I saw this on PostSecret today. It made me wonder if this person was trying to justify her suffering by putting down those whose lives are a walk in the park. Or a case of sour grapes, because she could not live that way?

The sweetest thing in life is to emerge triumphant at the end of the tunnel, having defeated the troubles that plague you. This way, life would have greater meaning, as we have experienced the double-sidedness of life.

But what about those who are lucky enough never to be beset by misfortune, and continue soar and achieve greater heights without once meeting a giant stumbling block? I don't think anyone would complain against having that kind of destiny.

Life's just that way and everyone has different fortunes. We may do all we can to justify them, but in the end, those justifications serve no more purpose than to console ourselves (if we think we're unfortunate) or stroke our own ego (if we think we're fortunate).

I may have forgotten how to read, but I haven't forgot how to laugh.

Next up, Life Lessons From The Mother - if I feel like writing.

Preparing for exams is killing me (especially for goddamn genetic engineering!). I painstakingly read my course notes until I get a headache which mysteriously manages to creep to my throat. I kid you not. I strain to read so much at times that I end up with a sorethroat.

It's 1 week and 2 days to go before the end of the education phase of my life! I'm a little sad it has to end on such a bad note, but relieved that it is anyway, considering I had been at it for the past 16 years or so. My brain's had enough!

Here's to hoping I'd manage to scrape through the other 2 exams (I've conquered 2 already - kudos to myself). Cheers *glugs*

I'm Suicidal

It's the last month of the semester and there's a cavalcade of assignments and exams to be done with before I can finally reach the end of this torment. I slog for each of them - each time getting mentally burnt out quickly and having to force myself to nap in a state of frustration and despair. It's not like the work I have to do is difficult - if you're familiar with me and my multitude of idiosyncrasies by now, you should know it's the doggone reading problem.

So after today's assignment was finished, I fell into a deep state of despaired reverie, thinking what have I turned out to be and what will I become in the future. Things have not been fine for the longest time ever - no doubt there have been fluctuations and I have had some good moments in between - but in general, I feel very mentally and emotionally crippled to go on living this life. It is very cliched, but I often wonder what's the point to continue living?

I've labelled myself the love scavenger because it's exactly what I do. I scavenge from anyone, anywhere who can afford to give me some random display of affection. I'm a person who can't function without getting some solid love from the outside world, despite having a family who has smothered me with love (notwithstanding the father); and I've become convinced that my many strange problems stem from the fact that I'm deprived of love, not unlike a little child who has been abandoned by parents and grows up psychologically troubled.

I know, you might wonder, why can't you try to be independent? I guess that's not how I'm wired - I'm an emotionally dependent person as Hong so aptly put it. I'm not like my sister, who's very socially awkward, but is quite happy to live in her solitary bubble as long the family is still there to be her backbone.

I am alone right now and flailing and gasping for air every single minute (except when I'm inebriated). I've been deserted by two boyfriends in the span of a year and it has left me with a gaping wound to tend to, emotionally. I'm lacking friends because I don't know how to socialize.

Since socializing and reading are two of the most fundamental skills required in life, and I'm struggling with them now, then, yes, what's the point?

You might wonder how exactly is it that I scavenge for love, since we all know that scavenging is actually the term coined for tramps looking around in the trash for anything that might be useful to them in their pitiful, destitute lives. Well, obviously I look for the ex (the one that lives in NZ), but I'm lucky if I can get the scraps of his time. I'd log on to MSN and talk to people whom I hardly know, hoping to get some of those emoticon hugs and cuddles. I'd send out a flurry of texts across this part of the globe, for the sake of the little joy everytime a text pops in my inbox. But like the tramp, these are means by which I just get by in life, they barely nourish me in my hunger for love.




Please love me.

I pity my mom. Everytime I cried piteously in a state of drunkenness, she would be there patting me and crying for me. I didn't want her to see me in this state, so i ordered her to leave....

Poor mother. What kind of daugher did you give birth to? I'm so sorry.

