A Fool Spent from Defiance

And then it all voices down to being too idealistic, thinking that real life is like a TV drama.

So the adults were right.

The atmosphere in the ward during my uncle's last moments was terribly stifling - or no, it was intensely sad. I've come to understand that it is at the point of finality that is the breaking point for most people, the knowledge that the heartrate monitors have gone flat for good, and that the weak revivals of heartbeat are lost to the straight line on the screen. The funny thing is that the lines aren't completely straight, they're slightly, only very slightly, jagged. Or it might be some illusory trick that your eyes play when you stare too long at the screen. All I remember from that night is that we each have got our different ways of grieving, but mostly it has to do with tears.

The few nights this week I've spent going down to a certain multi-purpose hall in the Jurong West area. At the wake we get to see all kinds of people. People you never knew were related to you.

"Carolyn, Vanessa, come over here, this is my cousin and her husband, call her so-and-so and him so-and-so."

"Orh." Repeats after mom in a mumbly voice. I've never seen these people in my life.

"Ah, hi, hi. Waaah, both your daughters look like you ah." Some acute observation skills there.

And what can we do but smile condescendingly at the tableful of old people.

One cousin said "The best places to find a partner, are at weddings and wakes."

At the wake you get to shake hands with all kinds of people. Is it possible to tell the maturity of a person from the way he shakes hands with others? There were gangly teenagers who were awkward in handshaking, those who put only their fingers into the grasp, and try to take their hand away too soon. And then there were adults who used both hands to shake, fully engulfing your hand in theirs. Being the anti-social person I am of course I was hidden behind Bessie and Phillip with Joe, who also had a bout of anti-social last night. I was looking straight into the handshakers' eyes to see if I could find out anything. I gathered that about 64.7% of them probably have never seen the man lying in the coffin throughout their entire lives before.

But you definitely have to appreciate that they took time off to come to the wake, to spread a little love to the man's relatives. And you have to admit that a wake with a large crowd definitely gives off a better vibe as compared to one that only has a few people sitting around right right?

My aunt had the warped idea of taking photographs of the wake for remembrance, and the honour of the task fell on me. It felt strange. It was like someone was pulling a weird joke. What kind of memory does that make? Definitely not a happy one.

Later will be the last time I get to see my uncle in flesh. The cremation's taking place tomorrow, but there's a damned exam in the way. How funny that most organisations and institutions only allow compassionate leave for close family members. Who's to judge if family members are close or distant? What's the measure of relationships?

All bad things like happening at once don't they.

What do you say when you're faced with a man who has leukemia?



When leukemia, or any other sort of sicknesses, rear its ugly head in your face, you must not flinch. The real ugliness in sickness is not the sickness itself. It is the state that the patient is reduced to in the battle against it. You have to be there to fully understand the gravity of it, and to witness the extreme unpleasantness of it. The stories you hear on TV, they may make you cry out of sympathy, but when it comes down to the reality of it, you find that you don't cry much at all.

In fact, you don't know what to think of it. One part of you tells you "Look here now, his condition is deteriorating by the day, and they're all preparing to let him go, there's really nothing you can do now," and another part is saying "Well, maybe it's not that bad, you look at him, and you know that he wants to carry on living, and maybe, just maybe, that will keep him alive." And when you do cry, it's not out of sympathy, it's out of the prospect of loss.

There are times where you will feel angry too, and frustrated, and many times you will feel extremely helpless. Extremely. You feel angry and frustrated because all the adults are getting pastors to carry out baptism ceremonies, standing around discussing which undertaker's services should be engaged, which church the funeral should be held at, when the only thing you know for certain is that the man doesn't look dead to you. Dead people don't breathe. Dead people's pulses don't register on monitors. Dead people don't lie there fighting for life. And then you feel extremely helpless because you don't know how to make the man feel better, and you probably can't anyway. But it doesn't stop you from feeling helpless.

It's never as simple as sympathy.

