flatliner of a day

today has been a seratonin-low day. I am definitely short on the happy hormone. thought to myself that I would really like to take the next five days off and vegetate at home. squirrel up in my rathole room and read Slaughterhouse Five and whatever else I've got lying around with fancy colourful covers and/or strong recommendations from trusted friends with taste. play Robert Downing Jr on endless repeat then when I get sick of it, play the triumvirate of yo la tengo, arto lindsay and belle and sebastian. if in the mood, throw in some radiohead or portishead to bring me to the verge of swallowing a shotgun barrel. metaphorically, of course. wake up my dogs when they're sleepy in the late mornings and wrestle them on the couch and get dog fur up my nose and in my ears and actually derive perverse amusement from having done so. the five days must be absolutely free of responsibility and reproach. if I can take my brain out and store in one of those regenerative tanks in which they stuck Luke Skywalker after he got mauled by the ugly giant snow creature, even better. I would take no phonecalls nor would I entertain emails. The only way to get to me is over a beer -- which must be Yebisu, Kirin or Boddingtons -- over at Blooies or some other bar where the bartender greets with familarity or already knows what I'm going to order. I might take some time to get a haircut even though my hair is already short and trimmed, but I find the sensation of sharp metallic objects combing through my head strangely therapeutic. I would like to chat with strangers who don't know me and therefore expect nothing, so there's no need for pretence or for tiring mind-games. just fire-and-forget.

but of course, none of the above is possible. just a daydream of someone who has to go to work in seven hours.

lazy afternoon with my type

Over Sunday night post-tennis drinks, J asked me what my type was. While my answer then tried miserably to give form to that necessarily amorphous creature, I think the following might be a better stab at my mythic type:

Clutter. 50s Americana pod-mod cream white TV that didn't work made for a coffee table on top of which piled heaps upon heaps of non-descript magazines with non-descript beautiful people on the covers. Bookshelves lined the walls and on them, the surreal, the existentialist, the comic and the epic stood back-to-back in no particular order. Somewhere between Kafka and Pramoedya, she squeezed in a Soviet-era wind-up clock--4:15. hands frozen in place, immortalising a spectacularly unpeculiar moment, perfectly straddling both the absurd and some unnamed historic consciousness.

At the centre of the room, she's squirreled up in her egg-tart couch that is really a cross between a bean bag and a chair [ten dollars only. she bought it off a cafe she had only been for the first time and loved, but found that it was closing in a weeks' time, so she brought a piece of it home. lovely -- once she scraped the dried-up roach remains from beneath the cushion]. The book she was reading fights for resting room on the bridge of her elfin nose with thick, plastic black-rims, behind which hide usually coy, playful globes currently in a restful sleep. Her scraggy fringe falls across the forehead carefully dishevelled. Ordered chaos, organised mess.

In one corner not already conquered by the hordes of books and magazines, an old stereo belts out Nina Simone, serenading noone in particular. Noone seems to notice either. Yet, somehow the rhythms evoke a pastiche atmospheric that is at once fabricated but also comfortingly familiar. Like home.

Chris Martin and I will not be friends

Coldplay are extortionist bastards. one hundred sixty eight dollars for free standing tickets!? uh uh. no thank you, you can sing to gwyneth alone, I want nothing to do with your sugar-coated faux angst. what do millionaires have to cry about anyways?

(Flashback: A winter's night in NY in the not-so-distant past. Outside, the streets are a noir-ish grey: you could almost hear Orson Welles lurking behind the corner in a trenchcoat. Elliot and I are in St Mark's Bookshop on East 8th [hope I'm getting this right.. my memory is a murky mess] browsing through pretentiously intellectual reading material, like too-cool translated Japanese fantasy lit disguised as 'postmodern discourse', but it's forgiveable. We were at that age when it was our prerogative to pretend to be someone else. The riffs of 'Yellow' hum themselves into the air, punctuated by the occasional intrusion of the rain whenever the door swings open momentarily to let another wannabe in or out. Of course, we didn't know it was called 'Yellow' then, but the freshness of unabashed Brit rock in a country where radio served a stale staple of bling beats and whiny pop rockers reeled us in instantly. The rest, as they say, was not history, but rather the shared experience of all who went to college at the turn of the millenium. Wasteful Internet decadence at its height: We Napster-ed Coldplay.)

So much for nostalgia. I'll have to KIV my Coldplay concert plans, especially since I had been unusually extravagant last month.

