absolutum dominium

saturday was hsien's burfday celebration! ok. so it was belated, but nonetheless...

seems i have problems waking up in the morning. cannot seem to wake up before 11am. hmm. public policy seminar tomorrow... gotta wake up at 7am... SIAN!!!

went to make my 1-year supple of contact lens. fucking $360. ARGH. ARGH ARGH ARGH. met him for lunch, then finally bought my winter coat (which i'd been eyeing since a month ago) and my leather gloves and socks. and i bought the leather gloves coz i thought they looked cool, and he thinks they make me look like i'm gonna use them to murder people. and i rejoindered tt i'd already killed a cow to get tt leather. so another person wouldn't matter tt much. HEH. ooh. and i bought kiddy socks in pink and maroon with pretty little hearts. wahahaha. his disbelieving look followed me out of the store.

spent the next 3 hours at baker's inn with my warm chocolate cake and goos conversation. actually, conversation was largely one-sided - him talking and me laughing. which happens pretty much 3/4 of the time. except for...

see the thing is, the night before at approx 2.19am, just as i was falling asleep, my ex-boss called me. first time in almost 6 months. 6 months of no contact, no calls, no messages, no nothing. she calls me. and she tells me she's been drinking heavily at thumper and alternative, and right now at the void deck of her house, she thought of calling me.

turns out she's an emotional wreck. in between the last time we spoke and now, she's changed jobs to a more stressful work environment. but more than tt, she met someone new. this girl who started out as her 'protege' and ended up as her lover. thing is the girl's married. and now the husband's flown off the bangkok coz he wants to leave his adultering wife, and the wife flew off in the evening without making any prior arrangements to go find him and to beg him to stay. and now my ex-boss wants to take a plane up at 2-fucking-am in the morning to go make sure the girl's ok.

and here i am telling her: "no. you cannot. it's a stupid idea. she's old enough to take care of herself. her husband's not going to leave her at the airport to die or get raped or abducted. if you go up he's gonna know you're a third party and tt ill make things worse..." blah blah blah.

obviously, she's drunk. she doesn't listen. she also tells me tt she blames me for whatever position she is in now. she says tt coz i 'judged' her when she was quesntioning her sexuality by labelling her straight-out lesbian, she was so shocked and hurt by my 'judgement' tt she decided to "go to the edge and never come back". so now she's a full-fledged lesbian. and apparently she doesn't find it in her to forgive me or to understand me.

and yet here she is, calling me at 2am expecting me to answer her cry for help, to be sympathetic and to drag her out of the mud the way i always used to, esp when her last relationship with another girl didn't work out and she got obsessively depressed for the next 1.5 years. i was trying to be sympathetic. maybe i felt guilty tt i did label her before she was sure. i tried to counsel her but she refused to listen.

she was just a melancholic emotional self-pitying mess of a person. what happened to the person i once respected? where did she go? the 2 hour conversation was so fucking draining and hurting. i wished it would end earlier even before the first hour was up. i was tired, i was sick and fucking tired of having t defend my stand about every comment i made or every piece of advice i gave. she kept insinuating tt i was a cold-blooded heartless creature, tt i no longer cared, tt i didn't know what love meant. like she did.

and when she asked about him and i told her about him, everything she said was negative. tt it was too fast. tt he was too old. tt we weren't compatible. tt this shouldn't be happening. tt i was being naive and impulsive and immature. as if i'm the one seriously considering running off to bangkok after a married woman and defending everything tt she does as if she has the god-given right to fuck around when married.

my ex-boss said tt she didn't know me. tt these past 2 year of being friends, for all our 6 hour phone-call marathons, she didn't know me. didn't understand me. tt i was always a puzzlement to her.

she called this our last phonecall. she said there was no more desire to call. maybe i was happier than her to hang up when we finally did.

there goes a friendship. i've come to realise tt maybe, it was never there to begin with. i went to sleep on fri night feeling like shit.

i was talking to him about it on sat. he was psycho-analysing her from all the prior stuff tt he'd seen before. he thinks she's close to the edge too. her call to me was a cry for attention, for sympathy. and he thinks tt she was never really friends with me to begin with. just like her other mentor-protege relationships, i was a potential love interest. the problem with me, is tt i'm too 100% straight. advances just bounce off me like ping pong balls coz i don't even realise them.

tt was just a speculation. but it explained why her expectations of me were always so high. why she always cared more for me than i thought necessary. why she always wanted to be there. why she was so pissed (and i really mean pissed) tt i'd got together with someone else and why she was throwing cold water on everything even before i could say anything. explained why i had so much of an influence on her, such tt things tt i said would affect her so much. how a simple label would have become a 'judgement' tt would force her to swing all the way to one extreme of her sexuality. it's as if all this time in the last 2 years, i was like her last hope to cling on to in between the worlds of heterosexuality and lesbianism. and because i'd in her own words "slammed the door in her face", i'd broken that last strand for her. she said tt i wasn't like anything she's thought i was. tt she'd created an image of me in her mind, only to realise tt i was nothing like it. and maybe tt's why. because she thought tt i would reciprocate, but i didn't.

