Read, cycled, listened, tarot, spoke, ate, read, painted. Good weekend.

Cat pee-ed everywhere. Malaysia suffers another loss. Sad weekend.

Tomorrow: must finish writing. must finish writing. must finish writing.

Every Malaysian is racist. Race is not a dirty language. Most Malaysians puzzle over the use of words like "ethnicity" or "origin" instead of the much richer and loaded language of race. Before any other form of self-identity, race comes first. then gender, or class, or sexuality, or brand affiliation, or anything else that needs to be named. Race as a marker is stitched so firmly into our psyche, our souls, our knowledge of the the self and our place in the universe, it's instinctive.

I learnt that I was one out of three chinese in my class when i was seven. Before that, I learnt that pig is dirty, just like Indians, except in a different way. I knew that there are differences in our way of life and theirs - theirs being a category that can always be interchanged as the familiar other. Racist jokes about politicians, nasi lemak, roti canai and chee cheong fun abound; lazy malays, money-faced chinese, stupid indians. And amidst the punch lines that carve our alienation from each other is the shadow of violence burning through the numbers, "May 13th 1969". Like the holy trinity, Malaysians are neatly cut up into a magical three that makes up the corners of a pyramid. With every other identity - Serani, Bengali, Orang Asli, Kadazan, Ang Mo, Indon and more - thrown into the darkness of corners, intermittently visible with a rare shift of light.

This morning, I chanced upon an abandoned Berita Harian at the next table during breakfast. Skimming through the headlines of Najib supporting Pak Lah and Hishamuddin abdicating his Pemuda UMNO leadership position, an advertisement caught my eye. Placed neatly across the bottom part of the front page, it enticed readers with a 70% discount on something. It took me awhile to figure out what the advert was about. Splashed in bold letters under the name of the company are the words, "100% dimiliki oleh bumiputera". Initially, I thought it was a property development project. The meta keywords "milik" and "bumiputera" immediately linked to make a cohesive picture of "satu lagi project bermutu oleh NEP".  Reading more closely, I realised that it was actually a sale of fabrics and cloth by a shop in Jalan Masjid India.

So why was it necessary to speak so directly to its potential market that their money will solely profit only bumiputeras? Berita Harian is a Malay-language newspaper. Their readership consists mainly of 20s to 40s, middle income Malays: 93% in 2007. We are freaking out silently at the moment. The recent elections results have thrown our pyramid into slight disarray. We're a little unsure what the masses want - as informed to us through a select and concentrated number of individuals easily identified through icons and colours.

Tony Pua, my crisp and newly elected Member of Parliament, scoffed at MCA when they tried to assure voters post their recent elections "defeat" that they will continue to protect Chinese rights. He said, "They just don't get it". DAP is all about "Malaysians first", the pyramid scheme just doesn't hold political resonance anymore. But then a few days later he sputtered at Pak Lah's statement about Chinese interests being in jeopardy if inadequate (race-based, read Chinese = MCA) representation is made in the Parliamentary Cabinet. So who is not getting what?

I think Malaysians are truly quite fed-up of being told that we can only have particular rights if we have particular kinds of race. The magic May 13th number is a little too far in time to properly evoke palpable terror. The terror of not being told the truth, of being somehow cheated of chances, of having narrow corridors to carefully sail speech bubbles - they are a lot more real somehow.

And it's also thanks to the development discourse that have been regurgitated to visceral levels to justify all kinds of wayang. Somehow, earning a living has become our primary inalienable equal right. Getting information and communicating it, scaffolded by our accidental and ignorant bliss of an unfettered internet access - also fueled by the language of economics - have become our collective seeds of desire. Race has become an irritating fence that we just want to dismantle.

We have all been struggling against our automatic racism. But we can't seem to let it go. Because it simply matters. It is the history and the land upon which we are now building our dreams of hope, freedom, justice, equality, etc. etc. etc. Before articulating any form of change, before cartographing our future, the raw materials we have for transformation is the bone black of our racist, nationalised beings.

