J.'s world

So, last night I went out with J. for the first time in years. J., a JC classmate whom I still count as one of my oldest and best friends, had asked me to go to the Zouk 15th Anniversary extravaganza that was dubbed "The Crystal Ball". As usual, J. knew not just the guy who was organising the show, but also the models in the show. AND the guy who provided the models for the show. AND of course, the Zouk guy with the power to summon free drinks with the tiniest wave of his hand...

The dresscode was "ballroom chic", so I had a funny feeling it was shaping up to be sort of a "big deal". I should have surmised this, of course, from the events of the afternoon before. Over tea and scones at the Royal Copenhagen Tea House, J. was fretting and fretting over what to wear. Apparently, midway through tea (and totally unbeknownst to me), he had realised after mentally going through his clothes collection that he had absolutely no pants to go with his new designer plaid/patchwork jacket and his new white shirt with the ribbon collar (apparently ties, ribbons etc are "in" this season). So after we parted at 5.15pm, both of us calmly strolling out of Takashimaya, he literally ran like a madman down Orchard Road to Blackjack at Forum Galleria before it could close at 6 and came out with a pair of dark red pants.

Me? I just wore my new Paul Smith shirt and hoped for the best. Not a great move, as I eventually found out, because I had bought the shirt in London from the Paul Smith sale shop off Bond Street. So when his friend R. (with the $8,000 John Galliano jacket) would only say that he had the same shirt, and not a word more, I knew straightaway that I had committed an unmitigated fashion faux pas. Later, I notice one of his friends, who supplies newsprint to SPH and has a different car for each day of the week, actually bought the same Dior jacket with super-rich detailing in TWO colours (one he wore at Zouk, one at Happy). "My price is the highest among all the suppliers," he whispers triumphantly to me at Zouk. "I just signed a five-year deal with Robin."

Strangely I wasn't my usual nervous self and wasn't intimidated or insecure at all (In the end I put it down to being like... 80 kilos next to all these waif-like lean guys haha). Plus everyone was really friendly and nice, and J. took great pains to ensure I didn't at any time feel left out. I just stood there taking in everything in J.'s world with a kind of wonderment I had not experienced for a long time. And when the show reached its thunderously spectacular O.T.T. climax (a fantasy white gothic feathered lacey pouty angel wedding kind of thing), I suddenly realised that life still has quite a lot to show to someone like me.

I just need to get some trendier clothes. :)

Martha Jewart

Inspired by the Super Hero quiz, I decided to take the test I've always wanted to take all along. And the answer I got from the "Which character on Sex And The City are you?" quiz is the one which my friends and I had suspected all along:

You scored 60% Charlotte
You're a romantic at heart, strongly influenced by the intuitive, profound and sometimes naive Water Signs - Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces. You're like a mother, a mystery and a poet all in one. Though on the surface you may seem innocent and all about seeking the good in people, beneath the surface, you hide secret yearnings for intimacy, for attachment and ideal love. You're looking for a knight in shining armour, a soul mate, someone who will complete you and tether you to the earth when you get carried away with your fantasies. You're super-sensitive, soaking up the moods of others; you're free with your emotions, crying at commercials and sad movies. You also provide a shoulder to cry on and open arms for hugs. Be careful that you're not so wide-eyed and trusting that you get taken in by some cunning wolf in sheep's clothing.

The story of Eurydice

One of the great things about sitting down and downloading all my favourite CDs into my massively massive 300GB Seagate external hard disk is that in the morning when I'm getting ready for work and iTunes does its magic thing of picking up the next song among thousands, something will suddenly jump out at you. An undiscovered gem which lay lost for years among the thousands of CDs you own, that finally resonates because the time has finally come for you to notice its parallels to your own life.

And so thanks to my computer, I now know that in Greek mythology, Eurydice was the wife of Orpheus. One day, a snake bit her and she died. Orpheus missed her so much that he travelled to the underworld, where he played such sad songs that it softened the hearts of Hades and Persephone, and they allowed Eurydice to return to the land of the living.

The only condition was that he was to have faith in the Promise, and had to walk in front of her all the time, never looking back until they reached the Upper World. But because he loved her too much, he got worried, and wanted to be sure that she was still with him. So he turned back to look at her, and she vanished.

All the things we'd hoped
Would always keep us close
Stand between us now, as fences
The letters that we wrote
Have all gone up in smoke
And now you're just too far to listen in
When all but hope is lost
You believe at any cost
In things that make the living lighter
And when the shadows fall
The promise of it all
Is lying in the bed beside her.

"Promise (The Cult of Eurydice)", David Sylvian (1987)

What the cards say

Today, I met up with C. for the first time since we broke up, face to face. We had a drink after gym. I passed him a t-shirt and a DVD I had bought him in London, along with some t-shirts he had left at my place. He returned me the house keys and two supplementary cards I had given him. We talked about the elections, my upcoming column and our friends. It was a good chat and I enjoyed it.

