i'm starting to feel a little bit bad for having disappeared without actually warning anyone, and thereby worrying some of my friends. partly it was a combination of circumstances and an urge to get away and mull over some pressing issues. wednesday to friday i was away in gloucester -- also known as the back of beyond -- to attend my cousin's wedding. and for the rest of the time i was genuinely just .. in hiding.

the wedding was actually really nice, apart from the enforced isolation: the train company i was travelling with, unlike first rail, did not provide on-board wireless access, which was most disappointing. it meant that the six hour train journey just dragged on interminably, and that i'd dragged my laptop down with me for no real reason. i was meant to try and get some writing done, but i chose instead to try and nap. sadly, i had some very grumpy -- and chatty -- people sitting near me, so sleep proved impossible. then when i arrived in gloucester, the hotel was too far away from civilisation for me to get any cell phone reception, and the fee for wireless access was extortionate, so i had plenty of time to just be by myself and think about stuff.

the ceremony was held in a gorgeous hotel, a former stately home converted into a luxury resort, complete with spa, gym, pool, two excellent restaurants and the most amazing park. the grounds were fairly extensive, and sadly i arrived too late in the evening -- and left too early the morning after the wedding -- to have time to explore. plus, i preferred to spend my time hanging out with my cousins, some of whom i hadn't seen in years. come to think of it, most of the family couldn't even recognise me at first -- i hugged one of my uncles and he was fairly confused about it until his wife kindly explained¹ who i was. and then there was my favourite uncle, who for some reason failed to recognise me each time i changed into a different outfit.²

i'm glad i went along though, it was really nice to touch base with the extended family again. also found out that the first grandchild in the family arrived two weeks ago, and is, according to his proud grandfather "very cute and chubby", and that yet another cousin is now engaged.³ funny really, because just before her brother mentioned the engagement, myself and yet another cousin⁴ had been speculating as to which one of us would be next to get married. it won't be till 2010, though, so the rumour is, which means i might not be in the uk for the wedding / excuse to have a giant party and invite all the relatives. *is saddened*

¹she was fairly condescending about it, given that a few minutes earlier i'd had to introduce myself to her.
²i met him at breakfast, when i was in jeans and a scruffy tee, again at the hindu wedding when i was in a sari and for a third time at the 'wedding breakfast' (which was at seven that night!) for which i'd changed into a dress. naturally i'd changed my hairstyle and makeup to suit the different outfits, which might have contributed to his confusion, but still.
³to an irish doctor. at this point, exactly one of my cousins has a nice, traditional hindu spouse. i'm looking forward to breaking the news to my mother; her reaction should be incredibly amusing.
⁴there are fourteen of us on my mother's side. i'm the third youngest, followed closely by a boy three weeks my junior and his baby sister, who is now 19. if i'm not wrong, the oldest cousin turns 35 at the end of the year.

it's not been an easy couple of months. it's been a lot of tweaking meds and dosages, which leads to a lot of random mood swings. this last week(end) i apparently decided to have a bit of a meltdown and so wound up leeching off eventual flatmates l.c and s.m. they were more than amazing, and fed me copious amounts of tea and chocolate and real food¹ and let me watch hours of tv². not been sleeping well the last couple of weeks, which either stems from or contributed to aforementioned meltdown. i suspect it's a little from column a, little bit from column b. threw myself on the mercy of my gp who prescribed me sleeping pills³.

this is a good story. monday night, l.c drove back to her parents' house so she could get a lift to the airport the following morning. s.m and i were chatting for a while⁴ when it got late enough that i thought i'd give the zopiclone a shot.