So what should we do? What can someone like Tony Pua do? When he is also left with the Chinese-interest legacy of DAP. Now together with PAS and PKR attempting to shed their skins and slither anew from the ashes as Pakatan Rakyat, attempting to assuage real fears and tensions of racist Malaysians to similarly let go of this lucrative pyramid and form something new. Whichever angle you take, it still looks like a triangle albeit with a different constitution. Perhaps Hindraf will get fed up that cries of "Makkal Sakthi!" being drowned by cries of "Reformasi!" or "Allah huakhbar!" and form a separate party. Then we could have a trapezoid. Or perhaps in time, PSM will finally get registered and we could have a pentagon.

I want a multi-headed hydra or a border-ignorant paramecium. The sad fact is, we are constructed by identity-politics. We are raced, we are gendered, we are genitalised, we are monetised, we are limbed, limed and slimed with categories and cardboard boxes. We're just at this moment in time, trapped in the room of race, prying the door handle into the room of class or perhaps gender. Obfuscating our racism by substituting Indian/Malay/Chinese-rights with rights of poor people, rights of women, rights of people living in rural areas, in the rain forest, in the office, in cyberspace.

But some rooms are more fluid than others. It is so much harder to get rid of your skin than say, changing your home address, credit limit, religion or genitals. And maybe one day, when there are so many rooms that doors take up a lot more space than walls, they will cease to matter as much. We just need to be brave and lift our one foot firmly cemented in the race room and try something a little different. Exploration has to start somewhere, so it might as well start with a careless jump.

once there was a bunch of people scared of a lot of things. they could perceive that their bodies were soft, that it breaks, splits apart, and unknown liquids flow out of them. they were aware that their bodies were in fact, full of fissures. holes, where some things enter, and some things depart.

it did not matter before, when drawing lines were a little less important. and where morphing and moving were part of life. but when it became more urgent to stay in one place and make that work, lines began to take root. they began to have names, rituals, ceremonies, heroes, lores and processes. they became so fat that it was possible to have pockets of anarchy, sarcasm and despair pock-marked within them.

these people lived in such a time. a time of lines, and deferrence to difference. the hallowing of stories and tales was an important way to preserve the sanctity of lines, and contain the messiness that lines create.

the mermaid is one such story. she swims in acknowledgment of untamed female sexuality. her voice - the capacity to legible communication - is woven with seduction at its core, with power to destroy the communal respect for lines. her naked breasts glisten with wanton disregard for the convention of undergarments and metal corsets entombed by lace and needles. she thrives in a mysterious world, unknown to man and his land. the fantastic and phantasmagoric.

and appears when men are most vulnerable, most out of his safe and comfortable universe, where he consciously sail to seek the edges of lines currently known.

but the most fearful of what is female, the biggest monster to the impermeability of lines, is her vagina. it is constantly reproducing mysteries; wetness, blood, womb, human, decay, life, orgasms. in logic as yet unchoked by machinations.

so these people masked it in the form of a fish. instead of legs, she has a fish tail. she cannot walk, or gape her legs and visually demonstrate her puissance. there are some fears so large that you cannot give them a name, or a description. because even to utter would be to empower further.

the mermaid is a nod, begrudging, fearful and in awe, to a might that flows around life as they currently knew it. and how she transforms in time, is how the servants of lines learn how to tame her.


---
do you remember how it feels like
to lose concentration
in a phone conversation
that stretched so long
about nothing and everything?

such careless intimacy
is a great privilege.
---

watched flower in the pocket by liew seng tat last week. mainly because i caught one of his shorts a couple of years ago and was blown away by his weird sense of narrative and perspective. can't remember what the short film was called, but it featured a grandmother's fantasy and active desire with an old love - a young boy (starring seng tat himself) wearing a communist beret. they pranced around - she in her existing embodiment as a coquettish old woman, and he as a nubile smiling young man - and then have sex together. he goes down on her with a pure and satisfied smile. lovely! a very wonderful story that is at the same time humourous, light and moving.

