because quentin asked me to
therefore, if i'm late for dinner - we're supposed to meet at 6, about an hour from now - i shall tell him that it's his fault. i'm quite sure he's a man when he's with amanda, true love makes you do that. but there are times he says things which make me seriously question his - alright let's just say that sometimes he's a really lovely and understanding sister. in fact, he's the only one who photowhores with me! amazing. i shall put up our latest picture soon, if i ever see it again. just like me, we're usually too lazy to do these things.

but before i begin, just now i was doing the ironing and for a moment i wished my brother wasn't quite so big. it's therapeutic running the iron up and down the white expanses of cotton that are his shirts, and it makes me happy to see the wrinkles from the washing disappear. but it really is rather tiring, especially in this energy-sapping heat.

***
monday saw the first time ever i'd watched an evening with friends. i'd sung for the past four years, and it was strange being in the audience and gripping quentin's arm everytime a major seventh sounded perfectly into the wonderfully large space that is the esplanade concert hall. we tried to put what we felt into words, but they wouldn't come that night, and i told him i'd go home and blog about it, so here it is.

i think it'll be different for him, because i continued singing for two years after we left jc. so for me, anyway, the moment came with the chord that sounded in the way you look tonight, i will feel a glow just thinking of you - it was an A13 i believe, or GABDE. the different-est colour of a rather draining night. a night that was really a cold welsh morning eating bacon, sausages and eggs in one of those charmingly stuffy english hotels i'd read about all my life; eating cherries and spitting out the pits directly into a dustbin outside topshop in london, listening to toots thielemans on the harmonica at 17 and feeling tears well up in my eyes for no earthly reason, uniforms, endless rehearsals and laughing in the void deck. a night that was jc all over again, and the magic created those almost four weeks in london, olomouc, wales.

draining because of how pure, innocent and sweet music is. a new colour of all colours - and yet it is, and can only be made by people who are flawed. proud, self-seeking, people who, being people, easily choose all the time not to love, to show un-grace. so i guess we have music to bring us, even for that little while, closer to God and to each other. when we forget that someone else is usually on a totally different wavelength. it doesn't matter, because he sings a G and you sing a D and you've got a perfect fifth, perfect harmony with each other, if only for that instant.

and it was so sad, somehow. because when i was 18 i thought it'd never end, that if i came back and sang some more it'd always be the same. i'm going back to sing tonight knowing that it's different, which is a good thing, but for those two years i thought nothing would ever change. it hurt, rather, seeing how everyone had changed. it would of course have been terribly naive of me to have gone on believing that we'd all stay our 18 year old selves, that we'd all not get sucked up into our own circumstances, our own lives. and so i was terribly naive to believe, essentially, that we'd go on choosing innocence.

monday night was jc all over again and the magic that was those almost four weeks in london, olomouc, wales; it was draining, and sad, somehow, because i couldn't look at people the same way anymore, not after all that's happened, and everything else i've seen. realising how we're all so human and how we're not in harmony any longer.

it was all that i couldn't leave behind, and now i find it's all that i could, and did. music does strange things to you sometimes. maybe we couldn't go on choosing innocence because the innocence we wanted to choose wasn't there any longer.

***
i love the fact that jon can be so annoyingly level headed at times when he's really not. i tried my best to describe how i felt to him at midnight after coming home from the concert and before he even said anything i said, "you're going to tell me to finish eating my grapes in the dark and then just sleep cause i'm tired and tomorrow morning everything will be different."

he was right, of course. and that's why he's my boyfriend (although he's a turtle) and quentin is my lovely sister. i'm going to be so late for dinner.

alright, i know i was extremely guarantee plus chop sure at the end of last sem that i was going to do jurisprudence but all things considered i think my mum's right - since she gave me life and she's eaten more salt than i have rice (here we go again, these chinese proverbs) therefore making her wiser, i would imagine, she's probably a better judge of my writing skills than i am and SO i'll probably not do jurisprudence la.

