christmas

Christmas day is a time to be selfless, no matter how silly i really feel inside.

A day to embody silliness so that 14-year-old girls can put aside their self-consciousness too--and win that prize for best costume!

Christmas is a time for hearty, homemade meals. Because homemade turkey is a lot better than store-bought, or worse still, turkey roll. But any meal with loved ones is delicious anyhow.

Christmas is a time to pretend that it's cold.

And to wear funny hats that girlfriends bought for you, because it's all excused at Christmas.

And Christmastime is also when my birthday comes along and everything is celebrated together conveniently. I used to hate that my birthday gets lumped together with Christmas and New Year's, but this year I appreciated that everyone around the world was in merrymaking mode, and sales are everywhere, and gift sets are aplenty, and everybody gets presents when we have my birthday party.

 

And Christmas is also the time of camps, of kids' camp and youth camp. Of holding small hands, and missing them even when January comes along.

I've had a very busy December, so busy that my own work's gotten sidelined. But these are the important things in life.

 

Marks of a good evening: Your salad requires a waiter's explanation, and the birthday girl gets chinese philosophy books as presents.

The desk. GGs get the hotspot. What can't be seen: my woolly sockshoes under the desk, and my bag drawer that's never shut properly.
Books I catalogued

Office essentials: Fun mug, fun coaster (sharon!), hand cream, colorful post-its, toys

The growing photo collage. I like things arranged rectilinear. And in the left corner, the price scanner that beams red lines across my things when they cross its path.

I've been rotating myself back and forth from this cosy office and yang film studio. At the studio it's dark and masculine and I have a beautiful Syncmaster to work with (two widescreens because one just isn't enough). At the office I have this cheery desk, practically all-female coworkers who offer me cookies and go for lunch with me. The studio is art, the office is design. Function. Yet between borrowing somebody's art space and having my own design space, I'd rather have my own space. To decorate, come back to, and dominate.

But I would love to have my own studio. With friends. I've learnt that I need these two things to be happy doing work: getting out of the house, and lunch buddies.

For two days I wanted nothing for dinner but red cabbage salad and chicken,which I ate at home in front of the tv. Going to bo's for pre-pre-cny dinner helped dispel that lazy antisocial mood, with rounds and rounds of song-shouting over a steamboat on her balcony (poor neighbors), even shoutier taboo, and bo who suddenly died on her couch for about an hour, and then got up and was fine.

I get incredibly manic and aggressive when we play taboo. Manda used to not let me give the words in jc because I was slow. Perhaps that has made me come back with a vengeance (and stress).

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For the first time in a long time today I felt like running away. It was all imagined tension of course. But I ran to the bus stop, and that is probably the bravest I can manage at one go.

Someday I'll be brave enough to run all the way to Moscow, and when i get there and confess it my mother will say "oh that's nice, what's it like? here the cats are fine" and the anticlimax will make me feel stupid and miss home.

Because I'm starting to realize that my paranoia extends beyond lift robbers and lightning. My own parents scare me, when they hold knives or Bibles. My home scares me; I always think that I'm walled in when I'm not. I have a trust problem.

So i'm trying this out: a new way of looking at God, a new way of looking at my parents. The fear could be good, but it has to go.

Sharon is one year older, and our table has two additions. So we congregated and put our hands together over the sink and made a pact to protect each other when more difficult times come.

And now it's horrortime.

1. Aimei has been getting mysterious silent calls from a foreign number. The international code belongs to Australia, Christmas Islands or Cocos Islands. She keeps picking up because she's curious, and says she can hear the caller listening, and once maybe crying.
On Saturday morning I got the call too. The same number, the same silence.

2. I cut my hair one night as I like to do before I sleep. The next morning the pair of scissors was gone. I panicked because it's a precious expensive professional haircutting pair, and because I've thrown things away when I'm sleepy. Then my mother told me she found my scissors on her chest of drawers. I can't explain it, but I'm relieved. The same way I couldn't explain how I woke up blanketless one morning and found my blanket draped over my mother's chair. I sleep on a doubledecker. All this night travel isn't very safe for me.

3. But the most horrifying thing is how irresponsible I've become. I'm sorry for hiding behind the wall when I saw you, and for taking an escape route to avoid you. And sorry for the diva attitude in my emails. And sorry for being deliberately m.i.a. in meetings. I just can't take any more work! I promise this is not my usual behavior and I will revert to a more cooperative me in due time.

You know toil-free days have arrived when:

Now if only tomorrow morning would come, so that I can go to popular and buy sticker paper and lettering and get this thing behind me! But tonight, while tomorrow has not yet come, I shall glut myself on photographs of this very satisfactory weekend.

Happy birthday amelia, yes we had a picnic in Singapore, at our Mystery Location. And happy holidays viscom group, you make me uncool and very happy, and I can't believe it's only one more year of midnight marathons with you in the lab.

Damei, we shall have our otherworldly Day of Contentment soon too.

I was thinking and thinking, and I suppose I do know why my submissions are all late this sem after all. I threw out my concept of time as a new year's resolution, clocks and calendars and numbers, in a bid to calm my heart so impatient for big changes. Not too practical, but calming indeed. Like cutting paper very slowly. And swift window-shopping after buying paper because I was in the area and had to say hi. I think it's better this way, being late for submissions but more proud of the work that comes out. I don't know. Yes. I think so.

How we spend special occasions #1: Thinking we haven't taken shots when we actually have. Note the cosy group hug.

How we spend special occasions #2: Going through many failed attempts to take group photos.

How we spend special occasions #3: Posing in every corner of the house in every permutation of poses possible and falling out of frames.


I love GG nights because we're klutzes underneath our costumes. Although I think we have to come up with a main programme other than phototaking. I owe the documentation of my life mainly to Amelia Chia, however, because nobody else photographs events as much as she does. When I'm old and amnesiac and reliant on photographs to tell me about my past, I'll wonder why it seems like I only hung out with her.

Today I talked about religion in class, and I showed a photograph of the GGs with Janis. I said it wouldn't be as easy to stay in my religion if I didn't have them--normal girls who have more in common with me than just religion. Perhaps someday I'll be tested, thrown into a sea of non-Christians or extreme conservatives, whichever turns out to be more challenging, and I'll have to see how I hang on to this thing that's supposed to be just between me and God.

Maybe venturing into this area of research is asking to be burnt. But I do have questions, big questions, that I think everybody should ask more than once in their lives. Such as "is religion more of tradition and culture than pure religion?" And what is the purpose of religion these days? How does somebody with no religion view life, death, the world, supernatural occurrences?

I desperately want God to be real, because of how great He has shown Himself to be to me. If He were not real, just something I've constructed in my head to help myself understand existence, a placebo effect of sorts, then there suddenly wouldn't be any reason to live. Would there?

I want to hear from anyone and everyone who asks these questions too. Religion may be just a world view to some, but it influences what people eat, who they marry, how they spend their weekends, as if without thinking they allow it to run their lives. It's time to think. If you were to invest in something that runs your life, it had better be real.