sideways tiara

New

2012-01-23T23:52:00.002+11:00

Today's the first day of the year for us Chinese and our Korean and Vietnamese kin, and anyone else who goes by the lunar calendar. All my best wishes to you for the year ahead. May you find yourself on the road to all that your heart desires.

Scorcher

2012-01-21T17:53:00.001+11:00

Thirty-seven degrees.

What else did I do in December?

2012-01-13T17:03:00.000+11:00

After looking through my pictures taken in that month, it appears this post might just as well be titled "What else did I eat in December?" I think I should make concerted effort to take pictures of other things I do, because I really do more than eat.

Honestly.

But since the food-skewed pictures have been taken, I might as well share the main highlights.

A couple of months ago, feeling restless and hungry, I took a good-sized detour on my way home from church. "Huge" in the manner of "unnecessarily crossed river even though church and home lie on the same bank". The happy result was my discovery of this Vietnamese restaurant on the business end of Northbridge. It's spacious, charmingly dingy, and services authentic, subtly flavoured food that doesn't leave me parched. I've returned a few times since, seemingly happier with each successive experience.

December also being the month of Christmas, there was the work Christmas lunch. The set menu was a forehead-slapping ordeal for indecisive me. Did I want festive (turkey) or favourite (fish)? Unusual (veal)? Or how about going totally veggie? Veal won in the end, tweaking my animal-loving, humane-lifestyle sensitivities in the nose.

And then there was that full Sunday, which doesn't happen often at all these days (I write this thankfully, remembering seasons not so long ago when Sundays were more tightly scheduled, physically depleting, emotionally fraught and spiritually wounding than any other day). I was hungry after church and needed something to tide me over before our late-afternoon date with deep-fried sushi which was to take place before we went to the jazz club, finally, only eight months after we'd first talked about it. This kransky roll filled the gap just right.

You'd have thought I'd made Herr and Frau Hotdog's day when I insisted on having mine the way they would, the way any self-respecting German would. "Onions?" she'd asked, beaming when I nodded. Another nod to sauerkraut, and the beam got wider. But I have never seen a happier sausage-selling pair than these two when I winced at the offer of ketchup and accepted a squirt of mustard instead, not the common-or-garden mustard next to the ketchup but this secret mustard from the small bottle that stood on its own far away from the standard fixings. ("It is very, very hot. Trust me, you don't want too much." She underestimated my Malaysian-raised palate. I will have more of the "very, very hot" mustard next time.)

So, it appears I'm still eating meat. More uncomfortable dialogue between the different parts of me. Yippee.

Seize the fluffy, small, stumpy-billed moment

2012-01-07T12:43:00.000+11:00

This lot were among those waddling around UWA's Arts courtyard when I had business being there a month ago.

I am of the "fluffy = adorable = where's my camera?" persuasion, which can be awkward on days when you've chosen to use the oversize tote with but one compartment and are holding abstracts from the conference on music and emotion in one hand, tea and a scone in the other.

But you do what you have to, because ducklings don't stay ducklings forever.

It isn't that the conference was such a drag that I had to go looking for fowl to photograph, or stay awake by posing donkey and conference materials just so. It was an interesting, eclectic three days. I made friends with an Iban girl studying music education in KL and an Australian Chinese doing her PhD in Spanish piano music at my alma mater. ("Friends" of the sort you have animated, stimulating conversations with at lunch and tea breaks but know you're unlikely ever to meet again.) Made contact with music therapy types. Listened to findings from music therapy studies on all sorts of populations: old, intellectually challenged, dying, friendly. Revised a long-ago lesson: People who can write up an interesting session abstract are not necessarily as gifted at making the actual session work. Watched a Japanese dude concentrate really hard on a score as a computer read his brain waves and played the music for all to hear.

And yet, when it was all over, I didn't wish that I could keep on listening to talks and learning from people who've done the hard yards with their clients... what I wished for was time to return to the courtyard soon with a book, beverage and sandwich, and all the time I wanted to sit and read and listen and watch ducks. A wish that has high chances of coming true.

I like it old-school

2012-01-03T22:30:00.000+11:00

I have a soft spot for hand-lettered signs.

Vietnamese eatery in a tiny arcade, Balmain, NSW

It follows, then, that I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. And Part 1. I hope you do, too.

Twelve years

2011-12-17T13:56:00.002+11:00

It seems a lifetime ago that the whole house stood still. So many changes since then: lines on faces, hairs turned grey, a grandson born, all the familiar feline forms that my mother knew gone the way of all cats.

Work and life alike throw me plenty of opportunities to talk about grief, to help others unpack theirs. That's the thing about grief, it really is a package. Its contents are mixed. Some days you reach in and pull out comfort, warm from the sun and smelling of cosy cuddles and laughs, whispered secrets and giggles and Saturday-morning shopping excursions.

At other times you feel bitten, as by a shark rather than by a mosquito: a large chunk of you, the part of you that this person shaped, is gone and you wonder how you go on. They don't make prostheses for that, but the human spirit is a wonderful regenerative thing. What grows back will never be what you had before, but it isn't completely foreign. I see others' experiences of grief, some much older than mine, and count myself blessed for the peace that I have.

I think I would have been a very different person if my mother were still alive. I don't know how much I'd have liked being that person. I only know and love the one I am now. I hope she does, too. From the nineteen years I had with her I've taken a lot, good and bad. A public blog is no place to tell about the bad. The good, no book on earth could hold.

I didn't feel any great pressure to post this today and only today, on the anniversary date. It worked out well that it fell on a Saturday this year, giving me time to blog. But truly, most days are the same. There's rarely, or never, a day when I don't think of her and miss her. It's really hard not to think of a person you strongly resemble in face and voice. But I've had a dozen years to find a way to live without the pillar of my earlier life. So far, by the grace of God, the way has been a good one to travel.

If you're one of those who knew and loved her too, raise a glass (okay, coffee mug -- containing a brew as strong as the mug can handle; we can always have a group tremour-and-tic session after) with me in honour and memory of the beautiful, tenacious, long-suffering, glad-hearted, cat-loving woman who was my (and my brother's) Mummy. Sally Saw Leng Geok, 1948-1999.

Easy

2011-12-16T15:39:00.000+11:00

... like Friday mornin'.

Short short story: Wave

2011-12-02T21:00:00.003+11:00

I completed a "short" story recently. It was nearly 5,000 words long. So I decided to create more of a distinction between short and short. I think flash fiction is traditionally capped at the 100-word mark. If you know me at all, you'll laugh at the thought of me keeping my thoughts so succinct.

Anyway: tell me what you think. It's been too long since I posted fiction here.

It was too hot to care about anything as she walked home from school that first day of summer, not even that her skirt was riding up and her old gym shorts were probably showing. At first she thought the bird was waving for help; it looked so like a greeting, a plea. Hi there. I am small and weak and hurt. Can you help? She looked both ways and hurried to the middle of the road. Immediately she saw the crushed head, the tiny still chest. Calmly, she picked up the body and walked back to the shaded kerb, laying it by a tree. She knew it was well past any pain but it seemed wrong to leave this defenceless one to be smashed and spattered by traffic. Later she would remember the warm, soft feathers, the closed eyes and slightly open beak, and she would weep. Later she would realise that was the first time in years that she had touched another living thing. Later she would wonder why, when softness had finally returned, it had come so sad and still. Now, she simply picked up her backpack and walked on home, gym shorts exposed.

Sketchbook Project Limited Edition 2012

2011-11-30T09:49:00.004+11:00

Should I do it? I've been spending so much of my time surrounded by text, words, all these linear arrangements of meaning. I think it would do me good to have an outlet in the wide open, even if it's a small, portable, recycled paper wide open.

People like this inspire me:

Want to join me? Anyone? Email/comment by December 11 if you're interested. Fees and FAQs here.

Sweet, green, crunchy

2011-11-27T10:32:00.002+11:00

My prior experience of asparagus has tended a little too far to the side of "like miniature tree trunks, a little greener but just as fibrous". Chewing like a beaver when you don't have the teeth for it gets old very fast. For this reason, I hadn't bought asparagus for over a year.

But these seem to be an entirely different creature: slender young stalks, making up nearly twice as many in a bundle of the same thickness. Just right for tossing quickly in a hot pan before adding cooked pasta and then, immediately after the heat is switched off, tearing in pieces of smoked salmon and a quick shake of freshly ground black pepper. Grated Parmesan over the top if you like, but the fish and pepper are all the flavour that most would need.

A brown study

2011-11-25T10:01:00.003+11:00

The vegetable world has its version of beauty queens: those showy, shiny ones proudly presented by their growers at agricultural fairs, those winners of ribbons and medals, those much-photographed models admired by the masses.

Then, I think, it also has its version of the mousy bank teller, the janitor with the smile nobody notices, the bus driver. Quiet beauties who do their work and pass their days unnoticed by most, yet treasured by the ones who do see them.

These two were waiting for me at the Wanneroo Markets. A shapely squash, and the shiniest, smoothest onion I have ever seen.

It just seems to me, we're surrounded by so many of these -- vegetable and human alike. They aren't loudly acclaimed but we'd notice their absence. Each one is unique, yet we allow our stereotypes and preconceptions to take away their individuality. Seems such a waste to me, that we'd so let the beauty pass us by.

The return of Christmas

2011-11-23T20:59:00.004+11:00

Decade-old aversion to Christmas trees broken.

Line from poignant not-quite-Christmas*, yet still moving, "Christmas" song fulfilled.

Donkey unintentionally made to resemble Dame Edna.

What a full Sunday, and what a good weekend. Thank you, Perth northern suburbs friends and family.

*I don't think Christmas is Christmas unless it makes direct reference to Christ, which means I don't think 'When Christmas Comes To Town' is a Christmas song in spite of its title. But it is nice.

Vegetable lasagne

2011-11-14T21:47:00.003+11:00

Unlike other meat-free dishes I've tried, this one has enough flavour and texture not to have me missing the meat. It's something that frequently confounds me, that in spite of my animal-loving, compassion-for-all-living creatures ways, I enjoy the taste of meat. They are uncomfortable roommates in my consciousness, these two characteristics.

The first time I tried this, I thought, "Sure, it tastes good, and sure, you don't long for the filling wholesomeness of meat. But is it worth all that time?"

The 15 minutes or so of slicing?

The nearly two hours of pre-roasting the slices? And then nearly half an hour arranging everything in careful layers? And then another 45 minutes of baking?

The second time I made it was after I decided that yes, it's worth the time, but I'd feel the pinch much less if I paid in instalments.

Hence, on the Sunday, the slicing and roasting, the transport of the frozen mushroom-and-potato puree from freezer to fridge. The recipe calls for white sauce, which is made of butter and white flour. I pooh-pooh your refined carbs, your empty calories, Recipe People. (Save them for the pasta sheets.) A few weeks ago I had tried and failed to make a mushroom soup thickened with potato rather than flour. The failure turned out to be quite a success in making a respectable white-sauce substitute for lasagne.

Then on Tuesday, after a hairy day at work that made me think those hard-nosed Temperance types with their wholesale shunning of alcohol consumption do have a point yes they do oh someone please get me a nice dim room with no stimulation and also hmm only about a kilo of chocolate yes milk is fine but at least 50% cocoa please, I came home needing to bake and voila! For once, something was already all set to be baked. Well, layered first, but after a day like that it was nice to have something so tactile and structured and real to turn my hands to.

And again I did that thing where I forget to photograph a cross-section before storage, when these vegetables with their watery cells tend to lose their shape and photogenic attributes. But before I took a knife to it, there it was. Inviting me to partake of the stretchy and the gooey and the crunchy and the mushy and all that is around and in between, to remember that what had happened that day at work and what sat before me in a baking dish had equal place in my life. That "life to the full" doesn't always mean what I imagine to be "life to the perfect", but it is good anyway.

So worth the time.

Buckwheat granola

2011-11-05T11:51:00.003+11:00

I followed Andy Bellatti's recipe for Oil-Free Autumn Buckwheat Granola, using the sweetener-free option. I can't call mine "oil-free", because I incorporated a tiny knob of butter during the last stirring. Neither is it Autumn over here in the southern hemisphere.

Nonetheless, it's a recipe I'm glad I tried, and will probably keep using. Conditions are much less rumbly and churny after eating this, compared with oat-based mixes.

While the mix was still warm, I filled my silicone teddy bears with it and stored them in the fridge (something that Mr Bellatti doesn't mention, but maybe his apples were completely dried and maybe he doesn't live in a place so humid that kiwi fruits sweat).

I have finally discovered a delicious breakfast that will not have me weak with hunger one hour later:

The bear and rye bread go in the toaster oven together, for 4 minutes. Warm, re-toasted granola as a chaser to a soft-boiled egg just done, interspersed with mouthfuls of nutty rye: it's a nice way to see 6.30am in, if you possess a brain that for some reason won't register that you live very close to work and really don't have to wake up at the crack of dawn every day.

I hope she enjoyed her birthday as much as I did

2011-11-02T20:09:00.008+11:00

Because I moved west just short of missing one Queen's Birthday holiday, and then stubbornly stuck it out here when all human instincts were telling me to just throw in the towel already and return to the ol' birthplace, I got to experience the holiday twice this year. And the irony is: neither one made a difference to my usual routine. The first, dreary, soaking wet one out East, I was unemployed. The second took place at the end of my first week (a very happy, satisfied, fulfilled week) at work... on the one day a week that I wouldn't ordinarily be working anyway.

Nonetheless, it was a great day. I hope the birthday girl enjoyed all that my home city of the moment held out to her. (Going by the news, that would be more bouquets than even the most crowded English parlour could hold, and a chance to slum it with the sizzled-sausage-clutching masses.)

I kept it low-key, with crochet overlooking the Indian Ocean.

I'd carefully packed all the supplies needed to continue with the current work in progress, because I knew that the path back from my morning meeting at Hillarys would include many enticing places to stop and listen to the waves.

It was a productive time, with not too many incidences of my starting with a foundation ring too large, neglecting to change colours, or forgetting how many rows I'd gone. And I haven't sworn out loud for years, but that day I didn't even think it, that's how well the crocheting went.

And then, while I was busy figuring out which angle to photograph from and quietly savouring the song of the waves... I felt something.

What was this sensation? Hair on my brow? Couldn't be, it was too... active.

Horrific memories came flooding back.

I had a brief flash of hairy legs before they darted back on top of my sunglasses, which I happened to be wearing as sunglasses are meant to be worn. I quickly pieced together that there was an unidentified arachnid with discernibly hairy appendages scurrying back and forth not two centimetres from my left eye.

Thanking God all the while (all the 0.5-second while that this was happening) for my unflappable demeanour, I calmly whipped them off and placed them on the table, avoiding sudden movements in case I'd got a specimen of the biting sort.

There were no bites, but all the same, I would be perfectly fine never to see another spider again.

Especially here:

There appears to be something wrong with my camera. I'm very sure that creature was at least five times as big in real life. Silly machine must be messing up its perspective.

Running With Scissors

2011-10-27T23:24:00.005+11:00

I've read a handful of child abuse accounts, but that didn't make Augusten Burroughs' Running With Scissors (2003, Atlantic Books, 304 pages) any more palatable. It's the sort of book that I hope will never become palatable to me -- yet that I go on reading anyway, because I don't want to be someone who assumes that bad things go away the moment I stop seeing them.

For a number of reasons, everything I read and watch gets pushed through a detailed assessment of how appropriate it would be for various audiences, mostly broken down by age. Between these pages lie stories that make me think, "This is no book for a child." A moment later, I'm jarred anew by the realisation that this is no life for a child, yet there it is: it happened, and here the grown Burroughs is to tell the tale. Given away at age 12 to a psychiatrist who appears -- pardon the expression -- loonier than anyone he's treating. Left to cope alone with the most frightening manifestations of his mother's severe mental illness. Allowed, while still legally a child, to be in a physical relationship with a man nearly 20 years older. What are they thinking? a voice yells with every chest-aching turn of the page. Don't they know that's statutory rape? Why doesn't she get help from someone who will help her get better? I know she's ill and that's not her fault, but how can she do this to her own child?

This one gets louder and louder with each passing chapter: Is there anybody -- just one person -- in this story who looks out for this boy? Who will give to him without expecting return? For whom he is priority number one?

I made it to the end and found that said person never turned up. It colours the world grey and powdery, bitter like dust in your mouth from walking around a construction site, to know that this evil happens constantly in the lives of too many small, vulnerable people. Yet, even with mouth dry, eyes streaming and heart wrenched, I knew this wasn't the last such book I'd read.

Reading helps me to understand, and that helps me to help. I have no illusions of myself as some magical healer, toting an all-purpose bandage for emotional wounds of all shapes and sizes. In fact, the more I see of just how much ugly this world is capable of, the poorer-equipped I feel to fight it. It isn't fun feeling helpless, but I think that's the key to being of any help at all. My colleagues who've been in helping professions for way longer tell me this is true. Clients come to us broken. We so crudely insult them if we give them the false promise that we, or anyone, will fix it. On the other side of that, though, is this great honour: that we get to walk alongside them while they discover the beauty that can radiate through the cracks. That, if we allow it, we are shown in the process the brokenness that is inherent in us, every one. And there, at our weakest, we find strength from beyond these broken selves.

Heigh ho, heigh ho

2011-10-24T10:21:00.004+11:00

It's off to work we go! The donkey too? You bet your stripey socks. We don't stock pickaxes in this house (or in most counselling offices) but a well-loved Muji pen does the trick.

I'm glad I woke up early enough to post this before I set off. It would have been that much harder to rhyme "ho" with "went".

These days

2011-10-14T22:09:00.002+11:00

It's nice to sit by the river with a book or two now, when the wind rolling off the water carries neither the biting chill of winter nor the fan-forced-oven blast of summer.

Poised

2011-10-13T14:28:00.000+11:00

Hello, horizon.