... which was the worst idea ever. we're talking auditory - visual hallucinations. on hindsight this is actually really funny, but at the time i was understandably freaking out. the two worst things were that i "saw" a pair of disarticulated hands reaching for me and "heard" a disembodied voice whispering "we're coming to get you." now, i was sleeping in l.c's room, which has an incredibly cool loft-bed, except for when you're tripping out and can barely sit up in bed, never mind get to the floor. i had to phone poor wee s.m and get him to come help me. initially he was pretty suspicious as to what precisely i'd been taking but i managed to convince him that (1) they were prescription drugs (i remember shaking the pill bottle at him) and (2) hallucinations were in fact a side-effect, albeit a pretty damn rare one. eventually he switched all the lights on, and logged on to spotify to play the entire regina spektor⁵ oeuvre so i wouldn't hear any more voices. naturally i spent the rest of the night in an incredibly uneasy half-doze, waking up every now and again to check that there was no one hiding behind the curtains. in the morning, i hightailed it back to the gp to tell her all about it, only for her incredible blasé response that if i didn't want to take them anymore i should just hand the remaining tablets back to the pharmacy.

so in conclusion, drugs are bad for me. and i still would very much like to get some sleep. hear my plea, hypnos.

¹well, not so much copious amounts of food. i'm still me, after all.
²including the rather exciting murray/wawrinka match, and the not-as-exciting murray/ferrero match. apparently i like watching tennis. who knew?
³i'd like to point out that i didn't ask for them. and she gave me like, three.
⁴during which conversation he finally managed to persuade me to sign up for spotify. which, i (heart) spotify.
⁵one of the artists we'd been chatting about before the whole sleeping pill debacle. in fact, i take this moment to mention that aims totally made my monday by phoning me from the regina spektor gig in hyde park.

today i opened up a web browser¹ to confirm the name of an article that i'd recently read. a quick search yielded surprising results: the second entry that popped up was a link to the abstract of a poster i'd presented at a recent conference². seeing my name online in that context gave me a small frisson of pleasure -- and a reminder of just how good it made me feel to have my work up on display, and to have fellow academics³ engage me in solid intellectual discussion⁴.

i hope that feeling will be enough to get me through dissertation crunch time..

¹instead of going through my files to find my copy. the internet is a godsend to the terminally lazy. and the congenitally forgetful.
²technically, i've presented it at two conferences now (you'll allow me to show off a little), but the result was from the programme of the the postgraduate conference (see below).
³which is a wonderful phrase to be able to use.
⁴surprisingly enough, i think i rose adequately to the occasion.

"For some reason, nothing else mattered and I raced against the clock to get up the hill before night-time reached critical mass and the sunset was gone. [...] The sunset now spanned the entire horizon in front of me: miles of miles of sky. Behind me, it was already night-time. But I was like a furtive god up there, surveying the last long sliver of the day, still with its afternoon-blue set beneath not just oranges and reds but grey, black, purple: all these swatches of sky bruising and smearing together. You couldn't draw this. You couldn't capture any of this in a photograph. I had never even seen anything like this in my life. This was the sky ripped in two with its insides spilling out. [...] The world was beautiful, even if people you loved died. In fact, if this sky was a kind of death, then maybe it wasn't so bad. Was there a heaven in there, somewhere, behind all those colours? [...] This was a sky from fiction, and I believed in it then. I believed in it all. If this was nature, then maybe nature was right. Maybe death was as natural as this sky."<sup>1

1</sup>Thomas, Scarlett. PopCo, London and New York: Fourth Estate, 2004. pp393 - 4

sleep cycle hasn't really fixed itself, even though i supposedly am on shiny new meds that should make me sleepy. the gp specifically warned me about that twice, and told me to stop taking them should i feel they had a negative impact. in general they seem to have no effect at all. what gives? also, despite all assurances that i could go back to them any time if i needed to, i couldn't get an appointment this morning, for love nor money. days like this leave me unimpressed with the nhs.

***
my first academic conference this week, even though it feels a little artificial¹. i punked out of giving a talk because the mere idea terrified me - plus i don't know enough students / lecturers to badger them into showing up to fill the room! have a poster up, which filled me with some pride, that was until today's so-called lunch-time presentation. despite strategic hovering near my poster no one really wanted to talk to me². even the giz, ex-DoS and my second favourite tutor ever admitted cheerfully that he hadn't read it³. skipped the second slot because i didn't want to spend another hour staring at people chat to their friends / coursemates and good lord this is an emo post.

i shall go back tomorrow armed with bravado and chat people up.


