I'm only happy when it rains

Singapore weather has been at its best ever since I came back. It's fabulous. I'll remember it for life.

There are awkward, unfitting events in life

(I've decided to give up thinking of a title when one is not obvious and do it in the Pillow-Book style.) There are awkward, unfitting events in life such as wet umbrellas on crowded MRTs or when the Small plate is too small for two pieces of (jammed) toasts and the Large plate is too large. We learn to solve or be at peace these little frustrations in life little by little as we grow up. But some of them never get solved and when they happen all I could do is put them off till they're forgotten.

高处不胜寒

At a heightened level of consciousness, you experience greater barriers in communication.

Incredible dreariness

I wrote an email to the 1st year Chinese students mailing list, asking if anyone's interested in playing erhu or learning to play erhu. It was a wild shot at trying to get some playing partner so I won't get bored playing it alone and trail off practices like I did two three years ago. Sending that email felt like contacting someone to buy their car. It has some pleasant aspects but didn't amount to much. I have really changed...

I must have changed. I even mentioned it at the dinner tonight with XB and YJ and felt no qualms about it. Well the truth is, I want to talk about it. I want to talk about it badly, about erhu, about walking and beautiful scenery and music and poetry and whatever my past encounters have been that stood for beauty. But no, I guess it's never to be. Perhaps in my attempts to be unique I've created a me that's so different that nobody's with me anymore.

In those wrong moments when people are instantaneously in touch with me, I wince and shrink and escape away. Or in some other right moments when connections are built and felt, my heart beats too violently for me to keep in disguises, so that at the end of it all I stood naked and exposed, regretting and confused. The two situations cannot be decoupled. One is both the cause and the consequence of the other. That's the laws of the balanced life of yin and yang.

So in any case I tried tonight and I spoke of the email I wrote. YJ's face brightened and followed up with, "Oh I know! That letter you sent! I saw it. How tu3!" The last syllable has multiple significances and probably has a different nuance of meaning in modern usage among young people. But it amounts to "being country-bumpkin-ish, unfashionable, uncool". YJ's just a child of course. He didn't even understand the normal world. But my vanity was hurt all the same. When one aptly equates getting hurting in vanity to that in emotions, he's never likely to discover his mistakes and become truly humble. But it was so easy to do! I could just tell myself, I would remain alone in Stanford for a long time to come, tell myself that all of my dinner table companions would, at moments such as this, suddenly become so distant from me that I felt like waving to them on the other side of the ocean.

But I wouldn't need to bite back tears anymore at least. So I have changed.

Do I sound incredibly wearied? I'm afraid that in order to continue believing and hoping in youth, feeling incredibly wearied at times would have to be the price I pay. When the weariedness takes over believing and hoping, I would have grown old. The belief and hope and youth, so shiny and sparkling like a cargo of treasures steadily being submerged by a sea under the brilliant sun, would be me waving my skeletal erhu-playing fingers until the last segment is covered by restless waves.

If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:.
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

- Rudyard Kipling

If You Were Coming In The Fall

If you were coming in the fall,
I'd brush the summer by
With half a smile and half a spurn,
As housewives do a fly.

If I could see you in a year,
I'd wind the months in balls,
And put them each in separate drawers,
Until their time befalls.

If only centuries delayed,
I'd count them on my hand,
Subtracting till my fingers dropped
Into Van Diemen's land.

If certain, when this life was out,
That yours and mine should be,
I'd toss it yonder like a rind,
And taste eternity.

But now, all ignorant of the length
Of time's uncertain wing,
It goads me, like the goblin bee,
That will not state its sting.

- Emily Dickinson

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed - and gazed - but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

- William Wordsworth

A poem that constituted the unseen poetry section in an English literature mid-year exam in secondary 2. The first line sounded nicely sing-able even though I probably scored a 7 out of 20 in that section. It takes all these years to realise that no matter how abandoned I had felt from the unfamiliarity of language and environment in those schooling days in Singapore, I had grown up to love everything about human nature and inspiration.