A borrowed welcome

2011-10-10T20:09:00.003+11:00

Dear newest little nephew,

This past Saturday, which I would later discover was to be your birthday, I went to the local library. As usual, I entered with the purpose of unburdening myself of borrowed reading and watching material; I left more heavily laden than I had come in.

For some reason, one of the things I picked up that day was a paperback copy of The Complete Nonsense & Other Verse of Edward Lear. Not that there's anything nonsensical about you, of course.

Today I was thumbing through the pages of "nonsense" (it's terribly insightful, more so than many of the "sensible" writings lying around) and came across a letter Mr Lear wrote to a newborn niece. It's quite long and I imagine your parents are busy feeding, burping, bathing, changing, dressing and altogether adoring you, so I won't require them to read you the whole thing. Only these lines:

"... I congratulate you heartily on coming into a world where if we look for it there is far more good & pleasure than we can use up -- even in the longest life... I therefore advise you to live & laugh as long as you can for your own pleasure, & that of all your belongings."

I look forward to seeing pictures of you that, doubtless, your parents will be sending along ANY MOMENT NOW (no pressure!). I look forward even more to meeting you in person. In the meantime, I give thanks, as I have done constantly from the moment I was told of your existence, for all that you are and were made to become.

Love,

One of your Kor-kors

1: One

2011-10-10T19:02:00.003+11:00

I thought it was fitting to end this last of my 31 series with "One". Not only because it's what comes after 2 when you're counting backwards; I do try to avoid redundancy in my language. "One" signifies a few things for me:

It signifies the idea of beginning; round number counting always begins with one. In order to have arrived at whatever age I am at the present moment, I first got to one. The seconds and days and years added themselves on -- but always one at a time, despite the seeming quickness or slowness of some seasons.

It signifies unity; within a person as well as with others. You don't have to be diagnosed with DID to be prone to disagreement with yourself. If you don't believe me, see what happens in your head the next time you reach for salty high-carb snacks that don't go with your diet; or when you need to decide whether to get out of bed for your daily run on a particularly drizzly day when your quilt is being very affectionate. For me, "one" is a reminder that I no longer fight myself over whether to go to work, whether to eat, whether I am bookish and analytical or creative and unstructured. I have found that it's absolutely possible, absolutely livable, to be bookish and creative and analytical and unstructured. Once I ceased to see the elements of my life as mutually exclusive, it became possible to live with them all, and that's such a relief because it doesn't feel nice to be rejected -- if only by yourself.

Finally, "one" signifies my Creator, the one without whom I wouldn't have made it through these nearly 31 years, let alone written 31 daily posts about them. I wouldn't say that faith is a huge part of my life; it is my life. It's a faith that has grown quite separate of my earlier experiences, mostly for the better; a faith that I have sought and asked for and wrestled with in order that it could become every bit my own. And what is faith without an object? Mine is utterly in God, who is one. Not "one of" a pantheon of guardian deities; just one. Not "one among" equals. One. Only. So massive that I can never coax my mind into understanding Him; so good that I can never stop wanting to.

When I began on Day 1, I wasn't sure I'd make it over these 31 days without skipping a day here and there -- there was this one particularly close shave that only barely scrapes through as an excuse for writing, but still... I did it! In case you missed any of them, here's 31. Thanks for reading.

2: Deep

2011-10-09T16:33:00.007+11:00

I was 75% of the way through my Master's before I realised I was achieving more than I was learning.

I was 23 before I saw that the Bible I'd been shown all of my life -- a confusing tangle of chapter and verse numbers, colons, names of people and races long dead -- was really a narrative, rich in meaning and experience, that continues to present day with a core message that never loses relevance.

I read so many books, essays, speeches out of context, never understanding until I saw the situations and backgrounds from which they'd arisen.

I met a great deal of people of people who were eager to know, "What do you do?", and from whom I was eager to hear the answer, before I realised that I would much rather know the answer to this one: Who are you?

More than ever before, now I want to know what's truest of any human, animal, idea, object or belief that crosses my path. I find that's usually not lying around on the surface for just anyone to see. I'm sick of taking things only at face value, of the laziness that leaves us ignorant and uncomprehending of the depths.

I'm far from the first to feel this way. There must be more of us around than I'm prone to think, or how would Leunig have thought to write the following prayer?

"God be with those who explore in the cause of understanding, whose search takes them far from what is familiar and comfortable and leads them into danger or terrifying loneliness. Let us try to understand their sometimes strange or difficult ways; their confronting or unusual language; the uncommon life of their emotions, for they have been affected and shaped and changed by their struggle at the frontiers of a wild darkness, just as we may be affected, shaped and changed by the insights they bring back to us. Bless them with strength and peace." (From When I Talk To You: A Cartoonist Talks To God)

3: Sky

2011-10-08T12:05:00.006+11:00

I enjoy looking up at what encircles our little planet. These are only samples; I think the best views are the ones that have me too enraptured to bother getting out the camera.

Clouds over Penang, Malaysia

Twilight in Macdonaldtown, Sydney

Overcast sunrise in Tamarama, Sydney

Morning in Wentworth Falls, NSW

Magic hour in Waverly Cemetery, Sydney

On the road southward, NSW

Summer blue, Haberfield, Sydney

First light, Mosman, Sydney

4: Body

2011-10-07T11:58:00.003+11:00

Eleven: A male schoolmate zips past the badminton court where we're having rhythmic gymnastics practice after school. "Hey you, I never noticed before that you have FAT LEGS!" For the rest of primary school -- a year and a bit -- this is what he calls me whenever he sees me. Up close, from a distance, anytime, loudly if nobody else is around to hear it, hissed under his breath when he doesn't want nearby classmates and teachers to detect his one-person verbal assault. FAT LEGS. Always I see it in block caps, stout and round as I must surely be, to have so caught the attention of a peer.

Fourteen: My aunt, sitting at the dining table with me and her daughter, demands of her, "Why is Sharon's face so nice and long? Yours is so round. Sharon, you don't eat a lot, do you? She [elbows my cousin] should learn from you."

Twenty-five: Walking to the basement car park after church, I rise on tiptoe to squeeze through the narrow gap between two bollards. Boyfriend-at-the-time drops his jaw in mock amazement, exclaiming altogether too loudly for an echo-filled basement, "Wow, you made it through! Guess you're not built like a house after all."

Six: Friends of my father who meet his family for the first time comment on his hefty son and slight daughter. "Of course, that's the way it should be. Girls shouldn't be too big. I wouldn't worry about her not eating much, that's how they stay thin."

Seven: "Is this your daughter? The one I met last year? She's bigger now, so cute! What happened, does she eat a lot now?"

Sixteen: "You've lost so much weight since I last saw you! Must be the stress from your dad's heart attack and all that. ['All that' = his nearly dying from the heart attack; a two-month recuperation before a quintuple bypass before a long recovery; helping my mum to deal with the strain of a husband and father who would not take responsibility for his health and never seemed to realise he was capering about on death's door.] But it looks good on you. Better than being on a diet!" Again I hear this at 18, 19, while being run off my feet with the combination of tertiary study in KL and accompanying a terminally ill mother to treatment in Singapore. Stress keeps you from eating. Stress makes you thin. Thin looks good. Stress makes you look good.

Twenty-three: My first ballet class since I was 11. Leotards and tights, hair in buns, the whole form-fitting outfit again to make it easier to note alignment and form. But I no longer have the uniformly pudgy, curve-less body of a child. I am almost at my thinnest ever, but I cannot bear to look directly at my reflection. My rented room in Sydney is a compact, tidy space of which one wall comprises floor-to-ceiling mirrored wardrobe doors. I am constantly in my own view, even when I don't want to be. That would be always.

Twenty-eight: I can look at myself now. I haven't made a hobby of it, but I don't cringe at the sight of myself or wonder if I'm taking up more of the mirror's width than I used to. I started eating at least three solid, nutritious meals a day only a year or two ago. I exercise regularly; because I want to stay flexible and healthy, not to keep myself from growing fat. I don't own a car anymore, so I'm forced to get up and walk to public transport if I want to get anywhere. People tell me I look good. I meet a good friend from KL when his ship sails into Botany. "Boy, you've gained weight!" are the first words I hear from him, yes, even before "Good to see you and thanks for travelling an hour and a half to meet me." They will continue to prick at me for a couple of years, the freely given comments on increase and decrease alike. But there comes a day, sometime in my 31st year, when they cease to bother me.

Nearly 31: Weight is only a number. Health can't be quantified, however much we try to take safety in "good" lipid counts and blood glucose. Food is no longer synonymous with control, nor size with power. As a child I never knew what it felt like to be enough, exactly as I was, to not be made much of just because I was thin and delicate or chubby and cute. As an adult I struggled to erase the memories of male taunts while trying to squeeze into a size and shape that would protect me from further attack. No more. I eat well now, with less concern for how much than how good it is for me. I move as much as I can. And I delight in every inch of the way I look, because I know that it's all a good idea to the one who made me this way. Nobody else's opinion matters.

Writing this post brought to mind this forgotten one from March 2006. Hope it also gives you something to chew on.

5: No

2011-10-06T21:11:00.004+11:00

Poor misunderstood No. It's associated with selfishness, with disobedience and disrespect, with impatient inflexible uncooperative people and difficult toddlers. It's assumed to be on the Dark Side of a duality on which Yes resides with sunshine, popsicles and all other Nice Things. So, Yes is good because when someone says Yes they're saying "I will do this", "I will make room for that", "I will give this to you". No is bad because of all the things we see people not doing, not making room for, not giving. It's harder to see that the No we hear is simply the other side of a Yes said to something else, something that might very well be far more deserving of that person than we are. That if we really want to nod to the important things in our lives, it's going to have to be a sideways shake to everything else.

I've found that most of us have a severely maladjusted sense of who/what deserves which answer, especially if we grew up with parents whose lives regularly said Yes to more work and No to spending time with their families. Or Yes to anything that would take us closer to being the Perfect All-Singing All-Dancing Plate-Spinning Excellent In All Areas Child and No to allowing us space to occupy this earth as our unadorned little selves. But childhood is far behind my generation now and life constantly lays a fresh multiple-choice question before us, with only two options. It could be time we learnt to decide for ourselves, instead of letting our families and pasts pencil in the answer on our behalf.

6: Language

2011-10-05T20:13:00.005+11:00

Yes, "Sharon" is my name. Yes of course I mean my official legal name. Well, it is the name my parents gave me -- um, there are lots of non-white parents the world over who give their children "Western" names at birth but, if you want to split hairs that way, mine's actually Hebrew. Oh, and my parents approved it but it was really my brother who chose my name when I was born. I know, not bad work for a four-year-old boy. I do realise I'm fortunate not to have had to go through life as Millennium Falcon Toh.

Thanks, you speak English really well, too. Oh, it's your first language so I shouldn't be surprised? Well, it's my first language as well, so where's your surprise coming from? Yes, really. It is perfectly possible for people born outside Australia (or England, Canada, the US, wherever else your Zone of English Language Exclusion extends) to speak English as a first language. It's not the only language I speak but it is the one that I use the most and therefore am most fluent in. I do wish I spoke my other languages better, especially the ones my ancestors spoke, but seeing that that ball got dropped at least two generations back it's been a lot less accessible to us than English.

I might have accumulated a tiny bit of angst after several years of introducing myself to ignorant people. It's only in the past few years that I've stopped trying to explain myself, and still more recently that I've given up the overcompensating streak that I subconsciously applied to make up for any handicaps that others might have assumed I needed on the sole basis of where I was born.

By the way, it works both ways: there are elderly members of my family who, despite our best efforts to explain the diversity of the world's geography, cannot be persuaded that there indeed exist "red hairs" (direct translation from the Hokkien term for Caucasian) who don't speak a word of English. It's easy to assume things based on your narrow experience of people of a certain skin colour or birthplace. I just hope this awareness has adequately transferred into all areas of my life, not only language. I want to experience people and places at their best and truest, not through the distortions of my preconceptions.

7: Stationery

2011-10-04T18:57:00.006+11:00

Town Hall Square Library Link, Sydney

This is what I'm likely to have with me on any given day: donkey, blank book, pens -- alongside the things more typically found in a handbag. (Keys, sunglasses, phone, camera, yes; five colours of lipstick, no. Maybe "typically" wasn't the best choice of words.) It isn't great for the shoulder, but at least I'm never caught without a place to write down a sudden observation/story idea.

I have a special place in my heart for inexpensive writing implements that write reliably and maintain their nib integrity up to the last drop of ink. I like even more that this Pilot G-1 (my favourite inexpensive reliable model of pen, most vexatiously not sold in Australia) in the picture has an old-fashioned price tag on it, and it's even reinforced with sellotape to prevent customers' itchy fingers from peeling it off. On that price tag is the logo of the stationery shop a few roads behind my family home in PJ, a shop that has been there since my childhood. My brother, youngest ketchup sister and I used to walk over as a special after-lunch treat on some days. The dim, dusty aisles topped with tidy rows of decorated pencils, arranged by design and lead colour, were fascinating to pre-formal schooling me.

It's no longer dim and dusty; some years ago the owner put in air conditioning and rearranged things a bit, probably wiping things along the way. But whenever I'm back it's still my go-to place -- to stockpile pen refills, of course, but also to browse other Malaysian stationery shop ephemera: badminton racquets, harmonicas, ping-pong nets, carrom men, ledgers, fishing rods, hula hoops. Things that can't be labelled stationery by any stretch of the imagination. So maybe it's not only stationery that I have a weakness for; it's the idea that it is possible to endure without conforming to a label.

8: Age

2011-10-03T13:27:00.011+11:00

I chatted online with a former teacher almost exactly a year ago.

"Hurry up and get married lah! You're nearly 30 already!" she urged.

I hear that sort of thing all the time, so that one event wasn't noteworthy. What made it memorable was the fact that this was the same woman who had said the following four years before, as part of a text message:

"[Husband] impossible n driving me nuts. Advice -- remain single til 30. Freedom priceless. Take care. Ms X"

So, if I'd taken Ms X's advice both times, I should have spent the remaining four years of my 20s in determined pursuit of being single. And then, it seems, shortly before the stroke of midnight on my 30th birthday, I ought to have found someone to marry and then made sure that everything was signed, stamped and toasted by 500 raucous Chinese* before carriage turned to pumpkin, horses to mice, and humongous glass slippers to humongous everyday flats (let's be realistic, even in a fairy tale I'd still have outsize flippers for feet). Because seemingly, 30 is a magical age when a woman's value expires unless validated by the institution of marriage.

More on marriage another day, but for now let's look at age. So it seems I've already failed one of the criteria that I'm supposed to have been able to tick off by 30. Not to mention that I am still, at time of publishing this post, jobless; have yet to recover the majority of my savings that I plunged into further study and the necessary relocation that ensued; do not own real estate or have a significant investment portfolio.

But I'll tell you what I do have, much of which I didn't have when I was 16, 21, 25, all those ages of which people like Ms X wistfully mourn the passing: I have joy. My mind, after 23 years in the gloom of depression, is at peace. I wake every morning with a sense of purpose and direction. Every task, big or small -- from making coffee and mixing cake batter to emailing people with Big Important Titles at international organisations engaged in helping-people-type things -- is informed by the knowledge that I am enjoying this moment in this place with these resources and these people because this is exactly where I'm meant to be.

Baking for other people gives me an excuse to make frosting.

Cupcakes for the New Year's Eve picnic of 2009.

Maybe one reason for so many to lament their age and the increasing distance from childhood is that they miss that time. On my part, I never had a carefree childhood so there isn't much to miss; or whatever I do miss -- such as people and pastimes -- most of them are easy enough to connect with here and now. Those that I can't, such as people who've stopped breathing and playgrounds that have been torn down: well, no amount of mourning for them will bring them back, so I do as I've learnt. I remember them fondly, and I find ways for my present life to reflect the riches they brought to my past.

A lot of my female friends a year or two younger than me have told me they're petrified of celebrating their 30th birthdays with no man in sight. For their sake I'll put it out here: I've spent the past five and a half years not in a significant relationship, and my 30th birthday was wonderful. I spent the day at the beach. Then I met friends for dinner, new friends who'd lived in the same apartment building for half a year without my knowing until I ran into them at my new church. She baked me a cake; he sang to me in Spanish. Later that week, I flew to Perth courtesy of nice cousins for a five-day celebration that included cake, a road trip, bad 80s rock, more of the ocean, and way too much food for five people with 30- and nearly-30-year-old metabolisms. The day I flew back to Sydney, another cousin invited me to a Moroccan dinner to celebrate two birthdays: mine and her daughter's, seven days after mine. The metabolism was unchanged. That was the beginning of a good year for me, one that has surprised me at every possible point.

The birthday cake Erin baked for me last October, which revealed

that we share similar principles in cake decorating. Picture by Erin.

When I started keeping a regular journal, one thing I resolved to see between its pages was growth. I wanted to honestly say with each passing year that it's the best I've ever had. So far, I've kept that resolution. Life has continued to be rocky. My family is as it has been and might never change. Still, I've given up worrying about elements beyond my control and instead invested all I had into improving the quality of my life where I can: the work that will take up the bulk of my time and, in return, give me some of that stuff that we use to pay rent and buy food and look after our neighbour; the relationships that have been entrusted to me; the body I'm left with for the rest of my time on Earth; whichever place I call "home" for the time being. Maybe the reason I don't work up a good sweat approaching every birthday, why 31 doesn't scare me and, I hope, neither will 84, is that I don't wait for birthdays before I contemplate where my life is headed and whether I'm doing it well.

So, in reply to Ms X and everyone who's hovered anxiously around me telling me that I need to get married/look for a house to buy/think about voluntarily increasing my superannuation rather than giving more money away... thank you for caring enough to say these things. (And by the way, the 3 of you to whom I owe money: don't worry, it isn't your money I'll be giving away. I won't resume my former habits of giving to causes until you've got back everything you kindly lent me when I needed food money and a roof over my head.)