¹postgraduate conference, which means it's an in-house event with no guest speakers or staff presenting any work.
²except for s.r, who doesn't really count because (1) we go way back - we've known each other since first year english lit and (2) his poster was next to mine, so when i was done inducting him into the mysteries of lexical access, he told me all about welsh (consonant) mutation. my knee-jerk reaction "good lord, no wonder it's a dying language!" harsh, but fair.
³even though he'd cornered me to yell at me for not taking care of myself. that's the second person this week to take me to task for being "too thin". maybe they have a point.

so my sleep cycle apparently is screwed to the point where i manage to drop off for about three, maybe four hours for two days running and then crash on the third day, sleep for twelve hours straight and then start over. this is (1) sub-optimal and (2) the reason why i'm blogging at 4.24 this morning.

***
i need to get the Fear back in my life. otherwise, take the above mentioned sleeping pattern, add a pinch of apathy and a soupçon of disinterest in my degree, my life, the universe and everything and you get the explanation as to why i have nothing to show for the last two weeks of my life.

***
the funniest thing happened today when i was chatting to aulait. i stuck my head in her door to complain about the awful weather ("it's one of those days when you expect catherine to come tapping at the window!") when i thought i heard raindrops attacking the skylight. in response to my fairly obvious query, she opened her browser to check the weather online. i must admit, i'd expected her to open a rather different type of window.

***
i can see the sky beginning to lighten. in a few minutes i'm sure the dawn cacophony will kick off, so before that begins i think i'm going to call it a night. hopefully sleep won't prove quite so elusive at this point.

so, i have to write this essay for this sem's class. i've done .. a lot of reading, mostly in an attempt to put off actually writing the damned thing, covered a lot of the literature, and taken reams of notes. the most interesting thing i learned the other day is reproduced here for your edification:

'... in the Gun-djeihmi dialect of Bininj Gun-Wok¹, kun-min (lit. eye) is in the vegetable gender, irrespective of possessor.' (Corbett 2006: 47)

further reading revealed that there are three other gender classes in the above-mentioned dialect, masculine, feminine and neuter. i can't quite remember what other common nouns are assigned the vegetable gender, but the above sentence made me come quite close to laughing out loud in the library.

***
i should probably cease posting interesting things². my third trip to the post office in two weeks and i think the staff have come to recognise me. j.c's jigsaw puzzle-letter got to her safe and sound³ so i sent off the second one to its intended recipient today. now i've run out of procrastinate-y things to do .. at least until people start writing back..

¹one of the languages spoken in australia, i believe.
²birthday presents and interesting letters. nothing illegal, of course, just uncommon.
³i hope that answers your question, j.n! and you'll get your cookies when i get my reply. *holds them hostage* if you're lucky they'll come with an exotic epistle as well!

because i'm trying to resurrect my blog .. or at least see if i really should just go ahead and delete it (SPOILER)

[1] today, while speaking to a lecturer, i noticed for the first time that i really can hear the edinburgh come through in my voice. people have mentioned that to me in the recent past - my cousin, for example, finds it hilarious for some unknown reason. but today i heard it for myself. don't worry, lah, i can still be as singaporean as always¹.

[2] thinking of that - and by extension, code switching - made me think that it would be such a lovely subject for a poem. which is a shame because ...

[3] ... the last four and a bit years at uni - all the reading i was exposed to, the people i met who really, truly wanted to write, to distill their various, inchoate thoughts into words and who were simply stunning at doing just that - just served to convince me that i wasn't good enough. don't get me wrong, i'm not claiming that they're somehow innately more talented, i think they want it more and do whatever it takes to get them to where they want to go².

[4] i finally dragged myself through to the post office to send off a parcel, and believe that i was heartily judged by the man behind the counter. his response when i told him what i was posting was a classic wee smirk.

