hello hello! the queen has come out of hiding. i have been online thrice in 17 days, how disciplined i am and i didn't step out of my house either except to go for my exams.

one more paper to go! feminism paper which i have no idea what is the format. we have three texts and three videos we should have read and watched but i only read the shortest one and only watched one video. i don't know how i'm dead i don't know how to study anymore but yet i don't care because it's the last last last last paper!

plus i got Cs for all my assignments and my tests and i didn't post on the forum which is gonna cost me 10% of my grades. sobs.

ok whatever, last paper! (which is 30% open book haha.)

i think it was at my great-grandmother's funeral a long time ago (when i was seven or eight), when us kids were supposed to burn incense paper by the coffin but we went and folded paper airplanes and boats out of the underworld currency and sailed them into the flames. we played hopscotch, and catching at the playground nearby. my cousin shannon burnt my brother's ear with the joss-stick, and we walked on clayey mud at the burial site.

we cried when my great-grandmother died, but tears were shed only the night of her passing, and we saw the wake as a one-week break from school. we had fun when we played, and it didn't seem like a solemn affair at all.

this time, it's different. right now, my aunt is sick at home ravaged by her grief, my uncles are downstairs keeping an all-night vigil, my mom and dad sleeping in their beds after more than 24 hours of exhaustion, and the grandchildren sleeping in their beds wondering what my grandmother was feeling or thinking when she passed away this morning.

was she in pain? wasn't she all right when i saw her yesterday? sitting right beside her as she ate half of her hospital dinner, all by herself, when normally she only ate 2 or 3 mouthfuls fed by my aunt, only to vomit it all out later. i spent three hours in the hospital with her yesterday, and it felt so nice to hold her hand. her warm hand with the jade bangle at the wrist she never took off. hands with veins enlarged by countless injections, and blue-black with bruises. hands that held me as a baby.

she told me my bangle was pretty. my lime-green weirdly shaped bangle. she asked me how much it cost. it cost a dollar, and she seemed amazed. she said it was real pretty and told my uncle reading the paper to take a look at the pretty bangle, only cost a dollar.

recently she passed her time in drifts of sleep, the morphine made her drowsy. she slept all the time, she can even fall asleep talking. she fell asleep while eating her dinner yesterday. and now i guess she's asleep for good.

they brought the body back from the hospital, and i held her hand again. this time, it was cold. wait. didn't she say we should have home-made sharks' fin again at our chinese new year reunion dinner? didn't she say she'd ask the fortune teller to see if jess and i were meant to be? didn't she promise to cook that chicken in alcohol for me when i was pregnant? didn't she say she'd consult the fortune teller to make sure my babies had good chinese names? didn't you, grandma?

i wonder how cancer is like. so many cancer patients in my grandma's ward died. some of them were only mothers, not even grandmothers, not even wives. illness is a terrible thing...

i love you.

"... arrogance and self-indulgence merged in her and, with a twist that was all her own imagination, she lived out her days exploring her own thoughts and emotions, giving them full reign, feeling no obligation to please anybody unless their pleasure pleased her ... she had no center, no speck around which to grow. she was completely free of ambition, with no affection for money, property or things, no greed, no desire to command attention or compliments - no ego. for that reason she felt no compulsion to verify herself - to be consistent with herself."

"there, in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning. for loneliness assumed the absence of other people, and the solitude she found in that desperate terrain had never admitted the possibility of other people. she wept then."

how about some intertextuality to underscore a bout of melancholy.

one thing i read in my feminism course is the importance of the interconnectedness of human life, i.e. your relationships with other people, and the necessity of each person recognizing his or her subjectivity in order to maintain those ties. which means that one has to situate herself in the first person and recognize herself as the agent of an action; she herself has to take action to maintain her relationships.

it's sad to realize that i haven't recognized this subjectivity, i sit back and wait for the other side of the relationships to take action. i am an object! a go-getter feminist i am not.

i guess being independent, emotionally and in other ways, and refusal to rely on others even when help is really needed isn't a good thing after all. you believe you can handle things on your own; you make others believe the same. eventually, no one ever offers to lighten your burden, and you are left to drown in your self-created solitude.

what an ungodly hour to be up at, what the hell am i doing here? i was just about to get back to sleep, but i am absolutely compelled to say this.