Thanks for telling me, in your own ways, to go after the things that you feel go best with my life at this age. But I'm really OK. I'm more than OK. I'm 30 years and 357 days old, and passionately enjoying every moment of the passing time. Because it isn't being married at 31, successful at 31, wealthy at 31, or even healthy at 31 that will make me happy. These things are all great and I believe I'll have every good thing I'm meant to have, when I'm meant to have it. But if I'm not able to find joy now without these things, I doubt I'll be any good with them.

Great timing, by the way, that as I started writing this post I saw this link on a friend's Facebook page. Wouldn't there be a lot less stigma attached to ageing if more of us approached it the way Hedda Bolgar does?

*This statement is no indication of disrespect towards the Chinese. I'm Chinese (at least on paper, and I'm positive that genetically my family is predominantly Han, but there must be some Benetton-advertising sensibility weaving through our lineage or surely my brother and I wouldn't look the way we do). I'm glad to be Chinese. But I'm not blind to the fact that apart from being the world's most populous ethnic group, we might also be its loudest. Especially at weddings.

9: Driving

2011-10-02T16:21:00.005+11:00

I'm not huge on cars; to me, they're nice to have if your life requires you to move around a lot. They're very nice to have in bad weather when you're cooking a recipe that calls for half a dozen eggplants and two pineapples. When I own one (or have charge of one), I do my best to keep the car happy. But I am not one of those people who's got a dream car all plotted out, down to the model and engine capacity and colour and detailing. If I had to choose, I'd probably go with something sedate and timeless in a neutral colour that doesn't show its dirt too easily, because car-washing isn't high on my priority list.

Which, I suppose, is what amused everybody in my life when I bought the very first car that was all my very own, and it turned out to be

Spunky.

I named it shortly after bringing it home, a steal at more than 20% off the market price. After years of driving my family's much-loved but increasingly erratic '79 Corolla, I had been wishing I could have a brand-new car for once. Whoda thunk I'd get my wish, well within the reach of even poorly-paid musical production assistant me? Granted, I had no say over the colour, or the fact that it had been a lucky draw prize for an equestrian event whose organisers saw fit to cover each door with a stylised horse. But it was still under manufacturer's warranty, had barely 200km on the clock, and the plastic still on the seats, and you could still see the original colour of the dipstick handle. And it had been released as some fancy-pants "Special Edition" with additional sports features, like a brushed-steel gearshift. Ah, the number of times I blistered my left palm getting Spunky into gear after a couple of hours parked under the Malaysian sun.

But I never minded, because it was clean and new and it didn't overheat, stall or leak. It was a safe vessel to give people lifts in, to get around with as work and leisure demanded without worrying about whether my outfit was waterproof enough. I could park it without straining my triceps sore. I could lock the doors when I was driving alone, confident that the locks wouldn't jam and require me to climb out a window. And it was mine, all mine.

Spunky is only one example of the way I rarely get exactly what I expect -- the way I usually get way more than I would have known how to ask for.

10: Ocean

2011-10-01T11:06:00.007+10:00

For an inland family, we spent a lot of time by the ocean when I was younger. My parents had membership at a club in Port Dickson and there was a time, hard as it is to believe now, when everyone was not too busy/distracted/angry for the two-hour southward drive to be made frequently.

Another big source of childhood memories is spending school holidays in Pangkor with my mother's family. Other than Thailand, this small island served well as an annual holiday destination. It was conveniently located almost exactly halfway between Penang and PJ, making it not too far a drive for any of us.

This is my memory of Pangkor, a place I've never visited since our last family holiday there in either 1992 or 1994:

The long drive up to Lumut (remember, there was once a time when Malaysia didn't have an expressway along its whole length? When all journeys were long and fraught with unhappiness for those drivers who cannot stand to be stuck behind a smoky, clattering lorry on a single-lane trunk road, and for passengers of said drivers?). A happy reunion with my aunts, uncles, cousins and sometimes grandmother. Parking the cars in the open-air lot near the petrol station. Gathering luggage and children, beach toys and inflatable dinghy, and walking to the jetty to wait for the ferry. I have no idea what the ferry service looks like now, not having taking that trip since I was 14 or younger, but I remember it to be an oligopoly of mostly family-owned firms. Each had a small number of vessels painted in a signature colour. That palette seems to speak for an entire era of limited paint colours, especially waterproof paint colours. There was green, the pale green of enamel drinking cups, and yellow-beige, and a lurid blue that kind of made you want to sing the Smurf song all the way over to the island, all together, as loud as your little lungs could manage. I won't say this actually happened. (I am surprised at how youthful our parents remained, in spite of us.)

Once on Pangkor, we'd check in to our accommodation: the old government-owned guest house when that still existed; a no-star beach motel once the guest house was decommissioned. That I say the motel had no stars is no indication of its quality. I'm just trying to introduce you to the island as I remember it before the developers for international hospitality chains swooped in and started building brand-name hotels. The Pangkor we knew as children was a place where accommodation was fancy if you could lock the door -- or, actually, if it had a door to begin with. The room might come with mosquito netting, sometimes for a price, but insisting on air-conditioning was what officially set you apart as a gringo. The rooms were clean and had attached bathrooms, and the showers even had hot water. There were showers; you didn't even have to take splash baths with a dipper from a built-in open-topped tank. What else could you ask for?

There would be fresh seafood at every meal, as befits an island holiday. Whole days were spent on the beach building and renovating sand castles. Often we'd be building the same sand castle for a week, because even though the beach was public and popular nobody went out of their way to wreck someone else's work. Rain didn't deter us so long as there was no lightning; we were going to be wet anyway. My father would use the rough weather to teach me how to dodge and dive into waves, a skill he learnt well in his athletic youth in the choppy waters surrounding Penang. Of course, he couldn't have known his daughter would grow up into someone who rarely spends any amount of time in water that isn't chlorinated and tidily contained in a lane-divided indoor pool.

At night, in those days when open burning was not illegal and the air was pristine enough for us not to mind polluting it a little, my uncle the Scout master would supervise the building of a campfire. We'd sit around it and have a singalong, listening to stories from these great big grown-ups who can't possibly have been children like us once, and what outrageous children too. It seemed just a little unfair that these sometime hellions, now respectably settled in the middle class, expected their offspring to be buttoned-up good kids. Just metres away, the waves would roll and recede, their voice remaining for all my life as a sound of safety and identity, good times and warm relationship.

Sorrento Beach, Western Australia

This was the answer that came to me as I drove along the coast the other day, windows down so that I could hear the surf even when the road dipped too low for me to see it. I wondered, why does the ocean mean so much to someone who was born and bred inland? What is it that draws me there time and again when I need comfort or perspective, and why does the sound of waves make me want to sing? Then the memories tumbled in with the waves, and for a moment I was home.

11: Music

2011-09-30T17:45:00.003+10:00

I started hearing voices in my head when I was a small child.

Eight of them, to be exact.

"Wheeeeennnnn yooooooouuuu knooooowwww theeee noooootessss tooooooo siiiiiiiiing..."

Yessir, repeated viewings of The Sound Of Music have been known to cause the von Trapps to come and reside in your head.

"Yooooouuuu caaaaan siiiiiing moooost aaaaaaanyyyythiiiiing!"

Maria was right. It's really easy to harmonise to any tune when you can picture a scale in front of you; the chords are plain as sight and you just pick which note you'll sing in each chord.

Or something. I would explain more clearly, because I do get asked a lot how I make harmony seem easy. Only I can't explain it now, because I am very, very sleepy, but I can't miss a daily post this late in the game. So I'll leave you with this, which expresses a lot of how I feel about music. And behaviour. And interpersonal relationships.

Did I mention that I love music and am so very grateful to have been soaked in it all of my life?

12: Depression

2011-09-29T12:41:00.007+10:00

I spent a lot of my life feeling as though I were living underwater, or behind several layers of invisible foam. It began when I was around 7. In my mid-20s a friend pointed me towards some literature on depression and the lights began to come on, but I still didn't want to think I was depressed because, well, there seems to be this unwritten rule in most Asian cultures that we don't accept or admit illness. Especially illness that you can't see. I quickly lost count of how many people told me to "just get over it", to "pull myself together" because my life wasn't "anything to be depressed about".

It wasn't until I was 28 and in a Master's elective on mood disorders that I read the diagnostic criteria for depression and thought "Hey, that's me. It's true what that one friend said. And those other people with their 'get over its'... they were wrong." I didn't waste much energy in retrospective anger towards people I'd long decided weren't worth keeping close as long as they remained unwilling to help me on terms I could live with. And this was 2008, the year I had quite a bit to be angry about in the present, and I was learning for the first time that anger can be dealt with in healthy and productive ways. I hadn't the time or energy to waste on conflicts long gone.

I'm only writing this, and beginning to slowly reveal more of my insights on mental health, because I've had enough of the Ostrich Approach to it that practically all Asians have been using. It is a real threat to your quality of life, your relationships and your career -- I hope you won't wait passively until it becomes a threat to life itself, but that is the logical end of all depression if left untreated -- but burying your head in the sand/work/drink/social network/gaming console/DVD box set/designer bag isn't going to bring you to safety.

To begin with, if you think you have even the mildest tinge of depression, please do a self-test. I think this one from the Mayo Clinic quite trustworthy, provided you answer honestly. Consider your results, then decide if you want to get better. I have found that we usually get what we want, but we have to agree with ourselves that we do want it. Take it from someone who wandered some 23 years in the wilderness of unwellness: it can be really hard to admit that you want something good for yourself. We Asians, self-deprecating and humble and ever mindful of keeping face. Now that's something to "just get over".

On my part, I got better on a combination of the following:

respite from the career hamster wheel that I'd been running feverishly on since I was 20;
prayer and meditation*;
counselling**;
adaptogen herbs, which come in standardised tablet form these days so there was no pounding of roots and reducing of dark bubbling liquids to be done. (I won't recommend specific plants to you because each person's brain and body chemistry is unique. What worked very well for me might only cause you to bloat and grow poorer. See a naturopath or one of those versatile, open-minded GPs like I had in Sydney if you'd like to go herbal.);
restored sleep patterns;
fresh air and sunshine (neither of which I had a great deal of when I was working, because I'd usually go from my stuffy sealed-up room at home straight to my air-conditioned office, where I'd remain until after dark);
spending more time with what I love: dance, music, movies, writing, friends.

*"Prayer and meditation" is such a floaty, ambiguous phrase. In my case, "prayer" refers to "conversing [largely informally] with God, with whom I have a real and personal relationship through my acknowledgement of Jesus Christ as my Lord and Saviour". "Meditation" to me is little more than "being still and reflecting on the indescribable goodness of God". Where, when and how, whether there are candles or music is played or flags are waved around, all those are just accessories. And no mountain cave retreats are involved. (Not yet, anyway.) As I learnt from Brother Lawrence, the 17th-century French monk filed in my brain as "the happiest kitchenhand I know of": If you can't be still and close to God in the middle of a noisy, full workday, you'll have trouble doing so anywhere else.

**By "counselling", I mean structured, usually 50-minute sessions with someone qualified to hold the title of counsellor/therapist. I had attended "counselling" before with a church leader who eventually, through her entirely unhelpful approach, become one of those people I was glad to leave at the periphery of my life. Later, when I was training to become a counsellor myself under strict supervision, I realised that the type of "advice" she'd given in our "sessions" would be grounds for disciplinary action by any counselling body and if my depression had been more severe, this woman could have been the final push I needed to go run in front of traffic or drive fast into a wall.

I tell you this not to haul up old dirt but because I know counselling is still largely unregulated in Malaysia and there's a strong chance that if you do try to get help, my near-disastrous experience could very well happen to you, too. I don't want it to. If you need help, get it, but only from someone trained and qualified to help you. Pastors and other religious leaders of any faith are not, by default, counsellors. Neither are friends. In my experience, as much as friends may love you and want you to be better, they usually won't know how best to help you. Here's one place where there are people who will: Calvary Life Ministries in Damansara Perdana has a team of professional, ethical counsellors. Don't be intimidated by its name; they're open to clients of all faiths and backgrounds. I know there's a growing number of private practitioners around the country, too.

I'm happy to write these daily posts even if nobody reads, because they are fulfilling their main objectives: to help me enjoy writing again, and to bring focus to what I am most thankful for approaching my 31st birthday. But if even one of my friends reads this and thinks, "Life could be better. I'm going to get help," it'll give me a tiny twinge of satisfaction that I helped chip a flake off the huge boulder of mental health stigma in our culture.

13: Journal

2011-09-28T12:01:00.006+10:00

The first diary I ever had was a pocket-sized page-per-day with pastel-coloured bunny illustrations on every page, purchased on one of my family's annual trips to Thailand.

I didn't know what a diary was then but my parents had told us it was a good habit to keep one, right after they saw the huge selection of cute year-specific paper goods in one of the many stationery shops we frequented in those years. I don't know if making up a good habit to justify buying something cute always works, but it worked that time.

So began a short-lived daily "diary time" for my brother and me. The first day went like this:

INT Dining room. Seven-year-old Ren opens diary to January 1, 1988.

"I don't know what to write."

"You can start with 'Dear Diary'. How about 'Dear Diary, Happy New Year'?"

Somewhere at home, because I come from a long line of pack rats who never throw things away, I am sure there must be a pastel-bunny-filled 1988 page-a-day diary, unused but for one page. On it, a childish pencil scrawl: "Dear Diary, Happy New Year!". The end.

It's funny to bring up that memory now, because I've turned into a compulsive journal keeper.

It all began with wanting to document details of an overseas trip in 2002. But then I discovered something alluring about big pages of unruled paper, so inviting to someone holding a gel ink pen between itchy fingers. I started to doodle. The doodling led to my writing about what inspired the doodle. Which led to further thoughts that led to further doodles.

And now, 38 books later...

April 2008 to January 2010

My family and others close to me know that I'm seldom far from the book of the moment. It isn't because I'm caught up in a Hemingway complex, or because I'm trying to impress anyone. I simply enjoy having a record of my life at my fingertips. It shows me the person I used to be, reminds me what mistakes I never want to repeat, and keeps me in touch with good things that have happened or that I've been told will happen. I don't always have the infallible memory of my childhood (a childhood where I frequently heard "Ren, remember this for me and tell me later... What? Of course you should, you're younger so your head has fewer things in it than mine") these days, and the journals are a reliable repository of events, emotions, lessons and affirmations. A work in progress, like me, documenting my relationships with people, with things I do, with my Creator.

I hope that I'll reach the end of my life with all my brain and memory function intact but, just in case they lose their sharpness someday and I need these books for a refresher, it's the good stuff that I want to remember. I don't want to grow old feeding myself on bitter recollections of all the wrongs life has inflicted on me. That isn't to say that when you open one of my journals, you're blinded by beams of coloured light populated by smiley-faced daisies and assorted woodland creatures. There are still ugly bits in the books, ugly enough to warrant placing the book in a freezer if that's what you do. But I am finding that by aiming for a journal with fewer ugly bits, I've been aiming for a life with fewer ugly bits. I think it's working. The ugly still happens to me, and comes out of me. But as I work on having the sort of life that would make a potentially vague, doddering 90-year-old me smile, I'm finding that leads to a more smile-worthy, trouble-free life in the here and now.

Still warm from purchase at the MOTL market in July this year, completed last week

14: Choice

2011-09-27T14:58:00.003+10:00

One of the non-academic high points of my 2009 was getting to meet some interesting public figures. One of those was Baroness Caroline Cox, one of today's prominent anti-slavery and social justice figures. At many points during the interview I felt as though I was living in one of those documentaries where they edit all of this one person's best quotes into a seamless voice-over, because every word that she said was interesting and profound and thought-provoking. To me, at least.

One comment that has stayed loud in my mind since then was on giving aid recipients "the dignity of choice, letting them know their voice matters". She gave some examples, concrete items that communities had said they'd needed that were very different from what would otherwise have been given. Picture, for instance, a village asking for supplies and help to raise food crops. Picture also the outcome of their receiving what they'd asked for, instead of a huge delivery of writing chalk for an already well-supplied school.

I remember that this is how the Baroness and her organisation choose to work, by getting to know the people they're helping and finding out what they most want to receive. I think that we could learn from them in our routine interactions with others.

How many times have we been approached by a friend who wanted no more than an hour's worth of concentrated listening, then disregarded that wish only to bombard them with unwanted and irrelevant advice?

What do we offer the senior citizens in society who don't have the resources to choose their own pastimes: line dancing and bus excursions? The company of other elderly folk with whom they share only two things: being poor and old? Would you want to hang out with someone just because she was born in the same decade as you and earned the same salary?

How often do we try to buy out our guilt with a coin or two for the smelly man sleeping on the street corner, when what he really wants from us is eye contact and an affirmation that he is also human, also deserving of food, shelter, companionship, all the creature comforts we assume to be our birthright?

I detest this about myself, that by default I would give what's easy and convenient. The advice, the contribution to bus rental, the coin. But that isn't my only option. In understanding that even society's lowest have (or should be given) choices, I'm shown that I, too, have a choice. I can see this as the way things have always been and always will be. I can view myself as too small to push against the well-worn convention that society has walked down for centuries. Or I can choose the messier option of seeing the human beings behind the labels, of breaking down demographics until I meet with faces. By fighting my complacency in order to bring choice to those who otherwise had none, I'm choosing to live as more than a complex atomic structure out to gain the best for myself and my own. And I hope that means I'm choosing, truly, to live.

15: Friends

2011-09-26T11:19:00.004+10:00

For company on long, aimless drives when I needed to get out of the home-work-home-work-home rut.

For writing and phoning often and letting me know I'm still a part of your life even though I've moved an ocean away.