[5] went through to see unky heinz today, and he said the nicest thing - i was whining away as usual when he interrupted me to say that he really wished i would stay to do my phd. i know i'm not in the right mental space to go into it right away - and he agrees, bless him! - but it's a possibility. for the vague, unknowable future. and it makes me happy that he has such faith in my ability to produce good work.

[6] he also told me that i need to take a break, and maybe go away for a while. me: "..." i don't have the heart to tell him that i've done nothing to deserve it but .. *shrugs*. i did kinda sorta make plans for may, so maybe i'll stop dithering and commit to them³?

[7] i need to work out how to get some real rest. i either sleep all the time and feel unrested or force myself to get up out of bed and still feel unrested. that .. doesn't seem right.

[8] i have happy-fun-doctor-time⁴ coming up, so hopefully that's something that can be resolved. don't hold your breath.

i was going for ten, but i can't think of anything else, so 8 it is. maybe this time i won't wait another five months before posting.

¹ which is to say, not very.
² i wish i had that kind of passion.
³ me? make a decision and stick to it? never.
⁴ yep, that's what we call it.

'I wish that he could see the things I've sown. Diluted in me is John Wiggins, as today's rain will be in summer's harvest. I wish that I could see him once again, hear his footfalls on the gravel driveway, heavy on one foot. These dried leavings aren't complete in their remembrance, like the trimmings swept from green growth on a grocer's floor, they crumble on my fingertips and fly piecemeal to the wind. I do not do my father justice, that was his charge. I've borne his name, in and out of marriage, a name that is my own, sometimes I wish his strain would leave me, sometimes I'd like to choke it to full bloom. I'd like to turn to him today and say, 'I love you: too late: I'm sorry: you did the best you could: you were my father: I learned from you: you were an honest man.'

I cultivate a tiny garden; 'plot' reminds me of a cemetery. I plant only what my family guarantees to eat. The rest I give to those who want. Had you known him, I'd like to think you would have bought your groceries from John Wiggins. He always had a pleasant word. He could tell you how to plan a meal for twenty people, give you produce wholesale, trim your cut of meat before he weighed it - profit wasn't Daddy's motive, life was. Life defeated him. He taught me how to pack a grocery bag, I worked there weekends, canned goods on the bottom, perishables on top. Someone puts tomatoes on the bottom of my bag; these days, I repack it. I was taught respect of certain order. One sees one's father's face, as one grows older, in the most peculiar places. I see Daddy in each bud. I see his stance on corners. I, myself, wear grocer's aprons, when I cook. My mother always said there was no cleaning that damned blood from those white aprons. My father left a stain: I miss him. I write longhand, and in ink.'<sup>1

1</sup>wiggins, marianne. 'grocer's daughter' from herself in love, london: secker & warburg, 1987

with less than two weeks to go, i present my birthday wishlist from four years ago, now with added stuff and 50% more self-snarking!

three addenda: (1) if you want to shot-gun getting me something, leave a message - anonymously if you want to surprise me, although, why would you bother? i'm making a wishlist! (b) this list will be periodically updated. i think. (iii) m, this list does not apply to you. get me something awesome! (...she demanded.)
( Read more... )

'I was scarcely a hair's breadth greater than nothing, a molecule or two above the vanishing point of what constitutes a human being.'(15)<sup>1

1</sup>auster, paul. mr. vertigo london: faber and faber, 2000

a sweet phonecall i received earlier today:

c.d: i need your help with this and i'd appreciate any time you can give me.
me: well... who else is going to be there?
c.d: none so far. you were kind of first on my list.

how do you say no to that?

(There are different kinds of treachery / ... there are different kinds of infidelity), but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it (147; 166)<sup>1

1</sup>winterson, jeannette. oranges are not the only fruit london: vintage 2001 [1985]

and the rage diaries finally live up to their name. sunday found me and the flatmates having a bit of a crisis as we found out that the leak in the stairwell finally hit critical mass. the plaster caved in and .. well, just look.