so i was all ready for another brilliant film, and flower in the pocket didn't disappoint. the story centres around two young boys and their father. it's quite a simple tale, but as with his previous short, it's really the relationship between the different characters that drew me in.

the first half of the movie slowly unwraps the things that these two boys do - at school, not completing their homework, playing around drains, forming new friendships by bullying and being bullied, tasting food, shitting, cleaning, sleeping - all the minute mundanity of life coloured through intimacy. it's full of tangible silences that sutures the whole story together. each character is rich and complex without falling into a stereo/archetype, and are revealed through interactions with the spaces they inhabit, the relationship they are de/constructing with each other, needs and desires, and best of all, minimal drama.

the younger boy - mah li ohm - speaks no malay, and a know-it-all classmate, maria, translates every single sentence that their bahasa malaysia teacher utters perfectly to him. even then, miscommunication happens, as he tried to tell a story about "keluarga saya" from his drawing of himself and his brother, mah li ahh. maria thought it's her name, and asked why his drawing of a boy has a girl's name? the intricate and chaotic linguistic landscape of the country is presented through such small moments - which was quite refreshing for me after two marathon days of cinta and mukhsin - which brings up sepet and gubra. they were all good cinematic stories about malaysian life, love, cultural and raced heterogeneity, but got a little predictably soapy after awhile. i loved sepet when it first came out. it presented outright the kind of differentiating assumptions we carry and enact through everyday life - mixing of chinese music with arabic calligraphy, scholarships given on race-based NEP quotas, the destabilisation of borders through peranakan identities etc. but when orked came out again in mukhsin, and the romantic, nostalgic and rose-tinted treatment given to play, poverty and conflict, i got a little weary of festive-seasoned advertisement moments.

or maybe it's because the protagonists had different ethnicities. i could relate a little more to a poor chinese family from somewhere near jinjang than i could to a middlish-class malay family from an unnamed but beautiful kampung. even though i have encountered both, i experienced them from a different positionality in raced identity. either way, it's really good to have more diverse takes to a complex reality.

so anyway, back to flower in the pocket. they were befriended by a tomboy malay girl, ayu, who gave them "glamour" names so she could more easily pronounce them - azman abdullah and azmi abdullah. and the beauty of priorities in childhood is presented by a simple "boleh" - quick assent for the convenience of knowing. ayu called herself atan and claimed the male identity to be able to play with them easier, but shed this simply when she brought li ohm and li ahh back to her place for lunch one day. when the two boys found a stray puppy, she cycled home and put on a helmet and gloves to be able to continue playing with them and the haram puppy. there is no hysteria, high-tension, drama or sudden change in background music. it's just a mellowed, routine negotiation of identity in constant flux and reenactment. very wonderfully done.

the father is a man withdrawn from life and his children, presumably because his wife left them (he tore her picture and tried to swallow it at the later part of the film), and works with mannequins together with a malay man, mamat, who has a strong physical and emotional bond with his wife. the tale evolves to his gradual awakening of his children's existence and his subtle and awkward demonstration of love and care to living things surrounding him.

the second half of the movie, when the story centred more around the father than the children, got a little too silent at parts. the small moments that reveal a lot more than is narrated gulfed question marks that weren't too titillating. maybe it's because i know the actor - james lee - who played the father. so i couldn't suspend my disbelief as well. or maybe it's because his character was focussed on interactions with inanimate objects, spaces and stillness. not sure, but it can't be easy to sustain and fold a story well without resorting to tried-and-tested techniques of contradictions, subtlety and drama.

either way, i'm going to try and get a copy of this film on DVD. it's something that makes me feel all wobbly and smile when thinking of film-making in this country, and the tentative steps we're taking to capture slivers of our life in this time. right down to the blurring out of the puppy when azan was sounding the background, and the bleeping off of "melayu" when li ohm asked to tear a page off his exercise book to wipe his bum after he had a poo :) hopefully, they'll do something about the uneven sound throughout the film before releasing it on DVD.

gush over!