For emails that go deeper than "Hey" and Facebook contact beyond sheep-throwing. (Does anyone even do that, still?)

For not being pai seh.

For knowing the worst of me and yet not judging me.

For driving me around the hometown where I no longer have a car.

For lending me your mother when I needed one and my own was too far away.

For hearing me say I'd found the books I'd been dreaming of since childhood, and then giving me the box set before I had the chance to buy it for myself.

For getting me to take the risks that have led to a richer life.

For telling me off when I say or do something bad.

For staying on the phone all night if I needed you to, back in the confused days of our early 20s, and then picking me up en route to uni because I was too tired to drive safely.

For helping to keep my Hokkien skills in shape.

For not being shy to burst into song in public, in three-part harmony.

For getting your family to let me stay in your home for over a month.

For keeping silly childhood languages alive.

For talking me down from my overcompensating Chinese ways.

For knowing when I need to bake, and willingly eating the result even if it's on the far side of edible.

For making me feel I'm not so alone, after all.

For being a one-person online cheer team.

For praying for someone you've never met in person.

For sending me your songs.

For proving that real friends don't have ages.

For showing me good food in far-flung places.

For knowing how to be silent without being awkward.

For baking a birthday cake for a friend you'd just made two weeks previous.

For being someone I am comfortable to laugh and cry with.

For keeping the best of me when I think she's lost for good.

For being someone I can trust.

For the many more that can't be listed because this girl's got to get on with Monday, but we know what they are.

Thank you.

16: Family

2011-09-25T15:01:00.003+10:00

A talent for tangential conversation. An unwillingness to accept status quo without question. The ability to improvise in four-part harmony. (It only happened once, but at least it happened.) Literacy. Compassion towards outcasts, two-legged or four -- or less or more, as this cruel world can cause to happen. An appreciation of high-quality baked goods. The capacity to confound bystanders by speaking in shorthand Hokkien. Facial features that, according to natives of several countries across the continents, seem to be right at home in all of those countries. Mad creativity. Unbending tenacity.

(My very favourite things about the one I was born into, in 100 words or less. I think that's 89? Please spend your Sunday in more worthwhile pursuits than verifying that word count. Have a good one!)

A few words on burnout

2011-09-24T15:13:00.004+10:00

It's dangerous.

It's not fun, even to the masochist.

If you're in the Malaysian workforce as I know it from my own and my peers' experiences, you're probably somewhere along the path to it.

Please learn about it and tell yourself honestly if you're at risk. If you are, please get help. Do not wait for it to "just get better". Not by itself, it won't.

17: Sewing

2011-09-24T12:53:00.005+10:00

I came home from work late one night in 2006, tired and hungry and grumpy. My brother and sister-in-law called to me from upstairs, where they'd been clearing out some long-held childhood clutter from the built-in cabinets. "We have a surprise for you!" my usually not so chirpy brother chirped. I mumbled something about laterafterIfindsomethingtoeat or justcomedownstairsandshowmeI'mexhausted. You don't always have the strength to enunciate clearly, especially one storey upwards, when you've just spent thirteen hours staring at pages of work by writers who have an anarchic view towards punctuation.

"No, come up now. We're hungry, too, so you can rest for a while in your room while we make something to eat."

no said tired then sofa down here call when...

You also don't always have the energy for complete sentences at such times.

"You really have to come up now."

All right, but you can't stop me being grumpy while I do it. I stomped upstairs and past two dusty, sweaty but inexplicably cheerful people, threw open my room door not looking forward to the messy sight of a bed I knew I hadn't had time to make before rushing for work in the morning, and saw...

"Surprise! Remember them?"

I don't know if I answered audibly, absorbed as I immediately was in being three again. It was Lowly Worm and his... lady worm friend whose name I can't recall. But I did remember. They were among the many stuffed toys in our childhood, distinctive for one very special reason. These were no store-bought, mass-manufactured worms.

They were hand-stitched by my grandmother, or mother, or both. In those early days when craft felt first came to our tropical home, and Richard Scarry was a hero in my household, someone had mentioned to someone wouldn't it be nice if the children had a stuffed worm, a three-dimensional, fully detailed stuffed worm, to play with? Not long after, we had worms. If only every child's early encounter with worms were so fuzzy and friendly and non-parasitic.

Image from here, but who knows where this person got it

In that moment I remembered something that used to be a major part of my life, but which I'd pushed aside except for one or two isolated incidents in the six years since my mother's death while I tried to be a responsible grown-up with no time for fun. I used to sew. I'm part of this family of women (and some men) who Sew. We enjoy this. We have huge stashes of sewing and knitting needles, crochet hooks, frames, patterns, threads, flosses, yarns, transfers... earlier that year I'd made a small concession to that part of my life when I made an E. coli, but I'd gone from that job into an even more hectic one and sewing was shelved again.

By the time the food was ready, I wasn't very hungry. Or grumpy or, magically, tired. I just wanted to play again, with the worms and some other long-forgotten toys that my brother had arranged on my window bench... and as I examined the tiny, even stitches holding Lowly together, the precisely copied Tyrolean caps, Ms Worm's string of pearls, the impossibly detailed red sneaker on each worm's... end? Well, I can't possibly call it a foot because worms don't have... anyway, not to split hairs, but that's the way Scarry drew 'em so we'll leave it at that... I realised how much I missed sewing.

I have tried since then, though life has continued to be just as busy and full of external stressors like you wouldn't believe, to keep sewing and related skills close by even if the projects are small and simple. Because if ever I lose touch with sewing again, I'll have again lost a huge chunk of me.

18: Work

2011-09-23T13:08:00.007+10:00

I little knew in 2004, when I was part of the team writing Drunk Before Dawn, that four little lines I wrote for the womenfolk in the opening ensemble scene would be so frequently quoted (usually as Facebook statuses or desperate chat messages) by overworked friends.

Work all day, toil all day

Not a moment can we waste

Dawn to dusk and beyond

Turn our backs and life is gone

Is this all life is, can there be more?

I've often wondered that myself, while sitting at the many desks I've occupied in paid employment. It's worth noting, too, that I wrote those lyrics in the earlier half of my 20s demonstrating my awareness of that restless questioning... and, for nearly all that remained of that decade, stayed in that lifestyle without even attempting to find a better way. I knew there probably was one, but I was too busy and tired to look for it on top of everything else I had to do. I knew I didn't like clocking 25 hours' unpaid overtime (not that there was such a thing as paid overtime) in a single week, checking work email on weekends, and rushing from a late night at work to another late night at rehearsal and fighting all the while this nagging feeling that it was all, to a point, meaningless. I hated frequently falling sick from the stress, which meant either that my equally overtaxed colleagues had to pick up the slack or I'd come back to work to be greeted by a corpulent In tray. And I did not enjoy holding a nebuliser mask over my mouth and nose with one hand and texting my boss with the other to say that I'd be in as soon as I could breathe. But like the characters into whose mouths I put those words, I asked without much expecting to hear an answer: Can there be more? Even if there was, I couldn't afford to go off in search of it. If I was meant to have this "more", it would have to find me.

Oops. You know what they say about being careful what you wish for...?

I realised with shock last week that it's nearly a year now since I was in a regular, paid job. This year I've had the very infrequent client hour and that's it. My family is not one of those with a deep-pocketed patriarch who keeps grown children afloat indefinitely while they figure out what to do with life. On the contrary, actually, "parentification" is a term my brother and I learnt by living it. It isn't something I'm proud or pleased about, but it's true and I'm learning to make the best of it. So, that I've got this far without becoming good friends with pavement and a hand-lettered cardboard sign, I can only say is through the grace of a loving God. Which isn't to say it rains legal tender whenever I step outside hungry. That grace has mostly appeared in the form of relatives and friends. You know who you are, and I thank you for loving me. Well, I knew you loved me before you fed and sheltered me but now I know it... more?

Being unemployed at 30, for a year at that, was never in my plan. I'd been working to support myself since my second undergraduate year, when I was 20. While I can't say I've loved every inch of my jobs, I have plunged into them with everything I had because that's the way I was brought up. But, as should have been apparent when I was writing this, this, this, this, this, this and especially this, I was all out of balance and as we know from watching accidents in acrobatics, road use and building construction, balance is the only way to long-term endurance. In all that time I hadn't had a single holiday -- my definition of holiday being a dedicated time, preferably spent physically apart from all the usual distractions, of not being needed or summoned by anyone for any reason. Collapse was bound to happen sooner or, as it was in my case, later.

I feel -- I hope -- I'm approaching the end of this unforeseen, yet very necessary, fallow year. As recently as a month ago, I couldn't bear the thought of any work, anywhere, of any sort and duration and commitment level. The very mention of it produced instant nausea and worse. Let's not even mention work; most days it was an achievement if I managed to do the most basic things: get dressed, prepare meals, clean up, do laundry, clean house. It was a bonus if I made it to the mailbox; an extra bonus if I could walk to the shops for groceries instead of driving. After years of letting rest be an incidental, often disposable part of my life, I've had to make it my focus for this season.

One day about three weeks back, I woke up early in the morning, instantly aware that I wanted to work. I wanted to work! I looked forward to getting out of bed! And doing something worthwhile that would help other people to live and, at the same time, give me some of what I need to stay alive. I wanted to work! And, I knew, that meant that something had changed: I can work again.

I can't wait.

19: Cats

2011-09-22T17:37:00.007+10:00

I am partial to them, these slinky furballs with their undulating tails and their glass-marble eyes.

Fort Cornwallis, Penang

I love their agility, their imperturbability, their unblinking -- if somewhat disdainful -- acceptance of their humans. I love the way they're aloof at first, but when they let you in you're in for life. Or until you do something terrible to them or someone they love, and then you'd better sleep with both eyes open.

The Rocks, Sydney

I love the smell of the sun that they bring in from long days of outdoor pursuits. Or naps. Very important pursuit, napping. I love to watch their collapsible ears in action when it's too noisy and they can't decide what to listen to. I love their individuality: I knew one who loved wheat porridge (bubur gandum) but only from a human's cupped hands, never from a bowl; another whose best friend was a dog; one who mooed and one who squeaked; one who'd dip his paw into the water bowl as though testing the depth (temperature? texture?) before he'd lower his head to drink.

People's Park, Singapore

I love that you can't own one any more than you can own the moon.

(Uh, if that was you who fell for that email scam... sorry you had to find out this way. How's that bank account doing after you sent your details to the Nigerian minister? Uh-huh. Would you like a cat?)

20: Loss

2011-09-21T11:27:00.004+10:00

School ties, a mobile phone. Heirloom earrings, tacky keyrings. Important emails. Blood from persistent nosebleeds when I was a child. Health from persistent overcommitment as an adult. Buttons, buckles, beads. Too many pairs of sunglasses. My mother. A grandma. A favourite auntie. My perspective, my cool, my temper. Weight. Ten cats, two dogs, a forgotten number of hamsters. Friendship (natural drift). Friendship (chronic neglect). Friendship (immature backstabbing). Friendship (death). Joy. Sleep. Track of time. Skin cells. Hair. Whole toenails.

I'll run out of time before I run out of losses to document. Some of the above weren't really lost; more like I let them go through poor choice. Some were accidental but no less painful for that fact. Some I got back. Some weren't worth getting back. Some I'll never get back over here, but someday.

Through it all I've learnt that life is loss. That though we try our best, relationships and things and people may slip away. Still, we try. We learn where we went wrong. We embrace what's here. When it's time to let go, we do so. We cry. We write long and laboursome journal entries. We draw. We talk to trusted people who are big on hugs, tissues and chocolate; small on useless platitudes. We so discover who really loves us and who needs to be relegated to the category Only Good For Superficial Air Kisses At Social Occasions. We resist the temptation to fill the void with cheap and undeserving substitutes. We bear the pain of emptiness. We ask that it be filled with good. The time invariably comes when we find that it has. We give thanks. We know we'll never forget. We know it was worth it.

21: Reading

2011-09-20T11:26:00.004+10:00

One of the best things about childhood was all the reading I got to do. I was privileged to have parents who read to me every night at bedtime, something I was later surprised (and saddened) to hear wasn't what all literate parents did for their children. All my cousins, at least on my mother's side, were read to, too, so I'd come to assume that it was a built-in component of childhood.

(If I was disturbed that not every child got read to, imagine my response not long after when I read the newspaper for the first time and discovered that not every child gets fed, sheltered from the elements, or protected from harm.)

So I'm thankful that my parents saw it as important that I learnt to read as early as possible, perhaps so that I'd stop pestering them to read to me. I'm thankful that my childhood was a time of relative financial stability in my family when my parents belonged to a club that had a good children's library. I liked that the adults' library had James Herriot, but I had to get my accomplice (also known as Pops) to check his volumes out for me because those stuffy post-colonials wouldn't let anyone under 13 into the library, no matter how quiet and reverent. I'm thankful that my nanny's family had 50 years' worth of Reader's Digest. From those yellowing pages I pieced together a view of how the world had moved on in the decades since the war, just as much through the advertisements as the editorial. The magazine introduced me to some of the authors I still admire now: Torey Hayden, Alex Haley, Erma Bombeck.

If I had to pick one favourite from the childhood library years, it would be Capyboppy by Bill Peet: an illustrated first-hand account of living with a pet capybara. It was written way before the exotic pet trade was the illegal, dangerous, irresponsible circus it is today -- or at least, before we became aware that it was dangerous and irresponsible. I was a kid. There were nicely drawn pencil sketches of a gigantic rodent terrorising pampered domestic cats so, unquestionably, a good book. We would check it out from time to time, sometimes getting my mother to phone the library ahead to reserve it for a long loan.

At some point my father, whose business at that time included a photocopier/printer distributorship, must have decided the serial borrowing was getting ridiculous so he photocopied the entire book and bound it into our very own copy, right down to the illustrated cover plate with a picture of Capy sitting resolutely in his inner tube. Over time my father became a staunch anti-piracy advocate, and I eventually followed. But you still can't get me to let go of our family's bootleg copy of Capyboppy, possibly even after I inevitably buy legit copies for myself and for my brother's offspring. It's hard to let go of something you can hold, concrete evidence that my father did try. He did want to be nice to his family. Those are the things that help me to remember that he always has and he does still, when at times the opposite seems to be true.

22: Belonging

2011-09-19T16:53:00.004+10:00

I had a working mum all my life. Well, not all. All but the two months after she gave birth to me and the slightly over one month before she died. And I guess I could add the weeks she had to take off each month from work (under heavy suspicion from amazingly uncaring employers who accused of her abusing her paid medical leave privileges) to travel to Singapore for chemo and recovery. While I maintain that I missed out on a lot from not having a mother who was more practically and emotionally available, I know I'll also always have reason to be thankful that this is the way our lives played out: if she hadn't needed a daily babysitter for me, I wouldn't have had a ketchup family.

(The name was coined when I was about 6, adapted from an episode of Punky Brewster, and once my "siblings" [also my real, blood sibling] and I got used to it we found we couldn't replace it with something more sensible-sounding. And we never really wanted to.)

They were the family who looked after me while my mother was at work five days a week, all through the year except when we went on holiday, for 10 years. They were the ones who kept tape recordings of my earliest attempts at speech, who mediated early fights (of the fist, nail and foot kind -- we were pretty badass) between my brother and me, who hold the negatives to that most embarrassing of all baby photos: the potty shot. But I don't just want to be nice to them because they possess incriminating pictures of me. I don't just want to be nice to them. I'm simply steeped, for the rest of my life, in gratitude for all they've been to me.

The babysitting arrangement was informal, unwritten as things were in those days before the nightmare of abuse in child care was widely reported. (But it existed; an older girl who later came into the same family's daytime care had previously been looked after by a woman who would lock her in a small store room without ventilation, food or water until her parents picked her up.)

Anyone would agree that all that was expected of this family was: in exchange for what my mother paid, they'd feed me, change me, bathe me and otherwise see to it that I was well in body.

But being with them did so much for my heart as well. Every child should be so blessed to have just one person love them as completely, unconditionally and irrevocably as Ah Poh (grandma to the non-Hainanese) loved me. Not only her; I grew up feeling so very precious to the entire family. And not, I can tell you, because I deserved it. I was the typical child. (The typical younger/youngest child, even, so you can add the requisite number of Insufferable Points for that.) I fought, loudly and often violently, with my brother and talked back to older members of the family. I screamed when I didn't get what I wanted, and then screamed louder when discipline arrived. I took for granted all that they, with the utmost tender patience, did. I was, in general, a Lot Of Work. Yet they've never made me feel like a lot of work.

Amazingly, 20 years after I stopped being under their daily care, this family is still my family. My ketchup sisters and brother are still my ketchup sisters and brother. They still love me way more than I deserve. Auntie still offers to cook chicken rice for me on the rare occasion I'm back in town. She still clucks anxiously and asks if I need medicine if I so much as sneeze in her presence, even if it's nothing more than a reaction to the chopped chili on the dining table. They helped keep food on my table when I went from self-supporting development sector worker to unemployed postgrad student. They chipped in, everyone in the family, to give me a large Christmas cash gift that first year I spent the season away from home.

It's impossible to reflect on the nearly 31 years I've lived without acknowledging all that this family has been in that time. They've demonstrated to me that you don't love something just because it's yours; it becomes yours in response to how you've loved it.

23: Dance

2011-09-18T12:54:00.005+10:00

I was born to move.

Or so I thought when I was young enough not to be inhibited, when I'd use any excuse to twirl and hop around my nanny's large living room or the upstairs hall at home. Music was optional. I just wanted to move, and I didn't care how I looked.

And then I started going to ballet class, and attended a primary school that was known at that time for sweeping most of the prizes up to national level in performing arts contests, and that was the end of dancing for joy. I still enjoyed dance (except in ballet class, but then again, not a lot of dancing happened at ballet class) but it began to take on a different purpose: looking good, getting the best part in the number with the best costumes, beating Those Other Schools. Even with these at first unfamiliar pressures, I still enjoyed being in rehearsal way more than sitting in class so it was nice to get a valid pass out of institutionalised boredom for a good hour or two each day during the run-up to competitions.

