Have you ever tried running in deep waters? I have. It's arduous. It's toilsome because not only does the viscosity provide far more resistance than air, the harder you push in one direction sends water pushing against you all the more forcefully on the return leg sweep. It's not just a battle of your legs, it doesn't stop there. You also feel this resistance on your arms and shoulders as you work. So you shut your eyes tight and you push, and you push, and you push yourself so hard till there's just nothing left. Then you lift your head up, open your eyes, and realize that, regardless of the endeavor, you're not making enough progress. But sometimes, by what seems like a miracle, you make it near land and then you trip, get caught in the undertow and it washes you further and further away from shore. It's fatiguing. Sometimes I feel my life is like that, except there is no end in sight; just me, the immensity of the sea and its intense resistance. Then, at some point in that wild struggle, I would just keel over, drown and disappear.

The great thing about being someone's best friend and having one is, in spite of everything, things can never be that bad. Life can be bitch, in our case, with its frequent, erratic moodswings and abominable tantrums. We know of all the things it finds to throw at us; work and difficult people are amongst its favorites. But at the end of the day, we both know that come hell or high waters, we'll always have each other, and whether we're eating high on the hog or living in the skid row, that is sufficient. So, no matter how bad things are or how bad they get, we know that there will always be someone behind with a starbucks on one hand and a shovel on the next to help bury the dead body of the fiendish boss or nefarious classmate you 'accidentally' extirpated and still make time for a tête-à-tête over coffee. We remind each other that suicide is not an option for us because we will lose the pleasure of witnessing God's wrath on the evil beings things in our lives and that would be a shame.

We do everything together; study, cry, goof off, laugh hard, share secrets etc. We cab down to each other's place in the wee hours of the morning to make each other meals when one of us is sick. We bring out the inner geek in each other. We are shopaholics with a credit limit. We offer honest opinions about our dates (Love is blind. Frienship tries hard not to notice) and our wardrobe choices; like telling each other to eighty six the tacky bling bling because sometimes no ice is better than being iced out. We splurge together, get broke together. She is a shoe slut. I am a bag whore. Together, we give 'Astronomical Damage' a whole new meaning. But as hard as it is, we still help each other maintain a decent bank balance, by that I mean there IS a balance, to make sure we both make it through the next month. I know, when it comes to savings we're very shortsighted. But baby-steps, Mon Chérie, baby-steps!

She is college to me as I am to her. All of the boyfriends and mean girls (or mean girl) and exams and eccentric lecturers and tests and tutors and crazy parties and our crazy mothers, we learned through it together with zero help from fairy godmothers, prince charmings and pixie dust. We raised each other. She is my sister, she knows the methods to my madness, and she is my best friend.

Eversince term break started it's like suddenly, every aspect of my life turned around in one fail swoop, from negative to positive, worthless to worthwhile. The last two weeks have been pretty mad. I've been trying to drown myself with plans. Swimming in the mornings, meet-ups, shopping sessions and movies in the afternoons and house parties and clubbing at night every night. It's been so fun yet so exhausting but everyone deserves to get wasted this way every now and then. Pretty dramatic change from the student life of chewed-up pen caps, doodles, daydreaming, photocopying and exams stress.

J was in Singapore for two weeks and for most of that, he spent with me. We visited the museums together and he never complains when I spend too much time on a single painting even though I know he gets bored fairly quickly. We watch movies together. It's just like old times. He gets the tickets first and forces me to make plans around it. He accompanies me on my frequent trips to Borders, gets me my smoothie, holds my hand and carries my bags while we walk around town and he lets me win almost all our air-hockey games. And on days we don't feel like doing much, we spend it in the pool at the Marriott or lazing on the poolside lounge chair next to each other. David is also here for the week, apparently things at the academy wasn't how he expected it to be so he made an impromptu decision to catch a red-eye home. He has become awfully reserved. I want to be there for him but I can't if he won't let me in. The only form of assuagement or accompaniment I have to offer is when I crash his place to play Guitar Hero World Tour with him and I can't play the drums for nuts. Other times, he's binge drinking at home. So as it is, I feel like a pretty useless friend.

