Friday, May 1, 2015

Zoomania

When I was a kid, I cried over the nest of baby rats my grandfather threw out. I wept over the stray cat that my mother wouldn’t let me keep. I cried for all the hamsters we kept when they left us one by one.

My father taught me to walk silently on footpaths, so I could observe my surroundings. Bird watching became an activity I undertook alone. I caught bugs, to the disgust of my classmates, loved bats and snakes with a ferocity that they couldn’t understand. I thought them all ‘cute’.

I adore snakes. The ploppy little heads, the lazy coils, the pure muscle. I love the unhinging jaws that open wide to swallow prey.

I admire horses. Sleek, strong, and powerful. Resilient on a farm, in a circus, on the battle field. They’re steady workers, but also wild and free spirits.

I’m amazed by dogs. The extent of the loyalty is astounding. Never mind Hachiko, who faithfully returned to the train station each day. My own darling who lies at my feet while I play the piano.

There are so many more. Too many to tell.

Thousands of creatures, each unique in their own right. It’s amazing.

How can someone not like animals?

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Ylophobia

Trees are huge. There is no other way to put it. Learning about sycamores, giant oak trees, baobabs that housed people, it was fascinating.

It was terrifying.

Trees, don’t necessarily undergo senescence. Left alone, with no limiting factors, they are able to grow bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and bigger. Something that doesn’t die, in this world obsessed with speed and eternity? Impossible.

Towering into the sky, arms outstretched to receive the sun, defying gravity to do so. They house a menagerie of creatures in them. From mites, to fungi, to ants, to worms, to birds, to snakes, to monkeys. All of these, in one tree.

Imagine the legions that a forest holds.

Glowing eyes emerging as the sun is dying. Sharp teeth, large jaws, catching claws just lying in wait. Hundreds, thousands, millions of creatures big and small, just watching. Watching. And waiting.

Imagine walking into the jungle, the wet rasp of leaves under rubber soled feet, the damp weight upon cotton clothes, the prick of branches against bare skin. The air is filled with a sickly sweet smell. It is the decaying of a thousand lives within it, and also the blooming of a thousand more. No one tree is identical to the one before or after it. This one looks familiar, no that one. Or this one. It’s a maze of uneven arms, saying “Stay, never leave.”. Imagine the cacophony of voices. Screeching, howling, whooping, whistling, and a baby’s plaintiff cry.

It could be, could it be? No it can’t be, keep walking and don’t look up.

Who knows what you’ll see looking back at you.

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Xenoglossophilia

I learned Hokkien on my own. I’d listen to the conversations my parents never meant for me to hear, the words they carelessly flung at other relatives and friends. I pieced together the meanings, shoddy and clumsy, then tried to insert myself into the talks that the grown ups always had without my brother and I.

My dialect is still half foreign to me. I know more of English, than I do of Hokkien or Hakka, the tongues of my parents. They consider it a success. A generation of children who had been globalized. I considered it a failing. It was a divergence from my roots, a woeful ignorance of where my great-grand-relatives might have lived or what they might have done.

Grandmother sometimes said things that never made any sense. My favourite was

No lang sa lei bak jiu, mian gong deng de ka hwua.

It translates to “Two people, three eyes. Don’t talk about the length of a person’s legs.”

She then told me the story of a man whose legs were not the same length. He married a woman who was blind in one eye. Grandma said, we all brought flaws to a relationship. People were all flawed and full of mistakes. But like the blind eye and the short leg, we all had to learn to make do. We learned to tolerate things.

I love languages.

Hilarious, given the fact that I’m terrified of speaking any single one of them out loud to others.

Every language has it’s subtle nuances, tied in to years of history and development. English is the bastard child of many languages. We have words like ‘envelope’, “mongooses”, and “philosophy”, all borrowed from other languages.

It’s interesting how French and German are similar and different. It’s lovely how one can learn Latin and then derive languages from there.

How many am I learning now?

Four. French, German, Japanese, ASL.

There’s something about language. Just something about it. I don’t ever want to stop learning.

Monday, April 27, 2015

Wanderlust

It doesn’t necessarily need to be far away from home.

Take the first train, get off 10 stops later. Look left, right breathe in total anonymity. No one here knows where I come from, what I do, what I like. There’s no need for the one, two quick march that we use at work.

Wallet, phone, keys.

Pause at all the stores, meander through them. Look at their wares. Sit down for a drink, wait out the hot sun.

Observe the couple passing by. She has her hand in his. He’s slightly taller than her. The perfect height for her to rest her head on his shoulder.

The kid is crying because his mother wouldn’t let him touch the stray cat. The old grandmother is patiently shooing the flies from her pastries.  Flips flops and stilettos pass by. Sharp suits and baggy hoodies.