( pictures behind the jump )

it's a long story with the flat agents being (insert list of expletives here because it's been a long day and i've called them some rather shocking things) and rude, to boot. for some reason we're being unreasonable in demanding that someone who (1) isn't the lady who owns the estate agency and (2) possibly has some sort of relevant professional qualifications come out to assess the damage? apparently since no one got hurt, and since the leak was fixed immediately (by a plumber that m and i phoned yesterday, after waiting a month for our agent to send someone around) there's no imminent danger and everything is apparently just fine and dandy.

some random builders who're refitting the flat downstairs saw the honking great hole in the ceiling and came to have a look though, and they say that it's sound for the moment, but that (having ripped up the linoleum in the bathroom) there is some surface rot on the floorboards and that we maybe should get that resurfaced. wish me luck with that because the fuckwits at the agency clearly won't do anything until something else caves in.

ouch. rage headache. most important thing - no one is to breathe a word to the parents.

so i've been meaning to do a post like this for a while, but somehow i never got around to it. finally decided that i wanted to play with my nice new camera (what my adored sibling got me for my last four? five? birthdays) and so:

this will be highly photo intensive, and i'm probably not going to resize any of them .. so consider yourselves warned

( 24 hours in photos )

wow, that was tiring. took me ages to sort out the photos and upload them and caption -- no wonder it took me so long to get around to it in the first place!

so the most obvious sign to me that i'm getting older is my decreasing ability to function on limited quantities of sleep. i was pretty hard at work last night, and eventually stayed up past three because i was absolutely determined to finish five chapters of a book that i borrowed off unky heinz. today of course, i've been a complete and utter mess because of that - forgot my purse at home, took ages to locate my keys and wound up essentially throwing away a fiver because i ruined an extremely expensive special delivery envelope¹ and then i had to run back out to buy a new one. then of course, i was in and out of the flat because i kept forgetting things that i needed to buy.

i've been so much less productive than yesterday because my concentration is shot to pieces, and i've also been assured that my (msn) conversation closely resembles word salad. i find this all completely and utterly unfair - gone are the days g.t and i would stay up late chatting or watching tv and i'd still be able to get up the next day and like, write an essay². meanwhile, it occurs to me that i have to be up for class tomorrow (oh, joy of joys) so perhaps i should head to bed. tune in tomorrow (or .. the day after?) for a super awesome post that i'm planning!

¹by sealing it without making sure that i had all the numerous important supporting documents that i needed to send to the embassy.
²blatant lie. there's only been one time in my life* that i wrote an essay in a single 24 hour period, and that was in sem one of first year when my laptop crashed.
*touch wood!

yesterday was a pretty rough day. i was grumpy through most of friday afternoon (because i had to see the delightful g.m off before she goes to taiwan!) and the night (despite the amazing pq who cooked dinner and made me many a cup of tea to stop me from freezing to death in her beautifully cold flat) and most of saturday morning.

i did go out for lunch¹ but then had to get ready and then run to work in ten minutes flat only to be run off my feet for the rest of the day. it really is getting to be an unbearable situation, and i did tell a manager (or three) that i'm on the verge of handing in my notice. what they don't know is that this is a major bluff because (1) i don't have anything else lined up and (2) i do need the shiny shiny moneys. i can bitch and moan till i'm blue in the face but i don't really have another option.

so yes, i did come home in a horrible mood, only to discover that my bastard next door neighbours were throwing an extremely loud party, with people smoking in the hallway and music so loud that i could hear the bass thumping away in my room. which is (1) as far away as you can possibly get from their flat and (2) on the second floor! they didn't actually turn it down until half five² and believe you me, i'm going to have several angry words with the flat agency. (i'm not actually going to speak to them in person. they look terrifying.) now i'm totally exhausted which is annoying, since i have so much work to do before seven. all i want to do is sit wrapped up in my robe and drink a nice cup of coffee³ and possibly nap again in wee while. damn commitments and such!