It's interesting that in school, the teachers would nod approvingly at me and say to each other, "Of course she's better than the others, she's a ballerina." Like any good Chinese girl, I'd be embarrassed and run to the back of the line because unlike the teachers, I knew the truth -- at least the truth according to my ballet teacher. One evening a week, I would turn up at the ballet studio and be snarled at for a solid hour for any/all of the following: having fat buttocks and thighs, not turning out enough, having my hair pop out of the classic bun we had to wear, sloppy movement, floppy arms and neck. If only my school teachers could see me now, I'd sometimes think.

Years later, in an undergraduate creative writing unit, over several tutorials we worked to create and develop characters. One such tutorial was devoted to villains and our lecturer told us to go over the top at first; we could dial back the evil later when the story was drafted and we could see how the characters interacted with each other. I didn't have to imagine at all; simply described That Woman's voice, her looming appearance from the perspective of a six-year-old, her repertoire of insults. (Note to all parents, teachers and others whose life brings them in contact with Small People: do not ever compare them or selected parts of their bodies and facial features to round pastries eaten to commemorate the eighth lunar month, to animals renowned for their slovenliness, to unattractive cartoon characters, to anything at all. At worst, they will grow up with damaged body image that takes years to correct. At best, they will become writers and... good luck.) The passage of nearly a decade since I'd last seen her hadn't dimmed the unpleasant memory of her presence in my life. The lecturer commented on how well I'd been able to convincingly evoke fear in a completely natural, believable human being. Imagine that, I thought.

I sucked it up for seven years in that ballet class under that teacher, until the combined pressures of puberty, fatigue from being expected to bring my best to school, tuition and every single extracurricular, and That Woman's abuse got the better of me. I'd been skipping at least one ballet class every month since the beginning of the year and my mother told me off sharply for wasting my parents' money. I knew she was right, although her aim might have been to guilt me into perfect attendance rather than getting me to quit. But quit I did, after another few months of fighting with my parents. ("We don't want you to think it's OK to quit anything you like whenever you want." "I'm not 'quitting anything', I just want to leave my ballet class." "What if next you say you don't want to have piano lessons anymore? Or tennis?" "I won't." [I was equally sure of both for opposite reasons: I loved piano enough to want to stay with the practice and exam route. Tennis was my parents' idea and I'd tried several times to edge out of the twice-weekly three-hour lessons to no avail, so I knew it wasn't even worth trying anymore.]) At first I tried to negotiate with them: maybe we could find a different teacher in a different school? A different class time, too, so that they wouldn't have to jump through flaming logistical hoops trying to get me out of school in time to zip across PJ to arrive in class on time, with my mother working against the clock and the moving car to coax my stubborn hair into a teacher-sanctioned bun. None of those approaches worked. So I left the class, and I still remember the first of those evenings when I didn't have anywhere to be: the relief of being able to eat a whole dinner at leisure, and the rapturous thought of never having to stand there in silence and have That Woman yell at me again.

But I don't want this entry to be all about how I lost my joy in dance because the good news is: I got it back. Throughout high school, I seized any chance I could get to join occasional dance/musical performances. I even made a friend in Form 2 who'd been under the same ballet teacher and whose experience corroborated mine, down to the same stock criticisms -- despite my friend being a good bit taller, slimmer and better turned out than me. I started to realise then that maybe the bulk of the problem with That Woman was in her head, not in any part of me. In my early 20s, enrolled in a tertiary dance programme in Australia, I had ballet and contemporary teachers who were able to show me that the faults I'd beaten myself up for all those years were simply the way my body was made. I might very well have been born to dance... just not to be a professional ballerina.

For years, I remained in that mindset of needing dance to be for something. If I danced Latin, it was to be for the sake of joining competitions, otherwise why bother? Tap was fun, but I couldn't hear myself and the perfectionist in me couldn't cope with knowing if I was making mistakes or not. The only performance and choreography I did for years was for church productions which, at least with the KL church in question, were even heavier on appearance and perfection than That Woman.

I arrived back in Sydney in January 2008, already burnt out but not knowing it, and one of the first things I observed about my new university was: dance studios. Well, of course I'd known they were there, seeing that I thought I was a dance therapy student at all. But I didn't know they were available to dance and DMT students for free, so long as we booked ahead and didn't clash with paying renters or other therapists seeing clients.

I started to use the studio for an hour each week. I'd bring my own CDs and pop the padlock attached to the sagging latch on the aging DMT supplies cupboard so that I could borrow the CD player. Sometimes I'd bring my tap shoes, happy to have a floor I needn't worry about scuffing. Other times I'd let my bare feet trace the old sprung boards, feeling the texture and history beneath them. Sometimes I'd crank up Salvador and put on my Latin stilettos. Sometimes I wouldn't move at all: I'd just play music and lie on the floor, slowly having the rhythm and colour seep back into a soul depleted through all those years of aiming for and beyond expectations. A few things became clear in those solitary studio times:

I will never be a professional dancer.

I am perfectly happy with that admission.

Dance has the capacity to give me so much more than the cash it could have paid me if I had been built to go pro.

I can't put it in a box and expect it to behave the way I want it, when I want it. I can't do that with any form of creativity. If art is true, there comes a point when it leaps out of the artist's hands and surpasses all limits self-imposed and external. But like a shy nocturnal animal, it is highly unlikely to show its true self if all we want to do with it is put it in a cage with no stimulation and thrice-daily meals.

24: Thailand

2011-09-17T16:16:00.003+10:00

I'm pretty sure the one country I have spent the most time in that isn't:

my country of birth
my country of normal residence
home to relatives or very close friends
occasional work location

is Thailand.

All through my childhood, my family travelled there about once a year on average. Not just my immediate family, but often my mother's siblings and mother as well. If you were ever in Haadyai in the 80s and nearly got run over by nine adults and seven children trotting along at a brisk clip, I apologise on everyone's behalf. There was always so little time, so much to [eat, shop for, discuss loudly in Northern Malaysian hokkien while drinking fresh-pressed sugarcane juice by the street].

And then there were my parents' company outings. I am suddenly curious as I write this. Why was Haadyai (Hat Yai? Had Yai?) the destination of choice for so many in the 80s?

Or was the so many just us?

Anyway.

Add to these at-least-once-a-year-to-buy-clothes-and-school-supplies Haadyai trips the occasional time in Phuket or Koh Samui and the still more occasional trip to Bangkok and I grew up with an unlikely familiarity, for a non-Thai living way too far south of the border for that to be a factor, with the Thai language and pop music. Which isn't to say I understood any of it; it just wasn't foreign.

I was always the moody, pensive kid in the extended family, and once I got old enough to do more than eat and nap in between markets and shopping malls, I started to ask questions. Mostly in my mind, these questions, because my parents and other elders had their minds on other things. When it's one for 80 baht, six for 250 and there are more than six colours/designs available, who on earth has time to answer a seven-year-old's queries about why so many of the street people are missing legs, how come you see beggar families with a young mother and three children but no fathers, and why did the lady in the nightclub last night sing in such a deep voice?

With my mother's death in 1999 came the end of the extended family's yearly trips to Thailand.

(Actually, it was the end of the extended family as we knew it, but I am not going to talk about that now.)

But by that time I'd already grown to love the country, regardless of whether I got to see it yearly or not. Despite only having the opportunity to visit twice in the past decade, I still think of it often: its heartrendingly high number of people living with AIDS. Its equal status as home of pristine island hideouts and hub of Southeast Asian child trafficking. Its shops. Its sweatshops. The smiles that inspired its unofficial tourism tagline. The disparity between swish air-conditioned department stores and the peddlers surviving on subsistence just outside.

My memory still holds countless stores contributed to by all my senses: the sweet singsong lilt of shopgirls calculating the final tally on my mother and aunts' purchases after more, more, more discount give for them. The dull tap of a dozen bronze coins in an aged plastic begging bowl, times several for each street corner we passed. The roar of tuk-tuk engines, the only way to transport such a large group from one place to the next without losing anybody or wasting precious retail time. The sensation of travelling very fast in an open-sided van whose driver, more often than not, favoured taking corners on one wheel. The sizzle and snap of street foods fried and fried again in oil so dark you don't want to know: spicy battered chicken pieces, glazed chili cuttlefish, pigeons. Soft, fluffy batter spheres filled with green kaya and baked in purpose-built moulds. Setting off from the hotel in the early morning, the thought of all of us together in some semblance of relationship so strange to my mind of today -- all 15 or 16 pairs of legs, various lengths, various levels of fitness, all trooping together to the corner Chinese restaurant two blocks away that served dim sum in the morning and shark's fin at night. The discovery of a pau variety we were not to find in Malaysia for over two decades to come. Strange now that I think about it, but we didn't eat a lot of Thai food in Thailand. The stockpiling of clothes, school shoes, good Japanese lingerie at a fraction of the Malaysian prices. Nissin cup noodles by the 24-cup carton, at least two cartons per family if everyone was feeling restrained.

Thinking of all that, with fond regard for everyone on those trips -- for the parents who cared to give us overseas travel in whatever ways they could afford, for the cousins who were my earliest playmates, for the countless Thais who drove us, served us food, showed us clothes, took up hems, taught us to count in Thai, offered us kids durian and coconut candies, showed us how to spot fake leather (of which, of course, none in their own shops), I have to concede that there are things we saw on those trips that I'd never expose a child to, places we went where I'd be happy never to go again, "entertainment" that I doubt I will ever find entertaining. On the whole I'm thankful to have seen what I have of Thailand, and to feel what I now feel: I still want to go back, and I know as a country it still offers me so much. But now, I have more to look forward to that stuffing my suitcase and my stomach. Now that I'm not a tot on someone else's time and budget, I can think of what I can bring to it, too.

Sara

2011-09-17T12:00:00.007+10:00

For just over a year now I've been reading her blog, occasionally joining in her online community and simply learning how to live from someone who does it so well. Her constant refusal to let chronic illness take her joy while it stole her breath, her energy and her voice showed me that I also had a choice in how I responded to the difficulties of my own life.

Image from GitzenGirl

And now it looks as though soon there won't be any new posts, as she moves on to where life -- finally, after all these years -- won't be constant pain and struggle. But if I know her at all, as she's allowed her readers/book club friends to know her, she isn't focusing on what won't be but on what will: being home. I just didn't want to wait until I had to refer to her in the past tense, because she is and always will be all about the present. I'm so glad that soon, her present will be forever.

Edit 29/9/2011: Sara passed away on Saturday, September 24. Even if you don't visit Sara's blog, please read this. I don't think we could ever stop learning how to live well.

25: Rest

2011-09-16T21:43:00.004+10:00

I feel for Rest, I really do.

Despite its venerable old age, right up there with existence itself, it's given only the most suspicious of welcomes in most of today's societies.

It's underrated, especially when you compare it with the response given to its siblings Activity and Achievement.

It's misrepresented as a luxury, so that instead of letting it fill the space it was meant to have in our lives we sigh, "If only I had the time!" (Although we Malaysians are more likely to phrase it something like: WHERE GOT TIME LAH! The block capitals are optional, but you catch my drift.)

It's supplanted by counterfeits like the Educational Holiday, the Productive Weekend and the Power Nap. I mean, really? Why can't we just let rest be rest without adding an energetic adjective to it?

It's a genuine physiological need that we often can't seem to distinguish from Laziness. I've found a simple way to tell the difference: Rest leaves you wanting to go back to work. (Unless you hate your work in which case, my friend, perhaps we should have a talk.) Laziness... well, you put it together.

So on the eve of the weekend as most of the world observes it, here's to you, Rest. May you be enjoyed as you were meant to be enjoyed, in all the right ways and all the right dozes (I'm not above puns. Cue self-satisfied little chuckle.) to refresh us for the good and satisfying work that awaits.

26: Baking

2011-09-15T16:03:00.009+10:00

I like to bake.

I like to use traditional recipes that other people have used for generations. It gives me a sense of connection to the rest of oven-equipped humanity. Some of these recipes are from my own family. It feels nice and warm mixing ingredients together and thinking of my grandmother, my aunt, my mother, my sister-in-law, their arms having mixed exactly the same things together at some time.

Cupcake baked using my maternal family's sugee cake recipe, 2010

Others, I get from recipe sites...

Banana bread, 2008: nothing but a sweet memory now

and until banana prices come down from over A$10/kg

... adapting them to suit what's in my kitchen, whether something more seasonal or a poor choice when grocery shopping.

Papaya bread, 2010

Others are from blogs.

Lemonless yoghurt cake from Orangette's lemon yoghurt cake recipe, 2009

I like to bake with friends.

Dual-flavour cupcakes, with Michelle, 2009

Frosted chocolate cupcakes, with Maggie and Bek, 2011

I like to bake for other people, to express my appreciation...

Improvised chocolate cake for my cousin who

braved my graduation ceremony despite a bad cold, 2010

... and my good wishes.

Chinese New Year cookie gift box, 2010 (year of the Tiger)

For a very short time, I thought baking would be a good way to earn some money. I did; but I also got myself another concussion and some colourful bruises. I think for now I'm back to baking for love.

Pineapple tarts and almond squares all packed up with pre-orders to fill, 2010

Finally, I like baking savoury things, too, meals that I hope are better for me than those processed things with scary numbers that I see in the shops.

Stuffed mushrooms, 2010

Mini pizzas on homemade wholemeal crust, 2010

I like to bake.

Hello, who's there?

2011-09-14T22:20:00.004+10:00

Blogger tells me there are people -- a surprising number -- viewing this blog. And here I've been thinking that I'm talking to myself. (Okay, and my Facebook contacts.) Thanks for dropping by! I hope you're actual human beings and not, like, Internet-crawling algorithms with a stuffed donkey fetish. Well, even if you are...

Who are you? Would you please drop me a comment so that I know?

27: Travel

2011-09-14T20:08:00.005+10:00

Some reasons why travel is one of the big things in my life:

It forces the ol' brain to develop new neural pathways as I figure out routes to unfamiliar destinations. Not only does this apparently lower the risk of my someday developing Alzheimer's; it's making me smarter now.
It relieves me of the occasional temptation to sink into comfort and complacency. Things are less easily taken for granted when even the most basic of affairs, like ordering a drink, becomes an exercise in daring.
It shows me something of who the Other People in this world are. Not just what they do, how they spend and what they wear, but how they interact with their loved ones and how they treat the less fortunate in their societies. (It also says something about a place when there are no seemingly no homeless, no mentally disturbed or substance affected people on the streets. Leads to the question: are they not there at all... are have they been put away somewhere to make the picture prettier?)
It satisfies the curious, adventuresome side of me that wants more than the same, known landscape day after day after day. Sure, the unknown can be scary... but turning it into the known is usually fun or, at bare minimum, enriching.
It sharpens my appreciation of what's already before me all the time in said landscape.

In my mid-20s when I was back in the Klang Valley workforce, the four years after I returned from Sydney and before I returned to Sydney, I would often have this sharp longing to be back in Sydney because I knew that chapter of my life hadn't completely come to a close yet. What kept me grounded, and possibly made my eventual return to Sydney go a lot more smoothly despite the odd injury and career-altering change, was my resolution to first enjoy all that home offered me. I made myself aware that where I lived year-round was a dream holiday destination for some and economic situation booster for others. (I had a hard time convincing myself, but all those maids and construction workers aren't pouring in just because they like to risk their lives building stuff under sparsely regulated safety conditions or leave their own children behind to look after a stranger's.) I chose to see where I was as the best place for me to be at that moment. And although I had to leave behind the people I love most, I had to tell myself -- as I do still -- that I travel not to get away, but to go towards something good, to the place that's best for me to be in next.

28: Penang

2011-09-13T11:51:00.013+10:00

The Penang I know, admittedly, is a Penang of short visits filled with wonderful company. I have never lived there so I don't know first-hand how it treats residents. I have never worked there so I can't comment on its economy. I have no comments, really, nor idealistic ramblings -- I've sat in its traffic; experienced the rudeness of some of its veteran hawkers; been rubbed the wrong way by the tourist-flattering peddlers of the Batu Ferringhi night markets. I don't think I'm entitled to feel anything but what I always have: an abiding fondness for the island where my parents grew up and where they met; and which they never quite left behind in their hearts, despite having set up their family south and inland.

And the food. If food were like people, I think every animal and vegetable destined for the table would aspire to finish its journey in Penang. It's the place where food becomes the best, truest, most guileless form of itself -- no wonder some call it a food paradise, since that is what most of us hope will happen to us upon reaching that place.

For instance, the cendol, the famous Penang Road cendol that everyone will tell you must be bought from the stall that is on your right as you enter the side street; never the one on the left. I have been perplexed for many years at the survival of the stall on the left, since I have never seen it with a single customer whereas the other one has an ever-present queue. Some of us have a theory that both are owned by the same people; the second was set up to provide an illusion of competition and high demand. Profits fall to the same family/group and, we are quite certain, if ever the "popular" stall runs out, there must be some dim alleyway nearby where staff members from both "sides" meet for the surreptitious handover of refills.

In matters such as cendol buying, at least, I go with the herd. Above: a bowl from the stall on the right. Note the subtle green, a shade that one can believe comes from pandan leaves. This is most unlike the lurid modern variety that resembles alien slime and usually has the texture of powdered cardboard. I wish that you could taste the Internet, because you would want to taste the slippery, beany, coconut-milky, palm-sugary iced wonder above.

And then there's the equally renowned asam laksa stall at the Ayer Itam market,

as reductionist as a stall can get with its one dish offered, one size only.

But what a dish!

