So Long

This is my most favourite piece of jewellery.
It is made out of cement and steel and has the word HUMANITY embossed on top.

I often wax lyrical about what the ring means to me, trying my best to make some philosophical sense. It is what is it and so much more.

Humanity set in concrete.
Perfect from the onset.
Cracks and lines forming over time.
Physically- expansion and contraction.
Metaphysically- flaws and weaknesses.
No two rings are ever alike,
concrete darkening over time,
Humanity forming its character.
Everchanging, ever flawed,
but distinct
and beautiful.


Three years ago, I lost my faith in humanity, but maintained a sliver of hope, that one day, I would once again remember why it was I loved people and their flaws. I am slowly healing, remembering. This space has seen me though the tail end of a second degree and the beginning of a second major career change. I have grown since starting here, weathered, loved, lost, reclused, opened, evolved. I never quite knew what direction I wanted to take with this blog, probably a clear indication of my state of mind, transient and fleeting.

Scared as I may be, I have worked long and hard to arrive at this juncture in my life, for medical school, for the promise it holds, for one day being able to do more than be a bystander when a friend's grandfather-in-law has a heart attack, for being able to eventually learn the skills to heal, to cure and provide comfort, relief. I am moving because I no longer embody certain elements of who I interpreted as sideshowjo back in January 2007, I took control of my life and took steps to fulfill my childhood dream, I may have finally found my calling, possibly, at long last.

It is fitting that this should be my last post here at sideshowjo. I hold the changing face of humanity in my hands, no matter how flawed or dark it may be, I look upon it with fondness and hope, that one day, I can contribute to its changing facets and hopefully, artfully craft it and shape it for the better.

I wish you all well, and I thank the few of you who have come by every so often, your encouragement and words of wisdom will not be forgotten.

Thank you, and goodbye.

What a ride it has been, what a ride.

Lemons

Lemon tarts
Lemon frosting
Lemon cakes
Lemonade
Lemon curd
Lemon sweets

I cannot get enough of the tangy goodness, even writing about it is making me reflex salivate.

Need
Lemon
Fix
Now.

Grandma

Public toilets were extremely difficult to come by in Prague and I was told, in most of Europe. It costs about 1 SGD for a visit and generally have old ladies minding the entrances.

News!

I am finding it very difficult to eloquently express the stew of emotions I am feeling at the moment but I think one can pretty much surmise the wreck that I am from the first page of this letter.

I am oscillating between squealing like a banshee on crack and crumbling like bits on a cookie tower sundae.

Elated and heart broken.
Relieved and scared out of my mind.

After some soul searching, have decided to send off the acceptance, along with the big fat mutherf**ing bank draft. For the love of God! Does it cost that much to learn how to insert IVs and administer paracetamol? Soon you will all be barraged with useless medical school stories and the various methodical methods of shooting up caffeine and eventually, painless suicide. The joy!

All systems go from here

Bring on the junk!

I just polished off a large packet of Tao Kay Noi and three packets of Pocky crunch alongside the sarcasm of Dr. House. Mother superior is out of town with daddy-o in tow, their departure heralds the availability of EVIL WHITE BREAD, EVIL WHITE RICE, EVIL FULL FAT MILK and copious amounts of snacks. Ahhhhh the smell of cheezel dust crusted fingers when I wake in the morning brings such delight. Two glorious weeks of junk and living in my own filth.

PS: I really miss the resident fat cat that used to roam our estate in search of his next snack. He was such a comforting sight. Where are you cat?

Gobbledigook by Sigur Rós

Joyous reckless abandon! Not to mention lots of nekkidness and touching. Nyum Nyum. Still daunted by the prospect of attending the Latitude Festival in Suffolk alone come July, but for Sigur Ros, I will crawl out of my shell.

For free streaming of their new album head to sigurros.com

Angry Pants

'In the American visa I am not allowed to smile. I look angry in the picture. I now know why all those terrorist pictures on tv always show them looking disgruntled.'

-Joshua

Sigur Ros the cause

The artwork of their new album and their new tracks encapsulates where I am at this point of my life, seems like their musical growth and development is congruent with the story of my life, either that or the scary obsessed fan in me is speaking! (She’s got crazy eyes!)

June

I cut my hair, getting rid of the extra weight, in many ways (No, that does not include losing 20 pounds)

I have finally found a character which I can hopefully develop. One day I will stay in a house with my favourite person, our cat and dog and a lawn full of gnomes, having built my empire with said character. Daikon Man, make way!

I also have a new bicycle and am enjoying riding it very much, yes, it has a basket and a bell.

