Soulmate. Check, Mate.

This lovely lady turned 26 years old yesterday. Truly the nicest, prettiest, most efficient, kick-ass Doctor I have had the pleasure of knowing this lifetime :) And don't let anyone convince you otherwise, Dr. L X Wong. 

Fortunately the events of our last birthday bash from January in Balham (read: mine) didn't prevail. No drunkard lapse of memory, no massive hangover, no incessant vomiting. Thankfully. 

We had a very fun-filled rest of the evening catching up on matters close to the heart, with responsible drinking. And in the end, one or two revelations struck me in the early hours of that morning as I was trudging home (my first late night in FOREVER!)

It occurred to me that the last time I went to bed at 5 am (or even 6 am) was almost ages ago. That was when I discovered I could speak to someone for a record 8 or 9 hours on end without feeling like a minute had passed. 

Last night, I discovered that the record was very much breakable. I could execute the same feat perfectly well with a group of my close friends, and for the first time, I realised that it was equally AS enjoyable. And that blurry image of a scene of cheap beer and incessant laughter was really all in the mind. 

After a whole night of exchanging tales, of priceless advice and of convincing each other that it never pays to be 'too nice', we are left with the one tag line everyone has been telling me since the beginning of time, that when you meet 'THE ONE', you just know. It's as simple as that. There is this thing called 'indescribable chemistry'. And there is also this thing called 'Timing'. Timing can be a bitch, but hey, sometimes she lets up and things actually do work out. 

To which I obstinately thought, I have been increasingly cynical over the years, but I have no doubts about that statement. 

Because I am sure that I have experienced that chemistry, and I have met that person. I might not have been his, but he sure was mine. I know how it feels when everything just seems so right, even if the brutal truth is that it only remains that way in your head. But as with most circumstances that I have come to realise the hard way over the years, it isn't enough for just love to bind two people together anymore. Sometimes, reality sucks. 

But I'm not into making sweeping declarations or premature dramatic gestures. That just isn't me. So as with everything in life these days, we shall wait and see. And I'm hopeful that one day, I will be able to tick it off as one of the things on my list and go:

Soulmate?

Check. 

Yes. Check, mate. 

WIP - Work In Progress

It has been a while since Meredith's narrations rang out clearly in my mind, amidst all the new and upcoming drama that Greys spurts out each week.

This particularly stuck, and reminded me why she was my favourite character to start of with years ago.

"I always thought I'd be happier alone.

Not because I like being alone. But it's easier to be alone.

Because what if you learn that you need love and then you don't have it?

What if you like it....and lean on it?

What if you shape your life around it? And then it falls apart....."

Likewise, I am a piece of work under construction.

But at the moment, with Korean dramas, tennis, coffee and friends, who needs to dwell on the grey bits of it all?

C'est la vie :)

Through Thick and Thin, For Better or Worse

I came to take an interest in Singapore's Power Family, Lee Kuan Yew and family, after the initial exposure in Malaysian Studies sessions, when Mrs P would go on and on about how amazing Lee Hsien Loong was. How well educated all three of LKY's children were. And then later on, after some input from Bao, how pretentious Lee Wei Ling's weekly column in the NST was in Singapore - and how I can almost conclude that all neuro people are potentially just....weird.

And yet throughout all this, I had somehow managed to omit the presence of Mrs. Lee, despite the fact that she was on par, if not a step ahead of her husband, and her well-read children. It was only till recently through some mindless surfing and procrastinating on the net that I came across Lee Hsien Loong's eulogy for his mother, and subsequently Lee Wei Ling's.

But it was essentially Minister Mentor Lee's eulogy for his wife that brought a tinge of sadness deep within.

Reading through his reminisces of their times together that tracked all the way back from Singapore moments to relocating to Cambridge to read law, to marrying in secret, to all that they had managed to achieve before returning to Singapore, I couldn't help but feel copious amounts of envy. I remember reading somewhere once, when LKY recounted that the Western perception of marriage was to marry someone you love, and the Eastern way of looking at things was to love the person you had married - and that in this lifetime he had tried to do both.

And my bubble of cynicism burst, and I felt an overwhelming wave of sadness, when I realised that this was exactly how my grandmother must have felt when my grandfather passed on.

When you have spent more than three quarters of your life with someone, how easy is it to let go and continue living the rest of your life on your own again?

And then another bubble of doubt resurfaced, and I remembered the last scene in '500 Days of Summer', when Summer was telling Tom how she woke up one day and she just KNEW.....for sure, about what she had never been sure of when she was with Tom.

Hmm.....so through thick and thin......for better or worse.

What are the chances that everyone will end up like LKY and Mrs. Lee?

Memoirs II

I once blogged about the power of the mind and the incredible, almost tangible picture that one can relive by fusing the mere memory of something with pictures and words.

Then I realised I had forgotten one major element in the recreation of this 'picture'.

Music.

There are a great many songs on my iTunes playlists that can transport me back to a certain scene and recreate that very picture right before my eyes, larger than life. And not just those labelled 'Our Song' or 'The Song That Reminds Me Of You' but random snippets of music where I can actually see, remember....and feel.