When wave after wave of complications hit - fever, fungal infection of the lungs, blood infection, kidney failure, cardiac arrest, as if having leukemia was the green light for all other illnesses - all you can do is to stand there and watch him try so hard to breathe. You try to guess his thoughts, what he's thinking of when he's lying in bed, but it's probably too complicated, and a young girl like you probably won't understand. Is he in extreme pain? Does he miss his wife? Has he lived life the way he wanted? But mostly it's the pain question. Is he in a lot of pain?

You stand there listening to your mom stroke his forehead and repeat "don't worry okay? Have a good rest, just follow the light," and she asks you to speak to him. While all the time you're slightly angry, thinking, why do you ask him to rest when he doesn't want to, can't you see he's trying hard to fight for his life? But then of course you're never really sure if he still has the will to live, because whatever willpower he has might possibly be negated by pain.

There are all these thoughts running through your head, and your mouth is very dry. What's there left to say when they're all convinced he's not going to make it? When the only moment of brief consciousness is when the man opens his swollen eyes for 4 seconds and tears. When all you can see is the tube leading into his left nostril, and more tubes leading into his mouth, and you wonder where they end in the body. When you get gripped by paranoia when the damned heart rate monitor gives a long loud beep, and your mom, your dad and you immediately jerk your heads to look at it.
What's there left to say at this point?

When the hospital bills by far total up to at least 45 thousand dollars, and you see your aunties and cousin keeping vigil outside the ward almost each day, how does anyone know what to do? Who has the right to make decisions for the patient then?



What do you say when you're faced with a man who has leukemia?
What's there left to say?

The End of All Things Big and the Start of All Things Bigger.

The End of All Things Big

The Start of All Things Bigger

Does My Brain Still Belong to Me?

Time to time I'm reminded of how we're like two patches of fabric on a piece of patchwork. We change steps at the same time, open our mouths to speak the same instance, start humming the same song at once, (are both intensely in love with Jay Chou... not. XD) exclaim in the same fashion together at the same moment etc etc etc.

(Maybe by some bizarre twist of fate assenav isn't my twin, and instead, ahmoon is! Gasp! The horror, the horror! But incest can be kinky until you get serious and talk about giving birth to offspring-- inbred kids are so unkinky.)

Nah. How can ahmoon possibly be my twin. I think he's secretly a mind reader, and he reads my mind and copies my actions to make me think "Ah, we seem to read each other's mind, this must be what they call divine fate! He must be my destiny!" *Swoons*

No silly, I don't really think all that when we happen to mirror each other, I just laugh and silently think "haha we're cute like that." And those are nice moments. (:

The Superhero Chronicles

I ought to have done this much sooner, but I didn't want to come across as sappy and mushy, but on second thoughts if you are my friend you will NEVER say I'm sappy or mushy or both. NEVER. EVER.

So there's this little story that i'm going to tell, to anybody who has any query as to how Spongemo (I Clean up Aftermath!) came to know Momo (The Amazing Dancing Bear (don't ask me why I don't know either)).

Alright so Spongemo is my superhero identity, and Momo is Raymond's. I dunno why he chose to be an Amazing Dancing Bear, but he has, and i shall not question his choice.

So anyway, i think most people out there are pretty curious as to how I got to know Raymond. (And I recently found out that even he wasn't aware of the full story. I suddenly feel mysterious.) And my evasive answers don't really inform much. Hey, it's not that i want to be evasive, it's just that i'm really shy. And then on a pretty, random day like this i decide to spill it all, including the stupid moments that took place in my youth. And then you all can laugh at me. But i won't mind. I won't. People have been laughing at me ALL MY LIFE UGRGH.


Let's see if my memory fails me. It's a pretty long story so I see the need to section out the parts.

Chapter 1 - It's almost like a life story because it dates way back.

So I used to be a girl guide in secondary school, and being girl guides we liked noisy cheers, playing with fire, cheesy games, scouts, and loud fun, (I seriously think there's no such thing as a quiet girl guide. Guides are all noisy. ALL.) and there's no better place where all the above converged than at campfires. Tadah! I remember loving campfires. They were the highlight of my guiding days. (: So, urm the very first time I saw raymond was at a campfire, I cannot remember which, but happy friend says that it was the queensway/commonwealth secondary one. (I forgot which she said even though she said it only 5 days ago. Yes my memory is THAT bad so you should not trust what you read in this blog.)