I miss my kinder self, back in the days when the smell of humanity was not repugnant.

uh oh take photo

“Are you bringing your Lomo to Bangkok?”

“Ya, but the bastard is temperamental.”

I don’t know what to take with me on holidays these days, not that the options are plenty:

1 old IXUS 500
1 temperamental LOMO LCA
1 panoramic Olympus Filem camera

Back to the whole camera thing, I should just get myself a digital SLR. But the technicalities! f-stop, shutter speed, ISO, aperture priority, Jesus, can’t they just make a simple camera for lazy idiots like myself?

Instead of having to f-stop down or up, replace it with a scale from 1-10, with 10 being ‘Make hole super bigger, let many light in’, 1 being ‘Make hole very small, let little light in’.

Instead of shutter speed, have a dial allowing you to control if you want ‘Open longer!’ or ‘Open shorter!’

What’s with all these fractions and decimal points? INTEGERS people! Integers! Big and small, less and more! Simple!

Okay I know...just have to hunker down and learn it all, yet another thing to learn.

Girl Things

Where can I find a bicycle like this. WHERE!

She makes (what I presume to be) Ray-Bans look like a million bucks.

Photos from The Sartorialist.

Smile to far away land

In 4 days time we can say Hello 'City of Angels! Hello again summer of 2002! Remember to bring sunscreen and hats!


I have come to the realisation that I have become one of those umbrella toting 'Aunties' who perpetually reek of sunscreen on hot sunny days. The hamster and I used to bake ourselves silly during the height of Australian summers, but those days are long gone for me. Learning about the harmful effects of prolonged sun exposure and listening to the famous local media whore pasty lizard skin coloured plastic surgeon remind his chi chi clientle that sun ages ones skin was impetus for me to begin my sun dodging activities. I still have those awful tanlines on my shoulders from a year and a half ago when we went to Perth because I got complacent with sunscren and slapped it on lazily, covering only as far as my fingers could reach. Needless to say, I was left with a crusty tan outline of my pudgy fingers on both shoulders as the only souveniers from the trip. Nice.
Sun and Jo is not a happy Jo no more. I have become an aunty.

Sod off!

I have been very angsty this past 2-3 weeks, and the only reason I can peg my anger to and me suddenly rattling of foul language like a loose cannon is my growing resentment and lack of respect for my down right lousy boss.

These are examples of the kind of toxic sarcastic things she says to her "team"

"You guys do all the work and I will just turn up onsite to get the credit"
"I honestly doubt how genuine your timesheet is"
"I hope you are not going to take any more time off or sick leave"
"Just hire a few more account executives to put up signs"

I am so pissed. And I now have the down right arsed luck to have to work with her on a particular project, very very closely. The client is a long time friend of hers, and instead of guiding me and including me in their correspondence so I am up to date with the progress, she opts to take everything offline and only when I send an e-mail reminding the client to deliever things to us by the stipulated time does she pipe and say something, copying in the client making me look like a fool. Both her and our business development manager do this, like a frikin tag team.

I am sick of this, as she has done this to me before, and only backed off when I told her that I felt that her butting in made it seem like our office has poor internal communication. I feel that I cannot grow under this woman. She is approaching retirement and just wants to gain personal glory and build a substantial nest egg for her single sorry divorced self. She does not care at all for her team and is so narrow minded that she only has the interests of ONE client at heart, that of ther friend, neglecting and under resourcing the rest of the teams until one of the managers had to literally beg for staff.

She is by far, the fucking worst boss I have ever come across, and not only that, she plays favourites in the office, woo hoo... you have succesfully demoralized everyone you frickin turd.

That's it, I'm sending in my resume to all those jobs I've book marked last week on jobsdb.

Yes, it has come to a point where I am now surfing job sites in the office.

What a bitch.

Mid May: Bangkok- for pleasure
End May: Seoul- for work
Mid July: London & Prague- for pleasure

This also means I am going to be spendng every cent of my monthly paycheck.

Like that how.

Morbido Weirdo

About a year ago I contemplated long and hard about whether I should take up a job at a morgue. Of course the fact that I was actually seriously considering the post made my coursemates recoil in horror and disgust, and which no doubt, did nothing to improve my social standing in the class because subsequently, they started to speak to me in hushed tones almost like I was going to whip out a chainsaw and rip them to shreds or disect them just for fun (hmmmm).

One of my coursemates made it a point to tell me that morgue workers in Singapore were predominantly Indian nationals with only a handful of locals taking up the job, which I suppose played a big part in me deciding that it probably was a foolish idea after all.