Snap a picture of the cat. Note down the name of the cafe. Maybe the friends would like to come here some day. The food smells good and the atmosphere is cozy.

There’s a smithy. One of the few left in the city. The worker pounds at the steel with a large hammer, heating it over the fire, then setting it back on the mould.

Two streets down, there’s a temple. The stare of the dragon is slightly unsettling, but it is also comforting. The carved scales are smooth, worn away by decades of rain and sun. The eyes seem to track the movement of every passer by

“Are you lost?”

“No, I’m just exploring.”

Thank you for your kindness, stranger. I’ll be fine. I’ll just wander a bit more, before going home.

Saturday, April 25, 2015

Verminophobia

You know where I come from
Where the roots are
Where the worms are

~ Worms, Lolly Jane Blue

 

Does anybody remember the first worm they touched?

I love bugs. But the first time I saw an array of maggots on the kitchen floor, crawling their way to freedom through the back door, I was terrified. Squirmy, wriggling, pasty things. The turgidity an undulating mass against the bottom of my feet.

They filled my dreams. Each step upon the writhing mass of maggots in my subconscious left me crying. More often than not, I woke with tears drying on my face.

People say we fear things we don’t understand.

Let me introduce a thing called ‘irrational fear’. Something people with anxiety understand very well. You know every aspect of the thing. You know its ins and outs. You know, logically, that it cannot harm you. It may even be beneficial! It is interesting!

But for some reason we cannot comprehend, thinking about it ratchets your heart beat up to 120 per minute. Your breaths are shallow and quick. Too much oxygen, you’re feeling faint. Logically, you know it’s nothing to fear. But the hindbrain just doesn’t get the message.

The child of two teachers who didn’t shy away from the truth, my parents taught me about maggots, their uses, their life cycle. I learned about their hydrostatic skeleton, the way fluid would flow from one segment to another, so that the worm could contract and expand itself for movement.

I understood that worms were good, most of the time. I understood how they worked, their life cycle, their internal organs.

But understanding doesn’t always chase away the fear.

I know mine didn’t.

Friday, April 24, 2015

Uranophobia

Ugly is the heart inside me
Rife with jealousy, anger, hatred
A million and one wrongdoings
Now by faith are ransomed
One still carries this doubt
Perhaps I am too far gone
Heaven welcomes all who believe
Open to those who repent
But am I truly saved?
Is is possible that God could love
A sinner such as I?

Thursday, April 23, 2015

Tachophobia

My mother used to call me a tortoise.

I spent an hour on the worksheet that I could have done in 10 minutes. Not because I didn’t know how to do it, but because I would spend a minute, just carefully pulling the pencil across the paper to make my letters nice and neat.

They weren’t.

I soon learned that slow was not appreciated. No one liked slow. No one wanted slow. I had to get up fast, brush my teeth fast, get dressed fast, do my homework fast, play fast, eat fast, fast fast fast. I rushed my homework so that my mother would call me a horse instead. My grandmother said it didn’t matter even if I was a horse because I would be a slow horse. A child born in the evening would prefer to take things at a sedate pace, she said.

For me it was true.

At 12 years old, the achievement of the year was successfully mastering the piece labelled ‘Presto’ after my fingers tripped over the keys a million times. After learning all my scales and pieces, the next step to perfection was ‘faster’.

It was a race against time to be better sooner. To achieve more than the other people my age. It wasn’t enough that I was good. I had to be the best at a faster rate. If my brother could memorize an essay in ten minutes, I shouldn’t need thirty to do the same. If he completed his Piano exams at 15, I shouldn’t need to take an extra year. If he could do Form 5 Science papers at age 12, why was I scoring lower.

Harder, stronger, better, faster.

Faster

An eternal race for time, to master everything in the short few years of our schooling life so that it would look good on our resumes. It would bolster our chances in the job market.

I’m 25. I’m studying in a huge university. Faster, faster, faster still. Publish this semester, finish your lab work by September, write your thesis by January, viva voce in March, graduate in August. Enter again in September, this time repeat all that as a PhD student.

The latest car, 0 to 200 mph in under 10 seconds.

The youngest doctor, finishing medical school in 2 years.

The newest phone, 0.01ms response time.

The best medication, takes effect in 20 minutes.

My pistons are churning, but there’s only so much friction I can take. Information is flooding in, 1gb per second but my Internal memory cannot process it all. And people keep telling me “You’re already 25” like my life is already over.

 

 

Several months ago, I stopped at the roadside to admire the butterflies dancing among the bushes. People walked by, nonplussed. I was just standing there, staring off into space. Most of them looked, but could not see the bright yellow fluttering wings. They could not understand why I was standing there, or perhaps they did not have the time to care. Only one girl paused, sparing a few seconds to smile. But she was on her way soon enough.