Everything in the laksa appears in perfect proportion to everything else: the minced fish, the tamarind soup with its small chunks of pineapple and its julienne vegetables, the spices, the hae koh, the fat noodles that are not, as some would claim, simply overfed bee hoon. Unlike regular rice vermicelli, laksa noodles are springy, just the slightest bit chewy, and resistant to soaking up liquid so that slow eaters do not start on a bowl of soupy noodles and end with a dry bowl filled with expanding starch. I am a fan of this last attribute.

After dark, the eating continues. At Padang Brown, kuay teow gets cha-ed with duck, not hen, eggs over a charcoal, not gas, flame. It tastes as distinctive as those two factors would suggest.

But who ever heard of eating only one thing per meal in Penang?

Satay is as it should be: glistening, yellow and sweet with black crunchy bits falling off the edges. I once met a Kiwi who told me he'd get by on meals of nothing but good Malaysian satay sauce if he could. You would feel the same if, after a long tiring day in the cranky heat with the irregular meals of a typical holiday, you had it bathed around a skewer of lean meat sandwiching fat, or a lump of compressed white rice, or a chunk of cucumber or piquant red onion. Or you might agree with my acquaintance that the sauce is an event in itself.

Lor bak, too, is textbook at Padang Brown: the meat is seasoned with perfect amounts of five spice, white pepper and other secrets, deep-fried till the beancurd skin blisters and shrinks protectively around the meaty core. The sweet lor, the dipping sauce that I loved as a child until some mischievous elder told fat-hating me it was mostly lard, runs out repeatedly as I catch up on all that I missed out on during the 20 years or so that my eating was picky. But not just me; everyone around the table is scooping it up. And why wouldn't we, when it's almost like having a smile on your taste buds?

Still at Padang Brown, the chai kueh (literally "vegetable cake") are a mathematician's or an artist's dream of ideal fractions. The skin is just translucent enough to show you what's inside, whether shredded turnip or koo chai (Chinese chives) with tiny cubes of dried bean curd. And, once again, what comes to mind as one chews is completeness. Nothing lacking, nothing out of place.

Finally, the mua chee for which a special detour is made to New Lane (Lorong Baru, if you're mapping). What is the minor inconvenience of driving out of the way and waiting double-parked on a congested road, when this is the reward?

Any attempt to pronounce the name of this dessert from this stall should have heavy emphasis on the "m", because you too will involuntarily hum with joy as you encounter every sweet-and-salty, crunchy-chewy morsel from a box that's always too small.

All that from just one day of a nine-day trip with my brother's family last year.

I doubt I would know how to experience Penang alone when so much of its food is centred upon communal eating... and so much of its experience is centred upon food.

29: Conservation

2011-09-12T18:15:00.005+10:00

I don't want to write about conservation of the type people usually think about: white men in Attenborough- or Irwin-inspired khakis, telling everybody off for flushing toilets too many times a day and using too much paper. (Toilet, or other.)

Today, truth is I don't really want to write about anything at all. But I set myself a goal and I don't want to see it go the way of all paper (toilet only), just two days after beginning. I'm glad I listed all these topics in advance so that I wouldn't be able to pull the "I don't know what to write about" card.

I wish it weren't so, but I have a strong resistance to saying that I am in support of conservation. Don't get me wrong: this world is a complex, captivating place and I would like it to stay that way for the rest of its appointed lifespan, without our needing to become dependent on full-body climate protective gear and other props from bad 1950s sci-fi films. I would like the existing number of plant and animal species to stay right where it is and, if it insists on changing, to go up rather than down (discovery, rather than extinction). I would like our water to be unpolluted, our landfills kept skinny, our lifestyles less excessive.

Yet I get the feeling that isn't all that comes to mind when you hear "conservation" these days. I can't help but also think of violent acts by animal rights activists. Of projects thick in red tape and thin in quality-of-life improvements for those on the ground. Of publicity gimmicks that foster the delusion that if you switch your lights and TV off for one hour a year, you are Doing Something to Save the Earth. And all of these make me weary and sad, as does the thought of all the hot air that gets generated talking about all the good we could do the earth while we go about our lives in ways that are completely contrary to what we're saying.

I don't automatically buy cleaning products just because they claim to be "eco friendly"; I need to know that they'll live up to the claim with ordinary household use, not in obscure lab tests. I am sceptical that recycling is always superior on all points to manufacturing new -- what about the water and energy used to collect, store and eventually recycle these materials? Isn't it also worthwhile to explore how to have less to throw away in the first place? And, every March, I am one of the increasingly few who conscientiously object to Earth Hour. Now that is one rare point of total agreement with the rest of my family, who have been increasingly bemused by its presence in Malaysia. (One year, my father sent me an email about how Important People had been quoted by the press as asking everybody to observe Earth Hour, after all it's only one hour on a Saturday, and even without TV or the movies you can always hang out with friends! Talk to your family! Spend time with your kids! One hour is all we ask; I mean, who ever heard of making investment in key relationships a regular lifestyle choice? Anyway, my father: he had gone for his routine neighbourhood watch patrol that particular Saturday night and seen more than a couple of cars, most with no more than two or three on board, slowly circling the neighbourhood while driver and passengers observed Earth Hour by gawking at what the place looked like with everything turned off.)

Small, fluffy endangered Western Australian native

seeks support of understanding humans

I know I'm a far cry from some of my composting, home-farming, permaculture-type friends and relatives. I can't say I'm satisfied with my current level of caring. And I think it's quite apparent by now that I have a strong self-critical streak. However, what I've finally been able to tell that streak, whenever it rattles off a soliloquy on how much more I could be doing, is: at least I am doing something. For what it's worth, I'm engaging my brain in my decisions on how to go about life, what I eat and wear and use, how it was produced, how it comes to me. I don't bring home anything I don't need, and when something needs to be thrown out I find out the best way/place to dispose of it and direct it there. I keep cloth totes with me almost all the time, so that I won't need to use a plastic bag. (I commented, years ago, on the use of "ecology" as bag marketing gimmick in place of genuine social responsibility topic.) I like my toilet paper recycled because that's one context where I really believe colour doesn't matter. And -- unlike many of the well-meaning "conserving" types I know -- I refrain from preaching at everybody else that they need to do exactly as I do. I acknowledge that everybody has a part to contribute towards restoring some of the terrible damage we've done to nature. I just don't presume it's my place to tell you what your part should be and grade you on your failure to do it.

Unless you're one of those who spend Earth Hour by deliberately getting into an air-conditioned fossil fuel-run vehicle to drive it around an already polluted suburb -- such people I do judge, with more enjoyment than is good for me. But it's hard to resist when they make it so easy.

30: Food

2011-09-11T15:36:00.007+10:00

I wonder how it's possible to say too much, too little, or just enough about food. For some of us, it never bears thinking about; it's simply what you take at mealtimes to avoid getting hungry and eventually dying. For others, it's an all-consuming passion.

And for still others, it's a dream: elusive, seemingly unobtainable.

See what I mean? So hard to pick just one thing about food to write about. So here's my one thing about food today: the lack of it. Also known as hunger.

I went through a foolish period on the border of my teenage and adult years when hunger was frequent, mainly because of my misguided response to circumstances. But in recent years, there's been only one day when I went hungry because I had no money. I'd started a new job in an upscale neighbourhood where the cost of one meal could literally feed a family well for a day. I had to rush to work that first day, and ended up leaving my packed lunch in my nearly-bare fridge; I'd thrown it together out of the only provisions I had remaining until my first pay.

I still remember how, somewhere around mid-morning, I began to feel the usual rumbling in my midsection. I usually counter that with some low-GI snack to tide me over until lunch. But that day there were no snacks, and there was to be no lunch. The hungry feeling in my stomach went away in the late afternoon as, I imagined, that organ decided it had had enough of being ignored. But for the rest of the workday, I felt my alertness fall, watched the lines in spreadsheets grow blur, willed the words to stop merging into one another and swapping places on documents and getting lost in my brain just as I was going to type them out.

On the one-hour train and bus journey home, all I could think about was that plastic container of food on the second shelf of my fridge. The girl next to me on the train had an open container of trail mix on her lap, from which she would periodically pull a nut, granola cluster or other typical trail-mix component. Every crunch was excruciating, amplified by the juddering across every single rail along the Harbour Bridge that had never bothered me before. Walking through Town Hall station underground to get to the bus stop, I was assailed by the smells of frying chips and seafood, sushi, panini being toasted, dark nutty breads from the German bakery -- all just an arm's reach away, yet they might as well have been half a world away because my wallet was empty.

I had long before that made a habit of saying grace before every meal, and meaning it. So I can't say it was that one day last year that caused me to be thankful for food, because I was already thankful. But maybe it made my thanks into something real, rather than an abstract concept. Now that I had been hungry, I knew now just how privileged I was each time I had food before me.

I resolved that day to go without food every year on that date, as far as health permits, so that I'll constantly be reminded of the many for whom hunger is not a choice. They're not always in some dusty faraway land, and they don't always have the "starvation look". Whenever I'm able, even if in the smallest and seemingly most ineffective of ways, I want to help the hungry to not be hungry. Sometimes I sink deep in ideological questioning, in suspicion over institutional motives and feasibility, or in beating myself up over how little I'm doing to solve a huge worldwide problem, but then I bring myself back to the blank-minded, wobbly-kneed reality of that one day and am reminded of the simple truth: the answer to hunger is food. Will at least a small part of that answer will come from me?

A final note: it's quite rare for me to directly address you, but I'll do it this time. Each of the links in this post is to a different not-for-profit programme addressing the contemporary hunger problem. If you can, please click to learn and give, or search online for other channels if none of these suits you. This post-a-day project has reminded me that there are so many material gifts I could place on a birthday wish list, which I still might do, but right now what would make me happy is knowing that there are just one, two, 13, 58, however many fewer (I know, what an awkward phrase, but the sky is blue and the sun is shining and I am in a hurry to post this so that I can go for a walk) hungry people on earth. For starters.

31: Life

2011-09-10T11:28:00.006+10:00

With great relief I can now safely say I'm through the worst of my burnout.

I hope.

In any case, I have been taking small steps daily towards a "normal" life. Normal for me, anyway. One of those steps being that I'm writing again. And I don't know if it seems counterproductive to recover from burnout by setting myself the goal of writing a blog post a day for a month, but even if it is I'm doing it. When I think about it, though, it's probably going to be helpful to have time set aside for writing, so that all other time can be spent not writing. If my burnout could have been attributed to one single cause, it would have been my failure to allocate time and effort to each section of my life that was in proportion to its importance.

So, I decided, in these 31 days before I turn 31, I will write. I made a list of things that are important to me, people and causes and objects and ideas, and I'll try to pick one a day to write about. If I get to October 11 having written all 31 entries, I think I'll have much greater clarity about what I've chosen to make the big things in my life. And if I don't, I'll have stuff to process anyway, through entries with titles like "Why Do I Keep Overcommitting?"

But now, at the beginning of this exercise where the outlook is bright, I'll leave you with this picture, which is what often comes to mind when I think about life.

Not the foot, specifically, but the little person who now walks (also hops, dances, bounces, gallops, chugs and shuffles) on it and its left counterpart. My nephew was three months and a week when this picture was taken, and already so wriggly that the reason my hand is in the shot was for foot-steadying purposes, not because I was trying to replicate some baby lotion commercial.

Today, he is four years and one day old. (It seems I inherited my father's penchant for precision.) He is intelligent and inquisitive and eloquent and all kinds of wonderful. And he is still what comes to mind when I think about life. Because he is so up-to-the-brim-and-over full of life; because his existence reminds me that mine has a purpose. Because after so many years spent surrounded by cultural and institutional assumptions that productivity equalled acceptance equalled worth, in the midst of trying to shake off those assumptions yet feeling defeated by their prevalence, I was reminded through an unabashedly joyful, unashamedly dependent, utterly vulnerable yet unstintingly loved little boy that life wasn't meant to be lived that way. All those words that I've used to describe my nephew, they're just things. And all those things we use to define ourselves as adults? Also just things. I already adored this boy before he even appeared to the world. I didn't know whether he would someday be able to return my verbal volleys (yes) or if he'd ever break our hearts with his behaviour (I hope not). But regardless of what the answers to each of those unknowns was or will be, the love is there simply because he is.

So, to have arrived at a point where I see every human being as valuable intrinsically, regardless of ability, appearance or performance; to know that we are loved far beyond what we deserve or can understand; to want to live every moment as an expression of gratitude and reciprocation of that love... to me, that's life.

Cashew lentil patties

2011-09-03T19:55:00.000+10:00

On the whole, they're a lot easier on mind and fingers than chicken. Not as tasty, but I am sure this can be corrected.

In a little gift shop somewhere in Western Australia...

2011-09-02T19:22:00.004+10:00

... sit the first minuscule buds of my enterprise.

It's been a slow process, but at last I'm getting somewhere.

While I'm in the final leg (photography, packaging, listing) of opening the Etsy shop, at least I know not all of my handmade hairpins are quietly passing their soft-petalled days in a plastic box in my room.

As of today, a tiny consignment of hairpins is available for sale at the Kent St Gift Shop of the Victoria Park Centre for the Arts.

The petals are made using the Japanese tsumami-kanzashi technique; the centres are ruffled fabric pom-poms using the same fabric. They came to me as discarded sample swatches pleading to be made into something beautiful. I hope I obliged.

If you're in the area and would like to make one of them your own, please drop by the gift shop. If you're not in the area but would also like one, please email me or leave a comment so I can tell you when the online store finally goes live.

I suddenly have all this energy to promote my wares and make more. I think they call this momentum. I like it.

Oh, and one last thing. I'll give away the full proceeds (without knocking off the shop's commission, material costs or any other amount) from every tenth item I sell. For now, the money will go to a children's home in Thailand where a dear friend of mine is involved in helping the little ones to forge joyfully through adverse early lives. I'll tell you more about them soon, once I know how much of the project I'm at liberty to share.

Pub goer

2011-08-30T22:40:00.003+10:00

At the Rosemount listening to a new friend's open mic. The beer is a prop; neither donkey nor owner are fond of tipple. (I doubt the donkey is fond of anything. It's a stuffed toy.)

A fun alternative to the tantrum

2011-08-21T13:42:00.006+10:00

When days happen like that one last week, when I awoke to find even my personal one-egg frying pan scratched by careless hands that don't know how to look after non-stick surfaces, and a sink spattered with breakfast debris and unknown bits in the sink trap, when it seemed the universe was bent on being ornery with me... when those days happen, some pre-verbal reflex takes over.

Without my having to think too much about it, the flour and eggs come out, and the glass mixing bowl. No butter in this recipe, the one from Orangette that I've made more times than any other thing I've ever cooked or baked. (Yes, family o' mine, even more than mashed potatoes. Believe it.) Instead of store-bought yoghurt, this time I have homemade kefir, a culture as unadorned as can be.

Whipping the batter is a good outlet, and the thing that makes this cake one of my favourites to bake is its adaptability. I swap the flour for wholemeal, sometimes forgetting to add raising agent, and it still rises forgivingly. I hold back, way back, on the sugar and it still tastes like a cake should. And the crumb -- oh, I could write songs about that crumb.

Like some magic cake from Enid Blyton that never goes wrong regardless of what went in -- or didn't -- the lemon yoghurt cake helps me to remember that my life is very much the same, thanks to a grace bigger than I could ever imagine. Scratched frying pans seem so small, so trivial in comparison.

There is one vital difference, though. You can't serve my life hot from the oven with strong, sugarless milky tea.

Always new

2011-08-10T21:45:00.001+10:00

It seems I will never tire of gazing upwards. At least, I hope I never do.

If you love breakfast

2011-08-09T12:45:00.004+10:00

And also painting. And journalling. And joyfully documenting life, even in the mundane and the not-so-good.

The Art of Breakfast from DannyGregory on Vimeo. (I enjoyed the whole thing, but the end credits were something else!)

Danny blogs here.

For those with chronic sleep problems

2011-08-07T19:54:00.004+10:00

I say

if you want

to get better

at doing something,

you learn

from those

who do it

best.

All photographed at Perth Zoo. Not the worst place to spend a rare sunny day. Especially after a fortnight of coughing indoors while outside paints itself in many shades of cold, wet grey. I was possibly coughing more by the end of the day, but there are no regrets. All that fluff (and fangs, and lumbering majesty, and ponderous beauty, and scurrying-about cuteness) was worth it.

Hot water

2011-08-06T23:22:00.003+10:00

Happy mail time

2011-07-31T14:09:00.006+10:00

I wouldn't say the past week has been all horrid, but the cough that has filled a lot of it most certainly is.

One thing that perked up my Friday was opening the mailbox and seeing this padded envelope

containing these

hand-carved stamps in a matchbox! They were a blog giveaway from Riyo, whose stall at the Glebe markets was one of my favourites back when she lived in Sydney. I was so excited when I heard I'd won the giveaway because her stamps have been on my wish list for years. I inked them up to see what fun I could get up to with them, but didn't get further than a bunny with a moustache mullet and a bowler-hatted kitty before the cough-induced fatigue took over.

Can't wait till I'm better, when my stamps can come out to play for longer and when life will consist of more than coughing and surviving on warm liquids. But I didn't want to wait till I'm better to say this thank-you to Riyo for the uplifting gift.

(The giveaway had no strings attached; I have a distaste for those so-called giveaways that require you to tell all your Facebook friends about some website or spam your contacts with coupons they don't want. Linking to Riyo's blog -- which will take you to her Etsy shop, if you're interested -- was solely my choice, because I appreciate her work and am happy to promote it.)

"Learn to crochet": Check

2011-07-29T17:16:00.004+10:00

I've wanted for years to know how to crochet. Despite having inherited, by default, my late mother's enormous stash of hooks, yarns, notions and patterns, I never had the time to pick up the skill while I was living at home.

