ick schmick

When you wrestle your way onto public transport and plonk yourself between a heavyset middle-aged European widow and a bearded man with a questionable smell lingering on the remains of his clothing, you forfeit all rights to personal space and any possible level of comfort. There's little that can be done to avoid the wispy cobweb-esque hair of the foreigner seated next to you brushing your forearm, rocking back and forth racked by silent giggles as you glare at their backpack covered in cupcakes and frogs and wonder what could possibly be funnier than throwing them into quicksand. We are (or at least I am) set an Everest on a daily basis, to push thoughts of contracting skin diseases or gastro out of our minds. I am by no means Emma Pillsbury - I live by the 5 second rule - but CityRail is known as ShittyRail for a very valid reason.

toddler talk

You represent the bungee cord which brings everything back to comfort, familiarity, all that you needed to delve deep to even recall once more. A memory, a state of being, a time which you both despise and hold dear to your heart. But there is always more than meets the eye, peering through those first impressions - the fear is that it isn't adequate in meeting your expectations, those both feasible and completely irrational. It is all good and well to have hopes, fantasies, dreams both inconceivable and within grasp. And the best is only experienced when you have absolutely everything to lose. You are given the opportunity to appreciate, not the superficiality, but the soul, the inner workings of what causes movement, emotion, inspiration, satisfaction. Consciously or not, we are striving for an equilibrium in our lives, and those intent on searching for life's meaning are realising all too late that they are missing out on the journey life itself is. Where does one find the lever to stop analysing, calculating consequences, preparing and predicting for what we believe is ahead? The best we can do is search within ourselves to define all that we are able to. Are we even remotely close to understanding ourselves, through self-appointed descriptions and analogies and comparisons? Perception is unique for everyone, and it teeters on the brink of humorous how we constantly misinterpret one another and, as a result, cause conflict neither party wants to resolve.

I know you were looking, but what were you looking for?

Maybe I am on the path to love, and maybe I will learn many things along the way. So here are some thoughts (though they are not my own) -

"The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it is not. It is an existential truth: only those persons who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of the other person - without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other. They allow the other absolute freedom, because they know that if the other leaves, they will be as happy as they are now. Their happiness cannot be taken by the other, because it is not given by the other.

Then why do they want to be together? It is no longer a need; it is a luxury. Try to understand it. Real persons love each other as a luxury; it is not a need. They enjoy sharing: they have so much joy; they would like to pour it into somebody. And they know how to play their life as a solo instrument. The solo flute player knows how to enjoy his flute alone. And if he comes and finds a tabla player, a solo tabla player, they will enjoy being together and creating a harmony between the flute and the tabla. Both will enjoy it: they will both pour their richness into each other."

From Being in Love

by Osho

Pyrenees Mountains, South France
Not jealous at all ...

Happy one month, Simons!

By the one and only Marie Ramos x

"You miss 100% of the shots you never take."

- Wayne Gretzky

total serendipity

Leaving something behind gives you something to return to.

Airports are the most magnificent of places because they allow you to escape as far off into the distance as you can imagine, yet the beauty of travel is that it should never be constrained. Every flight is a journey, every step away from familiarity is a new beginning, a glimpse into the millions of potential pathways which disappear from existence the moment we choose to walk down a particular one. Never leave with a heavy heart, don't take another step until you are fully aware of the wonders that the world has to offer. Because it is in the letting go with no regret that we gain everything and more; and embarking on a journey, especially a spontaneous one, is one of the most rewarding and exhilarating leaps of faith we can take.

I Shift+F7ed 'perfect' and got "just what the doctor ordered". Um, Microsoft Word needs to consult an actual thesaurus sometime in the near future.

add-me

 

The envelopes that the Red Cross supplies taste like pears, definitely the best tasting envelopes I've tried so far. I want to file and budget and organise and promote and be a fairy! It's raining phlegm (hallelujah!)

Emma says no more questions

Date with one Jess Chu!

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We write about our thoughts and we think about our feelings and we feel the things that we do and love and believe and share and I want words, I want words to encompass the essence of the present, the lingering scent of the past and the anticipation of what's to come that you surrender every fibre of your being to focusing on keeping your hands in fists so as to not spoil what is or what isn't. I want to overcompensate for the wasted, the empty, the neglected, the deprived, the forgotten, I want to overindulge until I am seeing but I am not, I want them all to coincide and blend, amalgamate, marry into one beautiful splendid moment of everything and nothing. I want to hold on but I know the beauty is buried in the letting go, something so precious that you suffocate its whimsical image by bolting it down with bricks, bricks of steel and heavy hearts. I want sentences, and I crawl under the table, picking at crumbs and scraps of fallen greatness, begging for more, more to sustain and nourish, but most of all to reassure.

sunday funday

Nostril flare contest

Little rats!

