Category: personal

The last few days have been a world of pain.

I went for that little surgery of mine (tonsillitis, as far as my insurer is concerned), and now the upper palate of my mouth has been brought slightly further forward to the front of my mouth, and a wire has been sewn into the bottom of my tongue. The doctor had told me there would be no speech impediment involved, but I find myself worrying about the loss in tongue-flexibility. At worst, it’s going to be a permanent lisp–oh the stereotype.

On a liquid diet so far, because chewing anything makes me see spots and small swallows is about all I can manage. If nothing else, my lovehandles are slowly receding–if I can keep up the diet another month I’ll be able to see a six-pack. At least, until I revert to fried eggs and spam for dinner again.

Just a note for the future–the insides of your nose are sensitive enough to detect the fluoride they put into our tap water.

Daddy bought my hospital bed number in 4D and won a couple hundred bucks. He should have gone with my roommate–his bed number was the top prize. Figures–he had a heart-bypass.

Ran 10km, the longest I’ve gone in a while, on Sunday. I would have posted sooner, but my fingers have only just recovered enough that I can type this.

Waking up a little late, I ended up turning up with the last batch of racers coming in for the race. Since the roads to Changi Exhibition Centre had already been closed by then, we ended up having to walk 3km to the start point, by which time I was sweating, a little out-of-breath and feeling very irritated with the ipod-connected, fanny-pack-bearing woman power-walking in front of me.

I regret not bringing a camera along. The route was along Changi Coast Road, a long barren tarmac road with nothing to distinguish my long tedium under the hot sun. I spent much of my running time thinking how if I just kept going on (not that I was going-on all the time, there was plenty of stopping-off involved) with a video camera in front of me I’d have an interesting piece of stock video that could be used for a film called, potentially, the “Singaporean Auswitch March”.

I took almost an hour and twenty minutes to finish the race. Not my best timing, but considering how sedentary my lifestyle has been the last couple of years I suppose its only natural. Ah well.

My birthdays have become a lot weirder ever since I got to know the Banana.

We had to work on our shared birthday this year, and desperate to make something out of a ruined occasion we did something rather silly.

The Banana describes the event on her SuperBand blog, so I won’t. For those who would rather a million locusts visit them than click on a mediacorp link, we ended up asking strangers to sign on our hastily-self-bought birthday cards.

People were very nice, and I must say my flagging faith in humanity has been restored somewhat.

Thanks to the Banana’s newfound fame (though no one whom we asked for signatures recognized her), I am now featured on the SuperBand website looking like a crazed squirrel.

The Banana demands that we do something even more outrageous next year. The way things are going, I fear that on our sixtieth we’ll have to skydive.

I am the kind of person who owns a laminating machine.

Recently, as I was dusting a shelf (I am also the kind of person who dusts shelves), I noticed the instructions on the box of my laminating machine, giving suggestions on what I could use it for.

Recipes and other important documents!

Ah yes, recipes–some of the most important documents in my life.

The recent months of my life seem to have slipped me by, slowly and without notice. Waking life feels a little unreal, as if I were walking around buffered by cotton wool and only allowed a dim peripheral view of the worldaround me. The hours and minutes merge into a dull, monotonous filmreel set on an endless repeating sequence, splashing shades of overexposed greynesss on a dull and dirty canvas. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I can hear the sound of my life ticking its way past its prime and into middle-aged-staleness, and it fills me with fear and loathing for the corporate slave I have become (and also the pressing desire to get a new, less noisy clock).

So, in an effort to escape the monotony, I have decided to take up an exciting new activity–Chinese Calligraphy.

Today was lesson one for me and lesson god-knows-how-many for the rest. It turns out in a class there are students of (extremely) differing levels.

Today my teacher taught me that there are 2 types of paper used in chinese calligraphy, which side to write on and how to fold the paper so that I can get neat little squares to guide me in writing. Then I was instructed to write “?” several times, as you can see below.

My first character

The guy sitting beside me was churning out letters with dozens of strokes at an impressive rate. Whilst I had to refer to a dinky little photocopied instruction manual indicating how I was to write the two strokes I had learnt, he was transcribing poetry.

He took his work home, possibly to get framed and put up onn one of his walls.

Mine would be more useful in a recycling bin.

