I’m going to migrate this blog again. The change from talfryn to zosterops was born out of practical necessity and convenience (I had the zosterops.net domain at hand when talfryn went down), but this move will be largely symbolic. Through the years, I’ve tried my hand at niche blogging (nature), and in light of my potential research I was for a while contemplating a sociological orientation but I think it’s best if I recognise that Dogged Wanderings in all its titular variations started out as a personal blog and it will forever be one. If there’s anything I learnt all this while, it’s that:

1. I really suck at keeping the different spheres of my life and my interests distinct
2. I do not enjoy public attention
3. I am incapable of writing educationally and academically on blogging platforms so I should just stop aspiring to provide commentary unless it comes naturally
4. I sometimes try too hard to please
5. I blog primarily for my friends and myself
6. Blogging can be fun

If I manage to wrestle control of talfryn.net again (the situation is slightly more complicated than a simple server error), then I might return to it, for eight years’ worth of old times’ sake. Otherwise, it’ll be a new start.

Thanks for bearing with me and all my nonsensesess.

Experience has taught me that some performers don’t take it too kindly to having a lens poking into their faces, so I approached one of the aunties, wearing my cheeriest smile and in halting Mandarin, if they’d mind my intrusion backstage. Then from down the road came D and M, who marched straight up the stairs by the side of the stage and disappeared behind the scenes. Old hands like them make me feel like a timid pup.

I hurried in after them, and waltzed a few decades back in time to see mostly men and women in their 50s, 60s, dabbling red make-up paint on lips and gelling hair curls readying themselves for the night’s wayang. This was the final operatic performance in a nightly series that started on Monday in celebration of the Taoist deity Tua Pek Kong‘s birthday. The incandescent light bulbs cast an atmospheric orange-yellow hue over the insides of what felt like a dilapitated, but lively and colourful shack, with costumes strewn all over the place and a network of electrical cables cross-crossing overhead. The performers were more than game in posing for us; a few of them had probably enjoyed a celebrity following in the days of their prime.

Back on the other, rightful side of the stage was a meagre audience of about a dozen. The smell of burning incense from a trio of giant joss sticks nearby buried its way into our clothing and our hair as we attempted to interpret the scenes that gestured (since none of us could understand a single phrase that was being sung) of justice, romance and deliverance of second chances.

Backstage is literally just behind-the-scenes, erm, screens

Veteran performers do their own make-up…

… while the younger ones (good on ‘em!) require a little bit of assistance

Photographs of the famous and the artistes themselves adorn most dresser boxes

One final check before the curtain call

Acting is an intense experience – those tears could only have sprung from real emotions

Link: Gallery on Flickr

Sentimentality is such an impractical, irrational impulse. I don’t have space for it. I wish I could just discard all those old stubby pencils, unused cartoon memo pads, furry animal stickers and birthday balloons that have long been coated by layers of dust but are still amazingly bloated with helium, but I can’t. Oh, and those cassette tapes and early generation Game Boys. Remember the beeper pagers? And Tamagotchi?

When I look at all these outdated technological devices, I am reminded once again of why I love books. They’re sources of knowledge and information and inspiration and truths and untruths and fictional worlds and everything wonderful. And, best of all, they’re timeless. My dad’s got his wine, my mom her handbags, me my books. The people who suggest that I should replace my library with Kindle and iBooks ought to be flogged. Aye, I love my books, each hand-picked into my collection or thoughtfully passed into my care as gifts, and I would never throw any of them away.

I hobbled out of the old apartment pushing two very nervous birds-in-boxes into the lift. Stealing one last glance at the now-empty flat, it seemed almost like yesterday that I was looking at the same bare walls just before we moved in, in darker times. Perhaps I’m saying this too soon, but I don’t think any of us will miss this place much. Too many unpleasant memories. I wish I could erase memories too, but I can’t.

Ah, drat, oh noes! The wryness is evaporating.

I’m tired.

Tomorrow morning, some guys will come and whisk my bookshelves and desk away, to find second life in a neighbour’s flat. Or, neighbor, as it were, since they’ve just moved in from the States.

