Sound and Fury

Because I love good writing that strikes a chord within me, here's a link to Mercermachine's latest post.

Ironically, I too, read it on a day of "leaden sky and turgid waters", except that being in Melbourne there were gusts of southwesterly winds buffeting the building I sit in as well. A day that sets the stage for Autumn's act.

Oh, bring back the halcyon days of summer past.

I could brood but instead, I'll post up excerpts from his post that struck chords and more than chords within me.

" It should come as no surprise to you (or me, for that matter) that I have loved before, that I have felt passion that brought down all my reason"

A passion that brought down my reason? Yes, yes and yes again.

"You've loved the wrong person or the right person in the wrong way or at the wrong time. You have, at one time or another, felt the very core of you being ripped away, be it in passion or sorrow or, God help you, both at once. You have known the coffee spoons. You have dared to eat a peach. You have heard the mermaids singing each to each, and you have learned what it is to drown and yearn for drowning, for the cessation of breath. You have learned that both passion and loss will give you an appetite for annihilation… and if you are reading this you have, one way or another, turned away from that siren's call. The dead don't read blogs."

Wrong person, wrong time, wrong everything. Yes again.

And to yearn for cessation of breath, to yearn to wander the country from whose bourn no traveller returns.

Yes and yes to all of the above.

A toast, to all who have loved and lost and lived through it all to tell the tale.

Truth or Dare

I always chose Dare. Because I'd rather do the most embarrassing and stupid things than risk dredging up bitter memories.

I started this blog last year partly out of boredom and mainly because I needed somewhere to vent during the cold winter of discontent. I've always kept the content light, a socio- political discussion here, an odd poem there, the usual I'm bored/lonely/unhappy navel gazing type post sprinkled in.

But I rarely speak here with frankness just as I rarely speak my heart to anyone else in my real life.

There are so many people who put their personal lives online for all to see. Their loves, hates, boyfriends, pets, girlfriends, break ups, sex lives, mental breakdowns....it's all there. All online for the whole world, including their friends and family to see.

I doubt I could ever do that. I have too much to hide, and mainly, my skin is just too thin. Anything at all that goes wrong in public makes me want to shrivel up inside and hide under the covers for the rest of the week.

But my silences usually mean my questions go unanswered. It gives power and control to people who hold my secrets because they know how much it means to me. It means I never get second or third opinions when faced with sticky issues in my personal life. It means I have no vent, no place to go, no one to turn to because I close off this avenue of release.

There are times I sit down and think to myself that I can't go on this way forever. That Donne was right; no man can be an island.

I came across the blog of someone I once knew, a long time ago. In it he wrote about his past failures, his lack of success in his career, the loss of his girlfriend...all the sad under currents of his seemingly placid and fulfilling life suddenly bubbling to the surface of that little blog. And I wondered if maybe one day I could do that with my own blog too. Write all the nonsense in my head and heart out onto my blue and cream corner of the web universe.

I could but I probably won't.

In the end, as Billy Joel once sang, my silence is my self defence.

Life is just easier this way.

Pamela

I've got an absolutely adorable tutor for corporations law this year. She's blonde and slightly chubby and has such nice smiley,friendly blue eyes. Plus she's so intelligently ditsy(was that an oxymoron?) she makes the entire class fun just because it's so cute to watch her.

Most really smart people are so awfully inaccessible because they seem so clever that trying to talk to them is an utter headache (plus stressful because I'm not particularly smart) but she really tries to make corporations law accessible which is good because corps law is insanely boring.It ranks second to civil litigation which was so crushingly boring I wanted to claw my eyeballs out and stab myself just to relieve the mind numbing boredom of the class. Seriously, I started cutting class just to avoid mutilating myself.

Anyway back to my corporations law teacher, I just found out that she co authored some book on Corporations law which judges quote from and that she's apparently really well known in corporations law circles. All that and she can still give this ridiculously silly but cute! imitation of a seal barking in order to explain the difference between a real seal and a company seal.

You know how in chick lit, you often get well meaning but ditsy and lovable protagonists? Well she reminds me of the heroine in the Shopaholic series of books. Except that she's obviously quite together and in control of her life despite being ditsy in some ways.

I guess it just goes to show what a huge difference a good teacher can make to any subject however inaccessible or boring it may be. Plus, it really helps that she's so approachable, I never have any qualms about approaching her with silly questions. (In fact, once when some one asked a terribly basic question, she actually turned around and apologized in her lovably flustered way for not teaching well enough so we understood the topic. )

I mean, which teacher actually apologizes for not teaching well enough??!!!

Every woman's fear

Every now and then I to go and read through some thoroughly neurotic and depressive poetry just for the kicks.

Makes me feel better about myself; I mean, compared to them (many of whom killed themselves before the age of 40), my problems are nothing.


