holding open the door for thee....

I’m actually at my place of work now. Had to eat lunch at desk because everyone else had plans with their friends! Poor me. I need my friends to start working near to me so we can go for furtively long lunches and relieve ourselves of this tedium. One fine day, when I am not anymore green into this world of adulthood, I will go for lunch with a friend, have excellent guacamole and some other random Mexican dish (they all taste the same) and get drunk on Margaritas. Then I will go home and sleep it off and pretend at work the next day that I had to take my friend to the hospital and I am soooo sorry I missed that boring meeting with that boring client who has a boring product. Of course I will be working in an advertising firm somewhere down the line.

Anyway, I have (and want) to write about my quirks. I have been tagged. That’s another piece of blog jargon I was not aware of or understood until today. I feel old. Actually I don’t but I am supposed to right? Fuck it right?? OMG I said the word fuck in office. Blasphemy.

I am totally suffering from a blockage of quirkiness. Hmmm. Apparently I have shitloads but I can’t remember anyway. Alright then, I will keep adding onto this when as I keep remembering.

#1
Imaginary conversations with my soul. What the fuck you say? Well I stand in front of the mirror and pretend that my soul is talking to my body. Soul II Body issues y’know. This is a sample (yet, highly trivialized) version of how the conversation goes:

Body: motherfucker, you will leave me one day and I will have to survive alone

Soul: don’t be such a jock. I have to live with you until you die. But I’ll leave if you keep drinking and smoking the way you do.

I am serious. It’s never played out and dramatized like the above but yeah, I pretend my body is an entity separate from my soul when essentially, my soul is the one that splits into two different voices just to humor this side of me. Hmm. I also crack up each time this happens rendering me useless for about five to ten minutes.

#2
Being anal-retentive with regards to domestic issues. My mother is anal-retentively clean. Which is why, I am the same way. If I wasn’t brought up in an environment where my bathroom rivaled Singapore’s finest Operation Theatre, I am sure I would stew in the filth my friends seem to enjoy stewing in. Ha Ha. Well they don’t stew in their own filth all the time okaaayyy.

My point is that until I got exposed to other people’s living environments and inevitably comparing it to my own, I had no idea that the way I wanted to keep my things clean was a little bit different. Although most people would say fucked up.

I think though, that too has been exaggerated (as you’ll see from #3) and I am a perfectly decent person to live with and I won’t judge you on your failings at keeping house. Oops.

#3
As long as there is no dirt or incredibly unhygienic thing in my line of sight I am perfectly ok with it. This is the reason why I sweep dirt under my bed (so that I don’t see the dirt) and the reason why I spray deodorant all the time (so that I smother my unhygienic state with carcinogenic fragrances).

I do however bust a blood vessel when it comes to cleaning sometimes. If I am in the mood, I can go after that one spot of dirt, that one fraction of a dust speck in that corner and you better believe that babay. That happens perhaps once in three months and I have it on my calendar… here, let me show you….

#4
Most of the time, there is a commentary running through my head. Usually it’s the kind of commentary you hear when there is a 200 meter race going on. Like when I am getting off the train, something like, ‘and as he goes round the bend and goes past the turnstiles, and takes over the man in the red t-shirt, he reaches the escalator first and in a moment of joyous victory blocks off a poor old man trying to get ahead in the race and life’, is not quite uncommon.

#5
My face has to feel like the surface of a baby’s butt after shaving which is why I don’t mind enduring really painful shaving cuts and excessive (well, excessive as it can get) bleeding to achieve that result. Most people don’t understand this but to me but if you read #6, you will empathize.

#6
I am paranoid as hell about acne. As a teenager, my face turned ugly… very ugly. Pimples took it over and transformed it into a Kill Bill extravaganza. That is when I started drinking water. Lots of water. Daily recommended intake? 8 glasses. Gautam’s intake? 24 glasses. I drink less now, but every so often when I binge on stuff like chocolate, mango, pineapple and any other heaty stuff, I drink as much as I can ……y’know… to neutralize the pimple-causing bastards of heat. I’ve just eaten a chocolate chip cookie, which means that in about 15 minutes, I will go for a piss which will last about 2 minutes.

Still don’t understand #5? Well…. Hair allows dirt to stagnate, causing pimples. Get it? Get it? Get it? Well perhaps it doesn’t allow it to stagnate but I really don’t feel like going back to my teenage years. The libido I might want back… but not the looks.

#7
I suck a lot. Let me clarify….. I bite into cloth napkins and pull out threads from them with my teeth. Then I suck on them until I can spit out big fat balls of thread. I always do this and when I was young, my mom actually replaced a few napkins monthly because, obviously, a napkin soaked in spit wouldn’t really serve its function admirably would it? I think this is why I got hooked onto smoking; it fits perfectly doesn’t it? And now since I’m trying to cut down, I find myself doing the napkin thing more often.

#8
I get obsessed way too often. If I started an obsession museum you would find, about 300 articles on the Titanic (movie), 2 books on the actual Titanic, 2 books on the movie, a fictional book on the sinking, a million photographs of Kate Winslet, 1 special edition Titanic video-cassette with 8 super postcards of the movie and a special edition negative of the reel of the movie, 10 imaginary ‘GSM’ awards given to Titanic, 1 imaginary lifetime achievement award given to Kate Winslet and shared by the remarkable Raveena Tandon for their respective ravishing performances in Titanic and Mohra. You would also find about 500 articles on Princess Diana and Mother Teresa, 1 book on Diana, the Time and Newsweek Diana Editions, 12 scrapbooks filled with articles on them. I also have 4 large exercise books dedicated to music and filled with the GSM Top 25 Countdown for every week from Year 1997 to 2000. I could go on, but you might think I’ve grown a teenage vagina. Ew.

