Book Drive

If you've got English books for children, ranging from pictorial one-liners to Enid Blyton, and have no use of them anymore, why not pass it on to Project Metta?

Project Metta is a joint effort by a few organizations: NAFA, Ngee Ann Poly, NUS, and the Singapore Buddhist Lodge. (I’m not sure if I missed out any.) At different time frames, these teams will be going to Laos to build a library and to teach English.

What we want: Specifically English books for children, the highest standard being Enid Blyton. That said, your Sweet Valley, Babysitter’s Club, Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, The Three Investigators, and other stuff you grew up reading will not be suitable for the kids because they have not reached that level of language proficiency.

When we want: My team will be leaving in early May but it’d be best if you could contribute before April to give some time allowance for packing.

If you have books to donate, please do e-mail me at yeo_zhi@hotmail.com. I’d very gladly arrange a meeting place most convenient for you to collect the books. If you have other friends in this project, you can pass it to them too. Even if you don’t personally know me, say I’m your boyfriend’s sister’s neighbour's cousin’s primary school friend, please do not hesitate to contact me!

I don’t know what you think of when the word “Laos” is thrown at you because quite frankly, I don’t know myself. I can’t attach an image to it the way I’d pair golden beaches with Australia or lavender fields with New Zealand, but I do know that your efforts (in digging out some old childhood books) will brighten someone’s day in a place not so far away from Singapore.

Thanks,
zhiqi

Snow Pig and others.

Very apt-in the year of the Oink. I quite like the other three paintings too- for the defiance in their objects. (Stuff I stole from a foreign blog i randomly clicked on.)

Infertile

These days when I am at a book, I would turn to the first few pages to read the writer’s credentials, to check out his life neatly summed up in a paragraph. I think of Morrison’s treatment of slavery, Conrad’s critique on colonialism or Coetzee on post apartheid Africa, and I cannot help feeling that there is nothing worthy in my life to be written about. My sanitized and protected Singaporean life, with no wars, no conflict, no suffrage. It is not that I long for something bad to shake my life. I am yearning for an experience, of some kind, I don’t know myself. Perhaps that is why I want to go to Laos, I think I might be touched when I see a landscape so different from our own, or when I witness a lifestyle I have only seen on television screens. I am not charitable; I cannot or am not prepared to dedicate my entire life to humanitarian work. Neither do I think that a single trip to teach English and build a library would change their ways of life in any way. I am hunting for something which I can create an experience out of.

Yet, I am aware that even in this sterile life, there are many experiences which I would not think or write about. It is easy to write about a country’s suffering or a shared common pain and emotion but it is difficult to write about something personalized and individualized.

Valentine’s Day

Valentine’s Day is quite different from the other occasions we celebrate-because it is difficult to tell who’s in the realm of love, who embraces the joy of friendship, who is in oblivion, who backs away from it. There is a suppressed joy that swims with ambiguity as you stare at faces of portraits, portraits and portraits that hint, and provoke your curiosity. You slip and almost smile, but you maneuver the curve, you put it on a standstill. It is a day that requires guesswork. Occasionally, it is blatantly obvious: you see a beaming lady with a bouquet sitting shyly in that bag beside her foot which she smiles at every six seconds, or the grinning man with a small box in his hands. You walk, look and turn in circles, unable to decipher the colour and texture of these other portraits. How about the housewife at the side painted with a colour fatigue, or this man, bespectacled, with a bagpack, with his thick coursepack, he stares at you for a moment, and you have that two-ninth of a moment to work out if he hangs Cupid by his heart. So, you carry that smile in a freeze.
You continue walking, and the canvases morph into clothes of colours, dancing with you. In the maze of love songs, flowers a thousand, pressures, there are the triumphant, and those gaping at the triumphant. Snipping the clothes into a thousand pieces, does it crumble such divisions and become all-inclusive?
2 hours past 14th February, when you meet the same people you met yesterday, you look at these paintings differently because the difference of two hours has ordered the way you should think about life now. Because 15th February is an ordinary day, and in this ordinariness, returns an equality.

Shame On You

You should be ashamed:

1) If you are pretty or handsome because ugly or fat people don’t give two hoots about looks (that’s superficial, sweet!) and stuff themselves with 8 Carls Jr’s a day plus 7 Cokes and 4 Milkshakes, with extra whipped cream of course.
2) If you are not gay/lesbian because they exude individualism and challenge the old conventions of love and family. Come on, hang those rainbow knickers!
3) If you plan to find a proper job, a neat private property and buy your LVs after working 140 hours a week because bohemians live it cool, live it poor, work 2 hours a week, and are jolly people. Peace out!
4) If you absolutely cannot suppress that burning instinct to check your reflection each time you see a shiny pole or coin or from the back of your Ipod because you should not be so kind as to consider whether your appearance hurts the dear eyes of others when you never flush toilets anyway. Really.
5) If your life is quite perfect because well, many people wouldn’t like you! Be Bad!

And your cheeks are red as tomatoes now-okay, be proud of that.

Singapura

Immensely happy and this needs no poetry or 'fluff'. Even if the lions did not roar during the first half, they returned strong! And despite the Thais having possession in their struggle to score an equalizer after our win in the first leg, Noh Rahman saved the ball-shockingly- beautifully. Of course, Khairul, you the man! Yes, I think Noh Alam Sha deserves his golden boots award. On a sidenote, Lionel Lewis's short shorts did not prevent him from doing his job.Gosh, am quite delirious with joy now.I love moments like this when I am overwhelmed with a sense of patriotism.

Lady Lazarus

Above all her other works, I have always had a personal liking for Lady Lazarus.
I was indulging in Ishiguro’s Remains and decided to look at my old books. I settled for Ariel. It no longer has the spanking new print smell when I placed it in front of my face and flipped the pages cover to cover. Still, there is something quite appealing in the seasoned pages and the rather insecure scribbling at the side of the stanzas. I once thought Plath’s poetry was a difficult read but the words now stared back at me with a sense of familiarity but strangely enough, I dare not plunge into the sea of Plath because I am not in a mood to deal with the emotions and thoughts that would surface with the re-reading of a text.

Lady Lazarus
I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it----
A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?----

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.

It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

'A miracle!'
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart----
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash ---
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there----

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.