Here's one I've loved for the longest time. Read it when I was 17 and it struck a chord. Re read it at age 24 and now it more than strikes a chord , it tugs at every hidden fear that women's magazines have fostered in me through the years.

Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
What ever you see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful---
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

By Sylvia Plath

Commonwealth Games

I've known since early last year that the commonwealth games were going to be held in Melbourne. But even when people were anxiously balloting for tickets to various games events, I remained unmoved and uncaring.

You can so tell that I'm not a sports fan.

But when a friend from church called up and offered a free ticket to the opening ceremony, I finally started getting completely excited. The day of the opening was so cool, the lights display and enormous light up fishies on the Yarra, the promised fireworks and lightshow....all conspired to make me as high as a little kid at the carnival.

There is no point to this whole post except to say that I totally love living in a city where stuff like that happens. I've gone for several of the games in addition to the opening ceremony(which was awesome by the way!) and I'm now broke but thoroughly happy.

The Vagina Monologues

One of the Melbourne university theatre groups did a production of Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues last week and I managed to catch it on its opening night. I went in with very low expectations; it was after all, a college production and I thought that perhaps they might not do its controversial subject matter justice. But it turned out much better than I thought and several of the actors turned in virtuoso performances despite a few hiccups in the delivery of the lines.

This isn't a review, just a post on some of the questions raised by the play and the ways in which it gave voice to many of the taboos and fears society placed around female genitalia and around women in general.

The play was feminist in character; I am a feminist. That being said, I disagreed with its premise that women and womanhood could be represented by the female genitalia alone. But I did like that it brought into the open so many of the fears, myths and taboo that surrounded the vagina.

The vagina, unlike the penis, is hidden away from view all of the time. So unless one makes a special effort to bring out a mirror and take a good look at it, it is possible for most girls to just forget about it. As such, a woman's relationship with the vagina, is also fundamentally different from the male's relationship with their penis. I have known many men to nickname their genitals, to consider it their partner in sexual conquest, but I know very few women who have had any kind of openness about her own sexual organs. I'd go as far as to say that I know a great many women who may not even know the names of the different parts of her own genitalia. Most women tend to have an attitude toward their vagina made of equal parts self loathing and denial.

As such, the vagina can probably be said to be a good metaphor for female sexuality and the way it is marginalized as compared to the openness with which society treats male sexuality and generally the male sexual organ. There is a veil of secrecy, and of shame, that surrounds female sexuality and the vagina and the menstruation cycle is part of it. They are spoken of in whispers, referred to subtly through coded words ( most girls in Singapore still refer to their period's arrival amusingly as their "auntie's visit") and not at all spoken of in polite society or at the dinner table.

I wrote about Tammy, the unfortunate and unwitting porn star in my last post and one of my main grouses about it was and is still that she was the one being lambasted and villified for her sexual escapades. Amongst my friends, most would talk about her in disgusted tones but laud her yet unnamed partner for his sexual conquest. If one is to condemn anyone at all, why not condemn them both? Why confine the shame and the publicity to her and her alone? You see, that is the great and terrible unfairness of male and female sexuality that obviously still exists despite vociferous protests by my male friends to the contrary.

It doesn't matter that shows such as Sex and the City have managed in recent years to foreground female sexuality; at the end of the day, the girl who does act on her sexual needs is still labelled as cheap or slutty. The men still get away with anything and everything as evinced by Tammy and her boyfriend. Tammy was and is not a slut; she and her boyfriend might have acted foolishly in deciding to film their sexual shenanigans for posterity but apart from that they were two consenting adults who decided to have sex. But I could say this till the cows literally came home and she'd still have a horrible reputation in Singapore from now on.

Perhaps that has been a slight paradigm shift in societal attitudes toward female sexuality in recent years, particularly among the better educated, cosmopolitan types; but among the more traditional families, nothing has changed. Many of my personal guy friends still want (and think they can obtain) virgin wives and at the same time, sow their wild oats liberally before marriage. The double standards that existed in my parents' time, still exist now.

Women are not devoid of sexuality, and the vagina does not exist merely to serve as a tool for male sexual pleasure. This was the theme for at least two of the monologues in the play and I wanted to stand up and applaud them for being brave enough to come out and say it. I only wish I could make every single guy I've ever known watch the play and try to come to some intelligent understanding of female sexuality and to clear away all of the taboos that exist in their heads about the vagina.