(forgive the long sentence - it's an after effect from having amended so many legal documents. legalese should be accorded status as a language, all by itself)

and you know what, she's right. chloe you're more analytical la. i'm not as fluffy as i thought i was. maybe if i'd been an arts student i'd be that bit more fluffy - actually no, i don't think so. i'm just wired this way lor. we'll see again when it's time to choose modules.

some people call it thinking too much.

anyhow, yesterday saw my last day at ________. i felt a twinge of sadness as i logged off my computer and logged out of my office email account for the last time. no more free khong guan sultana biscuits and tea, no more chats with the tea lady, no more kopping paper towels to use as tissue paper when i neglect to bring a packet out with me. no more lovely view from the window, no more extended lunch breaks, no more zhichao popping into my room at random intervals, declaring himself extremely sleepy and plopping himself down on a chair and promptly falling asleep. no more talking nonsense with him and cherissa when we're supposed to be doing proper work. no more jollibean from the arcade, wanton mee from golden shoe.

the most important thing i've taken away from this internship, however, is that i'm going to try my best to work in a law firm at tanjong pagar.

because amoy street food centre food is way better in terms of quality and cost than all of raffles place combined. the queues at golden shoe are also too insane for words, and amoy street's just nicer somehow - less cramped. plus there are the famous bake_of muffins.

i could always walk from raffles place to amoy street to buy them, burn some of the calories i consume. but i doubt i'll have the time as a lawyer, internships are different. oh well, we'll see. right now i'm thinking of ways for jon to poison/stab ____ without being caught. the things one will do for love, i hope. ok i'm just kidding.

every morning i keep seeing women wince, if ever so slightly, as they walk to work from the mrt station. and they walk so slowly, it's amazing.

i'm absolutely 100% guarantee plus chop sure that if women all wore flats to work productivity would increase. not just because of parts 1&2 of the flip flop theory (see below), but also because they'd be able to walk a whole lot faster. doesn't take a rocket scientist to tell you that if they walk faster, they get to work faster, get back from lunch break faster, and all these extra minutes will eventually add up.

someone should do a study.

after having eaten about four jollibean cheese pancakes for breakfast in the past two and a half weeks, i've decided that the cheese they use is la va qui'nuit (how do you spell it, someone correct me please). anyway it's the laughing cow cheese la. the one and only tasty cheese just right for me!

best friends

before jonong, quen and ian, way before law school and after abi and stella, there was dexter. who was really a best friend - we had long nonsensical conversations about everything and when i was 14 and he was 15 and he first broke up with his then girlfriend (i say first because there were subsequent times) i was there when he cried - and cried, and cried some more. and he was probably the first person i had one of those very honest pacts with - you know how there are some things you just don't say to good friends because it's just too weird, but with best friends you can and you do make these very honest, albeit rather weird pacts? ours was, if his then girlfriend asked him to stop talking to me then we just had to, and it wouldn't mean that we weren't still best friends because we would still just understand, being best friends.

that wasn't why they kept quarrelling la, because i was best friends with him, but it's funny in a "was i really like that?" way to look back and wonder why the heck you took yourself so seriously at that age. i guess everyone does it, or Growing Up wouldn't be Growing Up, it'd just be growing up.

but i thought about dexter because there were three - four? of us who always hung out together, and we each represented a part of alphaville's forever young:

some are like water, some are like the heat

some are a melody and some are the beat

whenever someone started the song we'd have to continue with our assigned bits. i think i was melody. i can't quite remember anymore, and when i was 14 i thought i'd remember forever.

and i thought of the song because i thought

the sun, the sand, the sea; love, life and being free

came from it, but it didn't. i've googled it about four times and i've decided that it was just something one of us came up with. i could always ring him to ask, but it's a bit early.

and i thought of the sun sand sea because - nah, i shan't blog about it. it's a because that'll remain a secret simply because some things are meant to be treasured as secrets.

i like not turning on the lights in the room - i'm weird that way, i guess.

i felt sad again this morning. yesterday evening joseph yeo said "wah you're so slack man never even wear heels!" i told him that heels hate me.

this morning i observed the feet of the women around me and they were all wearing heels. and some of their feet looked really, really unhappy.

the fire alarm was just activated in republic plaza! we are to remain calm and standby for further instructions.