i was supposed to hand in my lit essay this morning by 10am in school. yes, 10am on a saturday. a day on which, i am shocked to say, some people actually have classes! how preposterous. the nerve of the MOE! even civil servants have a five-day work week now. all they care about are citizens with children, citizens who are at the married and child-bearing stages, don't students have families too?! maybe they think having more school days would mean a higher probability of us meeting a life partner, hence increasing the marriage and birth rate in time to come. oh, the baseless logic on which they operate!

as i was saying, i was majorly griping about having to go back to school on a saturday. i live two frickin' hours away and i have to go back to school just to drop a bloody few pieces of paper into some perverted lecturer's/tutor's pigeonhole?! firstly, i know i could have written my essay a few days earlier and hand up on the last day of the wk that i'd be in school. but, we are in university and only freaks would do that (oops, i did that for the first essay!) moreover, this is the time of the semester when deadlines upon deadlines are piling up and there's just no way you can complete an assignment before the deadline. secondly, who came up with the term 'pigeon-holes' to denote those little drawers anyway?

i have forgotten what i was going to say. oh yes! so yesterday i slept super late and overslept for an hour over the time i was supposed to wake up and i was like, shit! i was supposed to email the lecturer a soft copy via email and a hard copy via the pigeon-hole, so i planned to email it to him while printing my essay in school. but since i was late, i decided to email him from home instead, so at least my soft copy would be on time if my hard copy wasn't.

so i grumpily log on to nus email, and a beautiful sight greeted my eyes:

QUESTION: Dear Sir, i would just like to enquire if some of us could hand in the hard copy of the essay by monday, but send you the essay by the due deadline tomorrow by email, as some of us do not have classes on saturday, and would be just returning to campus to hand in an essay. Thank you and sorry for any trouble caused.

ANSWER: Yeah, sure, whynot? No need to make a special trip on the weekend. All best, JWB

omg. i feel like God, the angels, my fairy-godmother, the deities of all religions, have heard my cries and granted me the exact thing i needed. imagine if i read this while printing my essay in school. i would seriously thrash the computer, and have a total B.F. (what's a B.F.? Bitch Fit, run for your life!)

i've just emailed the essay, and am mighty pleased. let me adjourn to my bed for some beauty sleep. my saturday is starting off great.

news on my grandma: she was readmitted to the hospital yesterday night after dinner because she was in pain. she could not breathe well too. the grandchildren were all in tears, and being the oldest among them, i knew i had to be in control. if i lost it, they'd all bawl and it would worry my grandma. she'd wonder, hey what's wrong? do they know something that i don't? she was just going there so that better medical attention can be extended to her because the grown-ups can't be there with her 24/7. (but i did lose it, for a tiny second). please God, don't let anything happen to her.

this place has definitely been cobwebbed all over, with a layer of dust settled over it. the allure of this place seems to have faded, but it seems such a shame to leave it, considering it took me hours of blood-sucking html to get it done. what's a blog for anyway... catharsis? do people really confide in people, or inanimate things like a journal. a blog is probably the worst place to pen, i mean, type down your emotions in, but i'll try.

i remember when i was little and staying in a farm at sembawang; i remember fishing in our huge, seemingly depthless pond, and being surrounded by lots of dogs. dogs who were considered family, who slept with me in the afternoons. my grandma told me she used to carry me on her back when she went to feed the pigs. we had a pig farm with lots of pigs - pink ones, black ones, pink with black patches. and things i can't recall i pieced together by looking at old photographs. in 1985, the government bought over the land on which our farm was built, and we all moved to where we are living today.

i drifted from my grandma after that, until primary four when i stayed with her for three years while my mom held a 19 hour job. she left the house at 4 am and only got home at 11 at night, so she couldn't take care of me. the lamest thing is, my grandma lives in the same block as we, on the very same floor. we were just separated by a wall. i grew really close to my grandma then, and to my cousins, who were there every weekend, and some of them everyday. we ate instant noodles (chicken tanmen with egg, mustn't forget the egg) every afternoon, went for abacus and remedial classes every saturday (we were all from the same primary school) and hung out at the neighbourhood playgrounds eating french fries from DO-AND-ME at blk 123. during the holidays, my grandma and us kids went to the hill behind our block to exercise. she in her light purple tee shirt walking rounds up on the hill as the sun rose behind her. i love the mornings, my favourite time is when the sky turns from dark to light, a little while after the sun has risen. after our run, we'd eat chee cheong fun and drink soya bean at the little stall at the coffeeshop at the bottom of the hill.