Most feminists are painted as bitter, men hating harridans and I'd always felt this to be untrue. I've always felt that most women are feminist on some level, whether they like to admit it or not. After all, the essence of feminism is the belief that women deserve recognition for their work and that they should have equal standing with men in terms of political and social rights. Despite many women who deny that they are feminist, I don't actually know any woman who would rather be treated as a second class citizen and consent to be condescended to all her life. We make up half the population; what we do, how we think and our contribution to society at every level, politically or spiritually, is essential. It pains me that great literature is often only the work of men and that almost all religions sideline women and their contribution. The political and legal arenas of even the most developed countries continue to be dominated by men and I truly believe that unless more women are represented in these areas, our society always be missing out on something great.

I may not agree with every premise in the Vagina Monologues, but I respect the woman who wrote it and the women who worked on producing it. There is a gap in society, in literature and in the arts that needs to be filled in and this play is an invaluable contribution toward filling in some more of the vacuum that existed.

The play also asked two questions that I'd like to post up on my blog as a way of finishing off this post. Not because that I thought they were terribly profound, but because I'd really like to get more girls/people thinking about their attitudes toward their own body.

1) If your vagina could wear something, what would it wear?

2) If your vagina could say something, what would it say?

Dangerous Liaisons on Camera

About a week or two ago, a friend of mine sent me the infamous Tammy video that had been making its way around the Singapore internet circuit. Forums, blogs..they were all swapping the video.

I'm no saint. I have encountered porn before (who hasn't?) but since most porn is geared toward men, I tended to get bored by it more than anything else. But this, this was something different.

I could not bring myself to watch the entire video and midway through it, I ran to the bathroom and nearly threw up. Don't get me wrong, I don't think sex is gross. But as an intensely private person, I could not bring myself to watch the violation of someone else's privacy without feeling sick to my stomach.

This kid didn't sign up to be an instant porn star and have everyone, her neighbours, friends, previous classmates, everyone who had ever known her, see her naked and making out with her boyfriend. Sex is the most private, intimate act there is and even though they filmed it, it was obvious that they never meant for it to garner the audience that it does today.

Nearly everyone I know has had that nightmare, where you appear in school or some public area suddenly naked and people point at you and laugh. I can only imagine, that for her, she wakes to this nightmare every single day.

Singapore is a hard enough place to live in when one has made mistakes, much less a mistake on this scale and regarding something as taboo as sex. Where ever she goes, what ever she does, there will always be someone who will recognize her, realize that she's no innocent and there will always be the whispers behind her back and the snide comments sent her way.

Please stop passing the video around. Forget the morality of it, the rights and wrongs...just stop.

I'm a very thin skinned person, and I know...that if I had been in her shoes, I'd have killed myself or left the country for good by now. I don't know what she looks like, I refused to look or remember and I'd really rather not know anyway.

Porn is one thing, but this isn't porn and this girl is not a porn star. Let her be. Whatever mistakes she may have made, she didn't deserve a comeuppance of this magnitude.

This was boredom induced....

You are a Brainy Girl!

Whether you're an official student or a casual learner, you enjoy hitting the books. You know a little bit about everything, and you're always dying to know more. For a guy to win your heart, he's got to share some of your intellectual interests. A awesome book collection of his own doesn't hurt either!

What Kind of Girl Are You?

Because I'm a Narcissist

Here is my Johari personality thingy for whoever wants to fill it in. Or if you don't feel like filling it in, you can just go take a peek at what people think of me here.

Yes, I am sorry that the list of personality words do not include "ditsy" and "anal retentive" which several of the people who tried filling it out have already highlighted.

Here Comes the Sun

It's now March and officially the start of Autumn even if the leaves are still stubbornly green.

I'm kind of glad I stayed in Melbourne for the summer even if it meant missing Chinese New Year at home. The Melbourne I usually come back to is grey; dull grey skies, grey pavements and people huddled in big coats.

It was so nice seeing another side to the city and to the people. In summer, there is this explosion of colour and life that I never really expected. Living in sunshine all year round in Singapore has made me completely spoiled. Here, once the sun comes out, the people emerge all tanned and long limbed from their trench coats and spill out into the sidewalk cafes and beaches. They lie beneath trees in the park sunning themselves and indulge in the fantastic Italian gelati that one can buy from so many places here. There is an air of desperately trying to take advantage of the long sunny days whilst they last.

To be honest, the long, hot days here really alleviated my homesickness. It's hard to miss sunny Singapore when the sun sets at 8:30pm and you can take long walks around the gorgeous city parks.

There were so many activities I indulged in over the summer, eating ice cream on 40 degree days(you would not believe how good ice cream tastes on a day like that), roller blading on St Kilda Beach, watching the sun set at 9pm in the evening and watching many many great art house/indie films at the art house cinema on Lygon Street. Despite my friends' gloomy predictions that spending the summer here would be draggy and boring, it turned out to be such a thoroughly cool time (pardon the terrible pun)!

I wish summer didn't have to end and I really really wish for the winter chill never to set in. But at least I've stopped associating Melbourne with just the cold and the chill of autumn and winter.