This sense of self-awareness and almost overwhelming understanding of almost every singular intricate detail that rests around me has somehow swelled up so much tonight and balled up into one eternally long monologue that goes on and on, on and on inside my head. It is a really good kind of feeling though, a sensation to be savoured : of being at peace with myself, of knowing my deficiencies and capabilities and having that kind of confidence to say that I actually do understand the way I function almost innately, and of looking at the world and people around me – people I love, people I have just met, people that I understand but cannot get along with, people that I grasp at and give up on understanding – in relation to myself.
So, the small things that have happened today: reading a few close friends’ thoughts on their blogs, talking to Evelyn and Heeai for a bit on whatsapp, listening to the Chinese professor who teaches the American Literature class insert anecdotes about his personal life, writing a birthday card to a really old friend, talking to a friend back in York, talking about post-York plans with Daryl, going for a discussion/sharing at the Multicultural Centre by street artist/Beverly Hills male nanny Ramiro Gomez , and then coming back home for dinner and relieving the sensation of being in the TNP newsroom again, as well as a nondescript day from last May which changed the sequence of events in the lives of many other people around me forever.
It is an endless circuit of thinking , and I’ve also just completed an essay for class about hypertext : interacting with reading, thinking about the ways we wrap our individual lives and experiences into the way we read, feel and perceive all these cultural products around us, and I just suddenly felt this urge to sit down here and pen everything down in a coherent manner so that I can look back and remember the exact point at which I made realisations that could potentially shift the shape of my life somewhere down in the future. There’s all these small stuff that happened today, but I feel like it’s so big, so large and difficult to contain in any kind of vessel, any envelope with postmarked stamps ready for long distance travels…that’s probably the hardest aspect of sustaining a long-distance relationship I guess, or rather, surviving the distance because there’s so much that you feel compelled to align with somebody else who is physically in another geographical location, another time zone, and the windows through which you usually communicate have been narrowed into these teeny tiny bars. You can literally grasp only pixels, pathetic fragments of flesh blood and bone…but I’m not going to start on that rant here ; I’m content with everything that I possess tonight, and somehow I’ve gradually learnt to stop questioning and doubting myself, and when I ask questions these are thoughts that will elicit new understandings, new appreciations of myself and the cloud of life that just swirls around me in general.
I’ve truly grown up a lot over this past year, but it’s not as if I’ve stripped off pieces of the old me and left them faltering behind in a dusty corner at home, static memories just accumulating the age of time on their surfaces. Rather it is this looking back and realising how every little thing fits into this greater trajectory, this big picture called life. Ramiro Gomez was really compelling in the way he was so comfortable with sharing every starkly personal story and encounter that he had experienced, and it was interesting the way he kind of embodied the same vision that I have inside my head – the sense that the personal is the political, that every experience that you go through can be translated into art, that the process of thinking and feeling and trying to share your creations can be a really solitary and apparently pointless kind of journey – collecting scrap materials from big discount supermarkets, driving around town and wondering about the most opportune times to display something that will disrupt a landscape, et cetera – but at some point you will make a breakthrough, and actually do things that reach out to people, make them feel like you have spoken to them , that you have touched them , and that little by little you have done something that can change things. Of course there is rage ; rage at the injustices of the world, at the class and power structures that have bound people in positions that they did not ask for and that they are helpless over, but what I think was the singular most powerful message I took home today is how you can translate these sentiments, thoughts and feelings into something that is not just inspiring, but also beautiful.
What does this say about me, then? A great many things ; I remember almost everything that has happened to me since childhood with a stark clarity; I’ve grown to study people around me like characters and I daresay I can understand some of them much better than they can even understand themselves. It’s a little unnerving to myself and perhaps slightly stalker-ish but it’s not just a case of being nosy and intrusive but more of this innate need to make sense of the world and yourself in relation to others, you know? The atmosphere of being overseas is vastly different from being back home – home is beautiful and inescapable in its own right, but every day you have to struggle to get past the confines of geographical space, of our tight, closed society where everyone knows everybody else in order to externalise this inner life that is a perhaps universal, transcendental force that is probably shared by everyone else you know in the world, just that we all build our walls up so high to protect ourselves that it takes so much effort to know the inner beauty and vulnerabilities that exist in every single human being. Tonight there is this overwhelming sense of possessing expansive space to dream, to think, to hope and to come to terms with how I’m like, what I am built for and what pushes me on to wake up to this world, every single day. It is a daily struggle, something that I was mentioning to my brother just now.