Recent obsessions were with Closer, Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind and American Idol. And of course, Sex and the City but none of them ever reached the heights of its pathetic predecessors. No regrets lah.

#9
When I am blogging, I twist my nipple hard for inspiration.

#10
When I smoke, I try not to drink water because I feel that if I do, the smoke residue will go into my kidneys and my kidneys will get lung cancer. Hmmm.

Okay the last two, although completely true, are sell-outs. But I hope you enjoyed these!!!

I want to tag some people but very few people read my blog and those who do are either already tagged or people who don’t really blog that often. Oh what the heck, Kurien and Mat, I tag you both.

And those who just stumble across this blog, I tag you too. Just leave me a comment so I can read about your quirks.

Who knows, we might even become lovers.

sweet and sour

If there is one thing that I have learnt in the past four years in Singapore, it is that I cannot assume that a friendship, however strong it may seem, will last forever. I have spoken about this time and time again and perhaps people who know me will roll their eyes at this post, but I want to speak about another aspect of friendships: fights.

Everyone has fights and we have all had our share of unpleasant brawls. Somehow using verbal obscenities is a big no-no but no good fight for me is complete without the use of the word fuck. For example if I say ‘what the fuck did you say man?’ it actually means, ‘fuck you’. I try not to make it personal. Yeah right. Digression.

But yeah, fights between friends can be devastating. All the negative things we know about each other floods out and because everything is usually kept repressed (and supposedly, understood without judgment), it becomes a roiling mess when things come to a head.

And I just don’t understand why….

When the fight is analyzed in retrospect, everything seems exaggerated. If you are at fault, you feel an exaggerated sense of panic. If you are the ‘victim’, you feel an indignation that is only perhaps, mildly justified and completely played off the panic you can sense pouring out of the other party. It is so much easier to have an argument and get it over with.

A few weeks back, I had a pretty serious fight with a friend. The reason why we fought was trivial but the words we exchanged, were indication of something much worse. Who wants to go through that kind of emotional rollercoaster and spend precious cents on pointless (but attractively mean) text messages? Good question. Anyway, we made up in a heartbeat and it was a fucking relief. That is what scared me…this sense of relief I felt. No one wants to lose an awesome friend but did I really think I could lose this friend just because of this fight? Jesus.

I think we all need to keep in mind that it is with our friends we most experience life with and it’s never worth losing someone you feel such a deep connection with. I’ve stated before that like a relationship, a friendship once it’s over can, over time, be forgotten but I must make a qualification.

We all know that when you are in a relationship, the dynamic is always changing. This is because the expectation factor is high; there is a sense of obligation that must be fulfilled either because it’s financial, emotional or any number of reasons. In a relationship, everything is being shared so it can be quite easy to want to get out of it and compromise will only work to an extent because if compromise were a way of daily life, it would get too damn tedious.

With a friendship, on the other hand, only a small part of your essence is shared and for us to be wary of any compromise that comes with that little bit of time we get to spend with them is just bullshit. Compromises have to be made and a friendship turning sour is only because that compromise was never made. What am I trying to say here is that when I say a friendship can be forgotten, I am giving the impression that the friendship is of the same status as a relationship but that is not so. I do think that although friendships do turn sour every day, it is less to do with natural progression like it may be with relationships but more to do with the fact that the friends in question are just not compromising and being utterly selfish.

What a mouthful.

I’ve mourned the loss of a great friendship over the last year but today I put it to rest because the regrets are finally gone. I’m not a saint and am not completely blameless but it’s tiring to wait for a glimmer of compromise. I sound bitter but it’s an almost obligatory vestige of bitterness I show because I don’t care and every day, I try harder not to care.

I look back and all I see is immaturity and if the price of not having that friend anymore is that I’ve become more of an adult, then I think it’s been completely worth it. So from today, I will keep in mind that a fight is just an argument and if I want I can take it seriously and make myself miserable but I’d rather compromise and preserve a friendship.

sandman blues

I have this unbelievable desire to sleep at odd times of the day. The problem is that it was never odd while I was in university. I mean, who cares if I don't make it to class for just one day? Now, I have to make sure I get my 5-6 hours of sleep before work which will never happen if I take a nap at 6pm. It's fucking annoying man!!

Consider today for example. It's Sunday and it's pouring outside. I'm in my room, smoking a cigarette and feeling extremely sleepy. I know how heavenly it would feel to turn up the air conditioning and snuggle up in my sheets and just drift off but I know I can't because I don't need my sleep cycle to go out of whack. Neither can I drink a cup of hot coffee (because that would be heaven right about now) because that will contribute quite significantly to making my sleep cycle go to hell. How boring is my life?

Therefore I am blogging and basically immortalizing my boredom in cyberspace. I am listening to some phoenix, faith hill and mimi. I really need to write. I feel inspired. I feel the beginnings of a story growing in my mind. I know it will never work out because I am lazy and very afraid. I am afraid to delve deeper into these seedlings of inspiration because if I can't proceed, if I can't go through with it, then I know I'm not really a writer, will never be a writer. It's false logic and viciously cyclic but I guess I feel if I don't write anything, then I will never fail.

That's why this blog is such a good thing. It keeps my desire to write something substantial at bay. It satisfies that strong need to write but keeps the pressure off. Oh dear God, I have issues.