As we chased the ticking seconds, chanting ‘faster, faster, faster’, it seemed that we had missed all of life’s little beauties.

As a child, I was preoccupied with so many other commitments and classes, engaged with becoming the best all rounded student within the shortest time, that I was never invited to hang out with the others. I couldn’t. I had classes every afternoon. What else had I missed in the quest for speed?

If learning is a life-long process, why are we cramming so much into the first 17 years of our life?

I cannot go too fast anymore. At 100 km per hour, my heart races, uneasy. At that speed, most car crashes are fatal. At the rate I’m going, pushing myself to do things faster, I am missing the little things that make me me. I’m killing my identity.

So I’m hitting the brakes, slowing my steps to take a breather.

After all, I am only 25.

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Symmetromania

If someone slapped my on my left cheek. I’d turn my head to let them slap the right.

Not because I’m a saintly person who tolerates violence, but because it wouldn’t feel right otherwise.

Left, Right, Up, Down.

When I was a child, I wasted a lot of time just on jiggling my legs. If I bounced my right leg four times, I had to bounce my left leg four times. If I went up the stairs right foot first this time, then the next time I would have to go up using the left foot instead.

Left and right. Right and left.

The two weeks that followed my fall from the window, I didn’t look in the mirror. One side of my mouth was swollen, caught on the wire of the grill. I didn’t mind bruises, but my grin had become lopsided. It wasn’t even. It wasn’t equal. Disgusting.

Ballet was amazing. Sure, we each had dominant legs, dominant arms, one side of the body that was better at something. But for each exercise, we always did both side. Right left, left right. Front back, back front.

Perfect.

Judo was scary. I was the ‘leftie’ in a sea of ‘righties’. Performing 100 sweeps with only my left leg left me unsettled. Not because it was tiring.

But because I felt my right leg was left out.

Left right, left right, left right.

Gotta find that balance. Gotta be even on both sides.

I assign things to both hands. My left was stronger. The one I used to punch people, or shove someone off balance. My right was dextrous. The one that positioned tiny crafts, wrote letters.

The workload was balanced. A stupid insignificant detail that no one cared about except me. Just a silly child, teen, naive adult, grasping for the slightest semblance of control.

Balance your work, your family, your friends, your lover, your hobbies, your commitments, your health. Assign them symmetrical, parallel workloads.

But no. Balance is rarely that simple.

Neither is Symmetry.

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Rupophobia

Dirt.

It spawned the word ‘dirty’. Something covered in dirt. Something unpleasant. Something… undesirable. To be dirty is unclean, is to be unacceptable in public. It is the unwanted truth, the bare basics that no one wants to look at, or think about.

How did the word come about? What about dirt is so unthinkably unmentionable?

Maybe it’s what’s inside dirt. Minerals, organic matter, microorganisms.

Microorganisms

Thousands, and millions of microorganisms. Bacillus, Acetobacter, Staphylococcus, Micrococcus, Enterobacter, Phages, Viruses, parasites

Thousands and millions of tiny invaders, just waiting for the opportunity to enter and take over. Rotting your flesh from the inside out, taking your nutrients and energy, sapping your life away.

Wash your hands before you eat, don’t go barefoot on the field, a dozen dos and don’ts but there’re still some strong against antibacterials.

They’re all around us, it’s true.

But there’s something about dirt.

That’s just dirtier.

Monday, April 20, 2015

Queerphobia

Maybe it’s because I’m an artist. Maybe it’s because I really don’t give a damn. But I couldn’t care less about the way a guy waves his hand. You should be more concerned with boys who think the world revolves around them. With their huge egos and fake gentleness it’s all a sham, and you don’t really see the problem

Let me get this straight (or rather, let me get it bent). You don’t get extra points if you have a ‘friend’ when you can’t even say the words gay or lesbian.

No I don’t like you like you. And so what if I do? If I were a guy, would you ask me the same thing too? I’m queer, not uncontrollable. Sure, I’ve got some impulses but I’m not an animal. What’s wrong with being sexual anyway?

What do we people do? I’m pretty sure we’re humans too. We aren’t a collective hive mind. We have our own hobbies that we do on our own time.

Oh wait, I don’t look like that? Like what, pray tell, because I’m sure you know by now. We people come in all shapes and sizes. We people have our own preferences and likes. We people are really really tired of all these ignorant questions. But still we do our best to answer them. It’s not really your fault, is it? That we were never taught about this, that we were never shown it’s okay to be this way.

It’s okay to like your own gender. It’s okay if you like everyone. It’s okay if you don’t want anyone either.

So we answer question, after question, after question.

In the hopes that maybe one day, we won’t be 'you people’, or ‘your kind’.

Maybe one day, we’ll just be one of you.