i was the first person she thought of when she was drunk. she was crying during our phone call actually. no one ever just 'thinks about' someone when they are drunk. in truth according to him, she'd never really put me out of her mind the past 6 months. it's when we're sleeping, drunk or high, or in shock, tt our subconscious mind, which is our true thoughts and feelings, takes control. and i never left her subconscious.

but i'd rejected her again. i'd refused to sympathise. refused to go back down to where she'd fallen so far and tried to carry her up with me again. i'd told her to wake the fuck up and do it on her own, or not at all. and she'd taken it as a slap in the face, a rejection of love and friendship.

he's asked me what my plans were. gave me three options. i'd listened to each one, but i'd said nothing. and at the end of it, he said tt he already knew: i've already made up my mind what i want to do with her.

and it's true. i made up my mind before she called, and her calling had cemented what i'd decided. there are memories, good and bad. there are happy times, there are laughter and tears. she'd helped me in many ways, and vice versa. but maybe she was right and there was never really a friendship.

in which case, there shouldn't really be anything left to lose.

so goodbye michelle.

...

it's funny. people have been giving me different pieces of advice. some are genuinely happy for me. some are apprehensive. some have told me to forget about it, to stop. they don't see a "happily ever after" for me. and in truth, i don't think i'm going to see a "happily ever after" either. it's also interesting coz the people who have told me to stop it are people who were previously interested in me. i don't know why the coincedence.

but those who know me, know tt i generally have made up my mind if i'm just 'telling you something', and not asking for advice. i know tt successful living means not taking risks tt you know won't work out. but i've never believed in successful living. like i already said, i don't believe in play it safe. i know tt you care coz you've seen me hurt, you've seen me screwed up, you've seen me in very bad shape and you know tt there is a strong possibility tt i am just being an emotional masochist and throwing myself into the pit again. and i probably am. but i can't let go. i can't go back to 'good friends' coz we completely bypassed tt stage from day 1. i can't let something like this just slip away. even if it doesn't work out, even though i'm probably being intentionally stupid for choosing precious moments of immediate happiness, even with the promise of years of pain thereafter, the fact remains, i have to embrace life. life with all its colourful emotions of passion and pain, happiness and grief. if i chose the safe route to forgo happiness to avoid the pain, then what is the point of living?

what if the point of living if you don't feel, if you don't make mistakes, if you don't learn? what's the point of stable if your never really happy? what's the point of living if you don't feel like your making a difference to someone else, if you don't love and feel loved in return?

i want someone to come home to next year.

...

anyway after baker's inn, i went over to chinatown to meet yanli, junch, the burfday girl hsien, ian, jason, zhaowei and tris for dinner. we had teochew food at ah hoi's. damn good food. duck with sea cucumber, a vegetarian beancurd skin dish, pig's stomach pepper soup, kway teow, steamed red garoupa, pomegranate wanton, and shui jing bao... it was SO GOOD. yum yum. of course it wasn't tt cheap, but the food was worth the money! and it was SO GOOD to see hsien again after so fucking long!!! oh man. i love you dear.

anyway after tt tris junch and yanli had to leave early. the rest of us went to eski bar to chill out. literally. they had a 13 degree celcius room and the -5 degree celcius room. we almost opened a bottle of chivas, but later prudently decided on individual shooters and cocktails instead. yanli had the lychee martini, hsien the tequila sunrise; zhaowei the eski blue. ian and jason shared a jug of chivas, but it was really watered down. for the lack of something new to drink (plus the drinks were expensive), just stuck to my blowjob.

it's actually quite a nice place. the progressive house in the background was very comfortable to listen to. we even took silly pictures in the -5 degrees celcius room for the fun of it. wahaha.



above: that is the bar tt is made up entirely of ice, ice baby.



and this is jason, me, zhaowei and ian.



me, yanli and hsien. apologies for poor pic quality. hsien has the ones with the much better lighting.

anyway i kinda wanted to see my baby again, so i left early. hsien and yanli got a chance to say 'hi' to him outside penny black. wahaha. :) and we walked for over an hour from boat quay to the marina promenade and back to the esplanade bus stop. talked about quite a few things, particularly a lot of my insecurities. which i do have and i still am apprehensive about even though i have already made my decision. went to the mac's at shaw house coz he forgot to eat dinner (again), said 'hi' to his bouncer friends at china black, and then he sent me home.

didn't see him today. prob not till tues or something. went to church with the parents in the morning. then finally went to get rid of the black roots in my hair at chapter 2, and came back for dinner.

interestingly, before dinner tonight my father suddenly asked: "have you fallen in love?"

i was so taken aback, i almost didn't know what to answer. i realise my father's much sharper than i realise. fuck.

tomorrow. DPP seminar. ARGH.