193 pages down, don't know how many more to go. My ass is now permanently glued to this chair, and my fingers just can't stop clicking on websites just so that I don't have to insert punctuation (a full stop is NOT OPTIONAL), correct very strange language and feel like I want to yell LEARN SOME ENGLISH FOR FUCKS' SAKE out of the window. That would be just wrong. Very wrong. Mustn't do that.

aquariums and puppets

So there was a huge French house that I was lucky enough to lived in, even though I was a student and rightly belonged in a dormitory room somewhere. The second floor had a floor-to-ceiling aquarium running around its entire perimeter -- but the water was half-full and it was clear that the great white shark (and smaller tiger sharks?) were not faring too well. There was even a huge sea cucumber stuck on the wall that looked like it was drying out.

So I found the hose, and turned on the pipe and poured the water into the tank which filled up surprisingly quickly. Before I had the chance to see how the fishes were enjoying all the extra water, I noticed a painting/figure/doll of an old woman that was just settling onto the bottom of the tank - no doubt it had been moved around when the waters swirled in.

I stared hard at the wrinkly face and I just knew, that if I stared long enough, it would move. In all my worst nightmares and lengthy-imagination sessions - this always happens. And so her face moved, but I wasn't sure - maybe it was the water that was making her move - and so I tried again and again. And the face got more and more grotesque. I couldn't walk away - what if she followed me? I yelled for Sandrine. I whipped the curtains close around the tank to hide that face from my view.

Sandrine, who had been cooking in the kitchen, came running. What? What? She's alive, I said, trying to sound calm so as to not freak Sandrine out. I let my hands go, and the curtains came down, only now there wasn't an old woman - there was a wooden puppet in the shape of a little girl and she wasn't in the tank anymore. There wasn't any glass between us and her.

Ah. Oh. Sandrine and I stared hard. The little girl came alive, she looked human now, she stepped out and in front of us.

Sandrine tried to speak to her, but it didn't seem like she understood. Try speaking to her in French, I said. It worked (I'm very multilingual in dreams) and the girl said she used to be owned by a duchess, and it was a very long time ago. She didn't seem to realise that time had passed.

I vaguely thought of Harry Potter and how that movie had made talking paintings a lot less scary.

Are you angry I made faces at you just now? I asked. I don't remember her reply. Sandrine was pissed off by now - what the fucked had I dragged her into?

NO MORE AFTERNOON NAPS FOR YOU JESS.

commas

Was out for the count due to a viral fever that went on for too long (at least it wasn't dengoo), now rushing to finish what I couldn't do due to too much lying in bed incapacitated, currently technically unemployed for the first time in I guess a not-so-long time but still busy as fuck, missing roommate Maria who left for some lovely little island in Norway (enjoy the summer, while it lasts), slightly sad the espresso maker broke but will learn to cope, cat-sighting count at an ALL TIME HIGH and I can't help but think its a sign about something but not sure what, feel like I oughta learn the Robot & Robo, successfully stopped Mother from freaking out about monsoon in Nepal & India, still can't stop fantasising about a beach in Sri Lanka.

“Thou shall not kill. Thou shall not commit adultery. Don't eat pork.
I'm sorry, what was that last one? Don't eat pork. God has spoken.
Is that the word of God or is that pigs trying to outsmart everybody?”

My annual Jon Stewart obsession is back.

“I want to look back on my career and be proud of the work, and be proud that I tried everything. Yes, I want to look back and know that I was terrible at a variety of things.”

Sometimes I spend too much time imagining what my life would be like if it had more animals in it. (And I don't mean on my plate, although I do think about that as well.)

Which is precisely what i did

Its time to stop. To think. To question the self and see if you can find a new way to proceed. Otherwise just put aside that camera and do something else.

- The Spinning Head

Asim Rafiqui says exactly what I am only able to express in vague, unhappy grunts. Too much love for his writing.