Sigh. Chinese calligraphy looks so easy when someone else is doing it.

I remember shopping for trekking shoes once with a friend, who was more experienced than I was in such matters. I settled on something that looked suitably pricey/branded/affordable–a pointless endeavour since they would only be worn on mountaintops where my only audience would be a bunch of goats–and proceeded to exclaim in relief that I would no longer have to worry about footwear matters for my trip. Whereupon said experienced friend told me that I should spend at least a month wearing the shoes so that they’d be “broken in” and more comfortable for the trek. Not entirely exhilarated at the idea of having to wear the heavy things about on campus for a month (all the cool kids wore flip flops to match their fishmonger attires at lectures), I made some quip about why shoe factories didn’t employ underpaid sweat-shop kids to walk about in new shoes, breaking them in first.

I thought it was a pretty funny quip, but he didn’t laugh and rather looked at me as if I had said something stupid. He then told me that I was being silly (said friend took footwear rather seriously): breaking in shoes wasn’t about making the shoes more comfortable–it was so that your feet could grow into the shoes . Shoes didn’t magically conform to a certain person’s feet, no matter how well-made they were – only feet could grow accustomed to shoes. Just because a pair of shoes was well-worn didn’t mean they would be comfortable, unless they were well-worn because of you.

The shoe-salesperson, who was kneeling beside me, concurred and nodded sagely, and they both cast pitying gazes upon me, me who knew so little about feet and shoes.

Ha ha, so did that mean I could break in stilettos if I walked in them enough, I asked said friend in a jovial manner, trying to break the awkward silence that accompanied my embarrassment.

He replied seriously that yes, I could, but I’d probably have to go through hell first to get my feet into the correct shape (said friend possessed little humour regarding footwear, or anything else for that matter).

I remember this little incident, mainly because it was the only time I had ever been embarrassed over shoes and also because it was interesting to me that my own perceived superiority over an inanimate object–a shoe–had been erroneous. It chafed at my ego that I was in fact the subjugated party, my feet in a war of attrition that it would ultimately lose, shaped and twisted to the whims of some strips of cloth and leather.

I was humbled at the thought that my shoes were bigger than I was.

And yet, it was also a cheering reminder of the plasticity of the human body–a reminder of our ability to surmount the odds, of how adaptable we could be to even the worst of surroundings. How we, the living, could triumph over the dead, as long as we kept on walking and growing. For surely even the greatest of mountaineers, before they set off on their journeys to heights unknown–surely even they too had experienced the slight squashing of the toes and the uncomfortably tough soles.

And so, my friends, I share with you this story of shoes, and hope that you can garner some wisdom from my pain. When next you encounter a seemingly unsurmountable task, remember the parable of the shoes and know that for us, Impossible is Nothing.

I’m not American, but since I’ve never done one of these memes before and I love to show off the expansive extent of my education…

The rules:

• Bold those you have read.
• Italicize those you have started but haven’t finished.
• Place an asterisk by those you intend to read/finish someday.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52. Dune – Frank Herbert (started but couldn’t get into it)
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Who the hell “finishes” reading the Bible?

I think I need to read more. Recently, what with Reddit and Google Reader, I haven’t touched a book that wasn’t work-related. It’s somewhat embarrassing that I haven’t read some of the ones above but seen the movie–such as Pride and Prejudice and any of the Potters’. It’s also a little embarrassing that I’ve read some of them without watching the movie–such as Bridget Jone’s Diary and Little Women.

I need to macho up my reading list. Why have I read Anne of Green Gables but not War and Peace???

More maddening is the fact that I read so much literary criticism online that I know OF all the books listed above, even if I haven’t read them. All plot-spoiled, sadly.

Found this article, which I found interesting because because of my problem with sarcasm:

THE ANATOMY OF SARCASM: RESEARCHERS REVEAL HOW THE BRAIN HANDLES THIS COMPLEX COMMUNICATION .

Sadly, the article only describes the mechanisms involved in understanding sarcasm (I guess I must have quite a few friends with brain lesions) but not the mechanisms for making sarcastic statements. Of course, it’s likely to be the same parts of the brain that govern the behaviour.

So there’s hope for those with especially sarcastic partners. A simple lobotomy can make life much more enjoyable!