After Sundown

After writing the previous post, and reading it to check for errors with some difficulty, I tried to commit myself to my homework. Barely half an hour later I am scrunching my face in agony and tears are pouring down my face non-stop. To read each word hurts me and to read many thousands more can only cause the agony to mount even further and the tears to flow unhaltingly.

It's been a year since this reading problem came back in full-force. And yet, it has never failed to make me feel like a freak, a wretch, a failure each time it accosts me. What's wrong with me? Am I the only person in this whole wide world with such an anomaly?

Only a month to go before my uni life ends, and I can't bear to imagine the amount of suffering I have to endure in that period. The fact that uni is ending soon isn't any consolation at all when I feel like I have lost one of the most basic skills to live. What happened?

Bounce-back Sunday

After the many drinking sessions, my sleep these days have featured lengthy, detailed dreams about things done, undone, and waiting to be done in real life. In them, I lived my life with much gusto: I severely chastised my dad for his lack of emotional presence in the family and for being a pretty crap father in general; my mom and aunts weren’t spared the tongue-lashings either for the way they brought me up and made me turn out the way I am. But it wasn’t all ugly though: I carried out day-to-day tasks with great aplomb, without anxiety being a pesky hindrance; I laughed and socialized with much joie de vivre; and loved and made love with reckless abandon. My life in dreams has been a substitute for the life that I want to live in reality, but have not been able to.

So this morning, I woke up rather perky, uplifted by my alternate reality and quite frankly, sick of the drunken slothfulness that I had been engaging in in the past couple of days. I hadn’t showered in two days so I stepped into the bathroom and had the most invigorating steaming hot shower that I greatly relished. The therapeutic effects of scalding water thundering upon and cascading down your body, the hazy steam swirling and dancing about you and the peaceful emptiness of your thoughts as you carry out the familiar routine of washing yourself, is really second-to-none.

And boy, I sure needed that shower. The two days of not showering had left my hair in a greasy limp state, the unremoved makeup from my face being the catalyst for more angry pimples, and my body emanating various odours that only someone head-over-heels crazy for me could adore (pheromones!). After the corporeal spring-cleaning, I spruced up and gave myself a good grooming down. A few hours later, I was ready to step out of the house.

I initially (and with great reluctance) intended on going to university for a gym session and starting on my mountain of assignments. So I boarded the bus with fatigue and arrived there with still greater fatigue and forced myself to pound the treadmill. I hadn’t been to the gym in a week and had forgotten the miraculous effects that a mere 20 minutes of running would provide: a satisfying trickle of sweat down my body leaving a healthy sheen on my skin, and the flow of endorphins that would buoy me for a couple of hours afterwards, at most.

There was this song in my iPod – Papa Roach’s Last Resort that I had been refraining from listening to, lest it drag me deeper into a negative state of mind. But listening to it while running today was surprisingly gratifying because it truly reflected my sentiments of late – that I was in great agony and suicide was a very appealing way to end it. Contrary to what you may think, the suicidal ideations that depressed people have aren’t actually bad, because in a perverse way, it gives them hope that their suffering could come to an end. And when the ray of hope shines through, we actually want to do something positive about our lives rather than ending it. Bad roundabout explanation maybe, but hope you guys get it.

I already knew that I would be abandoning my plan of studying at uni after gym. Coincidentally, Hong was in town and we had a quick first-time real-life meeting after a year of randomly meeting via Friendster and subsequently being MSN buddies. That was cool since we had wanted to meet for a while but never quite got down to it. The highlight of my day, really, was the sporadic affectionate hair ruffles he gave me :D After a year of listening to me whine about how deprived of love I was and how I had a tendency to beg and scavenge for scraps of love from random people, he, out of the blue, pulled me to his chest and gave my hair a good ruffle. Aw. Being the awkward one that I am, I said it felt weird doing that because we weren’t a couple, so he stuck to exceedingly platonic hair ruffles after that >.<