alright this is like, so totally gay but i love yalan, hurhur. i love facebooking about totally random (and insanely funny) things going on in the office - they shall forever remain a secret as they will seriously damage the reputation of CERTAIN other innocent parties - and not doing the work we're supposed to do; wasting far too many smses telling her to hurry log onto facebook just so she can, among other things, be the person to post the 100th post on my wall. i love meeting her for lunch, just us, even though the other year 2s probably think we're damn snob cause we never join them; scolding her for buying iced soy lattes from starbucks for $4.95 because they taste like kopi-c-kosong peng which you can get for 80 cents to a dollar at the surrounding drinks stalls.

hahaha and like i said before, i sound so, like, totally gay?

the situation has been investigated and there was a false alarm. any inconvenience caused is regretted.

i shall miss interning at ________ come the end of this week, if only because i won't get to see her as often.

because it rained this monday morning, rainy days and mondays is currently playing in my head. please don't try to bluff me that you didn't think of the song, first thing, when you woke up to the drizzle.

they don't get me down though, rainy days. mondays do sometimes. like this monday. i opened my wardrobe to pick out what to wear to work this morning, and felt a sense of doom. i just wanted to get back into my t-shirt and shorts and go back to sleep.

not because i didn't want to come to work, you understand, but because i'd just finished ironing all of last weeks' washing last night, and i realised i had to wear it all again this week. which means that i'll be ironing last week's washing this week, again. i almost couldn't bring myself to put on any of the shirts i'd ironed last night.

but it's not such a down monday la. i had milo with the turtle last night at al-amein so i'm quite pleased. thank God he didn't crash the car, although he was rather late in coming. i had to resist the urge to sms him to ask "YOUR CAR STALL AH??"

in other news, i don't think aunty patsy's going to cook me dinner anytime soon as mr quentin lee is still jobless. but at least that leaves him time to eat ice cream with me.

i've just come back from talking to the tea lady in the pantry. i tried to explain to her (in my rather not-so-good chinese) that i thought being a tea lady was probably more worthwhile than being a lawyer because tea ladies were more needed, somehow. and it just seems rather wrong that lawyers get so much more money.

and she said that people are paying for the use of lawyers' brain power.

oh, it's awful being shackled to your computer - and to facebook, as a consequence. this is the most time i have ever spent on some silly internet fad. i didn't get msn until j3, i don't have a laptop, and i hardly saw the fuss about friendster. i'm consoled by the fact that once my interships are over i'll spend less, if any, time on facebook.

computers give me a headache. really. so does air-conditioning. i don't ever want to get used to these two things. but looking at the way things are going -

the only saving grace about this entire thing is the wonderful view of the sky. and, from my window, i can see the ferris wheel. if i do get called to the bar (i have a strong feeling i will be, no matter that i have these grand lit teacher dreams) the one thing i'll look forward to is getting a room with a view. law firms are usually located on the tenth floor and above. and they're near the singapore river, which is near victoria concert hall and the esplanade and that's more or less my favourite part of singapore, besides bukit batok/bukit timah.

but what i wouldn't give to be out there, real ground beneath my feet and fresh wind in my hair.

alright. i HAVE to stop facebooking. people keep telling me i'm on facebook a lot. which is awful. but i'm just replying wall posts, what. i don't know why they have to do the whole mini-feed thing. makes you look like you're doing a lot when you're not la.

i love mysteries. when i have time i should really get down to reading all the agatha christies. anyhow, last night we went to lester's and we played the orient express! i think i like watching people solve the mystery a lot better than i actually like playing the game myself - i was simply dying to flip over the reconstruction card. especially since i'd had a rather long day chained to my computer -

the following conversation ensued in the car on the way home last night.

liz: oh chloe! you stay near valentino's! have you been there? (valentino's is this terribly expensive but "cosy homey oh so wonderful" italian restaurant, i'm SURE you've read about it in the papers. it's andrea de cruz' and pierre png's favourite restaurant)

chloe: no, it's too expensive

liz: oh but it's alright, you can bring your mum or your boyfriend or something you know, just once.