What can I say, I am absolutely fascinated with anatomy, anatomy in some sort of grotesque artistic sense, the intricate workings of the human body and in particular, our individual thresholds for pain and suffering. I also find the minds of serial killers, sado masochists, paedophiles, self flagellists, cannibals, pathological torturers, extremely fascinating, you get the drift.

Through the course of the year, I have begun to realise that these...interests...of mine should be kept a little more private, because any mention of it seems to evoke some nervous laughter or comments along the lines of 'eee Jo...you are so morbid'.

Perhaps apperances should be kept up for some normality.

The 2nd Quarter

April is when I will get to stay grounded in Singapore for an entire month, I am absolutely looking forward to it.
Everyone in the office has been stretched really thin this first quarter and things are not letting up in the second quarter.
I just hope this equates to a BIG fat bonus and some other incentives. Ha. Like that would ever happen.

SEOUL
Work wise: 6 days of absolute torture! The two lasses I was with kept my sanity in check, them and the dinners we had, beer and shoju (sake equivilant). The one night that was particularly difficult for me was when we were holed up after the madness of the day, sleep deprived, cold and hungry, collating 1000 meeting folders by hand. I had to dig deep for inner strength. This trip was also the one trip when I blew up at a poor AV technician who was caught in the crossfire of the mini war I was having with his manager. I have always promised myself that fuck ups and emergencies on site can be dealt with with grace, integrity, compassion and fortitude. My tolerance threshold for 'rolling with the punches' was however, breeched this time round, and I only remember getting really hot and light headed and repeating "This is not acceptable!" a few times over.

I will not let this happen again.

Play wise: Lump came up for 5 and a half days for a bit of play after a month of busyness on both our ends and we explored Seoul in 3 and a half. These will be written over the next few posts, because the individual experiences are deserving of an entry each. Wow wee. Oscar the Octopusss, I will do your death justice and write of your legacy!

Best memory of SeoulSteaming hot bowls of Nong Shin noodles with one egg cracked in eaten on a particularly cold night, in a make shift street side hawker tent with my most favourite person.

Now, THAT is what it's all about.

Ich werde da sein, wenn du stirbst

In 1999 on a very unexciting long train ride from our school in East Sussex to London, a close boarding school mate and I made a pact to start a pub in England should we both be single and miserable later on in our years. This mate however, met the love of her life while she was studying politics in Vienna, it was then that I very happily said goodbye to our pub pact. Unfortunately life had other plans, because just as soon as she had found the love of her life, she lost him to cancer a few years later. Marie-Sophie mourned and grieved through writing, reliving the entire experience and walking their journey a thousand times over in her mind. I cannot imagine anything more painful and beautiful both at the same time, almost cinematic, the parallel of a grief stricken Christian writing 'The Moulin Rouge' in his dusty attic. Marie-Sophie's writing has now materialized in the form of "Ich werde da sein, wenn du stirbst", "I will be there when you die", and all I can say is, "Isi, Herzlichen Glückwunsch!" and have it translated into english woman!

Wishing and Wondering

1. I saw a young lady carry a Anya Hindmarch 'I am not a plastic bag' grocery tote in the supermarket near my home today. I was excited and happy to see an environmentally conscious Singaporean amisdt the flurry of plastic bagging that is a constant sight at the end of almost every checkout line in our local supermarkets. But then! She took her wallet out of her 'I am not a plastic bag' tote and I saw that in actual fact, whe was paying for her stuff which was contained in 5 plastic bags, double bagged no less, and it seems, the tote was just something trendy for her to carry her personal effects in. I'm sorry, but that just goes against everything the tote stands for does it not? This is just as bad as someone flashing their headlights and honking their horn impatiently while displaying a 'I'm a Christian! Are you?' bumper sticker.

2. The Oxford Bodleain library is now open to public. OMFG.

My brother has secured himself a place in a US universty to gain an American perspective in International Relations, through their Masters Programme. He is so deliriously happy, furnishing us with statistics from 2006, where 900 applicants fought for 90 places in the programme.

Congratulations dear boy!
You've done it again.

Courage

You had to courage to do what deep down I have been wanting to do for a long time.
I looked at you, liberated, and the voice that reminded me of that desire resonated even louder in the hollowness of my being.

May you fly and achieve everything you've ever dreamed of, one day, I'll find the courage too, one day before I loose who I am, who I could be.

Things are just not how they seem anymore.

Thoughts

1) I have about had it with the young bitchy stewardesses who serve our home grown international airline
2) The apartheid years still lurks in the bowles of some bastard South Africans
3) Black townships are heartbreaking
4) When given wine in small excess, anyone will let their hair down, even eminent professors
5) There is no place like home