I revealed to a friend recently that BoyzIIMen's 'Four Seasons of Loneliness' will always remain one of my all time favourites. Simply because it has travelled with me through 5 years of my life and watched a great love turn into horrendously ugly drama and then settle back into an unbreakable bond of friendship.

This is the song that saw me through the days of 'Alyssa's Songs' on our iPods, the days of DJ-ing, of chatting in the dead of night till the sun rose, and more recently, of you being the selfless friend you were and comforting me in the most ironic of situations when I needed you most. And so it is that when I listen now... instead of the choked-back feelings and pent-up emotions that could not be expressed....I listen with an open heart, and smile back on the good, colourful moments of it all.

Then again, there are a great many things that can evoke the strangest and most irrational of emotions in one's mind, overruling the universal fact of mind over body. Because it is only human for your heart to react completely differently from the way you plan it to.

For a day or two, it was the blatant thought of having only yourself to rely on that struck in a place where the wound couldn't be seen. The emptiness of that gloved hand in the cold December rain. The purple umbrella and the swirl of events that came to play prior and latter to that. All these reignited this feeling of choking-back a zillion emotions, of choking back bile, and of that sheer emptiness somewhere within.

For a good 3 days, I avoided listening to 'Superhuman' on my player. The story of how I got to know of this song, how I came to love it, how we listened to it on repeat - this was a long story that I would easily have let to brew in the past. But age and experience have taught me to bottle up my thoughts and sweep them under a rug, and to not talk about them - or rather, to choose not to talk about them.

And so I decided point blank that there is a time to cease all silly obsessions. At the end of the day, when I have decided enough is enough and I will only shed this many tears for this man of the moment, because this is all it is worth, I realise it is easier achieved than I had deemed possible.

So I listened to the song for a good many times, determined to halt this phobia of songs which had the ability of planting an array of moments I had once deemed 'happy' before my very eyes. Happy moments which were no longer to be, and never to be.

And when I felt nothing, I took that step further. Stripping off all my sheets and finally changing them because I knew.....I knew that that wafting scent of Hugo Boss in my room was a mere phantom smell, and that there is a time to stop recreating memory as such in your head. Especially when these memories have been induced by a broken heart.

When the cloud has lifted and you see, you SEE clearly. There is a time to do what is right rather than what you would preferrably wallow in. What is meant to be or not meant to be. I may be a skeptic for now and will forever be guarded against further matters of the heart, but maybe....maybe one day I will believe again, and hopefully along the way I will cease to meet people who continuously obliterate all that is left of those few shreds of optimism within.

This Feeling

"When I was a little girl, my life was just music that was getting louder and louder.

Everything moved me.

A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much.

A calendar showing the wrong month. I could have cried over it.

Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested on the edge of the table."

- Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

I spent my latter years after that trying to feel less.

Everyday was about feeling less. Everyday I feel less.

Is it growing old? Or is it something worse?

They say you can't protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

Maybe it's time to let that go.

High School Musical

I recently had a very engaging 3-hour conversation with a High School friend, L (Zhin, for those better-informed individuals), about every little bit of nonsense you could possibly think of under the sun.

We spent a good part of the duration revisiting old times and the mutual people we could both think of, moving on to gossip-sharing (I prefer to call it 'keeping on par with current affairs') and then on to the subject of crushes.

I literally rolled my eyes, telling Zhin so, as I did it.

And he said: You might roll your eyes now, but I'm sure back then the mention of a particular name was enough to give you palpitations and make your knees go weak.

That....is probably pushing it a little too far. As far as High School crushes went, I never had much physical contact with any, lest went on any proper dates. Heck, I never even came close to actually turning that crush into a full-blown High School Boyfriend. The most I did was remark that this guy, or that guy, looked cute from afar, giggle profusely about it with Manda and the rest, and find strange thrills in the silliest little things.

Then again, what is a High School career without the crushes, huh?

The presence of these people lit up our lives that much more, back then.

Made Sejarah lessons seem that much less boring.

Made the long hours seem that much more bearable.

Since I was in the mood to saunter back down memory lane, I pulled out the autograph book I had owned in Form 5, flipped to Manda's page, and found myself frowning deeply at some of the stuff she had written. I had gone through so many other 'best friends' since those school days, that it made me wonder aloud which was that particular 'Best Friend' of mine she had been referring to at that time. It was good fun though, and I found myself laughing aloud numerous times throughout the whole experience.

I think so many of us have grown so much since our High School stints with crushes and romance, that when we look back, it can only be with a good laugh or good-natured humour. Truth be told, I no longer remember all the names of every crush I ever had on any guy in school, and even for those whom I actually did, I could hardly remember specific details and encounters in much depth at all.

But the conversation took a turn for the 'not-so-hilarious' exit when Zhin suddenly reciprocated my remark about a mutual friend's constant teasing by blatantly asking:

'So you haven't answered me. Did you or did you not have a thing for me in High School?'

