想见你　没有你　
城市再炫也没意义　
热闹的全都是你的幻影

想见你　心太急　
狂奔拥挤的人群里　
多希望下一秒就见到你

想见你　没有你　
每天生活只剩呼吸　
闭上眼晃动的全都是你

想见你　我的心　
其实从来不曾离去　
这一生只想和你在一起

cut to the chase, quick question from thefridayfive:

You have unlimited funds and unlimited space to make your dream abode. What and where is it, and what does it look like? Do you share it with anyone/anything?

(but not so quick answer, hehe.)

i already had unlimited funds and unlimited space in the sims 2. i had this three/four-apartment building called celestial court, where i shared a two-bedroom unit with max, alex and teddy. some of you have seen some pictures of the bedrooms and toilets (look under the sims taglist), but i never got round to showing you the nice airy hall-plus-kitchen; there was even space to fit in a handsome baby grand.

but anyway, about a year or so later, i built another little two-storey house in another neighbourhood. it's very small, with only one bedroom, but everything in there is DAMN cool. alex and teddy were to move in there eventually, while me and max would go stay in another yet-to-be-built house some walkable distance away. but being the crazy perfectionist i am, i tore everything down cos... the rest of the neighbourhood just wasn't going the way i envisioned it would.

back to real life, actually i'd be happy with a little pad to call my own. high-rise apartment in a bustling city sounds fine, but don't want too many other people/families living in the same building/estate (preferably less than ten other units and a lot of privacy). it'd have huge windows that can be opened and opaque curtains/shades - and in the bathroom too (rain shower; tub is optional).

bedroom and study are one with the hall... but still with ample space to do yoga, skipping or some shit. it'd have a row of ceiling-to-floor bookshelves that can be shut to keep dust out, and little door which walks into a wardrobe, with mirrors, and windows too, maybe. must have piano, and thick furry rugs one can roll about in front of the tv.

not too particular about the kitchen/dining, but it should have the basic stuff - in cool, dark colours and be super easy to clean. and if i'm living with guybrush, i'll need a big safe balcony for him too. part of the balcony could have some pebbled flooring, part of it could have some soil and carpetty grass (not sure if this would be practical for guybrush though), but also some smooth flooring for him to chill out on. okay, the balcony sounds really complicated... can i have two balconies? one for myself and one for him...

anyway, if i ever find the time again, i'll try to build something nice again in the sims to show off. but then i really need to get the rest of the neighbourhood in order first so that i'll know where my litte dream place fits in and all the amenities around it, etc. ahhh, so nice to daydream.

i am getting fatter by the day. all i think about all the time is food. and my extremely overpriced nike skipping rope seems to have gone missing; it would seem like a waste of money to get another one. should i go have mcdonald's breakfast instead?

today, someone described me as dreamy. am i really? how so? i do seem to get that quite often.

i'm a tone-and-expressions kinda person. in fact, i find that much of the time, i don't even hear exactly what you say; i read it off your face and interpret your meaning from the tone of it. in particular, i find myself extremely - too often somewhat overly - sensitive to eyebrow movement.

what's bad about reading eyebrows, in my view, is that i end up processing your initial, immediate reaction to matters instead of one that your brain has had split seconds more to process. of course, what's good about it is also that maybe i get as far as possible the truest and purest form of your immediate reaction... but then that may not necessarily be your final view on the matter, because you have not had enough time to process your reaction to it, to rationalise it and to deem if it was reasonable and acceptable or not. if you get what i mean.

if i were a less feeling person, maybe this ultra sensitivity to tone and expression may be more of a boon than a bane. because, then, i can coolly analyse them and store them as data in my head. but too often, i find myself reacting immediately to them, especially to negative interpretations. also, this tone-and-expressions thing may be the reason i'm so lousy at relating stories - i can't exactly give you a summary of the hard facts; i can give you only the sequence of events, the physical positions of the characters, their body language, the vibes and tones - which could be seen as rather subjective, though i would swear by them.

strangely (or not so strangely because maybe everyone else does that too), i also seem to store audio memory by tagging it to tone/expression/vibe/physical location. (otherwise, i have close to zero audio recall, and would fail at listening comprehension.) if i can remember your tone/expression/vibe/where i was when i heard it, then i can remember almost word-for-word of what you said. and i can generally quote it years after. (and yes, this is how i remember all my friends' dirty little secrets, hiak hiak.)