The handover process is in full swing - with or without a replacement - and I've had to engage in uncomfortable self-reflection. What does it mean to be in charge? What have I learnt? I've always known that I would be an unpleasant person - I have no patience, no tact, and I'm too prone to arrogance. I warned them all at the beginning. I may yell at you, but I'll always apologise later. But only if I'm wrong. Which I won't be. Or something to that effect.

Today, I received one of the best compliments of my life: "Jess, you are so rude, but you feel our pulse."

How on earth did they ever put up with me? Love them to death.

En route to Barisal.

Sights En Route to Sylhet and Back

• Nothing like a rat's disembowelment to kick off your day!
• The "Magic Tree" car freshener in the shape of a pine tree.
• A little van full of packed full of bananas. A windowful of bananas.
• The Sea Fish Centre. (No, it is not a food court.)
• A room named Compassion.
• Two ring floats, a plastic ball, and too much clingy t-shirt action.
• Chains around and around an elephant's belly.
• The bobbing heads of swimming cows. (Cows are beyond awesome, now that I've seen how they can swim.)
• The midnight cry (or moans) of a mating frog.
• The heroic/misguided attempts of a shama to ward eagles away from its nest.

Discombobulated

This is my word of the week. It has been a strange couple of days, fueled by my indiscriminate consumption of coffee.

It has been raining a lot. In the morning, during the night. Someone asked on the way to dinner, does this mean the monsoon is here? I didn't know. I've lived here through three monsoons and I still couldn't remember when the season started. The streets outside were flooded today.

So a building collapsed earlier this week. And then there was that fire where so many, so many had died. And then another building (next to the one that had collapsed) started tilting and they had to evacuate the area. And cracks appeared in the walls of another building, somewhere else, and everyone had to leave too.

I don't get that tingle anymore from these things. I don't feel that urge to hop into a CNG and rush there so that I can be part of the media covering the event. I don't feel stressed about 'missing out' on the action. I can remember how that felt like, though.

I looked through the photos when the photographers came back from those events. Dead bodies, crying people, body bags, charred corpses, more grief, more pain, more loss, all caught on a wide angle lens, and you mark down the ones you want. This image works better than this, don't you see? See how her hands clings on so tightly as her friends try to hold her up? It shows just how much pain she is in. And this one - a hint of a dead body, just a foot, its better than the whole thing. We don't show the whole body. That's tasteless, don't you know?

One of the photographers told me he couldn't sleep all night after covering the aftermath of the fire. It's just too much, you know? I patted him on the back and told him he had to let it go.

During drinks at one of those clubs, I said nothing when the topic came up in the conversation. Isn't it horrible? How so many people died in that fire in Old Dhaka? Yes, its terrible. I looked at my feet and sipped my wine. The woman across me wore a flowy silk blouse in salmon pink with sequins across the collar, matched with a thin belt across her waist. She looked very fashionable. Behind her, two men played a game of tennis. I watched a little cute mouse scamper across the tiled floor.

I feel like I don't live here. Like, this happened in another world, you know? They were still talking about it. I lit up another cigarette.

Nazrul called me two days ago. Where are you? Dhanmondi, I said. And you? Woodlands lah. Next week I come back. Fantastic, I replied. It would be nice to see him in his own country. But how will we meet? You live in Gazidpur! Aiyah. Then I come Dhanmondi see you lah.

I would like that very, very much.

OH GOD NO.

This was so painful to read. So, so very painful.

Beauties dating 'beasts'

By Goh Shi Ting, Multimedia Journalist, RazorTV

IN THE Disney cartoon Beauty and The Beast, Beauty falls in love with the Beast for his beautiful heart despite his hideous looks.

And many 'Average Joes' are finding that fairy tale coming true for them as they live happily ever after with women who are considerably better looking than them.

Founder of dating agency Table for Six, Andrew Chow, who recently match-made such a couple said that it is 'really true love'.