'OMG you ARE shameless aren't you?'

'Is that a Yes or a No?'

'I'm rolling my eyes now! Whatever rocks your boat!!'

'What if I said I had a thing for you in High School? Would it change your perception of me?'

'No way!! Because it was ten thousand years ago, and like I said, just High School crap!'

'Gosh you are quite the cynic aren't you?'

Hahahah. It definitely brought out bountiful laughter on both ends, although at my expense. To me though, High School really seemed like a century ago, and whatever whims I humoured myself with back then were far from serious, in any sense.

I do maintain that at this age and day, I would not hesitate to show very obviously, my liking for a guy whom I probably thought I could stand a chance with, or even just say it outright. It still remains to me, though, that whatever remains unsaid remains untrue. So I would only really like you, if I said I liked you. And vice versa. No mind games or anything of the likes now ;)

Here's to Zhin, who never fails to provide me with much entertainment, and who ultimately remains one of my most baffling (and sometimes exasperating) friendships to date.

Here's to Manda as well, who helped carve out the majority of my High School memories, and who remains one of the greatest friends of all time.

Ah, those silly antics that make up the most hilarious moments.

The Possimpible

In one of the episodes of 'How I Met Your Mother', Barney came up with the idea of making up his own combination of words to make new ones. My interpretation of his word 'Possimpible' was simply....making the impossible possible.

As mentioned before, I have become a sceptic when it comes to sappy love stories and fairytale endings. I have willed myself to become a realist and to read things as they are on the surface, never anything between the lines. I do not believe in far-fetched possibilities and about building a whole life in your heads when the now remains the now, and the future is something still intangible in the distance.

But there is something about listening to the stories of the people around you and seeing the exact situation you had deemed impossible, blossom into something so real in front of you, that brings up that warm, fuzzy feeling inside.

It makes me smile to see that amidst all the backstabbing, bad-mouthing, superficial facades and so forth going on in this world, something as innocent as a foundation of love can overcome everything and remain standing till the end.

Don't get me wrong, this doesn't change the fact that I am still very much a realist and a cynic when it comes to things like these.

But maybe....maybe once in a blue moon, there is that rare thing out there called a connection that can never be broken, come what may.

Because to me, you are perfect

I was just in the mood for sappy stuff and found these off a site while surfing: Le Love Image
.

I think I haven't been sappy for a really REALLY long time. Time and age have turned me into someone more cynical and more realistic. In a good way, I always say, because there's always a balance needed to everything, and I'm pretty sure I've reached that now.

So until I find that imperfect somebody, I can definitely still replace him with my OHCM and Harrisons ;)

He's Just Not That Into You

I first picked up this phrase frm SATC, where Miranda was introduced to this concept by Carrie's Man of the Moment.

Ever since, I've been reciting it in my head. I particularly like enunciating it where necessary. Read as shown:

He's just not that into you.

Unfortunately, I haven't had the guts like Miranda to actually spread the gospel to others yet, well who am I to dish out advice like this when I, like Carrie and the rest of the girls, have spent a fair bit of my life deciphering mixed messages.

Maybe it's all like what Berger said:

"With men, there are no mixed messages. If we like you, we're coming upstairs."

And I really, REALLY believe that it's true. Well, save for certain extenuating circumstances. But isn't life so much simpler without the constant pain of reading in between the lines and constantly pondering why this or that happened, amidst juggling hot-cold tendencies and trying to turn them into a more favourable answer?

I guess there probably are no love-hate relationships in this world. You either mean what you say or say what you mean.

So the next time something like this happens, I'm embracing the gospel with open arms and an open heart.
There are no mixed messages.

He's just not that into you.

PS: I'm so watching the movie soon.

[Carrie's narration]:

"Some love stories aren't epic novels. They are short stories, but that doesn't make them any less filled with love"


[Les Mis']:

"He who does not weep does not see"

'A woman's heart is like an ocean full of secrets'.

Someone once commented that I must have been born in the wrong era of music and movies. I seem to be stuck in the 90's when it comes to the entertainment industry. With the exception of Zhou Jie Lun and R&B of course.

But a vast majority of my favourite films of all time exist from the 90's.

And recently, I downloaded Titanic to rewatch again.

My friend told me I was mad.

I found it strangely captivating, especially the last bit when she was going down and everything was finally coming to an end...lost under thousands of feet of icy, cold water.

Then I realised all the times that I had been feeling pensive over what I had 'lost' the past 1 and a half years, was in fact, a misconception.

Instead I realise now I had voluntarily thrown it out of my life.

When I dreamt that I had been shot, I also dreamt that you saved me. And that came to my mind, a split second after I woke up, still reeling from the shock and thinking that it was real. For a moment, I was strangely comforted, and then the feeling passed.

I never realised how much I had relied on you until you ceased to exist. I guess you were the one who was around, most of the time, when turmoil and tension weren't boiling forth by the minute. But you never really did much, except be THERE.

And that's just not enough anymore, is it?