For;

You were watching Discovery Travel and Living and reading the very awesome "Wigu Adventures" early in the morning as you were trawling deviantart for pretty things and realised that Eleanor and Zhen Teng haven't updated recently and right now you are irritated with the red squiggly lines under Zhen Teng's name that denote that you've mispelled her name and "misspelled" which is really, grammatically incorrect but you do not care for you are tired and your toes are cold and the infernal cat is making so much noise and that woke you up in the first place and you are also upset that one of your favourite sites with heartachingly beautiful drawings closed down and the farewell message was in Japanese and you had to go to babelfish to get the translation in broken English that did not make much sense and then you felt like talking to someone but it is too early in the morning to be doing things like that and right now all your friends are waking up to get ready for school while you sit on your chair and type away in Shanghai during March break where it feels like a holiday extended into forever and you are homesick and want to go home but you can't because this is supposed to be your home now and you mutter distastefully at the way you're switching tenses throughout this wall of text and this will be the first full stop you used in the past couple of minutes.

As you sit there wondering what to type next (not really for you are typing right now) you look at the blank space with the cursor blinking on and off inviting you to type something (oh look a), anything because you will feel better after this is done when you try to put your mixed up feelings onto e-paper where everyone will see it-

But-

You cannot find the words to do so so you are left to ramble on and peter about you are, however feeling much better and you will continue to live your life here in this utterly alien place and forget about the things you have written and the indescribable emotions and thought that you feel for you will be swept up by schoolwork and World of Warcraft and the other rigours of daily living. They will be set aside for the lonely pre-dawn hours where you can pretend to play the poet and ponder in front of the monitor with it's harsh white light giving your face a ghastly sheen (pause)

Your gaze falls upon the Creative Singapore flag novelty mouse that your parents bought from Mustafa and you smile sardonically, deleting commas and typos and thinking of how stifling Singapore was when you were there, and now, when you are free of the closeted censorship and not-really-democraticness and meritocracy, you are seized with an almost violent homesickness and the words "The irony" are branded across your brain and your thoughts settle upon your year in Victoria Junior College and how bloody miserable you were and how Language Arts lessons with Mr. Koh, Writer's Circle and tuition with Aunty Linda were the only bright spots of sunshine in your life then. That was your paradise and hell and they have been taken away from you as you now fumble about in purgatory with Dante and Beatrice.

You have things to do, letters to write, life to live but right now I feel terribly, terribly lonely. Instant messaging and webcams have let me down for they are nothing but 2-D parodies of socialising and reinforcing relationships and fuck. I miss Tiffany Eleanor Wynne Ah Kong Ma Ma Aunty Linda Ophelia Othello PotO spamming GEP Laksa Tom yam Steamboat char kuay tiao and the monsoon season. I miss Singapore without the trappings of the PAP and the mummies of red tape.

Fuck Nostalgia. I want the real thing.

>_>

My how time flies.

So many interesting things happened. What to choose..

It is the March Holidays right now! Don't kill me people, you had your own March Holidays.

We're mucking about with microscopes in Biology. The day's interesting specimen: Pond water.

Me: *Hums "There There" and sets up the sample of pond water and duckweed*

Me: Hm. Green leaves. *Focuses again*

Me: Hang on, what's the brown thing? *moves slide around, focuses*

Bug: *twitch*

Me: *Shriek!*

I am not turning soft! I swear! It's just a natural reaction when you're staring into a microscope and something stares back. The bug won the staring competition needless to say. Ugh. It was brown and pear-shaped, it's black eyes taking up most of his head space. Not very pleasant I assure you, especially since it was squished under the cover slide dying a slow death.

Sorry little bug.

Other things happened that I can't remember. That says how interesting my week was. Mmnyes.

Oh, and I halfdreamed/halfhallucinated about Mr. Koh. I was Kevin and I talked to Ms. Loh and throughout it all my voice was narrating in descriptive over-elaborate prose. One of those "Wtf am I on?" moments. Next thing you know I'll be in a coal cellar sitting on a sofa shaped like Marilyn Monroe's lips and admiring a huge hairy teacup. (If you didn't get it, Google "Surrealism".)

WoW has taken up most of my life unfortunately. I am LEVEL 40 and I HAVE MY MOUNT. It is on FIRE and it is COOL. Woo.

My I'm on a roll today. As a parting gift, here is the best song/music video in the universe:

BOOKZ!!

My Pa's back from Boston! Oh happy day.

And I have my books.

• The Chronicles of Chrestomanci (book one) by Diana Wynne Jones
  
• The Pinhoe Egg by Diana Wynne Jones
  
• The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the night-time by Mark Haddon
• No Logo by Naomi Klein
• The Golden Bough by James George Frazer
  
• Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• The Man who was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton
• At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O’Neill
• Ignorance by Milan Kundera
• Skin by Roald Dahl
• The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
• Birds without Wings by Louis de Bernieres
• Sunshine by Robin Mckinley
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard

Ah, the buzz of a happy bookworm. You get extra points if you can point out which books were bought to look good on the shelf. :D

Currently, I'm reading "The Time Traveller's" wife in little bits because I don't want it to end. I know roughly how it ends but I don't know the specifics. When it does end, it's going to be heart-breaking and I'm trying to prolong my current feeling of optimism.

It's all going to be alright.

Rargh. Stupid Horde.

On a completely unrelated note, my youngest brother snores. Loudly. This is not a very peaceful thing.

This is surreal.

Title? What title?

I haven't blogged in a while have I?

Shanghai's alright. Spring's coming but it's still cold. I do miss Singapore.

Something has been bouncing around in my brain for a while. Technically, Shanghai's supposed the be my home now isn't it? But it's not. It still feels as if I'm on holiday. Shanghai's so.. new, so alien, so fundamentally different from Singapore that it would be redundant to say that it's completely unfamiliar.

I don't think it can ever be my home. My best friends, my family, everything that I know is a five-hour flight away. The family's here but the little things that used to make up my life aren't. Dinners at the Kopi-tiams, visits to my grandparent's, romps at Kinokuniya and most of all, you my darlings. Singapore may have been stifling (weather and otherwise), I may have been miserable at VJ, but it is still my home.

Soppy National Day songs aside, it is extremely hard to uproot fifteen years' worth of experiences and memories and transplant it in another corner of the garden. I can't even imagine what it must be like for my parents. One feels.. transient when it is done. Rootless perhaps to extend the metaphor.

The thing is, Singapore is only my home in essence. For example, my house has been dismantled and now resides in Shanghai. When I go back in June, will I be living there? No I won't. I'll be living in a Service Apartment or a hotel. Physically, I've got nothing left that connects me to Singapore.


Hm. How angsty.

Interestingly, I've found.. things of interest on the internet. Now it's just a matter of waiting for people to get online..