Sun, Wind, and Walking Down Under

Six days of walking and I feel my leg muscles are bigger already...

It's an odd mish-mash of skyscrapers abruptly appearing out of masses of short little buildings rarely exceeding 7 floors or so. That's the Melbourne City Central landscape for you. But the architecture here is so variable and interesting, Singapore seems like a bland, bland, boring contrast.

There are buildings here that look like overblown structural art-pieces...think the Marine Parade Community Centre on a bigger scale (maybe 5 times?), with more colour thrown in...standing right next to classic colonial buildings, grecian pillars and all, complete with bronze statues punctuating the front. Pity we don't have more of those...too bad.

It's easy to get lost, so I have a map on hand all the time. Streets bissect each other perpendicularly, much like in Singapore, but the whole network is like a checkerboard, and it's easy to overshoot Chinatown...Chinatown here is a mish-mash of Japanese, Korean, Malaysian, and Chinese shops, so it's more "Asian-town" than just China-china.

For now Mom and Dad are around; time to treasure our last day together physically, before they fly home. They're exploring investing money here, since the interest returns are much higher, and the property market seems to be booming. I guess actually being here as a student opens a lot of windows...

Panic and loneliness and the discomfort of having left everything familiar and comfortable behind have not sunk in yet, but I imagine they will, eventually, some time within the next fortnight or so.

I'm worried for him...He's probably at a low point now that the prospect that I might build my career here is becoming possible. When one moves and the other stays, things become insecure and unstable...but I have the length of the course to mull it over and figure out my future, all the prospects and options available, and consequences.

The future is like the sunlight here, white-hot and burning-bright.

New & Unknown

Flying to Melbourne 9-plus a.m. Friday, February 9th 2007.

Packing chaos at present. Future unfathomable.

Till November, farewell, home.

Wet Wilderness & The Great Unknown

Random thoughts, happenings, and etc.:

I have been offered a place to study fashion design in RMIT Australia, in 2007.

It's raining so damn much nowadays that it's barely enjoyable; who cares if you have to work while the weather is more condusive for sleeping in? You can't go anywhere without getting dirty and wet. Plus a dirty wet umbrella to deal with, which is easily lost.

I am extremely sleep deprived, it's so bad that I'm forgetting ridiculously. My short-term memory is probably gone. I can forget to switch off the lights even after being reminded minutes ago. I can forget a brand new waterbottle, bought just yesterday, leaving all 7 bucks of it, full of water, in the cab. I can forget to eat, forget my lover's birthday, forget something you told me just now. My brain is dying.

My parents and I are not getting along. Maybe the communication breakdown is complete. The difference in wavelength, misunderstanding, misinterpreting...and yet because I inherited all my personality flaws and communication behavioural traits from them...it's a bloody cycle of stupid emotional trauma I just want to escape from.

We all have our moments of insecurity, fragility, helplessness, and worthlessness. My parents have never made me feel worthy or self-respecting...funny how the people who created you and raised you can also torment you the most and inflict the most agony. We've lived together for so long and yet we barely tolerate each other; there's never enough patience.

Fine, if my life is screwed up, I'm really going to run away then. What now? What then?

I have no idea.

There is no time, and friendship at work is a scam

I am tired, and depressed, and I feel like an alien.
Work is not working. I am not coping.
Sometimes I muse that I deserve to be left alone.
Do these people even care? Maybe Pin's right, I care for them more than I should.
Colleagues cannot be friends.

Then I ask myself, what about my own friends? Is that all a scam too?

What kind of a loner am I?

Breakaway running

Let me break away for a while
Let me run into some foreign place
Sit a while and drift my mind
Submerge the self in a little peace:
Unconditional calm

Let me run free, a broken shard
Splintered from an unknown source or space
Forgetting my despised pain
Losing all senses in rushed euphoria -
Because fools run away

Broken fools run away

I. A.M. C.A.L.M. Integrating Anger Management: Critical Analysis, Lucid Mentality

I. A.M. C.A.L.M could also stand for Ignoring Anger Management: Cultivating Anal Loser Mindsets.

It's been a bad week, overall. Kept getting chewed up, screwed, battered and figuratively spat on. I suppose for someone more fragile and vulnerable, all this shit combined warrants some sort of emotional breakdown during the weekend. I simply do not have that option.