We had milk tea, deciding to brave the melamine-tainted milk fiasco, but found out that they tasted rather odd (though it’s probably not melamine-related). Hong announced that this had put him off milk tea for a while, and I certainly wasn’t going to visit that place ever again. We sojourned to Dunkin Donut’s afterwards, where he and his entourage bought truckloads of them back to where they came from: Christchurch. Apparently, Christchurchians (I made that name up) are so deprived of DDs that when they pop by Auckland, they have to buy them as though DDs was The Souvenir of Auckland. After an hour of so of our rendezvous, we said our goodbyes as he boarded his shuttle headed for the airport. No more hair ruffles :(

And so, after this relatively eventful and unslothful day, I walked back home with a slight spring in my step. Being the monkey-see-monkey-do person that I am, I had bought my share of half a dozen DDs as well. My lifestyle of the past week,where I had avoided gym and sat on my laurels drinking, had added a kg to my weight, and after devouring my decadent purchase tonight, I’m sure I’d add another.

Note to self: remember the benefits of running (shedding kgs and piling on endorphins) and do it as much as possible.

Chronicles of an alcoholic

I guess I portray the image of someone who drinks her days away, since most most my posts are written in a drunken stupor. That is quite true now, but more importantly, I can only be fucked to write when I'm buoyed by alcohol.

Does that make me a good-for-nothing person when I drink so much? I'd like to think that I have been a good girl in attending most of my classes the whole week, and suffered much in the process, and that I deserve it on a Friday night. However, that may not be true now, as I discover that I'm slowly succumbing to hedonism and wanting to be as pain-free as possible.

I drank on a Thursday night, on a Friday, and am now drinking on a Saturday afternoon. I can't justify my drinking anymore in the way some people drink after a hard day's work to unwind. I can't say that my drinking sessions are deserved after a stipulated amount of hard work.

All I know is that I drink because my yesterdays were painful. The pain spilled over to the current day, deeply burning into my memory, so that I needed to banish it from the forefront of my thoughts. Yesterday I was traumatised by my lab because I couldn't read the simple instructions without the jitters in my hands. I was traumatised when I went shopping with a friend by the vast array of items for sale available everywhere that it made me confused. Pah... small insignificant worries you may say. But you could not imagine the horrible suffering I had to endure during these simple day-to-day events. Put yourself in my shoes and you would begin to wince as I do and eventually turn to the bottle.

..........

I'm a terrible writer. I can hardly string my thoughts together to come up with coherent sentences and paragraphs. And it's not because I'm drinking. It's this fucking anxiety and self-consciousness that has robbed me away of all my faculties. Things that should be so easy and can be accomplished at the blink of an eye or a snap of the fingers, I find them terribly difficult.

I often write my blog in my mind and hope that when I'm up to it, I could type them out in the way I had written it so fluently in my mind. But it never works out that way. As I'm writing this, I am frustrated at my lack of articulateness and even thought about deleting this blog for good. I had told myself countless times that this blog would be an avenue to chronicle my life and that I shouldn't be worried about the expectations of readers. But it didn't work. I stumbled many a time as I wrote this.

Sigh if only there was some way where my thoughts could be accurately transduced into written form. Then I would be able to tell you the many fascinating thoughts that crossed my mind. Like how when this morning I woke up and saw my mug on the coffee table. There it was standing alone: a receptacle for carrying liquids for my consumption. But it has a 5 year history behind it - it was bought by me and my aunt when I first immigrated over here. My aunt has since passed away, but the mug still stood there unfazed and proud. Over the years it has carried various innocuous drinks, but lately this has been replaced by alcoholic drinks. Thats how this mug has evolved in the past 5 years: the humans associated with it have changed in many ways, but it per se hasn't changed at all - only its contents.

Leave me to this pleasant haze of surreality now. I regret that I haven't been able to express my thoughts and feelings as I would have liked to. There are so many things to be regretted. But why regret, when we can live for the present moment? And thats how I chose to do it - clutching my mug filled with this potion that I think is the key to the shackles that so weigh me down in life, and lets me be free.