'They look like an odd couple. The man is 1.65 meters and the lady is above 1.7 meters. The lady is very well-groomed and the man is losing his hair. But the personality and character of the gentleman is so much of a giant. He walks like a man who is 1.85 meters,' claimed Andrew.

However, the reverse doesn't seem to be true. Fewer good looking men are taking 'Plain Janes' as girlfriends.

I don't know where to start. I only regret that I read this online, because if it were in print I'd at least have the satisfaction of ripping this page to shreds and watching each strip of paper burn to its death.

E&S

Just a little ongoing project of mine which looks at the ground below, and, as John Lennon said, above us only sky.

Let sleeping dogs

A little altitude makes a whole lotta difference.

My trip north to Sylhet made me feel a little sad for the south of Bangladesh. Sure, the rivers are wider there, but look at all the green they are missing out on! I'm not quite sure why, but up north, the trees seemed greener, thicker, taller and richer. The Sharee river, flowing south from the hills of Meghalaya, was greenish and clear, its water cold and clean. I drank a few mouthfuls whilst on the boat. The last time I drank something that wasn't first boiled or filtered or from a Singaporean tap was when I was 14 years old, at the shores of a lake nestled between the mountains in Yunnan. The taste was the same - cold and free.

We stopped in the middle of the river, as the boatman made a grand sweeping gesture towards the hills in the distance. India! He pronounced, grandly. We got off the boat at some little touristy rest stop, and saw two magnificent Asian elephants.

I am useless in front of elephants. I am in so much awe, that they could be in front of me and not want to crush me to death, that I feel like getting down on my knees to show my respect.

I cannot fathom why animals put up with human beings. It would be so easy to shake off the four silly humans clinging onto its back and lumber away to freedom in the forest. I mean, what could we possibly do? Yell really, really loudly? (No guns present, hence not included in this equation.)

And yet, we've got these elephants doing inane tricks, like a salam with the trunk and a cute curtsey, eliciting loud laughter and even more gawking. What a disgrace. We are not worthy.

This is probably why I like cats, due to their low regard for all things human. They caught on fast to how silly we are.

I am quite good at cutting people out of my life -- it is not always intentional, and it doesn't always hurt, but it does make me feel like a robot with on-off switches.

What is up with these inward-looking thoughts in the middle of the day?? Oh right. I'm procrastinating.

It's like (here comes the bad analogy) surgery with permanent local anesthesia. You don't feel anything as you slice it off, it doesn't hurt even after the surgery, and there sure as hell isn't any sensation as the wound heals up. You don't even think about it, but sometimes you do get a glimpse of that cavity, that hole which you have created and you wonder shouldn't it hurt a lot more than this when you lose a bit of yourself? How is it possible to feel nothing?

This only applies to self-inflicted wounds. If someone else does the slicing against your free will - it will hurt like fuck. I still can't look at photos of my great-grandmother.

Oh shut up, Jess.

It occurred to me today, that I no longer notice the scars on my hands and face, that I am puzzled and surprised if someone asks me about them - which is rarely, since they are not really that noticeable - and I reply with a Oh! But that was ages ago! Which is true - it has been almost six months since the crash. I am used to the dentures, I hardly ever forget to wear them in the morning now, and I can taste food again even with that huge piece of plastic in my mouth. I still can't quite take a good bite from an apple though. I showed the dentures to a person I liked, because I didn't want to feel like I was hiding anything, and he said, "Are you trying to make me leave?". I knew it was a joke, but it was a bit of a mean joke, I think.