I am quite literally leading a double life now, and struggling with it. It's tiring and very bad for the creative juices. And the frustration building up inside, which probably will never find an outlet, is becoming an emotional tumour, festering cancerous. I'm not sure how to deal with it.

In the bathroom I hit the walls and stamp the floor like a madwoman, but even that is insufficient venting. If I could I would fling my whole body against the wall, but it would probably create a mess.

My left leg is in pain, or numb, and sometimes I suspect it belongs to someone else. Perhaps the emotional angst is manifesting itself as physical pain, proving to myself ever so obviously that this hidden problem could literally cripple me. But I continue to limp along anyway.

There's the future to think about. It's not going to be easy or smooth-sailing, I know. But even if I lose my limbs or am heading down some path of self-destruction masquerading as self-fulfilment, I have to persist.

I have to persist, keep my head up, keep my strength together and my energy high, and stop succumbing to the vicious cycle of compromise and loss.

I have to be calm.

...

Life twists you open and makes you give

But until when?

I've been feeling stupid and empty lately, like I can't keep pace, and that feeling of doom shadows my insides, making insecurity this foggy reality I can barely breathe in.

As though I am sprinting with all my worth, and that definitely, I will trip and fall and suffer tremendous agony.

That desperate desire to escape suddenly rears its horrible gorgeous head and roars. But I cannot go.

Perfectionism: the Clients' Epidemic

Insufferable is the life lived according to the Client's whims and fancies.
Hellish is the deadly combination of the spineless Client and the anal Consultant.

Perfectionism is a gloriously devilish ideal in this fucked-up, sick game. We're just pawns wrestling for meagre survival without any scrap of dignity or respect, in this hypocritical war for power, control, and right of way.

This is what voodoo dolls are for, I guess. Oh the fantasies of gory violence and sweet retaliation!

Pain, coffee, cheese, and bad breath

Oh the agony of miserable Monday.

Weekends don't ease backaches. They worsen them.

Cheese sandwiches and coffee give you bad breath, and a horrid aftertaste.

Urgh!!! The stomach revolts.

Silence is violence

It's not Keane's famous songs that pierce your heart most.

Have you heard "We Might As Well Be Strangers"?

I don't know your thoughts these days
We're strangers in an empty space
I don't understand your heart
It's easier to be apart

We might as well be strangers in another town
We might as well be living in another time
We might as well be strangers

For all I know of you now
For all I know

It makes me cry.

And there's "She Has No Time"

You think your days are ordinary
And no one ever thinks about you
But we're all the same
And she can hardly breathe without you

She says she has no time for you now
She says she has no time

Think about the lonely people
And think about the day she found you
Or lie to yourself
And see it all dissolve around you

She says she has no time for you now
She says she has no time

Lonely people tumble downwards
My heart opens up to you
When she says she has no time for you now
She says she has no time

I suppose when one feels down, melancholic rock really impales you like a knife in the chest.

We keep quiet, but really, we are fighting a vicious battle, but neither of us will ever admit to the glaring truths in this detached, strained, hidden war. Our silence is a subtle violence that rips up the insides, a clawed animal insane, frenzied, imprisoned, repressed, desperate.

It's all wrong. Everything is wrong now.

My mind is a blank, and it is like death.
How I yearn for it all to be bloody, and exploded anger, and real, physical wounds that will then heal. But it's not possible, because you are too kind. I don't know what to do, and how to live with all this.

Can I just disappear, just cease to exist for a while? Complete escape from this life, this monstrous trap, away from all its ruthlessness and vicious cycles and suffocating burdens.

Can I just stop breathing...inhaling, exhaling, all this stale, recycled, polluted air...for a while?

What's out there, in the great beyond?

Tears?

Gotta Love:

http://www.whitedogbobby.com/

Got Life? Or Life Got?

We are corporate-zombie-slave-machines marching into oblivion;
One team, united in ignorance, our numb unfeeling bliss
Never moved, ever indifferent, ever secure in the repetition of
The Routine, that which is supreme.

We feed like maggots on the rotting fruit of capitalism; with just
One goal, that deadly aim unwavering, to glut ourselves with unseen gold,
Luxuriating in the sordid fantasy of material wealth unbound -
At the knee of the god called money

We kneel for superficial gain, blinded by our glorious achievements,
Never expecting the poverty of death.

