Oct 15, 2010

The Game! One of the movies I forget to list when people ask me for the names of movies I like.

33 notes Sep 19, 2010

I have an ex who emails me once every year to ask me how my dog is.

The last email he sent last year was to share the news that Freckles, his Dalmatian we’d take for walks around the park when we were together a decade ago, had died. Since I suck at keeping in touch with people, I’ve yet to inform him about Jordan, the German Shepherd I had since I was in primary school, passing away earlier on New Year’s Day. I don’t even know how our dogs became an important topic of conversation for us but I suppose it’s because we’re just too retarded to ask actual personal questions about how each other’s lives are going.

And because we’re probably stalking each other’s Facebook profiles. At least I am. [Although I like to think the fact that we’ve both added each other as friends diminishes the severity of the creepiness of my stalking.]

Looking through the photos on his profile, I noticed that, 8 years on, he is still with the same girl, the mutual friend he’d cheated on me to be with. The same girl features in all of his photos since we parted. While the thought of this used to claw torturously at my chest, particularly in the early stages of the breakup when shit was fresh, nowadays, the thought just obliterates the contents of my skull.

He’s been holding the same person’s hand for the past 8 years! Meanwhile, if someone were to look at the photographic timeline of my love-life [which I don’t publicise on Facebook], you’d see me holding the hands of at least a handful different males; hands of varying skin shades and levels of hairiness on the knuckle, some fingers bony, some resembling of sausages, and some in which I clasped tightly and others in which my hand hung limp in theirs.

Anyway, I don’t know what this says about me. But I feel like there’s obviously something that other people know and I don’t.

Despite all of my hand holding sluttery, I still consider hand holding sacred.

There’s a sweetness in palms and webs of fingers coming together, and two hands resting neatly in each others [like those segments in Tetris that look like a lightning bolt and the other a sombrero; those two pieces could write a Kama Sutra on Tetris the way they interlock so effortlessly with each other in various positions] whether intertwined traditional lover style, or untangled like you would holding someone’s hand leading them through a forest, or one person’s hand wrapped tightly around the other’s pinky like a newborn [a position very suited to hands afflicted with clamminess as it allows for much-needed air passage.]

Often, I see elderly couples walking around my neighbourhood holding hands during, what I assume, is their daily exercise routine and sometimes I wonder whether they miss experiencing all the excitement and novelty that comes with a new relationship. eg. the magic in softly brushing your fingertips against a potential lover’s to grab the pepper grinder during a supposedly platonic brunch, or the electricity between two friends standing close at a concert praying for the crowd to grow and surge backwards and push them into each other forcefully, the swell of the crowd maintaining and giving them reason to press their limbs against each other, the follicles on their forearms creating a Velcro strap of sweat and stifled desire.

After being with the same person for so long, how do they prevent desensitisation to such awesome things? One day, I’m going to stop one of these couples and ask them.

41 notes Sep 16, 2010

Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam. April 2010.

1. Sharing a meal with our rickshaw drivers, who later tried to milk our [relatively] wealthy tourist teats. We paid the men each about $100 to bike us around Saigon for a couple of hours. We later discovered [from other tourists, hotel receptionists, pamphlets, etc] that we should have expected to only pay about $20 maximum each. We’d gotten a personal guided tour of the city anyway which was cool and ate at an awesome hole-in-the-wall joint for lunch where all the locals looked at us funny.

I learnt early on that if you are visiting a South East Asian country, and you are a female of South East Asian descent yourself and being accompanied by your very pasty, very Caucasian boyfriend, expect to have the local girls throw you awkward ‘You are a successful mail order bride!’ glances, and random sleazy old men approach you to ask “You must be from Thailand. How much for a night together?” [Yes, that happened. And no, I didn’t go home with him for $2/hour.]

2. A guillotine at the War Remnants Museum.

3. A tiger cage. War Remnants Museum. Used to abuse and torture Vietnamese prisoners. These things were about the size of a coffin, maybe slightly larger and constructed of barbed wire. Sometimes they’d have five prisoners locked up at a time, squatting uncomfortably, for who knows how long.

4. A monk at the Cao Dai temple.

5. Female Cao Dai members. They sung prayers and donged bells and chimes and stuff. Lolz, dong. I’m not even going to attempt to try to describe it eloquently. It was just kind of cool to be there to watch.

6. A meal before visiting Cu Chi Tunnels at a roadside eatery somewhere a couple of hours out of Saigon. The napkins for the tables were rolls of toilet paper.

7. Sitting on a tank in Cu Chi. Yes, I am a wearing a conical Oriental hat. And yes, I am wearing an awesomely daggy leather bumbag. I kind of like that it screams, “Yes, I am a tourist. I am probably carrying large sums of money. Pickpocket me now.” I mostly wear it to hide my gut.

I’m going to try to post photos from Cambodia and Mexico eventually.