In other news, I attended the F1 Night Race and ironically, the race interested me the least. I liked the performances though. Speaking of performances, I spent an evening in Earshot Café at The Arts House because Joe, Mark and Sidetrack were playing there. It's a nice cafe to frequent and when it closes you can always walk over to Timbre for a few drinks, pizza and music.

Apart from going out and meeting friends, I have the time to do things for myself. Some days, I stay home painting on canvas or on my nails, immersed in a novel with hot chocolate on the side or on the couch stuffing myself stupid with doritos and catching up on gossipgirl and scrubs. Other days, I take walks around the city. I like how my life is right now. It feels like I've reached a balance instead of having to vacillate between extremes. This is the first real break I've had in two years. And for once, in four long semesters, I don't feel the need to fight life for the remote control.

Painting is probably the most beautiful of all arts. In it, all sensations are condensed, at its aspect everyone may create romance at the will of his imagination, and at a glance have his soul invaded by the most profound memories. Like music, it acts on the soul through the intermediary of the senses but hearing can only grasp a single note at one time, whereas the sight takes in everything and at the same time simplifies at its will.

Most of the time I'm caught up in a maelstrom of emotions and I have all these thoughts bouncing around in my head, nothing to offer but my own confusion, but with a brush or oil pastel in my hand, the world just gets quiet. When I paint I feel as though I'm liberated from all the influences and pressures of the world. I don't think. I just paint under the dictate of feeling; moving the brush where my heart tells me and losing myself in the different hues and tones. It's so alluring; the mess, the smell, the feel of my brush against the textured canvas, the mixing and blending of acrylic or watercolor, watching my paintbrush surge across the surface change color and with each brushstroke allow the motif to gradually emerge from the seeming confusion of paint.

When we were little, life worked perfectly. No matter what happened, everything turned out alright in the end. Scraped knees, canceled play dates, dropped ice cream cones— we would cry for a short time, but by the end of the day, everything would be perfect. And now as we’ve grown older, we’ve lost the faith as we stumble through each day; crying over broken hearts, lost friendships, and lost dreams. It seems like life and perfection have turned their backs on us, but really it’s just that we’ve grown up. As children we didn’t pay attention to such details about our daily lives, but now we are more aware, and the little details seem to be amplifying our pain. But just remember that when we were younger, life was hard too, but we had faith in perfection because we could look past faults. So don’t lose your faith. Learn to know that each day will pass, each heartache will be mended, and everything will be perfect in the end.  ♥

So I'm back, and into the fourth week of yet another new academic semester, at college where every lecturer assumes that you have nothing else to do except study for his/her module.

I can't help but think that in tertiary institutions, intelligence, education, knowledge all have become great idols. But there's one thing most have overlooked: intelligence and education that hasn't been tempered by human affection isn't worth a damn.

Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for something more. I don't really understand why we take such pains to over-educate ourselves. Perhaps in the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly well-informed man-that is the modern ideal. But the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.

I don't want to be amongst those not knowing where they are going, or what they want, and still following blindly, suffering so much in secret, always unprepared and amazed and knowing nothing; and have one thing lead to another and by degrees something would then form itself out of nothing, until one reaches this calm, this quiet, this certainty.

Sometimes I feel that the outside world pressures you into a mold and, while most accept it in conformation, the remarkable ones reject it in their pursuit of greater things. It is in their refusal in which they create a rupture to the mold and that makes all the difference. I believe that the choice you make, between pioneering and following, can become the story of your life. The pivotal point in which a person chooses not to conform, but to embark on her own conquest to define joy, will be the single magic moment that helps her to change and sends her off in search of her dreams. That is living; to give up the drive for self-affirmation which impels you to flee from the unreliable, unsolid, unlasting, unpredictable, dangerous world of relation into the having of things and to expose yourself naked to the world with the other creative and beautiful minds.