Then
Damnation mocks and
Minces our existence
in its entirety,
Worthless, worthless, worthless
In the infinite reaches of Eternity.

Egads the squeeze!

From that great giant blender of Life, spare me some small ounce of time to do more of this:

http://www.funkygrad.com/lifestyle/displayarticle.php?artID=731&subcat=live


and get as good as this:

http://www.venacava.org/newmain.html

Hmmm

http://www.onedotzero.sg/

A handful of thoughts

• Imagining the emptiness and pain when I will have to give up somebody in order to fulfil something. Dream or Lover?
• Wondering if I am losing my child-like perspective, and therefore, my youth and the heart and spirit that give it strength
• Am I too self-absorbed and do I deserve what I am getting in life?
• Collars and cut and clothes and fabric
• Sleep deprivation
• The warmth I feel when he is with me
• Am I taking too much for granted?
• Money problems
• Getting rid of my spare tyre
• Getting down to doing all that craftwork, drawing, painting, and etc. stuff that I've put aside for the longest time
• How the heck am I supposed to break out of this cycle???

Whole meal in a pot'o'rice

I'm brainstorming a bunch of easy-to-cook one-pot meals for lunchbox purposes...to save money, of course. Maybe completely vegetarian, maybe completely oil-free. Healthy eating!

Something pseudo-Korean, to be all dumped in a rice-cooker:
white and brown rice, a variety of mushrooms (button, straw, abalone, etc), diced red carrots, snow peas, maybe some yellow capsicum, and a bit of Taiwanese sausage, all cooked in chicken broth, then topped with pine nuts, toasted nori seaweed, and bonito flakes.

Quickie soup:
Add chicken stock to cucumber, white/red carrots, corn cobs, sweet potatoes/potatoes, maybe even leafy veggies like watercress, quickly boil together or microwave, then beat an egg into the mix. Tofu optional, for protein.

Super-chawanmushi (can't be lunchboxed; it's a cook-now-eat-now dish):
Pork/chicken cubes or mince, prawns, squid, crab-sticks, carrot cubes, corn nibblets, dried Chinese mushrooms, broccoli/cauliflower pieces, beaten eggs, water, all mixed and steamed or microwaved to form a savoury egg-pudding dish.

There's also Tofu Salad, where you can top it off with lots of different toppings...that's kind of fun if the silken tofu doesn't turn into mush.

Hmmm...gotta dream up some more...

Struggling in the Workplace

What lines should be drawn between "training" and "exploitation"? How do you measure the value of a human being as an employee in an organisation? How far does the employee have to go, what does she have to endure, and what kind of dire and drastic circumstances have to occur, before she has to finally evaluate that there is simply no other route to walk, other than out? What if there are comfort zones too valuable to ignore, too (surprisingly) reassuring to break out of?

How does one find balance in the clashing perspectives of the employer and the employee, and is there any right or wrong? When peace is kept through silencing the opinions of one party, where is the fairness and openness, and the "completely necessary feedback process" so highly recommended in a secular corporate organisation? Or does politics always prevail, and seniority/greater hierarchy always triumph?

When you judge a person by the error she commits, do you also not consider the context, motive, intention, magnitude, and, of course, consequences? Or does the initial agenda of teaching a lesson to the errant person serve an even higher purpose, therefore deserving greater priority?

I'm trying to find justification in all of this, some rationalisation of the situation. Maybe I just don't learn. Maybe I'm being too stubborn, inflexible and narrow-minded, Maybe I'm naive and inexperienced, foolish, immature, and rude. I just cannot understand my boss's point of view, and he cannot understand mine, and we just are so paralysed in arguing our individual cases that we neglect to come to a compromise, and then I get mowed over by his reprimand and end up sulking for the rest of the evening.

We just seem to be playing this cruel game that parodies a conflicting, melodramatic family-tragedy, and spins in a vicious cycle that cannot end, over and over again, each time in a new scenario, but always with the same frustrating conclusion.

Should I just walk out and never return? When will that time come?

Crapazine is Cool

http://www.crapazine.com/

A cool collective

http://www.the-03.com/

Cool Site

http://www.funkbuilders.com/