So anyway, at that time I was fourteen or fifteen I think, I can't really remember the details. So being the crazy Jielun fangirl I was at that time I naturally noticed this jielun lookalike sitting among the Gan Eng Seng Dragon Scouts. So happpy friend and I gushed about him for awhile during the campfire, and that was about it.

And like all cute guys you see at campfires you forget about them within a few days even with all the gushing back in school. And most importantly you never expect to see them again.


So when I saw this jielun lookalike the second time at another random campfire of course there was another mini commotion among 7 guides about this guy who looked like jielun. HAHA. Silly girls. (I know, what are the odds that there were 7 girls from the same class in girl guides right. Naturally we bonded.) =D So anyway, this jielun guy, for the second time! But still, coincidence; the west cluster schools only had that many troops what. So although what took place next appears to be a blurry smudge in my memory, i'm pretty sure the commotion lasted a little longer back in school this time. But of course this jielun lookalike was still all but a pretty stranger, a brief encounter, definitely not as forgettable as the last time, but still forgettable.
And then came the third time, which was the most vivid memory. Because I can still remember that it was held at RI, and that happy friend called dg on her phone to say that the jielun lookalike was standing on some balcony looking at the sky. And of course during the campfire I kept noticing that he was looking very disinterested. Of course anyone would be disinterested when all the RI scouts had for fire was an image on the screen, and all three performing girlguide troops had to dance to the same Jolin song. That was the worst campfire ever.
And then being the very stupid young girl I was, and the very good friends that my friends otaku and tofu are, we stalked him. YES RAYMOND I STALKED YOU FROM RI TO THE MRT STATION AND ALMOST INTO THE TRAIN, WE WERE RIGHT BEHIND YOU ALL THE WAY AND YOU DIDN'T NOTICE. (Now that you know, does that freak you out a little? You were right in calling me a stalker. -.-) Hurhur. But it also kind of happened by chance la. Cause the three of us decided to explore the RI building, and we were walking all around the school. And it just so happened that the GESS troop was still around when we'd finished exploring. So we stalked them. MAN I sound like a total loser can, fine, laugh all you want, I don't regret doing it. Not at all. Even if it sounds stupid. But hello that was age FIFTEEN can URGH. And it was the first and last time I ever stalked anyone. I swear. Cross my heart.

And after that I decided that I would like to get to know this person who looks so sad. (Now I know he looks sad because that's just the way he looks.)

And so one fine day I spoke to my cousin who was studying in GESS when we met.
"So, do you know any scout who looks like Jay Chou in your school?"
He took a while to register what I was saying.
"Mm, I think I know who you're talking about."
"Oh haha, urm, can I have his number?"
"Oh, urm I don't know him personally, but I have a friend who's a scout."
And so he gave me Boon Peng's number. (Nope, Boon Peng is not Raymond's chinese name.)

So who's this Boon Peng person you may wonder.

But I am going off to bed because I am sleepy. And I will continue the next time if I feel like it. Sheesh I am so annoying and I am finding it ridiculous that I used to be a one-time stalker.

Don't Stop Us Now.

Obsession;
if not now, then when?

On an entirely different note, I know it's annoying when people keep telling you how to live your life. When people start doing that, there're three ways of dealing with it. The first way is to comply. By listening to them because you know that fighting it will probably only make matters worse, and it probably is for your own good anyway (as they always like to say). The second way is to estrange yourself from those annoying people (and hopefully they'll just go away like the random beetle that flies into your house). But these people have a nasty habit of reappearing, always. (Not unlike the random beetle.) The last way, is to be a rebel, and do what rebels do best; rebel. Fight those annoying people till your last breath, and refuse to live the way they want you to live your life. Well afterall it's your own life, and you can bear any consequences that accompanies it right right? Rebellion is probably only for the very childish, or for the very mature. People who are in between probably can't afford it.

And on an entirely different note again, Assenav hasn't been doing a good job of keeping this blog going huh has she? Annoying brat.