back from me
I could be busy
Away
Sick
Or fresh out of conversation topics

return of the native

[Haven't read this one either. But at least I own it and am faintly acquainted with Mr Hardy.]

Fantasise as I might of moving to a bigger city, I suspect it'll be much wasted on me - for every time I take notice of my town, which is astonishingly seldom, I get culture-shocked.

• What's up with the malls, heh? The layout, the aromas (not always pleasant), the traffic (and the obstructions thereto in the name of continuing development), ... if you didn't know where you were, all point to a location somewhere in Southeast Asia. And if you listened closely enough to the background noise you would hear almost no English.

• Along my cycle-path to Work, on the outskirts of the CBD, are some low-lying parklands just inside the riverbank. A couple ... check that, a man and a woman of undetermined relation, in their early 30s maybe (difficult to tell for reasons which should shortly become apparent) live there. Their entire possessions appear to be the rags they're wearing and what's inside the 4 or 5 bags which hang off a bicycle that's long past its passenger-carrying days. The first time I rode past them I thought they were regular poor folk (ugh listen to myself!) out for a morning stroll and a little treasure-hunting among the rubbish bins. Until the next morning, when I evidently disrupted their slumber - inside large plastic bags set up on the lawn. They probably move around a bit from day to day (whether for change of scenery or at the urging of police/rangers, I wonder), but they keep coming back to the spot which I've come to think of as theirs; and it's not a bad choice, all things considered. When it rains they need only move 10 metres or so to reach a pedestrian underpass. I've taken to ringing my bell (which I'm not in the habit of doing) on approaching this particular underpass, for fear of wrecking their home. Unfortunately it's too late to start saying hello now, we having crossed paths too many times without mutual acknowledgment.

• In any given locale in the world cleaners, like taxi drivers, are invariably non-natives. I've stayed back at Work often enough to have met most of the cleaners who service our building. Whenever I can I make an effort to exchange civilities, with enquiries about their day and family and employment conditions, i.e. the usual condescending questions which even I cannot rise above. I haven't learnt any of their names. I am certain that the objects of my brief and obligatory attention have not a clue most of what escapes my mouth and in any event find it more a nuisance than anything. The basement bike-shed is just outside their HQ (read: a couple of store-rooms); sometimes I see many of them gathered around their equipment trolleys, laughing chatting humming to the radio, oblivious to the language barriers amongst themselves and the more sinister barriers between them and those whose workplaces they clean.

a room of one's own

[A pompous literary allusion, of course, I never having read any Ms Woolf.]

Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father.

Jeanette Winterson, Oranges are not the only Fruit

The 2 or 3 people with whom I've been caught sharing confidences all happen to have their own dramas to contend with at the moment (such that if I started talking I might be expected to listen too - which can be a chore *eye roll*). And I dare not risk unloading on anyone I'm trying to romance. So here I am, naturally, bouncing in my safety net.

It came to my attention some weeks ago that my parents are set to rent out a 4th room in their 4-bedroom house. I hadn't had any time to process this news; until it crept up on me early this morning, and kept me awake after just 4 hours' sleep.

The room in question was once mine - or, as much as one could own anything under one's Chn parents' roof. It isn't a room in the strict sense but rather, an open games-area (converted from a former garage) located directly outside the laundry. Since I moved out it's become N's room (except that her bed is still in the master bedroom - another source of tension between myself and parents). I left my (as in, paid for by me) big desk and swivelly chair and bookshelf and TV-DVD-VCR combo and mattress and antique wardrobe behind, in the naive (and misguided, as it turns out) hope that my sister would have some place to hang out and receive guests - including myself. Apart from the lack of door and poor lighting and inferior insulation as compared to the rest of the house, it's pretty nicely decked out. More importantly, after the 3 proper bedrooms were let it's been the only space in that otherwise not unspacious house where N could conceivably enjoy some privacy - privacy which is crucial in her formative years, privacy which I never had growing up and now, by the looks of it, nor will she.

For what it was worth (read: diddly squat) I voiced my disapproval of the proposed arrangement. Unfortunately it was clear from the outset, without anyone having to say a thing, that the only circumstance under which my parents could be persuaded to reconsider would be my moving back in and tendering periodic payments commensurate with their "foregone profits". Which - don't panic - I have no intention of doing.

The result of my selfishness being, come Thursday, the only parts N will get to see of her own home will be the kitchen, the dining area, the corner of her parents' bedroom where she sleeps, and the "living room" which has already been largely obstructed by the imposing hand-carved mahogany lounge suite, the enormous flatscreen TV and her electric piano.

"Furious" is an adjective smacked of overdramatique as far as my feelings are concerned, particularly when these relate to my parents - towards whom I've long mastered the craft of functional detachment under the cover of ostensible devotion. But I am furious. And helpless (which, admittedly, is less unusual).