yonghong: HAHAHAHA! her boyfriend!! HAHAHA!

chloe: HAHAHA!! i have nothing, nothing, NOTHING (if i don't have you).

liz: what? what?

yonghong: she'll end up paying for her boyfriend lor. or they'll both end up washing dishes!! haha! and that's quite romantic what. she'll be like, jon, i have a soapsud in my eye.

chloe: yes, can you please take it out for me? oh! now i have MORE soapsuds in my eye because YOUR hands were soapy!

and the future of the legal service is in our hands.

i came to work extra early this morning so i could get my bsf homework done, and i picked up a cheese pancake and soyabean milk from jollibean at the arcade (opposite republic plaza, next to clifford centre). for $1.90 you get a regular douhua and pancake of your choice and for $2.00 you get an upsize douhua and pancake of your choice. the nice aunties tried to convince me to buy the $2.00 one but i told them i couldn't drink too much douhua or it would start coming out of my ears.

不能喝太多，喝太多会从耳朵出来。

bu neng he tai duo, he tai duo hui cong er duo chu lai.

it also doesn't help that there are three lousies currently on a bus to kl WITHOUT ME. fare thee well my merry men, and i hope jonong gets through.

there's nothing i'd rather be doing now than sleeping. then i'd wake up to a lunch of instant noodles with ntuc chicken and whatever vegetable's in the fridge, play the piano, watch some tv. go for a run or swim perhaps. i hope i never get so used to being chained to my computer that i forget how lovely it is to be outdoors; visiting the sunset whenever it catches my fancy or looking at the clouds and stars. the night sky's been really clear of late, have you noticed?

what i'm currently doing now is preparing to draft alterations to some company's memorandum and articles.

i almost cried last night - okay, i did tear - because of the 9 o'clock show. note how we've taken to calling all chinese serials at nine the 9 o'clock show. it's a very singaporean thing. just say "did you watch the 9 o'clock show?" and whoever you're talking to will instantly know what you're talking about. chances are they grew up watching all your old favourites, like xing ah lang and jing zen tou - and professed undying support for either zoe tay or fann wong at some point.

i staunchly professed adoration for fann wong - you could never support both. besides, when i was ten, the father of my friend staying across the road said i looked like her.

my favourite caldecott hill actress is currently huang biren. she deserves a hong xing da jiang for her role in this 9 o'clock show.

zhichao and the tree, and the flip-flop theory part 2

there's perfect sleep weather today. or running weather, whichever you like.

you know what's worse than doing data-entry? data-entry in chinese, particularly when the handwriting of those who filled up the forms is totally illegible. but there are perks. because i had to help _____ do this, i moved to a proper room with a window and a view. and it's lovely, the sky's my favourite slate-bluegrey and towards the horizon there's a band of some greyish-orangey yellow colour.

***

i'd wanted to blog about my first week interning over the weekend but blogger was down. as it is, there're now twenty minutes to lunch but i'll try to talk about everything which happened. i'm into my second week at _______ now, and zhichao keeps telling me he wants next week to come. ostensibly because he wants to finish the internship but really because he's worried about results.

potted plants, indeed. i'm sure it was a tree (don't you just hate these cryptic things people write about on blogs).

also, josh has joined us. he sms-ed me yesterday when he was in the meeting room waiting to sign the confidentiality agreements: omg i got lost in the lift!

***

we walked past a spinelli's outlet on the way back to the office on wednesday; i love the smell of coffee, and the look of chocolate cake in those glass display things. dark, rich, glossy. i think i like them so much because they look very neat, especially when they're topped with little marshmallows, and/or pieces of chocolate moulded into flowers, fans.

coffee smells better than it tastes. you think? i was telling zhichao on our second day - and he was the first person i actually admitted it to - that i don't drink coffee because it's very bitter without sugar and milk, and sugar and milk is fattening. i only ever have kopi-c-kosong when i'm in dire need of a caffeine boost.

the coffee from the coffee machine in the office is pretty good, but it's got a slightly metallic taste. i tried some for jon's sake, because he needs it. i also like cappucinos with milk and no sugar, but i think that's beyond the capabilities of the coffee machine.

