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February 25, 2007
(Another) New Start
The Chinese New Year is the third New Year celebration in less than two months. For many procrastinators it also means the third and final chance to get moving on their New Year’s resolution. For many burdened by troubles it represents another new start when other New Years have failed to deliver its promise.
May the New Year bring with it good health and prosperity. May it also inspire you and give you the strength to fulfill all those promises you have made to yourself.
Posted by quickness at 04:29 AM | Comments (0)
February 21, 2007
Clarity
After feeling so uninspired today, I can only think of one image. Without any clear time reference of the file, it took me half an hour to find it in my archives.
Posted by quickness at 05:34 AM | Comments (0)
February 17, 2007
Heart, Azmina.
Dear Azmina,
You’ve been crying a whole lot lately. We’ve been getting into a number of arguments, mainly because you still cannot understand how things are supposed to work. Sweets before bed make you hyper and would make it difficult for you to get quality sleep. Fighting with your little sister is not good. Not sharing is bad. Homework is a necessary evil. Being on time is important.
Mornings are especially hard – it’s a struggle to get you dressed and get you to eat something. You always say that it’s a holiday when it’s not. When your teacher was late one day, and the class room was still locked and dark, I believed you for the 15 minutes we waited outside class.
Maybe because I can see a lot of me in you; it compels me to treat you a bit like an adult that you aren’t. I know you strive to be five when you’ve only celebrated your fourth birthday last January.
You see Azmina, both you and I are the eldest in the family. Your posture reminds me of how I was when I was your age. You have a good memory – when you were barely walking, you won’t give me face for a few months because of something that happened earlier. You are also forgiving – nowadays our disagreements don’t last very long. You don’t eat much breakfast, cos I know your little tummy doesn’t wake up till about 2 hours after you have opened your eyes. Sour doesn’t bother you… at all. You have trouble with unfamiliar faces, which makes it hard to deal with your extended family. This will pass. You hate milk. This isn’t a temporary phase in your life. You love ice cream, and your mother doesn’t know this, but I must be around six when I too preferred mint chocolate ice cream to other flavours. Nobody will ever know why. You have a mole on the sole of your foot. Yours is on your right, and mine, on my left, so that when we give each other high-fives with our feet, the two can meet like two long-lost halves. And of course, you are cute because I am your father and you are my daughter.
Like I do with your sister, I miss you when you aren’t around. Grandma picks you up from school most times, and I try to have lunch with you whenever I can. Grandma is also eating a lot of chicken during her lunch hour because you don’t eat much of anything else.
Your love of music moves your body every time a good tune is played. We are not destined to be great dancers. We love the same song that we have in the car CD player. Sometimes you would make me play the song 7 times in a row, from the time I pull out from the driveway, till we reach the school. You know the words to the chorus even though you don’t know what it really means. Basically it’s about someone getting hurt. It isn’t a particularly happy song, but if it makes the two of us happy singing it together, then you would agree there isn’t much else to think about.
Heart,
Your Papa.
Ps. After you had finished all the lemon segments in the picture, you made a bangle out of what’s left.
Posted by quickness at 06:07 AM | Comments (3)
February 16, 2007
Oh glorious warm sand...
SH, a friend and neighbour who stayed in a building next to ours during the first few years we were in New York, saw a photo of the giant mirror near the Rockefellar Centre in my last entry and messaged me yesterday if I was still in the city. I have re-read my last entry and I can see how a casual reader can misunderstand what I wrote. It was supposed to be taken in context with previous posts.
So, SH is in NY for the next month or so, after having lived in both KL and Singapore in the last 3 years.
I am sure we’ll have lunch soon SH. Meanwhile, enjoy the sub-freezing weather from all of us in the sunny South East Asian region. I heard it’s gonna last till just after you end your 4-week stay there.
Posted by quickness at 05:51 AM | Comments (0)
February 10, 2007
Away at home
You’ll settle down soon enough, E said, not realizing she had said those exact words a couple of months earlier.
After some constant insistence from N, we finally moved into the transit apartment we’ve been trying to occupy for a long time. Moving into transit apartments is never a good thing when you have actually reached your destination. It just took us about a month to find a place of our own in New York. And soon after, in just a couple of weeks, everything had found their own place.
It has now been about three months since we arrived, and we’re hit by the slowness of pace. Like the human body that had been hit by flu, e-ver-y-thing seemed sluggish, infected with malaise.
The kids are constantly confused about where home actually is. They go looking for their shoes when it is time for our guests to go, thinking they have to leave too. My socks do not travel the same way my work shirts do. My camera bag is in the bedroom, missing most of its contents.
Perhaps the biggest disappointment to not having a permanent place to stay is that though we have now physically returned back home, I can’t really be there – at least, not as much as I want to be, or not as much as I could be. Having to constantly switch places is like traveling through planes that require an incredible amount of effort to go across. And when you do get across, it takes time to gather yourself together.
Our transit apartment is a nice place to live, though I cannot imagine bringing our own furniture up three flights of stairs… only to move them out again in a couple of months. Space-wise, it’s about two to three times bigger than our last apartment, and had just recently renovated. Having just spent a few weeks, the space is still a bit bare, a bit too disinfected. Its character is derived from a cracked window, a small area of peeling paint, and minor blemishes, all amplified by the overall sterility of the surrounding.
We were nonetheless very lucky to even get the apartment - and it was not without help from people who understood, to whom we thank.
Now, instead of having to have to stay in two places, we have one. We still have a lot of stuff at our parents’ though. The boxes at mine’s are in the hundreds, many are still inaccessible, being stored too close to each other. I am not looking forward to going through the boxes when we finally move into a proper place – not with the very likely prospects of finding something broken in the trans-Atlantic shipment.
My boxes have been opened and resealed repeatedly. I do this to slowly get essentials from storage, just as I am slowly piecing together some of the pieces. Orphaned from home in our own home, we feel homesick.
Posted by quickness at 09:40 AM | Comments (1)