We’re checking into a serviced apartment a few days later. I’ll have to share a room with my sis, so that’ll be a messy, interesting experience. It also appears that I’ll be sharing with her the same alarm clock, which will wake us up before the sun rises, every day for a couple of weeks. There’s no such thing as drawing lots when you’re dealing with parents; I’ve been tasked with driving her to school.

This will be my final broadcast from the IKEA Jonas desk, in service since 2008.

After visiting the Singapore Biennale 2011, I am even more convinced that to be a creative genius requires one to either take leave of his sanity, live through an agonising history, or be melancholically possessed.

It’s also amazing seeing the number of people who are willing to spend an entire 20 minutes watching Ronald McDonald and fries floating about in a flooded McDonald’s restaurant.

Global warming and the apocalypse, as envisioned by the Danish artists SUPERFLEX

Dark strokes on a bedsheet by That Person, aka artist Matt Mullican under hypnosis

More on Flickr:

The bird splats have been taken care of, and I can see the silver in my tyre rims once more. I swear that the manual car washer guy gave me an evil glare through the windscreen, a greyey foamy one at that.

First it was the moaning groaning me, and now it’s the me that’s blogging about the mundane and the insubstantial. I seem to have picked up not just acarines but some wryness along the way. It’s something I’ll have to get used to.

Is there such a thing as being noosed in a writer’s loose?

The Lady has been evading me lately, so it’s probably for the better that I didn’t try to catch Macbeth tomorrow on Friday the 13th.

Take ticks and today, both topics that I’ve tweeted about, for example. How’s it that a duck and I can have traipsed the same trail at Chestnut Ave last weekend and he emerges blessedly unmolested while I end up being parasitised by 17 eight-legged bloodsuckers?

And this afternoon, my mom and I were trapped in a lift at the new place when its doors got stuck while opening. We tried to out-yell each other through the 2cm slit, but there was drilling nearby so nobody could hear us. Rescue came after a sweltering 15 minutes in the form of an inhumanly strong Bangladeshi worker who with his bare hands pried the lift doors open and asked us cooperate with him, “Pull, madam!” As if we could be of any real help there, since we had earlier tried doing what he did and the doors barely budged. We managed to squeeze through, but the doors were hopelessly jammed after that and the buttons refused to work. We later reported the ‘technical glitch’ to the security guard, who visibly brightened at the thought of finally having a worthwhile task to tend to other than staring at his black-and-white CCTV screens all day.

Let’s not even talk about the number of bird splats I have on my car…

So, back to the Scottish play. The bard in our group said that the witches remind him of Pirates of the Caribbean. I thought they looked like the Mad Hatter. Perchance Johnny Deppish? Then we all agreed on the Joker, frizzly hair, smudges and all. My sis was a little disappointed that King Duncan wasn’t carried down the runway and on stage in style in an Audi (the show’s branded as part of the Audi Classics 2011 after all, and there’s an A1 sitting by the corner) but the performance was appropriately macabre in a quirky contemporary-medieval fusion sort of way, including the costumes (skull armour and hoodies), props (swords vs pistols), accents (native Elizabethan English, midwesterrrn Amerrrican, audibly-suppressed Singlish), and the producers’ choice of venue. The audience picnics their dinner out while numbing their bums on (bring-your-own-)mats that are laid atop an exhumed Christian cemetery. Bats roam the night sky, one or two occasionally flitting into the spotlight. It was largely an enjoyable and uneventful – that’s a good thing – evening, although it did make me wish I had paid more attention to Shakespeare in school.

A few of us must have walked right into an ant trail when we were returning to the car, for before I could start the engine I had to spend a whole good minute plucking tiny black biting ants off my shoes and socks. I imagine it could’ve been worse, had I attended the play tomorrow. A cyclone of scorpions could’ve sneaked in and stung me while I was steering, or something.