***

i think, like marigold did, we all feel glad at some point of time that other people cannot know what we're thinking. at a board meeting last friday i could barely hear what one of the directors was saying in heavily Korean accented english. the director, dandruff visible in the hair just above his part, kept fidgeting in his seat. bet the rest of them weren't listening either, but thinking about tea.

board meetings are boar-ing!

i've also decided that people hold shares so they can eat. they feed you very well at extraordinary general meetings. i suppose there are monetary benefits in the form of dividends but the food comes more often, plus it's FREE!

***

i believe that the court shoes of the world (flats included, can you beat that?) have united to make my feet utterly and totally miserable. last week, four people suggested three ways for me to make them happier.

1. cherissa (the year three intern) and mui kheng told me i should bite any new shoes... so they won't bite you back. according to mui kheng this REALLY WORKS.

verdict: i haven't tried it, and i don't intend to. haha.

2. the turtle, in typical teenage mutant male fashion, told me to wear socks. he even offered me a white pair.

verdict: dude, no.

3. hannah from my bsf group told me to slather my feet in moisturiser. confirm won't get blisters one.

verdict: this works! and best of all, my feet are happy and smell nice.

of course i would say just change the dress code, and let everyone wear flip flops to work.

but i figured (during the board meeting i spoke of) that there's no point changing the system, because it's just one of those things. like how tea ladies and garbage collectors get paid so little even though they do so much. it's just the way the world's turned out. there HAS to be this division between work-wear and casual clothing.

the following is of course totally untrue (as zhichao will testify, seeing as he was looking at shoes online) but jon said that for guys it's very simple: they have shoes which make noise and shoes which don't.

still, he has a point. if we started classifying things that way, maybe we could have flip-flops as work-wear. like you can wear flip-flops which don't make noise for work, and flip-flops which do out of work.

i TOLD you about board meetings already, right?

i started my intership at ________ today, and the very nice lawyer i ended up being attached to and i were walking out from a client meeting to catch a cab back to the office when she said,"it's really good being at (insert name of law firm here). you get to see what goes on behind the scenes with all these multi-million dollar transactions ... quite exciting right. but then you realise, that the people behind these transactions, they're just - people."

we all are, really.

***
because the very nice lawyer was so very nice, i offered to help her go down after work to psa building to check some documents, and she told me to take a cab - because it was rush hour, it cost an amazing TEN DOLLARS AND TWENTY CENTS to get there from raffles place. absolutely amazing, seeing as the journey would have taken about 7-10 minutes if there hadn't been rush hour traffic.

despite the fact that the cab fare's going to be charged to the company account, the amount is still amazing. i was replying jon's sms on the way to psa, telling him i'd call him later because i was talking to the cab driver. he told me later on that the moment i said that, he knew i was doing some work thing - how can anyone bear to spend so much money on cab fare?? and this is why people say lawyers earn too much money. if i'm not wrong all cab fare gets billed to the clients. it beats taking the bus, but, surely... i have no right to complain anyhow. and it DOES save a lot of time. still, i feel vaguely uneasy about it, almost as if it's rather unethical.

but i did have a rather interesting conversation with the taxi driver. he told me that he thinks the boys of today aren't growing up to be "da4 nan2 ren2," or, literally translated, "big men" - i.e. what we would today (rightly or wrongly) call male chauvinist pigs. in further off times this simply meant that the men took the role of breadwinners on themselves.

big men are those who tell their wives to stay at home and look after the house and the children, and they work like mad to keep the family going. instill the right values - thriftiness, enough family time when the kids are not in school - and everything will be good. he went on for a good ten minutes, past vivocity, about how boys (well, the men of today rather), have forgotten what it's like to make sacrifices for their families, for their wives - he said (in chinese), "maybe my wife can't go shopping everyday if she doesn't work. if she stays at home, wakes up and makes me breakfast, then sends the kids to school and keeps the household running. but the peace and comfort she gets in her heart from not being stressed at work is worth more than anything money can buy." when i told my mother this over dinner, it was she who said,"so would you say that's very male chauvinist?"

the answer i gave, obviously, was no.

