And I'm in the driver seat, trudging along the coast line as we inch closer to the left turn that would park us right by the beach, while from where we were, we looked out at the impermanent marquee tented along on the grassland, fluorescent shafts of light cast a third world clinical glow and them folks who belong to town saunter about, plied with ( Read more... )

Awesome Christmas gifts. Finally my very own copies of Iris Murdoh's The Sea, The Sea, Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and Herman Melville's Moby Dick or The Whale. I could reread them over and over again. Blissful end to a decade and a hopeful beginnings through one might anticipate of the turbulent teenage years of the twenty first

MS told me, in a momentous though quiet and unfussy meeting of far-flung friendships forged through LJ, some months ago that he was attracted to my stubbornness for insisting on employing the written word in my livejournal (these days, blog would have become the de rigeur terminology) and never have once used a photograph to illustrate my thoughts ( Read more... )

It's nice to stay up this late at night. I haven't done this since university. It's easier to fall asleep these days, I don't have that restless youthful energy in me anymore. Those days of thunder seem to have come to pass and the working life is measured by a different rhyme and reason ( Read more... )

In the last semester of my sophomore year, Shih Tao's 10,000 Ugly Ink Dots was what I laboured over with a reverse sleeping pattern, working from midnight until eight in the morning, surviving on instant noodles in the computer lab. Shih Tao's preoccupation was to realise what he understood as I-hua. Translated as one stroke, it expresses the ( Read more... )

hello journal. it's sad that i don't write to you as often anymore. not that i haven't been keeping to my resolution, which is to write more. it's just that priorities have shifted to some other platform. other platforms mean other kinds of writing, the sort that doesn't have similar texture and contours as the ones i get to shape here ( Read more... )

1. So, what happened to VN? Tell us. We said, leaning slightly forward in anticipation, mindful of the beer bottles that we were brushing against as we huddled into a tight ring around a small squarish table in a swishy expat bar ( Read more... )

I look across, from the balcony, towards a calm and waveless sea. If I squint hard enough, I can make out the shadowy crop of a ridge that might just be the opposite end of the bay, its languorous pool of water unstirred by wind. The road that follows the curving bay is lined with coconut trees and there is a cloudy cast above this passive picture ( Read more... )

Today was the first time I saw the volcano, faintly appearing from a swirl of smoke that hovers above its breathing and puffing crater. It has a steep slope running up forcefully on both sides, erected as a stolid tower and centre to the town that is beyond its reach ( Read more... )

When we collapsed on the parquet, lying on our back, inching into a comfortable position, shoulder barely brushing against the other, you craned your neck and exclaimed, 'We've destroyed our lives ( Read more... )