Anyway, the point of this mid-morning ramble is to muse on how quickly I forget. If a near-death accident doesn't make an impact on me - what can?

no te metas con el toro

Amongst other random, strange things from my mornings - a Huffingtonpost report on how a celebrity couple no longer sleeps in the same bed, a video on too many of my friends' Facebook Walls on teeny tiny girls doing some sexy dance (so much irony in re-posting a video that you find nauseating), an image of the matador that got gored through the throat (you've been warned), brief musings on how I'm getting increasingly irritated by photographers who are too in love with their own work, shock at news of Sygma being closed down, and trying very hard to recall the last dream I had before I woke up and not being able to and then suddenly remembering it as I brushed my teeth that I had dreamt of two toddlers standing on a parapet and yelling at them to come in IMMEDIATELY and then somehow my mom was there and asking me why I was yelling and I explained to her and she seemed not to quite get it and tried to fall out of the window to see what the fuss was all about and then there was a lot more yelling (from me) as I grabbed her feet and dragged her in.

And then, my Mom metamorphosed into a young Caucasian man with suicidal tendancies ("This is my third try but I keep failing") and I sat with his hands in mine as his wife sat beside us and I tried looking into his eyes to try and understand why why why why why. And his wife, who was blonde with big eyes grabbed my arm and pleaded to help her understand as well.

The daily act of reading newspapers in the morning is always a bit of a despondent affair.
Today's papers, for instance -- An an 18-year-old boy beaten to death in the middle of the night at Kamalapur railway station. A 14-year-old domestic worker who was "found" hanging from the ceiling fan in the house of a policeman where she works. The last line was a particularly nice touch.

The deceased went to sleep around 11:30pm on Saturday and did not respond to repeated calls the next morning, he added.

And the International pages -- out of the six stories on one page, five of them had some variation of the word "kill" in the headlines. Kill. Killed. Killing. Assassination.

I don't really have pleasant dreams, but even my imagination isn't that fucked up. I think now about that line from that speech Meryl Streep gave at a commencement ceremony in NY (another FB-linked video) about how you should pay attention to the cracks because that's where the light gets in.

I like how she whispered this line, leaning in close to the microphone but whispering it so softly that you just had to lean in to listen and thus listened to every word she said.

And this in turn reminded me of a dream I almost had - I can't remember now if I made this up or I dreamt it, but either way it is all very real to me.

And also, there was this:

I subscribe to an RSS feed that feeds (I do beg your pardon) me with lots of interior design images which I usually click through with a Pffffft but this one elicited more of a gutteral purr quickly followed by a brief imagination session about the many ways one can climb into a hammock.

Of course, in my version of this room, there is at least one cat sprawled belly-up on the stone floor, soaking up the sun.

Writing grant proposals, drinking too much espresso, dreams of Cambodia and South Africa threatening to distract me, really needing a tiny little cigarette.

Things

- A sign that advertised 'Live Surgical Demonstration'
- Electric storm over Dhaka with humidity so thick you feel like there is a mask on your face. Thunder-less lightning is always unsettling.
- A dream about an entire cinema hall singing out loud BOWIE'S IN SPACE

Today I met an ayah on the roof of our building. She was walking up and down, across the length of the roof. I watched her for a while and couldn't help but ask her what she was doing. Walking! she said. Because any other form of exercise wasn't possible in Dhaka for her.

The city does strange things to people.

Whoever said that a watched pot never boils clearly didn't watch it for long enough.

Or at least, I think that is the belief on which my stupid brain operates.

the nearest exit may be behind you

Back in 2005, I actually did a daily countdown on this blog just to see how many days I had left in Dhaka. I remember getting rather stressed, because I couldn't finish doing all the things I wanted to do.

I expect that things will be a lot different this time around.

On my iTunes playlist is a 45 minute-long recording of an interview I did during my days at Lexean. I interviewed someone who ran a counselling center for single fathers, and I think it was one of the most enjoyable chats I had with someone while on the job. The conversation flowed effortlessly, and it makes me smile hear the words 'acrimonious' and 'state of equilibrium' uttered with a Singlish accent.

I let it play for a bit today - I find it strangely comforting to hear myself talking with a Singlish accent. I'm not sure if it's because I'm overseas, but I often catch myself lapsing into some weird bastardised British/American/Pretentious mixed accent -- it sounds so awful I don't know why people talk to me.