my grandma used to walk all the way to the market to buy her own groceries, and she cooked her own dishes. i remember complaining about always eating porridge and eggs. she went to the temple, and she went on trips. she made us clothes, and she taught me how to eat green apples with salt. she was the one who brought me to school on my very first day of primary school. she bought me my first pair of sports shoes, which i remember was brown and red and had three velcro straps. she was always asking me to eat, and made sure i had money for school. when i had track practice, i'd write her a note in chinese saying i had to go pao3 bu4 (literally "jogging") because she wouldn't understand what the real term for track practice meant.

when it was time to go home in primary 6, i cried and refused to go. my whole life was there now at my grandma's. but i left eventually, and i have been leaving my grandma's side ever since. caught up in work and play, i hardly visited my grandma even though we lived like three minutes walk from each other. i only saw her at reunion dinners and at the temple and those times when i was at the bus-stop and bumped into her walking forlornly home alone after a trip to the market. whenever she called to ask me to go over for dinner or to pick up some herbal tea she made, i'd be extremely impatient and rude.

and now that she's so sick, i can't afford to be like that anymore. all those trips to the hospital, all the tubes in her arm, how she never complained but instead told us not to visit her if we didn't have time, it just ate me up to see her like that. i visited her from school almost everyday, less on busy weeks, up until the day she was discharged. she'd already lost her breast to cancer, and had other operations and now, it seems the cancer has recurred and is spreading.now that she's discharged, the first few days we had a reunion dinner to celebrate her return in conjunction with the midautumn festival. that was a tuesday. on the sunday i saw her, she had lost half her head of hair to chemotherapy. throughout the night i had to hide myself in the toilet to cry.

when you confide in people, their natural reaction is to tell you they understand, and that they've experienced the exact same thing. losing a grandparent, or having had an extremely ill grandparent, is something most people my age would have experienced. but please, don't say that to me. because i believe everyone's experience is different, and it wouldn't make me feel better... in fact, it kinda makes me feel worse to know that my relationship with my grandma can be commodified and generalized in such a way. but of course, that doesn't mean that any consolation wouldn't be appreciated.

i think the worse thing is knowing that she can't do any of the things she used to be able to do. she can't cook, god she can't even walk. she needs a back brace to keep her back straight so it won't hurt and she gets around the house in a wheelchair, with someone pushing her. the only thing i'm grateful for is that i still have the chance to let her know how much she means to me, because i didn't get the chance to even see my grandpa for the last time...

i am so touched by the number of part-time stints that have been coming my way this week *tears*

thanks for remembering me girls (addie, ma, my brother). although i am sorry to say i can't take them up this week, keep them coming in!

i just finished typing up my literature presentation on jazz music! i am so tired! should i brush my teeth? anyway i just wanted to say HIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE to everyone.

i meant to blog yesterday because friends finally ended its run (in singapore at least) and i was sad. ten years is a bloody long time, so it means we've been watching it since primary 4?

have i told you guys before that my first ever episode of friends was the one with the fake monica? back when chandler was skinny and ross had horrid hair. actually i liked ross' hair best when it was real flat and scarce, back when he had that monkey, marcel. and rachel just looks better and better, her hair is soooo silky. and i heard that both mr and mrs brad pitt mix two crushed aspirins into their shampoo to keep their hair in tiptop condition. does it really work...

and i teared when rachel came back: "i got off the plane" awwwwwwww. i relish the idea of a couple coming full circle back to where they started; like when faith wears out, you can still count on fate, if you may pardon me for sounding too idealistic. i'm so worried that joey is going to grow old alone... but i guess we'll still be seeing him quite abit now that he's having his own spin-off.

and may i add that the hospital is never a happy place; unless you're having babies. now, some people don't even find that a good thing. two weeks and counting - i think i've had enough of the hospital for now. get well soon, grandma!