One thing that I’ve got better at over summer is this whole idea of self-definition. I never used to write so openly about myself or to release so many details about my own personal life , but I think I’ve kind of realized that the more I revisit these thoughts, the more honest I am to the world and to the people around me the easier it is for them to approach me and vice versa as well. And in terms of writing this bodes positively ; I’m no longer trying to skirt around topics that are ‘too personal’, ‘too painful’ , ‘too raw’ in order to desensitize myself and somewhat prevent the flood of emotions and instability overflow and consume me, but rather, trying to recognize what is innately inside me and articulate it in a controlled, productive and hopefully beautiful manner. After today I also know exactly why I looked up to Gomez : it wasn’t just his art, the way he spoke or his ideals, but the way these aspects are all interconnected – something small happens to you, you think about it, you use art to try to process it, you feel like something is wrong with the world and you believe that art and beauty can make it heal. There’s no greater thing that I’ll like to achieve in this life than to do something like this too – Gomez said that he was a school dropout, never graduated from university, and he’s working as a nanny babysitting kids for rich Hollywood Beverly Hills type of people as a regular daytime job , and in an interesting way his art feeds off from this occupation that so many people (think perhaps every single Singaporean you will encounter on the street) will regard as unsavoury, derogatory. But he is so intelligent , not in the straight A Singaporean manner that is usually the first image that will appear in people’s minds, but intelligent in the way he understands things that happen in the world, the way he can understand small things and then realise that they are all part of this great big interconnected web that we all play a part in. I hope that if people say that I am smart, that will be the kind of smart that they are referring to as well : not the kind of smart that is selfish and for the sake of securing a stable career, not the kind of smart that means sticking your head in books for an entire day without gazing out at the world around you, but the kind of smart that says okay, I am who I am and you are who you are and what are we all going to do about this to make sense of everything around us?
I know I want to write and I know I can never sustain myself without writing. I do enjoy the work I do as a journo, especially when I am working on stories that matter, when I see small things happening around me that add up to a bigger picture. I also feel inspired by the experiences I have – not the mundane press conferences with people trying to sell PR pitches, but experiences from being on the ground, doing the nitty-gritty and sometimes difficult tasks by myself , venturing to previously unknown areas just to find something out or to see something take place because they spark thoughts and feelings that I can later attempt to translate into creative productions. Sometimes I wish I could do more than just write ; work with film, work better with the camera, more pursuits that can attempt to do some kind of justice to the exact mental world that is unfurling at different days in lives. At times when I am thinking so much like this I try to look back and remember where all these styles of thinking came from ; I think working in theatre was definitely a really big intellectual progression for me. It was just student Chinese Drama, your average run-of-the-mill production, beset with more challenges than accomplishments, but I learnt a lot about ways of thinking about the world from the workshops that we had with Drama Box, and I also learnt a lot about the power of art to effect social change.
Based on the classes that I’ve been taking this term and based on the past school year : I guess I’m basically intrigued by anything that involves power, including race gender and class structures, and also means of articulating and critiquing these kinds of power though different forms of media particularly art and mobile installation kind of stuff that make art relevant to the everyman — technology and interactivity do a lot as well. School has stopped becoming a chore for me since pretty long ago because it’s the natural state that I find myself in – I still don’t really appreciate period modules because some of the language and themes still appear pretty archaic and irrelevant to me at moments, but when it comes to topics that I genuinely feel something for, I’m hooked. I can never think without feeling, I can never feel without thinking. These two things are entities that are always tied to each other, encircled, entwining like a helix. I guess that is why a singular relationship to somebody can mean so much to me as well : a friend, a family member, my boyfriend. When things are aligned, when you feel and care, you think and think and it’s this crazy endless journey of self-discovery and growth that you kind of embark on, together.
Have already started thinking about places to go and things to do on my Masters year – I know it is a long time away but there are too many pros and cons on the sides of different countries and courses that I’ll want to take my own time to sort them out, just so that I don’t end up looking back and regretting. I hate being far away from people I care about, but sometimes this kind of space to just get lost in my own thoughts is something that I appreciate as well, but I guess more than that it’s probably the academic culture that I’ll factor in as well. I liked my classes in York, and most of them were taught really well, and I like the emphasis on independent learning that probably made me a lot more disciplined and structured in my argumentative writing in the end. But there’s a really nice sense of open-ness and diversity even here in Santa Barbara ; people that I’ve encountered at lectures and talks like these seem genuinely determined to do something about the world, and they’re remarkably open to people from any where in the world, and celebrate being different. England is quaint and there’s so much history and culture in that whole region, and I think a lot about myself and where I come from over there, but I don’t know whether it was because it was only my first year or that I just wasn’t in most opportune environments, but I could never really feel this sense of openness, this sense of completely blending in, just like that . Most of the time I felt like there was a certain kind of aura that I carried around with me, because I looked and sounded a little different….I don’t know whether it’s just me being overly sensitive, or just being incapable of looking past these external issues, but these are the general impressions I have, for now I guess. I wish I could be in Asia as well, thinking more about myself and the region that I actually belong in, and finding out about things that are actually of even greater pertinence to my country, but the time period and courses seem to fit less well than these two countries that I’m talking about now.
First world problems I guess, that I really shouldn’t be whining about because there is so, so much that I have to be thankful for and tonight of all nights I am slowly listing them down, paragraph by paragraph. One day I’ll get there – becoming somebody important to people around me, somebody that strangers can come up to and tell that I’ve done something that made them see things in a clearer light, that they can relate with what I’ve thought or said or done, that I’ve spoken straight into their hearts. I cannot get enough of this ; the externalization of my crazy mind, the hope that somebody else can look past the fact that I’m more than slightly strange and loony and hyperly awkward and realise that there might be the slightest trace of grace and reason that is contained within this hodgepodege of scattered monologues, accumulated through these days of being in a new place, of learning, of growing. I love you world. Feel free to make comments if you are secretly stalking me because psst- I probably do that to you more often than you realise. Every monologue is afterall half of a dialogue that is crying out for its lost counterpart. x
Kismet and Karma 