I am fearful of the uncertain yet I relish the taste the sweet fearful excitement of the new promises. I cannot live an ordinary, platitudinous and uninspired life. To be more precise, I don't know how to. I don't like routines, life is too short for repeats anyway. I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger than reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I cannot transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.

So while most girls I know of dream of winning over our teachers, wearing that dress we couldn't fit into, wowing the boys, eating the last olive and spilling Campari on our rugs. I want to go through life having to suffer and struggle, to love and sing; I want to draw my worldly share of triumphs and defeats, I want to taste bread and blood. I want all the choices, tears or kisses, loneliness or camaraderie. I want to relive everything between pen and paper, make it an essential part of my writing and perhaps serve it as a craft and use it as a way of growing in my own understanding.

I want to one day look back with pride and faith at the journey I have taken; although I may fail to match my dreams of perfection, I want others to rate me on the basis of my splendid failure to do the impossible.


Credits to Virginia Woolf and Anais Nin for inspiration.

Pio said before that he’ll be back so soon (this christmas) I wouldn't have time to miss him and asked me to look after his heart because he left it with me. He lied. I miss him, every minute of every day. I still faithfully carry his heart in mine though, and I dare say I have never taken such care with anything in my life. Just yesterday, I was on the phone with him and he recited Neruda to me before we ended the call;

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

that this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

It's so curious: I can resist tears and 'behave' very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then all it takes is his voice in a poem, something so small, and everything collapses. God help me, I'm falling for this boy like a suicide from a bridge.

I'm really anticipating the start of the holidays with Pio's return. I'm going to enjoy myself this Christmas; quality time with family, friends, the boy and having time to catch up on my reading. It's amazing just entering a story knowing you would emerge from it feeling you have been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, your body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.

Good things aside, things in the institution have been hectic with the influx of ICAs but the friends make it bearable. Though, I'm not too thrilled with this one girl who has been back-biting me for quite some time; she deceives me, betrays me, says spiteful things about me and does worse whenever she gets the chance. My friends have been watching out for me and I pretend to be oblivious to the things she does. Quite frankly though, I've never met anyone so completely devoid of intergrity, values and conscience before. She doesn't really care about what goes on in anyone’s life but her own and she fails to realize that when she messes with one part of a person’s life, she's not messing with just that part. You just can’t be that precise and selective; everything. . . affects everything. What makes it worse - she is aware of the damage she inflicts on a person, just that those were intentional. I actually wrote her a private note exposing her back-biting and added by saying her actions and words can damage a person and it ultimately speaks more about herself than anyone else. But that's not the end of it, she's gotten very vindictive and at times, in the face of others, plays damsel in distress by falsifying things to her favor and denying the things she has done in front of the people that verified those events to me, her accounts, or stories however you'd like to put it, are incongruous. Honestly, where is the point in having to resort to poisoning peoples' minds by manipulating their perceptions of others in order to obtain attention which would not otherwise be forthcoming?

They say bad things are always going to happen in life. People will hurt you. But I know better than to use that as an excuse to fail or to hurt someone back. I believe that there is a good side and a bad side in most people, and in accordance with your own character and disposition you will bring out one of them and the other will remain a sealed book to you. If what most claim is true; that the underlying issue is her constant desire to be the center of attention and because we share the same group of friends, she probably isn't getting as much as she hoped for. Then all I have to say is: that doesn't even serve as an excuse to cause harm to another, nothing warrants such malice. The need for attention is inversely proportional to emotional maturity, therefore if you indulge in attention-seeking behaviours you're just telling everyone how emotionally immature you are.

Perhaps Pio is right; sometimes you just need to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep you in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy because when you will not fly into a passion people know you are stronger than they are, because you are strong enough to hold in your rage, and they are not, and they say and fabricate stupid things that could damn them for hell. There's nothing so strong as rage, except what makes you hold it in--that's stronger. It's a good thing not to answer your enemies.