I find that I have a tendency to mimic accents -- you may want to kill me when you hear me speaking to someone who is French.

Anyway, the person I was interviewing was explaining the consequences of divorce and how they are trying to help keep families together, and something he said hit me as hard as when I first heard it:

"And after a while, the child is forced to choose - and that's what breaks children."

For all those who can't remember the lyrics. Remember - Sunday always comes too late.

That's Not Art

Rage (when not directed towards me) can be funny. Behold my latest source of the giggles:

That's Not Art by Garrett Murray -- where he bashes the shit out of so-called emo 'art'. I'm not sure why and how he comes across all these things, and god forbid that he's actually seeking them out.

Anyway. This site is not going to help me with my attempt to be POSITIVE and surround myself with GOOD energy. But it makes me laugh, so I figure it balances itself out.

See the Sun (via thelasthomerecording)

Hard not to, you know, unless you’re blind. In fact, I completely fail to take any meaning from this, even after trying very hard to get my mind into the state of ridiculous “things mean more than they seem” pseudo-artists. After 20 minutes of staring at this and thinking intensely, I’ve realized it actually has zero meaning. ZERO.

Things (via haylieerin)

Then you’re going to love this thing you just created.

Only More Love (via gatekeeper)

Shut up. Seriously.

So he asked me to tell him what I liked about him. In my reply, I tried to give answers that wouldn't make me sound too crazy. I didn't list down everything either. It would be impossible, and would not help much in the trying-not-to-seem-crazy department.

He laughed slightly at some of the things I said, but I'm not sure if he was amused or uncomfortable. When I was done, he remarked offhandedly, "You like everything!"

Oh you silly, silly man, you've got no idea.

It's reached that stage where some people actually leave the room when I enter. Perhaps its not so much because of my presence (this is credit that I would not like to take) but because they're not really supposed to be there.

Still, I don't enjoy being the Walking Reminder That We Have Work To Do.

Revamp.

It was time for a change anyway.

Am trying to get more organised, and posting all visual-related posts on Pause. Stop. Play -- I just need to direct my random-ness elsewhere.

I realised, that even after about five years of blogging, I've still not upgraded my technical blog skills - other than being able to find free templates a lot quicker than before.

And regarding Catharine Lim's latest article -- I'm not quite sure why, but it didn't go down very well with me, mainly because she slapped a negative connotation to the word 'dissent' from the beginning. Doesn't it just mean having a different opinion?

(I realised after writing this post that it is insanely boring. Sigh. And all I had wanted to do was to throw spitballs from the back of the class!)

Watched Lee Hsien Loong's interview with Charlie Rose today, and I. Cannot. Believe. He. Mentioned. SARS.

A question from a friend about Singaporean politics had me feeling rather ashamed and ignorant, and I tried to do some brief research online just to understand the fundamental principals of how is it we operate. I came across this paper Asian Values, Authoritarianism and Capitalism in Singapore by Soek-Fang Sim, in which it states:

Rather than being a proud and self-confident nation, Singapore exists only through psychosis, as an existentially anxious nation (that awaits the salvation provided by the PAP).

The sense of national fragility is heightened through the staging of media spectres...

Media spectres which we are all too familiar with, and which puts LSL's SARS comment (I don't care if he later retracted it, it just showed how well-rehearsed that response was) in an interesting light.

Total Defence campaigns, that image of LKY sobbing, those terrible racial riots, the National Day songs (There was a time when troubles seemed too much for us to take...) and the strange divisiveness in our notion of multiculturalism. LHL said as much in his interview (transcript):

LEE HSIEN LOONG: Well, we’re happy to be a metaphor, but we remind
ourselves that we have no safety net and we can always fail if we get it
wrong.

CHARLIE ROSE: And what would "get it wrong" be?