i tried valiantly to defend the men of today, but my chinese wasn't good enough. i said something along the lines of my generation (therefore including girls) is just spoilt, we don't know the meaning of eating salt and hard work and chi1 ku3. and that parents are the ones to blame because they get maids etc. but i don't think that's what he was trying to say, really. and that wasn't what i really wanted to say either. i wanted to say something along the lines of "women just want more rights now," that whole "we deserve equal opportunities as females because anything men can do we can do just as well, if not better" thing. it's true, i think that's why the men of today are becoming increasingly emasculated.

it's a pity, really. quite a travesty. not that women should be meek, or that we shouldn't stand up for ourselves - i daresay we're superior to men in some, but not all ways, and we should stand up for what we know is right, especially when we know the men just don't get it.

also, the bible says that wives should submit to their husbands, but it definitely doesn't mean women should be dominated by men. it just means that women should feel like women lor. you get what i'm trying to say? the most awful thing about it all is that we're to blame for feeling unfeminine. in these times, particularly with the cost of living in singapore, i think marriage, and setting up a home's a partnership thing - a joint venture. but it shouldn't get to the point where husbands let their wives work longer hours than they do, and/or earn bigger bucks. it's just not quite right, somehow.

all that being said, i do know some extremely nice boys who would willingly work their asses off if it came down to it. i was tempted to tell the taxi driver that i thought my boyfriend was a "da nan ren" but i figured that'd have been too nauseating.

yesterday, i gave quentin a job recommendation. and he had the nerve to tell me that admin work was not of a "value-adding" nature.

!!!!!

oh well. i hope aunty patsy will cook me dinner again soon.

***
i went for a run just now, and this lady approached me as i was nearing sixth avenue, anxiously asking if i'd seen her dog. he's small and black and looks a bit like a cat. you came from coronation plaza, right? i wanted to tell her that i saw him, because i saw tears starting to form in her eyes and they were reflecting the lights at the bus stop. but i hadn't seen him, and i had to say no. all the best looking for him, i said.

which encounter made me think of something a very nice girl i spoke to at jaime's party said, about how she wanted to have a dog instead of a child. because you might bring a child up well until he's twenty and then he might flip for no reason. imagine the hurt, she said. if you can cry for a lost dog, what more for a child?

and i also saw the garbage collectors - there were two of them, and they stopped at every single dustbin along bukit timah road. i'm not kidding. i saw them as i was leaving the nie track, and they drove on into the night as i crossed the overhead bridge into my estate.

these things we should be thankful for, things we don't even know about until some chance encounter, out running late at night - and it was late, around 2340.

really, we're all just people.

ADELE!! thanks for the tip, haha. quentin and i shall drag ian out for interaction on tuesdays at suppertime then.

today i made an investment for the future, it was all of $13.55. since the turtle's been so garang-ly practising piano, i decided i might as well join him, and attempt to earn back all the money my parents spent on piano lessons for almost 12 years of my life - i finally cleared grade 8 in j2. i decided that i would attempt to practise to become "able-to-perform," i.e. sing and play at the same time. not "performance-standard" as such, but "able-to-perform". christmas songs and the like, you know? then i can actually attempt to get gigs over christmas (as if it's that easy).

so, i bought a manuscript book and a chord book - a chord dictionary, rather, with all the chords you'll ever need - supposedly. on retrospect i probably could have found something like that online and printed it out for a fraction of the price, but oh well. i'm quite inept, really, and quite messy, so i don't think it's such a bad thing that i've actually got chords CONSOLIDATED, and not on loose sheets of paper. i'm going to write lead sheets for myself - stop pooh-poohing, i already admitted i was inept, i need to see the notes, especially since all these christmas songs have rather complicated chords. now i've got the sounds, i've got to figure out what i'm going to do with them. if i even have enough time to, i start interning next week.

