sometime this week, amidst the smell of deodorizers and cleaning agents, i experienced that moment of intense numbing silence pressing around me on all sides as i watched my hands force soapy bubbles towards the reflection scowling back at me. it felt as if, if i could just stop breathing for that one moment - to hold on to a single inhale - i could perhaps let the silence consume me, to let it entomb my body, keeping me still. after all, when i stay still, i imagine the rest of the world keeping still along side me. it's like stopping time...but not really; because while i may remain still and silent, i am certain the faucet in front of me would continue to gush with water and the automated-deodorizer tacked up on the wall would continue to periodically mist the room in smells of roses and lemon-drops.

then again, maybe that is how it's supposed to be. no one can truly stop time, one can only take hold of their own individual moments and slow it down enough to live in this perfect solitary heightened existence, in which the only flaw is that one is not allowed breath. it was enticing to imagine all the possibilities of a heightened existence: to see, smell, touch, and feel everything for the first time again; and so i tried it. i held a breath full of roses and lemon-drops and felt everything else hold theirs.

it was amazing...aside from the burning in my chest from a breath held in too long.

now that i have submitted my thesis and waiting to defend it, i am officially bored. i know how silly it may sound since it has only been a couple of days since submission, but i can't help feeling so darn stagnant that it makes me want to jump out a window and crack my skull open just to liven things up a bit. it's just strange waking up and not having to plop myself in front of my laptop and type like crazy.

but whatever, i know this current boredom won't last long because it seems my brain has moved on from my first novel and is concocting my second. won't reveal what it's about yet, but it seems to be great fun.

and to those who have so far enjoyed my first novel despite its many flaws, i thank you.
maybe i should try to get it published...

...and no birthday blog post for me because i am too darn lazy to talk about my ageing-process.

last year^click, at this very moment, i could be found stressing over my unfinished essays for Thesis1; and this year i'm stuck, even more stressed than ever, trying to finish up my Thesis2 (editing my damn novel and writing more essays) in time for the deadline on the 17th. i guess it's nice how some things never change.

...and 9 more days until i turn 23. please start thinking of my present.

the novel is finally finished and all i have to do now is to finish up the essay on my creative process.
no idea how to go about writing that.

21 more days and the thesis is due. fuck. fuck. fuck. fuck. i am not happy about this at all because i still have a few more chapters of my novel to finish and the creative process essay which i have no idea how to go about writing. so stressed right now like you wouldn't believe. after all this, i better get a crate full of orange gummy bears, assorted jelly beans and endless jugs of mojitos for all my hard work.

but on happier news, PLAINSUNSET^click is playing a show in the Philippines on friday!

i still remember the moment when i first heard them play. i was just sixteen and my best friend, May, was nineteen, and we attended their album launch for the "The Gift" without even knowing who the heck they were, only to leave hours later, converted into mega-stalker fans, attending almost every of their gigs thereafter, donned in full mega-pop-punk-spiky-belt attire and chanting along to the lyrics, half-drunk.

i can't believe it's been seven years since i first saw them play.
great. now i feel old.

but anyway, i am so stoked about their show because Plainsunset is the local Singapore band that really got me into attempting an instrument and joining a band, in the first place, just so i could look sexy with a guitar and drink all the alcohol i want - and that's actually still the reason i bother being in a band now, the whole sexines factor and the endless alcohol allure.

and i really have to give credit to those guys for introducing me and my friends to the scene-kid life of drinking vodka hidden in soda bottles while dancing atop the Youth Park letters completely wasted at 1am on a Wednesday night, knowing full-well that we have classes early next morning; and also for causing me to almost flunk out of school, when i was seventeen, due to my new found habit of drinking excessively and partying like a complete out-of-control idiot. okay, maybe none of that were ever their fault; but me attending all those rock shows and meeting all those people who just wouldn't stop buying me endless rounds of booze and inviting me to all sorts of parties sure didn't help.

so it's late and i need to get back to my thesis now - or at least sleep; but before that, let me show-off my autographed copy of their album "The Gift" which i got signed when they last came over here a few weeks after my 21st birthday back in 2007; and since i want some sort of remembrance for my 23rd birthday, i'm going to tell them it's my birthday when i go try to get my copy of their new album signed on friday just so they scribble me a Happy Birthday on the CD.

i'm an uber-fan-nerd that way.

so here's the thing about trying to finish a 250-page novel before the month ends: you know you start going crazy and realizing what a shit writer you really are when you spend thirty minutes polishing a stupid paragraph only to realise hours later that the pretty words and images and metaphors and all other literary nonsense you've peppered it with, just made it seem like you're writing about people farting in your face.

but yeah, i laughed like a mad-woman after that.
i should just stop pretending to write.

p.s: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince sucked! i feel like a fool for being so excited over it.

so it's july and i now have about less than 2 months to cough up 75 more pages of my novel and an essay detailing the creative process behind said novel. i am so behind and feeling so detached from the life i had to put on hold just so i might finish this novel in time.

i miss everyone. i hate staying locked in my room, every single boring day, squeezing words out of my stubborn brain which refuses to co-operate with deadlines i've set for myself by shutting down whenever i have to finish a few chapter. i want to instead go out, drink a vat of alcohol, get laid and never write again - or at least never write for a long long long long long while.

but no, i have to graduate and finish this damn thing.
so here's to more weeks locked up at home!

Chapter 12

We were never built to be solitary creatures. We're meant to mingle. We're meant to go to the occasional parties laced with red plastic cups and throbbing music, where we'd eventually find ourselves, hours later, head suspended over the toilet bowl, puking ours guts out while some guy, in grimy shit-laced boxer shorts, lays unconscious by the door, holding onto a lime green sequined dress.

We're meant to purposely position ourselves by the self-help section of the neighborhood conglomerate book-superstore, mulling over books – which we have no use for except as a foot rest while we summon dwindling reality-television morals to permeate our consciousness - on the pretense of hunting down a lone man searching for companionship or an explanation on why he spends his nights, eating out of a cardboard box re-heated in a microwave oven while watching re-runs of Barney&Friends.

We're meant to hog a table at Starbucks, an order of Chai Latte, barely half-drunk, cooling in between ours hands, our eyes on the lookout for a man we stalked on an online dating website, littered with pictures of smiling happy couples wearing matching sweatshirts on its front page, while we pretend to peruse a newspaper turned over to the section on World Affairs.

We're meant to cruise around the supermarket for our hours, with our trolley barely filled with food, easing down the aisles one-by-one, touching every jar and can filled with tasteless food products, hoping to bump into someone who'd fill us in on the best way to cook chicken before we'd charm our way into getting invited over to their place for traditional home-cooked pot roast and potatoes.

We're meant to have a Myspace, Facebook and Twitter account, which we update with lies every few seconds, all in an attempt to deceive ourselves into thinking that we are social butterflies with millions of friends - who knows nothing about us but our username and profile picture which we change every few weeks - and thus should never worry ever again about not getting greeted a happy birthday.

We're meant to never stare out our apartment window, our body parked in front of a computer with the screen frozen on a website advertising cheap international air-fares, fingers resting dead on the mouse, unable to click on the SUBMIT button, while we look at clouds dance itself to forming shapes, alone.

did that make any sense? because i feel like i'm starting to not make sense...