What I wouldn't give to disengage from my parents' lifestyle choices, to slip into innocuous oblivion the way they did long ago to me. But there's this person that I love and fret about (no more than I need to though, I think), who is completely at the mercy of two people with whom I find it so easy to disagree and so impossible to reason.

weakened

Took yesterday off Work with a view to preparing for today's exam (as far as Work knew the exam happened yesterday - a little collusion with a colleague suffering the same plight, goes a long way), but of course ended up having a grand time doing anything but, until 10.30pm when reality finally struck... Crawling into bed at 2.30am with a headful of mumbo-jumbo for an 8.30am half-dayer, just isn't as exhilarating as it used to be; and it never used to be much that.

Things to do on a Friday afternoon to make one feel more involved in one's baby sister's life:

• surprise pick-up from school
• donate retired computer to her classroom
• watch from porch as she feeds ducks (wild, not domesticated, despite the tempting inference given our ethnic background) bread and water on the front lawn of parents' house

Suffice it to say exam was too long, too hard, my handwriting a flaming disgrace, my effort equally so. I am still bristling with resentment and self-loathing: all these things I'm dying to read calling out to me from their various resting places (bookshelf, eBay, free ebook website, ...), yet I spend most of my days learning about how to make/save a shitload of $ for people who already have a shitload of $.

Thankfully cooking + power nap (not done simultaneously) promptly kicked the moody cow out of me. Then in the evening, cycled half a suburb across to join Special K's birthday celebrations (pizzas + Absinthe). Amidst the merry-making she managed to find the leisure to taunt me with her lovely straight girlfriends.

My stint of bandwidth pilfering is nearing its end - upon the highly anticipated return of my housemates The Lovebirds (yay!). Back to my naturalist 95% procrastination-free ways!

after the deluge

I have put this gripe off for too long to do justice to my state of mind when first overcome by the venom I felt rising inside me. But I am desperate for distraction from the previously mentioned relapsing affliction, and if I focused hard enough I could still recapture a fraction of the original angst, so I may as well give it a stab.

There is also this to say: he and Harold had nothing in common except youth. No spiritual bond could survive. They had never discussed theology or social reform, or any of the problems that were thronging Michael's brain, and consequently, though they had been intimate enough, there was nothing to remember. Harold melted the more one thought of him. Robbed of his body, he was so shadowy.

EM Forster, The Point Of It

I knew you were trouble even before we met. I'm almost never wrong about this sort of thing, and that time was no exception. Yet I welcomed you so recklessly, with the impatience of someone who had not another moment to waste on a past that could neither be continued nor erased.

I gave you my bed, my time, the food my housemates left for me, a little of myself too. You took it all, ungraciously, propounding a sense of entitlement I was too stunned (and stunted) to refute. I shrugged it all off, too preoccupied elsewhere to argue. What the heck, I told myself, my heart was not mine to give and if not that what have I to lose?

For you were there, of flesh, that I could see and hear and eat with and make laugh and... Everything that she was not. It didn't keep my mind from straying - I never pretended otherwise to you or myself - but nobody was getting hurt (or were they).

It took you less than a day to decide that you had to contact me everyday. It took me months to realise that I didn't want to know you anymore, not at all. Those were extremes even I'd never before known. How long will it take you to learn the true reason for my sudden disappearance?

Because of what I had tried (and failed) to exact from you, I cannot bring myself to say the words that will secure my release: Whichever way you spin it I did not exploit you the way you forsook me. And because of what I know about you, I am also afraid of the final insult - of your (recovered) ambivalence.

won't learn

So my shrink was right: the best antidote to any fixation, is another. She was right about something else too, and about that I shan't give her the satisfaction of knowing until absolutely necessary.

But wise as she, I fear, could not tell me why I always and only covet the Unattainable. My own theory - involving perpetual self-esteem crises, a defeatist mentality, and old school Freudian subconscious self-sabotage - I do not care to go into (and nor should you).

Here's how I know that I'm in trouble. For the last 18 months or so there's been one irregularly recurring event (IRE) that taxes my sanity every time it rears its ugly head. To say that I burn in this IRE (a phrase in a song that I for a long time mistook to be "burning desire") would be overstating the case - but not by much. Well the IRE is on again (into day 4 I believe), and I've barely had a chance to fidget about it... Cured! Rejoice!, you say? I say Nay. For in its place is nothing easier; and my affliction is all but receding.

I am conscious of the possibility (however slim) of one or both subjects of my successive fixations seeing this. But I am no novice at being thought ridiculous by those whom I fancy, or if the charge be indiscretion - I doubt that they'd have preferred some frightful private outpour. Besides, I am only scribbling here to numb my mischievous (not to mention inconsiderate) imagination, which every chance it gets throws me into elaborate tales of passion that unfold quite independently of reality or logic. So I'm doing us all a favour.

It must be all that Eddie F I've been reading clashing with choice lines like "You are what you say you are so think before you speak" picked up from this little-known movie or that. (Ironic really, given the proximity of these two guilty pleasures on the International Scale of Trashiness.) I feel nauseous.