one death among many. a husband was a casualty of someone else's war when he was doing his job, driving another man to work. 1723 people with webbed connections of blood and time died because of a cyclone. and the usual suspects of death from armed conflict, economic neglect and invisible diseases.

life goes on.

my brains have rusted. just checked out the process of rust. it's full of shorthand formulas to make life simple. hum. it's late and my eyes are tired. my fingers have stopped dancing across the keyboard. they're kinda fumbling instead. fumbling for the right sequence of alphabets to string together an emotion, or a moment, or simply, a thought. nothing comes to mind.

iron yields to change too well. it embraces in return every other than embraces it, and in that gesture, becomes something altogether different. it ceases to become iron. i was going to say strong. but it turns out that iron is a soft metal. it's alloys that are strong. in chemistry, we accept that combining different yet similar things will produce something strong enough to hold an elephant march across water (but then again, so would wood). in marriage, we panic over the slightest difference in the hue of belief systems.

the outcome of rust is tagged as corrosion. corrode is such a damaging word. it brings to mind gaps and holes with uncertain and greedy edges. jagged to remind of ruptures. it makes me think of old people. old people are corroded from time. time is filled with air, water, and soil. the sweat of others. the frowns of others. the expletives and genitalia of others.

i am being corroded. i've lost the ability to use words like 'hyphenated beings' with ease. everytime i think of difference i imagine a group hug. i've been corroded to vanilla. soft, twisty, vanilla ice cream in a cone, so exquisitely popularised by mcdonalds.

and i missed another demonstration this morning.

trying to shit out an article for the sun, and it's been constipation time (actually, i have been constipated. and mugs of peppermint tea only gives me insomnia instead of the blessed runs that i've been longing for). but anyway. yea, trying to write.

i have made a conscious thought of making full use of what little space i have to 'speak' to more than my ever dissolving cluster of 'people i know'. but every month when it's deadline time, i just get constipated. everything that comes out sound insipid or didactic. and who wants to be lectured by yet another smart ass punk who has eaten less carbs than salt?

so here i am. trying to massage some of the words out in small squeezes. coherent sentences that say something. anything. make some kind of gesture towards a meaningful freedom of expression - no matter how negotiated.

i don't want to be constantly self-reflexive, borderlining on navel gazing come every second week of the month. i don't want to be wearing magnifying glasses peering for holes and incessantly pointing a huge red finger at every gap i see. i don't have solutions, so i can't offer that either. i don't know much, so i can't offer new information.

in short, i don't have much to say. 

yesterday i bumped into a really good friend, z, while i was about to take money out from an atm. she told me that another one of her close friends (i'll call her a) - we all went on a grrlie holiday together - just gave birth. strangely enough, a was thinking of z just before her contractions began, and that was one day before z's birthday. the next day, 17 july, on z's 30th birthday, a gave birth to her second child.

---

i first encountered the concept of synchronicity at a talk. c, who was really into combining psychoanalysis and feminism, asked me to join her. being curious about a field of knowledge i don't usually get into, i went along. the dude was american, and started speaking about his idea of jungian synchronicity. according to him, synchronicities can be recognised through a set of personal symbols that is accessible only to the self. looking at dreams in particular, he went on to talk about how synchronicities pepper throughout our dreamscapes. they appear when there is a need to counter subconscious emotions that are repressed in waking life. for example, feeling really resentful at a partner but not having the desire or energy or some other logical reason deal with it when awake. there is a need to balance out the psyche, and this is where dreams come in. the point is, to be able to recognise repressed emotions, one needs to delve into dreams in search of synchronicities. which can be detected through symbolic reverberations. doop dee doo. i remembered thinking it was all a little suspiciously 'self-healing' and 'oprah' to be taken too seriously.

but it was interesting. and i never really forgot about it. because coincidences are funny things. they make a person think about fate, destiny, the existence of gods and ultimate super computers called 'deep thought'.