***
i've been wanting to share about chinese new year for the longest time - well, seeing as it was in february, it's obviously been a long time. sharing with pictures and all, but i realised they're all on my dad's laptop and i'm too lazy to go transfer them to my computer. but it was just a lot about how i appreciate my family very much and love them even more, and how i realised what the meaning of true love is - i think. i took pictures of my maternal grandparents, and my paternal grandmother's best friend and her husband which i wanted to put up, because they're really lovely people. in all senses of the word "lovely."

take my maternal grandparents. my grandfather had a stroke when i was around nine or ten, and my grandmother's been taking care of him ever since. she complains now and then, but she's remained faithfully by his side, accompanies him to all his physiotherapy sessions, cooks his meals, supports him when he walks - which is no joke, because he walks extremely slowly now. my mother told me the other day that after his heart bypass surgery, my grandmother arrived at the hospital every day when visiting hours began (she cooked nourishing food for him as well, i think) and left only when visiting hours ended. every single day. and the doctor commented to my mother that it was impossible to find dedication of this sort in young people nowadays.

my mother always says my (our?) generation can't take pain - we give up on our relationships easily, but in the past you got married and that was it, you had to make it work. no nonsense about finding true love after marriage with someone else, or having "irreconciliable differences" and getting a divorce - divorces were shameful things in those days. even when our parents' generation dated - i suppose they were just as unsure as humans beings will always, always be - but they knew that they were dating to see if it would one day be for keeps. relationships meant more than just holding someone's hand, or having that person ferry you around to various places.

then there's my paternal grandmother's best friend. her husband's diabetes worsened drastically recently, and he's now dependent on her for everything. she complains about it, but she still does everything for him anyway. if you think about the marriage vows, there's actually nothing very surprising about all this, because it's what you pledge to do when you get married. in sickness and health, for richer or poorer, better or worse, till death do you part. honestly though, i think such dedication, such unconditional love, really - it's surprising today, because we're too used to putting ourselves before others.

the both of them still wear their wedding rings, by the way. he, frail and thin now; wasted hands with skin turned baby-smooth, which once used to be rough and callused, carried me when i was a baby. her dark-skinned wrinkled hands, agile fingers kept busy with various craft-work as she sits in the living room with him day after day, surviving with him as the tv blares in the background - he can barely talk now. and on both their left fourth fingers, a circle of silver.

***
on that note, i'd like to think that God's teaching me each day what it means to love unconditionally, and that He's helping me to do so. oh, for old-fashionedness.

i was watching live from abbey road after swimfan just now - the killers were on and they did a cover of dire straits' romeo and juliet. i think it'd be nice to name my daughter (if i have ever have one) after a song. there's stella by starlight, there's amanda, jon says there's denise - but i think i'd want juliet. especially after this song. or maybe not - julie's quite nice too, there's so julie by low. if i name my daughter juliet she could be julie for short.

juliet when we made love you used to cry
you said i love you like the stars above, i'll love you till i die
there's a place for us you know the movie song
when you gonna realise, it was just that the time was wrong juliet?

i can't do the talk like they talk on tv
and i can't do a love song like the way it's meant to be
i can't do everything but i'd do anything for you
i can't do anything except be in love with you

and all i do is miss you and the way we used to be
all i do is keep the beat and bad company
all i do is kiss you through the bars of a rhyme
juliet i'd do the stars with you any time - romeo and juliet

quentin and ian acting gay/bryan in his singlet (OH MY EYES)/christine and liz sighing over the fact that jon wasn't home/quentin and ian again, being silly at supper/and acting gay, again

our very own jonathan ong chungsiong turned 21 last thursday, and if you read my previous post ian and i were on our way to a top secret mission - yes we were going to surprise him at his house! even though liz had an exam the very next day and i had one the day after. you can see the pictures from that night above. finally ian, i have proper pictures of you with OTHER PEOPLE - you really ought to step out of the world of wow more often.

BUT. if you look at the pictures, you'll ask -

where's jon?

that's right, we got to his house and found out he wasn't in. we ended up writing "PANGSEH" all over the cake-box which held the cake christine had very nicely (and thoughtfully and lovingly) baked for him (and we didn't get any, boo). and then he says, "you guys didn't give me any hints, what!"

dude, it was meant to be a SURPRISE for a reason. we ended up going to al-ameen for milo and prata, which was quite enjoyable.