The sad thing is, our sunny island rarely gets any remotely good bands doing shows that I always feel compelled to go even if it was something I only marginally like. Coldplay's good because it stirs up warm fuzzy feelings for old times' sake, but it's not really the footstomping, fistpumping kind of 'good' nor is it clever or witty enough to excite my inner geek. Every now and then, we get a Franz Ferdinand, and every inch of your soul, every particle of your being is charged with such frenetic excitment and you feel like frankiestein waking up to the smell of morning. But then it ends and you hang around, hover, stick your hands in the pockets and kick the dust off the ends of your sneakers while humdrum Oasis and Coldplay come and go and you wonder if you should just go because there's nothing else.

My next frontier is the local indie scene. I went to an Observatory gig last year but noise rock, symphonic or not, wasn't quite my thing. Cafe Cosmos or Timbre, anyone?

Drivel

what an exciting Monday. S is almost dead (again). ET is on the verge of civil war (again). and M looked like it was gonna blow--well, no one really knows for sure, but Channel News Asia claimed M erupted this morning, sending the office into pandemonium before we realised that Asia's numbah one news network was out-of-step with the rest of the world (again)-- turned out M was just farting out voluminous smoke.

Those who don't have a clue what the Acronyms stand for: Guess. It's not that difficult.

Other earthshattering news at work: F is joining the office. Of all the major disasters that could've happened today, none can match up to the one that actually did. F embodies everything I am not: serious, hardworking, and actually successful. The only consolation I take is that he's got a Third-Reich combover and a cheek-mole that looks almost cancerous. F is one of those types for whom the universe obeys a separate logic and alien laws of physics. If you cracked a joke, he would think you were trying to criticise him. If you confessed ignorance, he would assume you were testing him. Welcome to the world of the over-serious and hyper-intense. Where "take it easy" is gibberish and "relax" only muttered under the breath in quiet shame.

Worse, this fuckwad is taking the cubicle next to mine. Maybe I should seal off my workspace with a hanging duvet.

Started on another Jap dorama tonight. Idolatry is the opiate of the modern-day single young adult. Who needs a social life when the companionship of the fabulous and the fantastic can be realised at a mere $15 (plus ten percent discount at selected Poh Kim)? And the art of idolatry is at its most refined in the Japanese dorama. No need for convoluted plotlines revolving around epic family power struggles or boardroom battles. No chockablock kimchi kookie convulsing on her faulty facet teardrops either. What you have instead is cheeky cool or spunky cute --a polished pop fantasy tailored for those who pride themselves on being different but succumb ultimately to better packaging anyways. Love it.

An actual quote from a Tokyo University law student (saw this on TV years back): "When I grow up, I want to become like Kimura Takuya."

BACK

After not writing for a good two months, I'm staging a comeback that's inspired by Po's confession that he actually bookmarked my blog on his browser. [ah. the little things that keep me going.]

so why haven't I been writing? for a chockful of reasons that always invalidate themselves upon enunciation: ranging from the usual-- "I've been swamped with work, up to the neck, you know!"-- to the pathetic-- "Other people's blog so much better mah. I write so lousy, malu!" -- to the sad-but-true-- "Sian. nothing to write about. brain is dead."

In any case, if you're reading this, it means you're one of the faithful who still check this page for updates in spite of seemingly perpetual disappointment. So... thanks.

I'm going to take this entry as a warmup for the revival of my blogging days, so I won't be rattle off endlessly about my thoughts/feelings/musings/life or lack thereof for the last 8 weeks. Will instead just pretend that all of that didn't happen and start afresh on a blank slate. so stay tuned ok!!

quirkyalonemyass

this site is almost cool:

http://quirkyalone.net/qa/index.php

Beneath its pseudo-intellectual celebration of self, its really just loneliness repackaged. smells like a bunch of over-grown former gen x loners thumbing their noses at people in relationships for 'settling'. Friendster for people too proud to admit they need Friendster. pwah.

Maybe I don't understand -- I did only score 70 on the 'Are you quirkyalone?' quiz. That makes me quirkytogether: Possessing aspects of quirkyalone-ness, but still somehow find myself in a coupled situation every now and then.

What's Your True Colour?

Puay Lim, your true color is Orange!

You're a bold, confident orange. A warm, powerful color that indicates a strong, welcoming personality, orange is the mark of people who are social and extroverted by nature. Vibrant, with an upbeat attitude, you have a bright, inviting demeanor. Energetic and fun-loving, you're a real friend-magnet. Your easy charm and unassuming manner make you the sort of person people want to meet and get to know better. Well-rounded and fun to be around, you enjoy helping others, so it's no surprise that orange also symbolizes attraction. Orange is an extraordinary color — for an extraordinary person.

I can't believe I even wasted five minutes of my life to do this quiz. Sycophantic drivel is just not my cup of tea at 1am after a 16hr work-day. I rather be Agent Orange -- caustic to the point of pain, but you just can't make it go away.