i realised that i'm becoming less and less tech-savvy as i grow older and lazier. i used to trial and error around with all those funny programs and could churn out some good stuff but i can't anymore.

dreamweaver is rotting away on my laptop, taking up hundreds of mb of space as i try to convince myself that one day, i will master it on my own. i don't even carry my laptop around anymore, it is just too heavy. elisa must have some great muscles.

my right eye is twitching non-stop, what does it mean?

the school term panic is starting to set in now.

i am super duper in love with samaire armstrong.

ok, not very chesty i know but she is the crusader for us lesser-endowed! so is gwen stefani and pre-mom kate hudson. not to mention a bevy of other beauties...

oh anna, please come back to the o.c...*sobs*

my brother came into my room the other night while i was chatting online. he sat beside me and blabbered away about something, and after awhile, he got tired, got up and left.

he likened talking to me with talking to a wall because i never listen. to him anyway. but i did! he asked me to suggest what nature scene he should paint next. (yes, he's surprisingly into watercolours now.) imagine, someone you've known all your life and he suddenly surprises you with a knack.

admittedly (and i do this ashamedly), i've never tried to know my brother better. i'm like this stereotypical asian parent, with all these emotional barriers that prevent you from telling your kids "i love you" and "kinky sex is really great." when he opens up his heart to me, i'm all neanderthal: i grunt, i hmmm and ahhh and ohreally.

just awhile ago, i found his blog. it was about his then-girlfriend, which he broke up with soon after. i didn't ask why, i just assumed it was another one of those teenage romances that fizzle and pop. it turned out she had been cheating on him; she had a boyfriend when she went back to shanghai on holiday.

he really poured out his soul in what he wrote. he wrote about how he hurt, and it reflected on his perception of himself. he even wrote a poem about betrayal (all by himself too!) that blew me away. it was honest, it was heartwrenching, it was brilliantly written. it made me cry and then, i wished i was a better sister.

i've been editing his essays for years, and honestly, his grammar was in disarray, his vocabulary was severely limited, and it was a huge test of my patience. but this piece, stemming from heartache deep within him, it really made me wonder whether he nicked it from somewhere. come on, i thought it was a song!

i felt real rotten after that. here i am, behaving like some walled in caveman, never trying to find out what's up with his life, living under the same roof, me in one room listening to sappy love songs while he was moping away churning out angsty poems and i had no idea. i'm a terrible sister!

i cried and i swore to be a better sister. i'll buy my own food sometimes and not tell him to go to hell everytime he asked me to pass him the remote which is like, 1 inch away from his hand.

so the next few days after that, i tried to be in tune with him, and like be nicer and ask him how he's been and all that. i also silently put a curse on his cheating ex.

within a month, he found a new girlfriend...

wtf. i shall just save my energy for more constructive purposes from now on, like trimming my cuticles.

i like to ask people 'would you rather?' questions. you know those questions that run along the lines of 'would you rather watch a porn movie with your parents or watch a porn movie starring your parents?'. it's captivating to see the logic behind how people think, why people make certain choices, to analyse the kind of people they are.

this notion of choosing between two evils, being forced to choose one shitty option out of two, is just so... i don't even know how to describe it.

i think i've asked this before: would you rather break up with your boyfriend (or girlfriend, whichever) because of unnatural circumstances like him leaving for another country, or because he fell for someone else?

i used to choose the former, because at least i knew that the break up wasn't because he didn't love me anymore, and the latter meant just that.

but now, i realised that i'd rather the latter, because at least i'd have someone to blame, and the love i have would die easier, because there's no way else.

the former just seems too painful, precisely because you still love each other, but can't be together. you hold on to the fact that maybe it could work out, and you don't know when to let go...

have you ever been stuck in a rut, and all you want to do is to curl up in a ball and cry your heart out?

have you ever felt that everything is just going wrong, going downhill, turning sour, becoming rancid, and you just don't know how to fix it?

have you ever wondered if forever really exists, if it can, and who are the blessed few who've achieved it?

have there been times when you're already down in the dumps, but all you ever play are sad love songs?

has it ever crossed your mind why some people are so heartless, why some seem devoid of emotions, and why some are so goddamn indifferent?

i have, i am, and it's driving me crazy!