---

it's fucking hot today. and i had to drive all over the place. with not enough sleep. the last time i didn't have enough sleep and had to drive around KL, i knocked into an old malay woman's right ankle. her sons were lawyers and either have been ignoring her for awhile, or dotes on her incessantly. i had to send her to gleneagles hospital to see if anything was broken. she initially appeared fine, and then got more and more vocal in her expressions of pain as she was on the phone to her sons in the car ride. when they got there, i was threatened with court suits and treated with the sudden display of filial love.

so today i made a note in my head to drive carefully. as i was waiting in a jammed que near the traffic lights, i saw a car bump into the car in front of it. a cloud of dust was freed from the scene of the accident and floated towards the toll booth. even though the damage wasn't great, they caused another jam behind them as hazard lights were bleeped on a minute later. before i had time to muse about this, my que started moving. not a minute later, there was a similar accident on my left lane. a mini 4WD bumped into the car in front of it, and its bumper is on the ground, freshly fallen. a minute later, hazard lights on, and another jam appears.

---

so that got me thinking about this whole concept again. i read up a little on wikipedia and another website from a phd student who examined synchronicity in relation to post-structuralism. in a nutshell, synchronicity is about meaningful coincidences that are not causally related. because it is laden with meaning - i suppose from a personal perspective - it is explainable if one accepts that mind, matter, past, present, future, spirit etc is somehow connected in a meta kind of way. kinda reminds me of kaku and his writing about higher dimensions. if there are only 4 dimensions - depth, width, height & time - then a lot of stuff in physics doesn't make sense. theories of quantum mechanics & general relativity contradict each other, and chasing einstein's dream of fusing the two, it becomes clearer if there is a higher dimension, or hyperspace, or parallel universes where things that don't make sense happen and make sense when they do happen (i don't claim to understand any of it, but it's interesting toilet reading!).

so again, looking for the meta equation, the one ring to rule them all. in other words, if you pull back far enough, you see more, and understand more. in kaku's analogy, if you're a carp in a pond, being caught doesn't make sense unless you perceive there is a world outside of the pond.

---

my roommate in uni, h, lost her twin brother in a car accident. her mother lives in a different continent to the both of them. at the night of the accident, h's mother dreamt that she was pregnant. her stomach started to hurt so much that she woke up. sensing something wrong, she rang them both. it's a very sad memory.

---

what is the point of believing in this concept enough to want to prove it? so that we can better understand the now, or so that we can predict the future, or to know how the now is entangled so meaningfully and purposefully to the future? but this is what we do anyway, every single day. making meaning. drawing patterns in human and social behaviour. creating tactics and making decisions every split second to carry on. if synchronicities are not causally related, then to seek the connection is to unravel the cause or the purpose no? or is it simply reassuring enough to know that things are somehow connected, no matter how obtusely for the moment? 

---

i am currently reading the may 13 book, as another theory is expounded on why this event happened. every explanation of history carries within its flesh a cartography of space, time, sequential events and people - a kind of pattern, prediction, with embedded messages of forewarning, prevention, recognition, articulation, something. as texts quiver with each story, the self morphs into another idea. another archetype to feed into another mass of contradicting collective consciousness-es.
m
a lot of what i do is spent on trying to change a certain course of reality. and this means paying careful attention to what's going on right now. what has happened before. what could possibly be a crack into the future. and concurrent futures swimming like small snakes, hissing for dominance. i don't know what thinking about wormholes, parallel universes, jungian synchronicity, post-structuralism and other new language can do.

maybe it's just good toilet musing.

there is usually something hiding behind the buildings that was just a moment ago, merely new; now, looking more and more like a maze i have to clamber through. big waves, the colour of deep seas, will stretch impossibly high to engulf any notions of sky. they are always heavy, always with unknown depths, always a painfully beautiful greenish colour, and always, always, coming closer. i am sometimes with people, friends, or ghost friends remembered from a long time ago. and all  ebulliance of novelty and adventure would be framed by these waves. i cannot swim so well. but i never drown.

---

notes on a scandal attributes too much obsessive compulsions to unarticulated sexual desires. but the contradiction of gaze and innocence was beautifully done.

---

i feel very tired today.