so i can get a little lost when i'm given emotionless words utterly devoid of tone and expression and vibe and whatnot. and i would want - or feel the need - to know how you meant it to be said... was it meant to be pissed off, petulant or playful, or what? because i am a sadly reactive person, so i need to know.

if i stare too long, look too searchingly at you or into you, it's because i'm just trying to understand, and it means that your thoughts are less transparent to me than are most other people's. but then again, i believe that transparency is often a matter of time. but that's a story for another day.

i was just going to sleep, but couldn't resist another post, especially when i actually have something random to say.



in response to a short part-of conversation on much-loved movies tonight, i think this may well be my favourite movie of all time. maybe you're right - i didn't realise it back then, but now i know exactly what i love about it.

it's about alienation in a big city - it's such a lonely flick. it has rain, and grey skies, and umbrellas. and it has a very simple plot, not much speech, but a lot of thought. it's almost like the chinese/cantonese version of lost in translation, only simpler, cleaner, and imho, better.

are there people in your life whom in your opinion can do no wrong? those who, ANYTHING they do or think or say makes a whole lot of sense, is perfectly understandable and totally forgiveable? because there are such people in my life. there are in fact A FEW of such people in my life. my sister is one of them.

part of me believes that it is in my psyche to have such people in my life. that is, i NEED to have such people whom i will place on a pedestal to worship and adore; whom i will, if/when the need rises, defend their honour to the end... without even having to know the facts of the matter (i.e. typically irrationally).

in that way, i guess, i'm like a dog - though i'd much rather be thought of as a cat. (one other doggy trait in me is my love for playing frisbee, catch and ball.)

well, of course, no matter how blindly worshipping and adoring the infp fan is, there will inevitably be disappointments, since people are imperfect. this reminds me of how we've been taught since young that God made us like that - we NEED to worship and adore someone, essentially Him; except we somehow always misguidedly go and worship and adore other people and end up having to suffer the repeated needless pain and disappointments in life and feeling that dreadful void that our idols just can't seem to fill.

i believe that. but i still can't help just having these people in my life, who in my head i know that whatever the matter, i'll be on their side and they be on mine (except when it's just a fight/argument between the two of us). i also think this is partly because i have this strange intrinsic need to be loyal, and therefore feel safe in that loyalty - that is, to have a core circle of trust that works both ways.

mayps understood that very well. <-- and this statement means a lot to me, because it's not just that she was in my core circle of trust and i in hers (this is much more easily achievable than my next phrase), but that she UNDERSTOOD very well this concept and i knew she did, and she actively practised it and could be public about it. just a few short months together, and i felt absolutely safe with her; i was in bliss. remembering this makes me miss her. again.

this is another belated response to the question "what was so good about her that made me so crazy in love with her?" that a number of people have asked me.

of course, i also felt that she was good at what she did, which made it much easier for me to adore her from the start; and i was rather reticent at the beginning, but she came to me and opened up first, so naturally, that gave her MANY bonus points for the "safe" AND "authentic" factors, which are VERY important to me.

how easy, it seems, to work yourself into my heart and mind.

just discovered the amazing pattern - everything the people i adore say is incredibly insightful, clever, witty or funny, and everything the people i detest say is incredibly short-sighted, narrow, ignorant, plain stupid or just blah. everything and everyone else just falls in between.

***

when i was in secondary school and reading harper lee's to kill a mockingbird at home ahead of class for lit, i cried many times over several sections of the book. so many things in the book, i will never forget. to this day, so many of the quotes in the book remain with me.

at times, i have thought, such a childish book - it's really easy understanding, the perfect secondary-school lit text. yet, re-reading parts of the book tonight (or day), i discover that atticus' wisdom has shaped my life so much more than i even realised.

months back, a colleague - who has an interest in people's mental processes, etc. - asked me to look into my past and to try and identify why i am the way i am. he said this with specific reference to something lah. i looked inwards, racking my brains at that time, but couldn't give him an answer right then. it wasn't till i randomly went through atticus' closing statement in the tom robinson case just that it finally struck me. it's a funny thing really, the skips in logic this infp brain can make at times, and the impact it can have on my preoccupations and preferences in life as i grow older.