Over two years ago, I bought a beginner's crochet book on the cheap. You'd think I believed that owning the book would itself give me the magical ability to crochet without ever picking up hook and yarn, because it took me so long to acquire both of the latter.

But it finally happened. Last weekend, I passed my time in the city by getting acquainted with its op shops. And there they were in the knitting-needle basket. Not just one but four crochet hooks, stuffed into the plastic case made for the largest. Shorter and skinnier than most knitting needles, they must have been passed over by other vintage-seeking types. Or it could be they were waiting for me.

Around the corner, a dollar shop (where nothing costs a dollar anymore, sigh) had 100% pure acrylic yarn on offer. I brushed off my misgivings about the acrylic. After all, I thought, I just want to learn the basics; I'll be choosy about yarn content when I know what I'm doing.

Less than an hour after I got home, I'd got the hang of it and seemed to have a scarf well underway. But as the scarf grew longer, I realised it wasn't going to be my scarf. It was working up into a scratchy, slightly shiny texture. That acrylic might do for some other purpose, say a pouch or bookmark; not something to keep in contact with sensitive neck skin for hours.

But what was I to do, I thought, now that I was already so far into my first project. I wasn't about to just donate it to landfill. Did I know anybody who could pull off a shorter scarf length, who wouldn't be bothered by the acrylic?

Did I?

Turns out I did.

Very good. On to the next project, then. And from now on, I think I'll stick to natural fibres.

No longer empty

2011-07-27T11:47:00.004+10:00

Lake Joondalup.

When I first met you, you were dry as a writer's brain the morning after deadline. Nothing but pale grey sand, with the occasional few inches of water where a few ducks were illustrating the concept of either denial or faith.

It was nice to see you again, after the unexpectedly wet winter had made its debut.

If I could only speak Duck, I think I would have been hearing them say, "Told you so."

The importance of good web design: an illustrated account perhaps made ironic by my blog's lack thereof

2011-07-21T14:24:00.008+10:00

Well, West End Deli,

If you hadn't created a website,

If you hadn't seen to it that its design is clean, photography well-lit and nicely composed, online menus and blog posts kept up to date,

If you hadn't stuck tidily to the one typeface that is, thankfully for you, not Comic Sans,

I might not have felt that I had to pay you a visit in person

and then I wouldn't have seen your pastry counter, with its typewritten signs and tempting petits fours (not pictured, thanks to my composition that needs a little more work than yours).

And a donkey would not have had a jar of brown sugar cubes upon which to be set (irrelevant aside: the donkey was named "Sugarcube" by the manufacturer. "Mo" comes from the experience which led to its becoming my donkey).

And I wouldn't have known that you make magnificently rich crepes, offset by the zingy rhubarb compote and pistachios, which made me want to go home and try making my own. (It's not you, it's me; I have this insatiable need to replicate tasty things other people have cooked for me.)

But whether I succeed or not, I hope to see you again soon. Those petits fours are calling me.

The road to New Norcia

2011-07-16T23:04:00.006+10:00

It was the kind of road trip that begins with a prayer and a scenic detour to show off the river, in all its glimmering splendour, to the visitor from Singapore.

The kind with a food stop just shy of an hour in, because hunger comes at least every two waking hours for some of us. (Namely me.)

The kind where an observant eye allows you to spot a billboard advertising what looks like a promising purveyor of baked goods, and you pull into a service road a few kms down the pike when all you're thinking of is your hunger and you never even realise that you've managed to pull right in front of said bakery.

The kind where you order a pizza each from behind the glass and the lady asks if you'd like them heated up, you say yes, and later in the car you open the paper bag to see darkened grill marks. The disfigurement proves worth the taste: crunchy savour rather than chewy, soggy microwave stodge. The moist sweetness of fresh tomato and the taste of soft, yeasty white bread -- a rarity in a wholegrain life -- gives the carb boost needed to get to our destination, the monastery town a whole thirty minutes away.

The kind where we overshoot the destination but don't mind a whit, because the country is so pretty and there are horses -- no, wait, those are cows, she corrects herself time and again -- to look at along the way.

The kind where you begin with no expectations, and find yourself most richly rewarded because every moment is gold and you know we humans always sell ourselves short, so there's no way you could have expected highly enough.

The kind where laughter is free-flowing and conversation unreserved and silences, when they come, are not awkward.

The kind where you arrive at the monastery town and know it's not a place for the average point-and-gawk tourist; somehow that makes you feel more welcome.

The kind where you linger and gaze while, for a change, using your camera sparingly. There are other ways to take pictures.

The kind where you wish you could stay a little longer, but you don't regret having to leave because your life away from here is just as peaceful, just as rich, just as spiritual. Or it can be.

The kind where you agree on the return journey to go back to the same bakery for a "real" lunch, because the pizzas were that tasty. One of you grabs the rare opportunity to sit outdoors and not perspire while the other stays on the warm side of the glass, reading old newspapers and colouring word art in her journal, and there's contentment all around.

Altogether a nice kind of road trip.

It's tomorrow!

2011-07-09T23:35:00.002+10:00

Poster from Made On The Left

Looking forward to a creativity-feeding Sunday afternoon amongst others who make... on the left.

Repost: Orange Tree

2011-07-05T21:14:00.002+10:00

I first wrote about the girl at Orange Tree just over three years ago -- look how I just said "three years", as if it barely meant anything. Three huge years have transpired since we last heard from the girl, and I never did say much about here about what became of her and the blossom she was tending.

Perhaps soon you'll hear an update, but it depends more the girl. She's the one who lived the story, so she'll have to tell you herself.

Originally posted May 11, 2008

All my life, the girl thought, all my life, I have wanted to taste an orange.

Oranges, in this world that the girl lived in, were not easy to come by, and to taste one was a dream seldom to come true. A fortunate few experienced it once, and a very fortunate few, twice; some had even been to the legendary Orange Grove and made their living there.

But, this girl thought, I will not be greedy. I only want to taste an orange once, and then I will be happy.

She wrote to the elves at Orange Tree. "I would like to make a trip to the Tree and taste an orange," said she, "and, as it will be expensive and I must give up my present place on Flatbread Land in order to come, I will need you to tell me when the oranges are in season so that my trip will not be wasted."

She sent her letter by the swiftest of the swifts (and the swifts are birds that live up to their name), and soon a reply came:

"We thank you for your interest in oranges. We have exciting news for you: beginning with this upcoming season, we will no longer be growing plain, unexciting oranges on Orange Tree.

"We will instead be growing new, enhanced Vanilla Oranges, which are sweeter, more fragrant and tastier than the old oranges. It will be like tasting the orange you've dreamt of all your life, only better. As you know, our visitors were allowed to taste Oranges in exchange for one year's labour. Vanilla Oranges, being ever so much more of an experience, will require two years. We hope this is acceptable to you. If it is, please put your pine-cone seal on the dotted line below and return this letter by the waiting swift. We guarantee that you will be able to start work on your very own Vanilla Orange blossom as soon as you arrive."

And so, the girl began to make plans. Her little room in the dear house on Flatbread Lane was closed up, and her little car was sold, for if one wants to follow a dream, one must be prepared to make sacrifices. Good-byes were said, and tears were shed, but if one wants to follow a dream... well, you know the rest of that saying. And oh, she had dreamt of tasting an orange, so now that she had a chance of tasting not only an orange, but an entirely new! improved! orange, go she must, whatever it cost her.

And the girl bravely stepped into the pea-pod boat to Orange Tree.

Before very long, she had arrived, and been assigned her very own blossom to tend, to love and to keep alive for two years, that at the end of the two years, she might taste the long-awaited Orange. And not any orange would it be, but a Vanilla Orange.

It was not easy. There were days, and nights and afternoons too, when the girl wondered if the long hours of toil were worth it. There were times when she resorted to drinking the bitter juice of the Coo-Cow tree, named for its curious black-and-white trunk and the sound its leaves made when squeezed for their juice, just so that she could stay awake until the next turning of the blossom was to take place.

And yet, through it all, the girl told herself, you must work hard. You must stick to it. To taste an Orange! And not just any orange, but a Vanilla Orange! Are not two years of toil worth it?

Until the day came when she saw the Chief Elf, and she casually said hello, and he said hello in return;

and the Chief Elf asked, "How do?";

and she replied, "Fine, thanks, and you?";

and the Chief Elf said, "Fine, thanks, but are you really? You look so worn out.";

and she said, "Well, actually, Chief Elf, I am very tired, for I work day and night to tend my blossom, but it's all worth it, isn't it? I mean, with the new Vanilla Orange, I will..."

but she didn't get to finish, for the Chief Elf's eyebrows had shot right up to the top of his head, higher even, for elves don't have very large heads, and the Chief Elf had been surprised indeed at what the girl was saying.

"The Vanilla Orange!" he said. "Why, what's this about the Vanilla Orange?"

"What do you mean?" asked the girl. "Isn't that the new orange that is meant to surpass the ordinary old orange in every way, and then some?"

The Chief Elf's eyebrows returned, somewhat, to their normal post, and he said, "Why, yes, but we had decided not to grow it after all, because we were told that the Forest Office was letting us continue growing theold oranges."

The girl stood staring at the Chief Elf, speechless, for nobody had told her of this.

"What... what about the... Vanilla..." she sputtered.

"Oh, that was just an idea we thought of, when the Forest Office was thinking of not letting us grow the old oranges anymore. But now our Ordinary Orange Permit has been renewed, so we won't be growing Vanilla Oranges. In fact, I think that blossom you've been given-" and here, the Chief Elf took out a large ledger, in which were written the names of the pixie boys and girls tending the blossoms, "why, you aretending a Vanilla Orange blossom. Well, well. But I'm not sure it will bloom and grow into a Vanilla Orange, you know, for this isn't supposed to be a Vanilla Orange tree now, just an Orange one. In fact, I'm quite sure what you've got is an apple blossom, for Orange Tree produces apples, too."

The girl, well, she was dismayed beyond words. For she had shut up her little room in the dear little house on Flatbread Land, and said good-bye to all she had held dear, and bought a one-way ticket for the pea-pod boat to Orange Tree because, after all, who knows how much your life might change once you've tasted the orange, and you might never go back to the old one.

And now, to be told that her dream might be dust?

The girl was angry. She had had a dream. She had invested much into the dream. And nobody, not even the Chief Elf with his nearly detachable eyebrows, was going to take it from her.

Today in Fremantle

2011-07-01T20:48:00.007+10:00

After a surprisingly energetic wind had battered my ears and sent my balance wonky, after I had survived a blackly comical circular dance with my wind-whipped umbrella, after coming close to being knocked out cold and turned monocular by said umbrella;

After a late lunch of fish 'n' chips under shelter where my ears could stop stinging and my vertical orientation return, after reading another few emails exchanged between Solrun and Steinn, after being given a bag of hemp fabric swatches by a friendly shopwoman, after I stumbled upon the felt shop I had so hoped I'd find despite not having its address;

I wandered from the bustling heart of town until I reached South Beach, and saw this,

and remembered:

The light is always worth whatever happens along the way. And a thousand times more.

Packed

2011-06-18T00:24:00.003+10:00

So, I've spent two weeks packing and saying my farewells and sorting out final things to do with this beautiful flat where I've been able to spend the first half of 2011, and all the while, I consciously think, I am so calm. I'm moving coast to coast, and it isn't bothering me at all.

Today I threw out the last of the trash. Waited for the on-time arrival of the removalists. Signed away my 20 boxes-and-parcels in faith that we'll meet again, me and the compactly organised, compulsively inventoried sum of my worldly possessions (in this country, anyway). Ate a quiche; ate a cake. Did some vacuuming. Put out some things for Freecyclers to collect at the pre-arranged time. Went for tea with a friend and her two very bright, entertainingly tangential children. Came home. Walked out again for dinner. Came home.

And it hit me all at once, what I've been trying to tell myself for weeks.

I'm leaving.

I really am.

I don't know when I'll come back here. I know I will, but it's all hazy and abstract, and it's unsettling that the place that's been my very concrete reality for three and a half years is soon going to be just another place in that miniature world in my head, in that part of me that stores the essence of eateries well loved and places that held my blood and secret bookshops that none of my friends know and benches in Hyde Park near the guitar busker where the shade never leaves you and the pavilion in that little waterfront park in Glebe where you're bound to get ambushed by a joyous dog on every visit and... and this post is running too long for someone so short on sleep.

So. I'm leaving. That's pretty huge, considering everything that's happened here.

But on the other end of this journey, I'm arriving.

That's even huger.

Under Cover

2011-06-13T11:06:00.003+10:00

It's a wet, grey Queen's Birthday (eastern states only).

Best not to forget your umbrella, if you're brave enough to step outdoors.

One day in Tamarama

2011-06-11T23:08:00.009+10:00

In the midst of the packing frenzy, at times I think about how little time I've given myself to say goodbye to Sydney.

I wondered a couple of days ago: am I being fair to us? We've had three and a half years together, packed to bursting with intense memories. Don't we deserve a little more time to linger?

The answer, I've decided, is no. I will fill this last week in Sydney with good things to remember, but I don't have to go out of my way to remember what's past. I've lived with a reasonable amount of purpose and presence in each day, and the things I'll miss most can't be recovered with new visits anyway, because they're filled with precious people and times that I can never bring back in this life.

Maybe I'll dig up a picture from time to time, and tell you the story so you'll have a better grasp of what the past three and a half years here have been for me. I've never divulged very much here before; the full unedited story has always been reserved for my private journal.

It might be a picture like this, taken in October 2009.

There had been some rough news over that past weekend, about the sudden and tragic death of a relative. Also, I was contemplating the imminent conclusion of my Master's and where I'd go next. Unhelpful comments had been made by the people I trusted most at that time to give me emotional and spiritual guidance, and I felt unsupported, misunderstood, unsafe.

On that day, I left home long before class was to begin and took a huge detour to a lookout at my favourite beach.

A beach that my cousin once described as "unpleasantly turbulent", even on the most placid summer's day.

Maybe that's why it's my favourite beach.

Because maybe, as deep calls unto deep, turbulent calls unto turbulent.

Every time there is something to celebrate, something to ruminate, anything at all that gets me out of the infuriatingly complacent plodding rhythm that sometimes overtakes my life, I find myself at Tamarama.

On this day in 2009, shaken by the news of my relative's unexpected death and confused about my own life's path, I found an empty pavilion and sat. The waves rose and curled and slapped each other around; I sat. They peaked and cast themselves onto the sand; I sat. I sat until the anger and apprehension had settled; until it seemed the ocean had taken all of my unrest to spend on more rising and curling, peaking and casting.

And then I walked away and drove to class, another day closer to where I want to be.

And the waves, they're still rising high and crashing hard, so I know I don't have to.

Mexican night

2011-06-08T22:23:00.002+10:00

Last dinner at Northside for a while. It was a few nights ago, but time flies when you're having trouble deciding what goes into the same box as eight years' worth of journals.

There's so much goodness waiting to meet me out west, but there are also many things I'll miss over on this side. This is one of them.

Punishment and punishment

2011-06-04T17:39:00.010+10:00

We were talking the other day about discipline. Someone's toddler nephew has recently got into the habit of hitting his sister, and the Big People are trying to make it stop.

In addition to reprimands and stern warnings, spanking is on the list of methods used to stop it.

I think it's ironic. You think it's wrong for the kid to hit other people, so you hit him to make him stop.

I could be mistaken, but to his little brain, won't the logical process look something like this?

I don't like something my sister does. I hit her.

The Olds don't seem to like me hitting. They hit me.

Hitting must be the standard response to something you don't like.

I shall go on hitting my sister when she bugs me, then.

Maybe I'm oversimplifying. I know I'm not diminishing the need for discipline and boundaries and, not being a parent myself, I am not criticising my friend's family or telling them what to do. Just questioning whether theirs is the best approach -- questioning stuff being one of the things my brain is constantly occupied in.

It got me thinking of how society does exactly the same thing to the people who do Bad Stuff ("bad" as defined, usually, by the majority and by the law. I'm not saying crime isn't bad... I'm just asking, who got to decide on the definitions of crime?)

I have a friend who, from time to time, posts news articles on Facebook about the latest child sex violation case to hit the Malaysian news. It doesn't take long for her other friends to pop up with expressions of outrage or just... rage. It reminds me of the time a few years ago when a few of us were having lunch and somehow, conversation turned to the case of the moment.

(It's a sad thing that for a relatively small country, Malaysia has a thick history of child abuse. And that's only the cases that get reported. We do tend to conform to the general Asian practice of sweeping things under rugs and pretending there are no lumps.)

Around the table, my friends were talking about what the offender deserved to have done to him because of what he'd done to his very young victim. Things got a little graphic and I was stunned by how violent my nice little urban acquaintances, with their expensive chemical perms and manicures and designer outfits, could be.

And then came my turn.

"You don't think that maybe whatever you think should be done to him in retaliation for these horrible things... maybe all of that pain is already in him, from something that happened before, and that's why he's like this now?"

Silence. And glaring.

"Are you saying he doesn't deserve to be punished?"

This is me four years after that lunch. I still am not saying he should have been let off the hook. My point, then and now, was that abusers are usually abuse victims who've finally got big and strong enough to act on the powerless feeling that most often arises from being abused. Unfortunately, frequently they turn on someone weaker as a victim, rather than confronting their abusers -- because no matter how big you get, it's hard not to feel smaller than the person who shattered you to fragments. And then their victims grow up and hurt some other, smaller person. And then that smaller person grows up and...

... and while this pattern repeats on and on, like the seasons of a low-quality daytime soap opera, we sit at our linen-clothed tables eating expensive fusion food while shielded from the relentless humidity that, except for our being so fortunate as to have access to air conditioning, should be ours to experience in sticky discomfort. And so it is that we get to take for granted the grace that has put us here, all pretty and smug in our weekday make-up and fancy office outfits, instead of on the front page of the news to be hated and spat at by all who see.