She's even got the fists going

Peek a boo

Best kid evahhh

Fries a la pho

kobe jones

Too lazy to form sentences. We had fun, it rained. Here are some pictures:

photographic diarrhoea

Anger at whoever took me to a MUSHROOM FARM for lunch

Look how close I got to the ducks in Perth!

One of the rare occasions where every member of my paternal family showed up

Lake of Dreams at Sentosa

Marina Bay Sands

Asian moment

Azn hair in my eye

Bread = Happiness

Some of my favourite things - oh, and Jess!

watching marstahsheff

The Chocolate Room with Miss Chu

"You look like a little rat"
: (

LOOK AT THESE SHOES by far the funniest things I've seen this week

This coming week I will embrace mud crab and pandan cakes!

can I have my job back

"According to Aristophanes in Plato's The Banquet, in the ancient world of legend there were three types of people. In ancient times people weren't simply male or female, but one of three types : male/male, male/female or female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangment and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife and cut everyone in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing half." 

Haruki Murakami Kafka on the Shore

I love this idea of how people might have been once, if you stop to think about how much sense it makes when the person you thought was your other half turns out not to be - the betrayal and disappointment because you're not their other half, either. And we pass through life like we do when we shop for fruit, picking up apples that look how apples should look, until we return home only to realise that it's rotten from the inside out when we cut it open. And so back we go, when we can be bothered or when we're out of anything left to sustain us, and the search begins again. But you don't want apples if you're a popcorn machine - you want corn. Only you don't know what you want or what you need because you don't know who you are.

I feel as though ignorance isn't something we can be legitimately frustrated about when we view it through our self-appointed intellectual eyes. Sometimes a piece of writing can make one realise that there is a house outside of the room they've been holed up in, a neighbourhood surrounding that house and an entire nation and world beyond that. And I'm not going to be pretentious and publicise my interest in and knowledge of Objectivism, mainly because I understand as much about the topic as I know that there is cheese in Tasmania. But the ability to submerge yourself in the beauty of its words and visions is more than I can say for the mundane yet highly relevant (apparently) world of marketing.

highlight of my week

Unable to hear the right lyrics anymore

do you sleep like a spoon?

It's all just a crazy, beautiful meeting of sorts, thinking about how feelings and experiences become the essence and inspiration for music, which in turn affects people in the most incredible of ways, sparking a whole new generation of emotions involving millions of different people who will never meet one another or have the chance to ignite amazing relationships, romantic or otherwise.

I think I'd have a better chance of success following in the Korean Seventh Day Adventist closet-rock-band-drummer footsteps of Lane Kim with these knitting needles than actually doing any knitting at all. Casting on .. YOUR FACE SHOULD CAST ON.

Sometimes I think that the entire corporate world is a well-kept secret, that behind the millions of frosted glass security swipe-your-ID-card-here doors there really is nothing but coffee breaks and water cooler conversations and should I be sleeping with someone from the office? And they employ little men from Mars that scuttle around doing work and refilling paper and toner whilst these corporate giants take all the credit for it.

warm my bones

"Promises are meant to be broken, and people are only surprising when they aren't disappointing you. When you're young, you think things get better as you get older. But the truth is you just get better at dealing with them."

- Carly Cristman 

Yes, she's a makeup guru on Youtube, but she speaks the truth! I can't express how much mediocrity seems to be the norm, and at any given moment things are either bad or worse. Disappointment and delays occur on a daily basis, but at least it isn't disease and death we're dealing with. (Wow I didn't even mean for that to happen.) Are we missing all that the world has to offer by zooming in on what it lacks? It's never "I'm happy with what I have", it's "Why don't I have enough? Why can't I have what she has? Damn I should have ordered the veal." We can dream, we're encouraged to, but the fantasies which bring most fulfillment are completely unattainable. If you 'believe in yourself' it's been said to help, but I always feel as though it'd jinx your chances and you've got to act nonchalant, and not let the universe know what you really want in case they won't let you have it.

This may seem like a negative post, but in truth it's the opposite! Really :)

Happiness isn't happiness without a violin-playing goat

don't hate me but ...

I LOVE YOU. (Like, I don't even know what went down between photo #1 and #2.)