(as a sidenote, it's funny how my friends, teachers, colleagues, bosses, etc. always seem to be asking me to look into my past for explanations. or maybe these are the only things i actually register of all the things they talk to me about. and then the "answer" never quite strikes me till months or years later, so i can never quite explain myself to them.)

literature, it's such a curious thing - it can be so moral, yet so amoral. till today, so-moral-yet-so-amoral matters, things, people, whatever, they still intrigue me. (maybe anything between the lines, i don't know.) and the people i adore, i think i adore partly because they are people who get this, some way or other.

last night was the crazy super stormy night.

because i was very tired, i slept early - at about 11pm, way before the storm. but was jolted awake by sudden thunder at close to 3am. it was so freaking loud and lasted for so freaking long... my bed, which stands against three very packed bookshelves, vibrated (quite violently, in my sleepy opinion).

when i woke in shock and before i actually opened my eyes (i was under covers), i thought it was an explosion at the carpark downstairs - not a very crazy conclusion to arrive at, considering that there WAS actually an explosion at a carpark near my house many years ago when i was a kid. and i heard the explosion. (so, understandably i hope, i was scared out of my wits.) if anyone remembers, a bomb exploded from under the passenger car seat, shattering the hip of a 7-month pregnant woman... she and the baby died, and the person who planted the bomb was never found. i re-read the news articles on that incident in office today. so sad.

before i opened my eyes, the thought that was passing through my mind was: this is really big, we're all gonna hafta grab our clothes and run downstairs. and then i opened my eyes to crazy flashes of lightning lighting up my otherwise-always-very-dark room, even through the rather opaque curtains. i jumped out of bed, ran to my parents' room and flung open the door... to find them (and my sister, on the floor) all sleeping soundly in the aircon with the windows shut tight and curtains drawn.

then i exclaimed to my dad, "did you hear that??!!???" to which he responded sleepily, "yah, if scared, come in and sleep. but don't step on sister ah." a bit anti-climax. so i said no and closed the door. but lightning still flashed like crazy and thunder continued to boom from a distance, although not as crazily as the one that woke me up. and because i had woken up in such a fright, i couldn't get over it for a long time.

i was scared of the lightning even though i was supposed to be safe at home - lightning usually isn't that scary. and i'm seldom woken up by things, so imagine how loud the thunder must have been to jolt me awake... in my mind's eye, there was a huge smoking gaping hole in the carpark downstairs. so scary. :(( even guybrush was scared and i sought him out for comfort for a while. i was so freaked out. :((

at that time, there was no one i could share my trauma with. i missed colin 'cos she wasn't even in town to experience the same scary thunder - i whatsapped her but she must have been asleep as it was late. :( then i went on facebook from my phone under the covers hoping to find some comfort, but didn't get any cos i guess other people staying in other areas didn't hear it. :( one person i knew who stays close enough to me to have heard it was too busy partying in tanjong pagar, so i knew no point in checking if he survived the storm. finally, i'm glad to say, i found some reassurance on twitter, and then whatsapp, which helped me feel a lot better by 4am... okay, quite loser, but whatever.

at that point, i realised for once the major disadvantage of sleeping alone. i imagined, in apartments elsewhere all over singapore, others being able to share the horrifying experience of being jolted awake by what they thought was an explosion, with their sleeping partners and finding comfort in the aliveness of each other. i imagined, in apartments elsewhere all over singapore, parents comforting their young kids and tucking them back into bed saying, there, there, it was just crazy, crazy thunder, and really, we're safe at home.

i felt so scared and alone.

and then i tried to picture, if this had happened on the 23rd storey of the shama apartment in wanchai, where the bed was right beside the wonderfully big window - how infinitely more scary it would have been. was this how she felt when she peered out the window at night at the warm orange lights in the other apartments across?

i felt scared and alone and so childish, because it didn't seem like anyone else was freaked out by the horrifying boom of thunder at all. :(

so, tonight, the skies look clear, and it's kind of a first for me to feel a sense of relief that it isn't storming.

i do love storms... but thunder and lightning, they're kinda scary.