I'm only asking if we even know why punishment as we understand it exists, in our families and in what to many of us comfortable middle-class types who do not have careers in law will only ever be a cloudy abstract idea: the justice system. Is it for the sake of correction, so that after the event the perpetrator will have a firmer grasp on the makings of a life at peace with him/herself and others?

Or is it just a slap on the wrist, a retaliation for making our family/community/country look bad and for wrecking our blissful little delusion that we've constructed a safe place for ourselves and our families, far from evils large and small?

Behind every dark cloud

2011-06-02T17:40:00.005+10:00

Lies a primitive graphic representation of happiness.

I don't know why I allow my craft-less times to stretch so far apart. We need to meet more often, felt and I.

Chocolatey day

2011-05-18T17:07:00.003+10:00

Such an innocuous beginning in a little cup of hot chocolate. Who could have foreseen the elevated heart rates, the increasing silliness, the sensation of being detached from our bodies, the impending prospect of crashing hard in a sugar-and-caffeine slump not an hour after the last fateful sip?

(But if I had it to do over again, I would, oh I would.)

Later that night, the big fondue set made its debut. Because hair of the dog is the only real way to get over anything.

Kitchen assistant

2011-05-16T22:18:00.004+10:00

Nice to have a donkey around to keep your carrot stack in perspective.

I think we're good with the carrots.

How about cabbage?

Mmm... let's see. Are we good?

How much cabbage did you say we needed?

Mmyeah I guess there is enough cabbage.

Avocadoed

2011-05-10T15:22:00.002+10:00

Lots, and lots, and lots of avocado. The generous giving of friends who had a bumper harvest travelled far, to a friend's family, to a friend's daughter's friend, to a friend's daughter's friend's cousins.

What do you do when there's so much avocado in the house?

Here's a sweet idea: chocolate avocado cupcakes. With a tart raspberry centre.

And a savoury one: cheese, bacon and avocado muffins.

Another savoury one: avocado and bacon scones.

We haven't run out yet. I wonder if guacamole will make an appearance.

Trust, stem stitch, and a garden

2011-05-09T18:17:00.006+10:00

I watched an old friend playing with his son in the garden.

Over and over again, he tossed the boy in the air and caught him. The response each time: a gurgling belly laugh and demands for "More! Again!"

I watched them, and thought how much fun the little boy was having.

Wondered whether he realises what a privilege it is, being able to do nothing but share a moment of delight with one's father.

Reflected on how the game is only fun, and only goes on, because my friend catches his son every time. Dropping him, by accident or on purpose (and yes, I've known that kind of parent, too), is simply not an option.

I stitched this a few weeks ago, as an exercise in refreshing two skills that had begun to wane: embroidery; and the word I set out to embroider.

My earlier stitches were uncertain and uneven, but by the time I reached that last "t" I knew where the needle should go and how tight I needed to pull. The motion and skill had been dormant all these creativity-less years; I only needed to awaken it. So, too, with trust. Something I thought I had been doing, and doing well, for years... and it turned out my stitches had been shaky in that department, too.

I sewed that last stitch at least a month ago, but I feel as though the work was only completed this past weekend, halfway across the country, in my friend's garden. Watching as a toddler exulted in the secure arms of his father, I was reminded that I have a trustworthy father, too. One whose presence I delight to be in. One who is infinitely infallible. One who also loves to toss me up and watch me soar.

And whose arms are there to catch me, every single time.

Hooked

2011-05-09T11:44:00.000+10:00

Collosal

2011-05-07T19:34:00.001+10:00

Karaage don in Myaree.

We had help.

New friend's new outfit

2011-05-06T11:15:00.002+10:00

New friend

2011-04-28T19:42:00.002+10:00

Walk

2011-04-18T15:34:00.004+10:00

Westward bound tomorrow.

There's so much I don't know about what this time in Perth is going to be.

What I do know: that it's already a place with many friendly and familiar faces. Some of whom I can't wait to say "Hay!" to.

Crochet cats and creativity

2011-04-16T23:53:00.009+10:00

A few weeks ago, I came to the sudden realisation that I had again been starving my creative self. I am not pleased with how the earnest pursuit of survival frequently causes me to forget that colour even exists.

I needed a quick remedy, so the following day I set aside an extra couple of hours in the city en route to church, to sit in the craft section of the Japanese bookshop and absorb ideas.

Which is how I came to make the acquaintance of:

Hello My Name Is Amineko: The Story of a Crafty Crochet Cat by Nekoyama.

It's a hybrid of photographic storybook and pattern/idea book, with full instructions for making your very own amineko (Japanese contraction for crochet cat) and its accessories.

I love cats; I love miso soup. I all but giggled when I opened the book to the sight of the blue neko with perpetually closed eyes imbibing. Yes, I'd been that deprived.

And yes, I know. I have a whole collection of my own photographs of stuffed animals in various poses and settings. It's just nice when I find myself in company.

And if, like me, you have no craft book budget at present, fear not. Nekoyama's original pattern is available for free here. You don't get the patterns for the other items; no glossy pages full of quirky amineko tableaux (such as black amineko hard at work "crocheting little ones")...

But hey, you can still crochet your own amineko to pose anywhere and any way you want. Whether or not yours turns out to be reproductively minded, it looks like fun. Wonder if I'll ever get around to it. Probably sometime after I learn to crochet.

Sconed but not forsaken

2011-04-16T12:19:00.005+10:00

Almost everything that I could do wrong, I did.

The butter, instead of being ice-cold, was somewhere just below room temperature.

I used the wrong flour -- on purpose -- despite knowing that wholemeal tends to produce dry, hard, unpalatable results compared to white. But that's the kind of allowance you make once you decide to stop letting white flour cross your doorway.

I added water to what looked like too dry a mixture, only to realise the error in the recipe book that put this step before the addition of the milk.

This left me with, instead of a malleable dough that I could roughly knead and cut, a glob of sticky and stretchy that provided my forearms with a thorough workout as I tried to separate my hands. I began to wonder if I would need to call/go outside for help. I walked further along the wondering trail, which brought me to the question of how I would manage to use my touch-screen phone or open/knock on doors while my hands were effectively glued together, with my fingers embedded in dough.

Fortunately, I didn't come to that. I still don't know how, but I eventually got the dough to stick to the floured pastry board. Still humming prayers that my many mistakes not be visited upon these innocent third parties, I closed the oven door and turned my back.

What do you know, grace shows up again in my kitchen. (Given the slapdash, misdirected way I tend to approach most food preparation projects, I think grace has permanently set up home in there. As you can see, it's a very welcome guest.)

They did take twice as long to bake as the recipe stated, and after the third day had reached a consistency that lent itself more to holding down paper documents than chewing. But still. I'm glad I tried, so now I know they really are easy to make. No longer will I mourn the loss of my favourite savoury scones from the line-up at the bakery; I can make up my own flavours.

Paus for thought

2011-04-14T09:01:00.005+10:00

Nothing like poking holes in a freshly steamed pau (none of that hanyu pinyin "bao" business when you're spelling in Hokkien) to start the day on a warm, sweet puff of nostalgia.

When we were children, my brother and I used to ceremonially do this to any pau we were served at the dim sum table. It lets the heat escape so you don't steam your tongue on hot filling. And, in some cases, it brings your pau on aesthetic par with the plate.

White flour, check. Refined sugar, check; thickener, check; saturated fat, check. Aaaaaand we're good to start the day.

More weekend spontaneity

2011-04-12T13:42:00.004+10:00

Taking a walk along the Garage Sale Trail with a friend (recent recipient of squarish cookies wrapped in pink foil), saying hello to skittish cats.

Weekend spontaneity

2011-04-11T21:20:00.006+10:00

Saturday morning: I pulled it off again, and again not on purpose. Stackable Baked Goods, Part II.

So my ball cookies spread while baking into the one large cookie with vaguely rectangular delineations.

So they aren't your conventional round cookie.

It turned out for the best...

That's because four-sided foil wraps more tidily around four-sided cookies.

(Thanks again, Mich. I finally got around to using some of your fancy foil!)

While raindrops danced

2011-04-07T14:04:00.006+10:00

I had so much trouble with this picture. I'd taken it spontaneously, while on one of my usual walks home from anywhere. The late-afternoon light had come up around the corner and smacked me in the face, and I had to try and snatch some of it to keep. What else are pocket cameras for?

But when I got to editing the shot, I found so many things wrong with it.

I wished that those wheelie bins were not there.

I wished those people had parked their cars somewhere else.

I wished the power pole was a few feet behind me so it wouldn't spoil my shot. And the stop sign -- was it even necessary? Don't drivers know well enough to stop behind the yellow line, especially on steeply sloping blind corners?

I wished that my camera was sensitive enough to take in the sight that first got my attention: raindrops being swept upwards in spirals by the strong wind, each drop dressed in luminous gold by the sunlight.

I nearly talked myself out of saving the picture at all, out of posting it here.

But which is worse: to unintentionally capture these unglamorous images of dustbins and strangers' cars; or to give myself no reminder of the moment? To take the best shot I can get, or not to try at all and risk forgetting that life offers us such lovely sights for free?

I think these are the questions I am at present asking, about bigger things than sunlight on street corners. The choice lies open, whether to wait for circumstances and people and equipment to be perfect -- or to accept what is offered to me, and bring home the beauty.

Conundrum (in Mo's words)

2011-04-04T09:57:00.004+10:00

Craziest thing, this donkey existence, but someone's got to do it.

So if it's raining rain, you carry an umbrella.

What if it's raining umbrellas?

Another recipe for the sparrow, maybe

2011-03-29T19:53:00.010+11:00

My connection with meat is still an uncomfortable one.

(I speak for myself. I hope the meat is well past discomfort or any sensation at all. This observation, I note, is not propelling my inner dispute about eating meat in a useful direction.)

The last time I prepared it was nearly a month ago now. I was still feeling brave after having conquered chicken, so this time I'd darted all the way over into red meat territory.

Lamb.

The more I cook, the more I realise how many of my default misgivings are related to human behaviour and past events, rather than to the food itself. But that's a story for another day.

Today, let's talk about these.

All good stories have more stories behind them, and so the chronicle of the Lamb Skewers of 2011 begins at the end of 2009, when I had my first encounter with plain Greek-style yoghurt. Prior to that, most of my yoghurt experience was restricted mainly to the thickened, sweetened, heavily flavoured substance that might contain some live culture; that's commercial yoghurt in Malaysia -- or what Indian restaurants serve as a beverage or the main ingredient for raita.

In December 2009, I hadn't reached my current state of no-refined-sugar zeal. I wanted fructose in my yoghurt, so help me! Yes, and stabilisers and thickeners and artificial colours too, thanks. This "plain yoghurt" business was so... so... unadorned. And I'd recklessly gone and bought a kilo of it.

So, stuck with a kilo minus the small bowl I had tentatively sampled, I set to finding ways to use it up.

Cakes were baked, following Orangette's classic recipe. A loaf to my pastors, cupcakes to my small group; I baked until I barely had to measure the ingredients anymore.

But still, the jar stood unfinished in my fridge. How could it be that one kilo of yoghurt contained so much?

Finally, one stormy December evening, I set my jaw and determined that this would be the last time I would take the jar off the shelf. This would be the day I would finish the unfriendliest yoghurt I had ever known. Vaguely following recipes I'd seen online, I threw in a few pinches of powdered spices, rolled large chunks of vegetables in it, and roasted them in a deep pan.

That was when I discovered that Greek yoghurt didn't hate me; it just took some... warming up.

Whether in a sweet or a savoury way.

Back to the more recent past, and the presence of raw lamb in my fridge.

And plain, Greek-style yoghurt -- which, by now, I've become accustomed to eating, having won a long battle with my tastebuds.

I didn't use an online recipe to make the yoghurt marinade this time. I couldn't; having just arrived back in the country, my spice cabinet was still bare and I had but two little packets that suggested harmony with the flavour I was picturing.

Cumin and turmeric powder. Added in gradual tentative shakes that grew more uncontrolled as my patience ran out, until the finished product was a deep ochre hue. Then a tiny squirt of honey; a few grains of sea salt. That's all.

The idea of skewering dawned slowly, and the need to pre-soak the skewers bought the lamb nearly a full day to soak in the tenderising embrace of the yoghurt. Remembering how well the zucchini of '09 had yielded to the yoghurt's advances, I'd also chopped one* up and throw it in with the lamb. The red onion slices I credit to a blogger whose page I now cannot locate. If you're going to try this one, don't neglect the red onion slices (lightly oiled just before skewering). They are sweet, and after all that time in the heat they only bite enough to remind you that pink isn't only for sissies.

That first evening, I slid everything off the skewers onto some leftover tomato-and-capsicum rice. The following day, for lunch, it was nestled in a spelt-flour wrap with fresh vegetables.

A couple of meals later, it was on the skewers with tomato-and-capsicum rice again, and then...

Well, what do you expect? I live alone and most of my meals are cooked for one. It takes a while to get through a whole batch of anything.

But I know I've discovered a winning recipe because this time, the lamb ran out before my appetite for it did.

*What do you call one zucchini? Surely not a zucchinus... right? Please say it's not so.

Sunday

2011-03-27T21:45:00.004+11:00

Morning: Marinated tomatoes and feta

on very large bread (the plate is also very large)

Evening: Breaking out of the gritty CBD underground section of

the train line to see a rainbow stretched over Sydney harbour

Long quote from Jane Goodall

2011-03-24T17:00:00.006+11:00

"The very most important thing we can do to try and get out of the mess we've made on this planet, both social and environmental, is to spend a little bit of time learning and thinking about the consequences of the choices we make each day. What did we eat? How was it grown? Where did it come from? Did it affect the environment adversely, or animal welfare? Is it good for human health? What do we wear? Where was it made? Does this involve child slave-labour or sweatshops? How do we get from A to B? Could we do it in a way that is less damaging to the environment? If we start to think like that, inevitably people make small changes, because very often they do things without having the faintest idea of the adverse consequences, and if people start making the small changes, then you start getting the major change that we must have if we care about the future for our children."

(Jane Goodall, in Wisdom: Life by Andrew Zuckerman)

Image from Jane Goodall Institute (Singapore)

Here is beauty

2011-03-21T20:07:00.002+11:00

The synchrony.

The musicality.

The innovative use of costumes as props.

The clean, supportive partner work.

Sigh.

Healing

2011-03-20T11:27:00.003+11:00

So many have been deeply wounded by nature in recent days.

May beauty return to dwell in these places, and within the ones who are learning to live once more.

Words are not enough

2011-03-16T12:01:00.010+11:00

This is lovely (profound, evocative, moving, passionate, stirring, playful...) :

I couldn't invent words in any language I know that would properly describe it.

So I'll just have to ask you to watch it. Then you'll know what I mean.

Image from Wong Fu Productions

Commentary and notes (and the film itself) here.

Beside me at church this morning

2011-02-27T17:26:00.006+11:00

“You moved here from Malaysia? That was very brave of you. I always think people who change countries are very brave. Although my own father was one of those people. He came over from Scotland...

“When I wanted to get married, he told me, 'Not without you going to Scotland first.' In those days you had to sail. It took six weeks each way. In the time that I was away, my husband built a house on the orchard and ordered flowers for the wedding and all that sort of thing. Later on, he asked me, 'Do you think that was Dad's way of testing the relationship to see if it would last?'

“My husband died suddenly 22 years ago. I was sixty-two then- yes, I'm eighty-four now. Are you sure you still want to come and have tea with such an old lady? No, he wasn't ill. The evening before, we took a walk by the river near where we live. We rested on a bench and he looked at me and said, 'You're perfect.' Which wasn't true, but it was very nice, and the next morning he- the other thing he said right then was, 'You're better looking today than when I first met you,' and both those things weren't true, but they were lovely because he was saying how he felt. The next morning, at about three o'clock, because he had to get up very early for work – he worked in the Flemington markets supplying fresh fruit and veg – well, the next morning he was gone. And I always think that was a special gift of God's grace, to hear him say those things just before.”

We talked a little more, she repeated her invitation for tea at her home sometime, she impulsively gave me a hug. For one timeless moment the gap between eighty-four and thirty, Scotland and Malaysia, the 1960s newlywed grower couple and the white-haired woman sitting alone beside me, faded into the briefest of trivialities.

And then we walked out of the sanctuary into life as normal – if ever it is – to the foyer where a friend asked for a ride home, where people were drinking coffee out of non-biodegradable foam cups, carrying conversations in defiance to the humming, high-pitched energy field that always seems to emanate from kids' church downstairs.

By your side

2011-02-17T18:07:00.005+11:00

Tenth Avenue North "By Your Side" from Provident Label Group on Vimeo.

I love everything about this song. The truthful lyrics; the unhurried metering; the rise-and-fall simplicity of the melody. I could listen to it over and over again.

It's the video and its added sound bites that I'm not so keen on, because it seems to send the subtle message that God is "by your side" only if you've lost your home to a hurricane, fire or similar catastrophe.

Which, I will never dispute, he is. And I am not disputing that the crisis relief organisation that produced this video does fine work.

It's only that the video doesn't do justice to the wide sweep of grace the song refers to. Because it doesn't take your being caught in a state-wide flood to get the Almighty's attention. The point is, wherever you are, he's there. Even in the situations that don't make for so much dramatic camera footage.

Like being stuck for eight years in what seems to be a career dead zone, and feeling too old -- and too scared of making your wife and kid suffer even more -- to make any change drastic enough to get you out.

Or finding yourself back in the very same section, and physical location, of the rat race you'd put all of your resources into escaping.

Or facing the end of a relationship that took up the second half of your 20s, blinking in disbelief and trying to navigate this new, lonely landscape.

Or waking up in a life that's got all the right boxes ticked, having all that you ever asked for and yet feeling that it's not what you wanted.

He's by your side there, too.

Wherever "there" is for you.