What started as an online chat with an ex-colleague who was asking if I’d voted (I didn’t by the way, as there’s a walkover where I am, and even if I could, I’m not sure if I would since my parents won’t; we wear a different flag on our hearts) ended up as a lunch and a reunion of sorts with the office today. They’ve been phenomenally busy in the months since I left:

The guy who used to sit in the cubicle next to mine is getting married next week, and – yay, another wedding – I’m invited, only that it will be held where we used to organise all those dreaded conferences and it just reminds me of the sheer number of parking coupons I had to punch the dates and numbers out of. Another two ex-colleagues have totally whirlwinded their romances and will be getting hitched at the end of the year. How they manage to do these things is beyond me, although being way more advanced in years does seem to edge things along a bit. Something to do with hormones and loudly ticking body clocks. My boss, in the spirit of things, has scribbled in font size 99 on a piece of cardboard: “Vincent will you marry me?!” (No, my boss isn’t gay; but he’s got the political hots for a particular opposition party member.)

They also went to produce polo shirts with the logo that I designed for the branch as my parting gift. Big boss says that until the logo is formally approved (if ever), it is not to see the light of the general public and so we shall be restricted to wearing the shirts in our own homes. I was given a complimentary shirt, in the smallest size, but the even smallest-sized shirts are usually a size too big for me so I might just have to use it as a PJ top. That’s a twisted thought – wearing the logo of my previous workplace to bed.

Doing a quick count of the fingers since I’m incapable of mental arithmetic, I realise that it’s been seven months since I last saw most of them. Seriously? It’s been that long?! And my weeks left on this island are disappearing real fast. There is a fundamental Maslowean need that would have to be addressed soon (first in Singapore and then in London), since we’re getting booted out of our current apartment in about a week’s time with nowhere proper to go to. We’ll have to trust the wizardry of our contractor and his army of 30 workers at the new place to save us from the fate of watching our monies get gobbled up by exorbitant hotel rates. If only we owned a caravan! We could even park right next to my sister’s school instead of having to pay her school bus to detour or draw lots over who’ll be chauffeuring her the following morning. In my dreams, perhaps.

Without needing my fingers, I know that I’m facing four moves within the next thirteen weeks. My-life-in-boxes joy.

Alrighty, it’s time to shake off all this depression, I say. They’re right, growing up isn’t easy, and the world has always been going to the dogs. Life hasn’t changed much through the times, in this respect. The world continues to spin, and we along with it. There’s so much I should be happy for.

I promise I’ll try to be less moody from now on.

Ps. That was the veggie-laden Korean buchujeon in me talking.

Now that my mind is waging the final battles of a psychological civil war, my body saw fit to take matters into its own physiological hands. (Um, that doesn’t make much biological sense, but blogging’s all figurative.) It’s clearly had enough of not having had a single positive thought in weeks. (Like, how does that sentence even work?)

For one, I seem to have chucked a yewy when it comes to food. I’ve returned to shunning meats and oh-stop-staring-at-me chocolatey sugary things. I’m back on bread and oatmeal instead of nothing for breakkie. I’ve abstained from junk as snacks.

Aside from asserting the connection between a healthy diet and stress relief, my body’s also identified physical exertion as a therapeutic technique. So it sent me back into the pool this afternoon, where I detoxed through clocking a record number of laps – I usually dip in with a certain target in mind (laps, or duration), but I went in this time with just: until I get so tired that I can’t swing another stroke. More than ten laps beyond my usual routine, I was being carried on euphoria and inertia and had no intention of stopping. My dad had to come down to the pool (a total first!) to summon me as it was nearing dinnertime. Adrenaline makes the lack of exhaustion deceptive, for I could hardly find the energy to lift my chopsticks at the table. At least I know that it won’t be that difficult for me to fall into sleep tonight.

I bumped into my grandaunt in the carpark today just as she was driving in and I was heading out, and she wound down her car window to ask if I was all right. It looked as if I had just made an enemy of her and the rest of the world, she said. Black as thunder. Out of concern, my grandaunt told my mom about it, who then told me of how my grandaunt told her about it, and said that she told my grandaunt that everyone’s been in the pits lately and too many things are happening for us to pay attention to the many other little things, so forgive us if we’re too tired to drop a smile. I smiled at that – so even my mom is not immune.

I can’t believe I have the impetus to blog. It’s like I’m trying to make up for posts not written, the way my lacrimal apparatus two nights ago was trying to make up for tears not wept in all the years past.