¹i will continue to contend that dessert does count as lunch. if i can have curry for breakfast, which i have done, to the mingled admiration and disgust of many a flatmate, then yes, cake does constitute a meal.
²i did managed to fall asleep sometime between replying to a text message at 2.11 and receiving a reply to that at 2.16. but then i woke up at 5.05 clutching my phone and couldn't drop back to sleep until about 6.
³after last night i've fallen off the coffee wagon with a vengeance. my ulcer might explode but right now that is the least of my worries.

i envy your faith and conviction, your simple, unshakable¹ belief that you'll get what you want, or better yet, that what life hands you is essentially all that you need.

i'm aware that by simply wanting what you have, i prove that i cannot be like you but maybe, just maybe, being in your life is enough.

***
in other news, as you can see i'm slacking off again. there's a lecture in a couple of hours that i'm considering attending. i don't have to go² but i think starting to skive now is a very bad idea. having said that, i took my first mental health day of the term, and did nothing for a glorious 24 hours. i might have succumbed to extending it, which is frightening prospect. i need to get down to my reading - i got about two pages in and declared a lunch break. that was two hours ago. i'm still not sure how i powered through four chapters in five hours on monday. i fear that on that one day i used up all my studying mojo for the week.

whining won't help (right?) so i suppose the only thing to do is to get back to reading.

see you online in five minutes. *resigned to her own laziness*

¹spellchecker made me do it!
²normally i'd get a "friendly" "reminder" along the lines of 'see you at the meeting!' but both my supervisors are away attending conferences. i would be pleased, except for the fact that they've both stood me up on meetings this week because of their conferences.

so apparently my body once again is revolting. against me, to be specific. long story short, i suspect that my stomach ulcer - dormant sine '06 - is flaring up again. it's not that bad, this time - no really excruciating pain, or pressing need to throw up all the time. just mild discomfort¹, and a growing realisation that i should just stop with the coffee and the spicy food² and probably the soft drinks and alcohol.

go back to the part where i'm not allowed coffee anymore. pause, and relive the horror of the last time i gave up caffeine³. i've already had a rather pathetic moment at work when i heard the milk foamer fire up and i crept clear across the room to try to convince someone to make me a cuppa. luckily for me i'd already warned everyone not to give in to my whining so i had to just resort to breathing in the lovely scent of coffee grounds⁴. the real issue here is that i'm having those withdrawal headaches! it's a nightmare, and all i can do is hope that it'll settle down posthaste. i have enough on my plate right now, what with all this reading that's piling up⁵.

¹although i wonder now whether the "cramps" from hell that i was moaning about last week were actually because of this ulcer.
²not that i'm actually cooking or anything.
³remember second year? two weeks into my detox and i was crying to m about my desperate need for coffee.
⁴hello, my name is kiru, and i am a caffeine addict. i'm also apparently addicted to footnotes.
⁵last one, i promise. unky heinz, having ignored me all last week actually emailed me today, on a saturday, to recommend yet another book that i should be looking at. *death*

after a fairly good weekend, i'm left questioning myself again. i'm not sure why i'm being so emo, but i do suspect it's because all the bad things i managed to push out out of my tortured little mind over the last couple of days have begun to come back to bite me in the ass¹.

***
f'r instance, the last time i spoke to the lovely lady at the singapore consulate, she assured me that i'd be able to apply for a new passport² from here with just the documents i have on me³. of course, this apparently was a blatant lie as there's a lovely long list of supporting documents that i need to supply along with a completed application form. the form itself is about one page long, and will take three minutes to fill out. the supporting documents will take 8 - 10 days to reach me, assuming that i can get the folks to post them out as soon as humanly possible. of course, coming clean to my dad means that i'm going to wind up ruining his day as well.

i have a feeling that today is going to be yet another day when i crawl into bed at a ridiculous hour and then refuse to emerge.

¹and of course there's a little personal drama in all this. i made the mistake of going out last night and came back feeling emotionally drained because i felt completely out of place among people i actually like. going away for summer sucks, because i then feel like i don't belong anywhere.
²if i haven't already mentioned this, a new passport is the only way to deal with the "little" travel document related problem i have.
³and if you're a regular reader (hi, j.n!) you'd know that i lost my ic in australia about a month ago, and therefore have no form of identification, save my passport. it's a vicious little cycle that's left me wondering if i still exist.