LEE HSIEN LOONG: If you don’t have the right government, if you have
the wrong policies, if you cause a loss of confidence. Supposing we were
in the situation of Iceland, of Greece --

CHARLIE ROSE: Yes, I wanted to talk to you about that.

LEE HSIEN LOONG: Where would we be? Iceland is a friend of the EU,
Greece is in the EU, so the Germans come riding to the rescue in some way.
But in Singapore, how are you ever come back?

CHARLIE ROSE: And who would come to the rescue of Singapore if you
had a huge debt problem?

LEE HSIEN LOONG: Exactly. We’d be just another broken-back country
permanently.

CHARLIE ROSE: So you can’t afford to be -- have that kind of
financial crisis because you’re not sure --

LEE HSIEN LOONG: We can’t afford to have --

CHARLIE ROSE: The IMF is not going to be there for you.

LEE HSIEN LOONG: We can’t afford to have a disastrous bump in the
night, whether it’s a financial crisis, whether it’s government
misbehavior, whether it’s a security problem. But we only have one chance
to make a go of it. You can fail -- you can succeed in many battles. You
fail once, it’s finished.

In the beginning of this paper, Sim explains that Singapore has managed to avoid the transition to a liberal democracy even though the problems of late-capitalism exists which should rightly lead to a "flourishing of liberal discourses". How did we manage to avoid developing such "liberal inclinations" and demand of "political choices"? How did we manage to avoid ideological fragmentation?

To protect its one-party rule against threats of liberalisation and welfarism, the PAP labelled these tendencies as dangerous "Western" values, the antidote to which was the "Asianisation" of society, where communitarianism is promoted as an alternative to welfarism and plural/liberal democracy.

At this point, I realise I am basically just attempting to summarise the paper as a way of understanding it better. Ah well, in my defence, 'Asian Capitalism' was not on Cenite's reading list for political science.

Asian Capitalism, as Sim points out, is contradictory. The Asian Values component preaches harmony, the whole idea of community/nation before self, and self-reliance (ie meritocracy). It supports the one-party ideology by "emphasisng consensus over conflict" and de-legtimises ideological alternatives as "opposition for the sake of opposition" is deemed un-Asian.

Through Asian Values, capitalism and authoritarianism becomes mutually reinforcing: authorianism protects capitalism by enabling it to be un-compromised by welfarist demands, while capitalism success "protects" and provides economic legitimacy for authoritarian governments.

The contradiction comes when you realise that communitariansm is opposite to competitveness -- but it is this opposite nature that allows the former to be used to make this version of capitalism "more caring and the nation more cohesive"

By encouraging citizems to dream a dream that only the PAP can bring to fruition, authoritarianism is rendered tolerable, even necessary.

Ah that Singapore Dream. For those who will spend their lives chasing that Dream, it is bolstered by what Sim calls the "meritocratic myth" - that if you work hard enough, you can make it. For those who already have plenty, you raise the ceiling so that they never reach that stage where non-economic dreams become important or relevant.

At this point, I had to resort to Googling more about this meritocratic myth which, as usual, made me feel stupid - how is it I have never come across this before? We have a chapter to ourselves on Wiki's Meritocracy page!

The success of this myth is just one of the many examples of the PAP's ideological success. That we complain about the cost of healthcare and yet think of welfarist values as being unthinkable and inferior, that we are exasperated by how stifling the Singapore Dream can be and yet accept it to be the "normal path" of life etc...

The moral, economic and political legitimacy of the PAP is seemingly undefeatable.

CHARLIE ROSE: How do you measure your commitment to democracy?

LEE HSIEN LOONG: I think we measure it by the legitimacy of the
government and by the results, how Singapore works and whether Singaporeans
are able to have a better life.

I'm halfway through the paper and am already exhausted. It was enlightening to read about all these things when they are being discussed in a coherent manner.

Told ya it was a weird day.