When I got home, however, I wished he hadn't given me back those credit cards. I have no use for them at all, and in the end, they only reminded me of what I felt when I applied for them. How I proudly told the DBS officer who called me up to ascertain our relationship that he was my partner. That I thought of him almost all the time during our time together and how I really loved him wholeheartedly, but somehow it wasn't enough to see us through.

The cards also made me realise that even though I will eventually learn to love someone again, I doubt I will ever give my heart unconditionally to someone again. When my Valentine's Day tribute to C. was published on Fridae, one cynical reader wrote in the feedback section that such displays of emotion were simply foolish and naive. And that I would look at love very differently when the relationship ends.

Now I look back and I realise that what he said is sadly going to be true. That even though I will recover and have other relationships, there is a certain magic and wonder that is probably forever gone, and I will never again feel the depth of feeling which enabled me to write such a piece. That future relationships will make up for, and repair, the disappointment I felt, and at best, go only most of the way in restoring my faith in love. Maybe one day I'll look back on these sentences and be amused to find about how melodramatic they are. But I suspect there will always be a ring of truth about them that I will never shake off.

I am spiderman

Your results:
You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man 65% Superman 60% Wonder Woman 60% Green Lantern 60% Robin 57% Iron Man 55% Batman 45% The Flash 45% Supergirl 35% Hulk 30% Catwoman 10%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

Click here to take the "Which Superhero am I?" quiz...

Necessity is the mother of re-invention

More than a year ago, when I momentarily quit the job that I was doing for a very different one, I was chatting with my new-old boss K. in her room when she startled me by stopping in mid-sentence and suddenly opening her drawer and pulling out two Bon Jovi CDs. I think we were talking about organisational change (as is the usual case with her).

She (squealing):
"See! This is what I call re-invention!!"

Me (caught off-guard and never really having been a Bon Jovi fan):
"Wah!".

She (gushing slightly, but somehow still able to draw a corporate lesson):
"Don't you just love Bon Jovi? Oh my God, wasn't he just so cute? Anyway, see how they released interpretations of their old songs, so that they are old yet new? It's not always about new material, new stuff you know. Sometimes the great stuff is already there and we just need to find a way to polish it, to renew it, to reinvent it..."

Me (pretending to study the CD covers):
"Yeah... I see what you mean!"

She: "Do you want to borrow them?"

Fast forward to today. When I go up to London, one of the things that I always do is look for concerts that I can go to. And I always find something on that I like. Not this time, despite careful scrutiny of hundreds of listings at least 3 issues of Time Out, the only names I could really recognise that I would consider going to were Goldfrapp, Sigur Ros and ABC's Martin Fry (performing at the Hard Rock Cafe no less). Then it struck me. I'm ancient. I can't tell The Kaiser Chiefs and Interpol apart (or can really bother to). I can use band names like Coldplay and My Chemical Romance intelligently enough in a sentence but I don't really have any feel for these bands. I came back from London with just one CD purchase -- a boxed set of remastered Eurythmics CDs. Sigh...

And now, back from a trip to HMV at lunchtime, I have bought "Union Street" -- a new album by Erasure featuring acoustic versions of you guessed it... old Erasure songs. Putting it into the car CD changer, I was shocked at how much I loved it. And appalled - yet proud - that I knew exactly how the new acoustic version of "Stay With Me" differed from the 1996 acoustic version, and how both differed from the bleepy album version.

Is this re-invention, or simply a failure to move on?

I try hard to put you out of my mind
Every night alone I'm thinking 'bout you
How can I avoid this pain without you
I won't cry, I won't be sorry no more
I know that this is something I'll get over
Maybe I can learn to love another
It's just a matter of time
A matter of time

Just because I lock myself in my room
It doesn't mean that I'm afraid to talk to
Those people I know that might have seen you
No return, I keep reminding myself
I won't look back
Won't regret a single moment
I gonna mend this heart inside you've broken
It's just a matter of time
A matter of time

"Spiralling", Erasure (1987)
"The Circus" / "Union Street"

A happy chapter ends

Three weeks ago, on March 8, my happy and "settled" life as I knew it, came to an abrupt end.

There seemed to be many reasons for C. leaving after almost 6 years of being together. He was always a loner and yearned again to do what he wanted, not having to consider someone else's feelings. He realised that he had accomplished little in his life at the age of 28, and felt that the relationship had held him back, and was still holding him back, from an all-out attitude towards his work. He wanted to spend more time with his family, whom he had neglected during the time he was with me (and we were together almost all the time). He said he wanted out of relationships with anyone, not just out of a relationship with me. He wanted to be himself again, disappear from the community, shut himself into a room and be anti-social.

But the one single reason that really mattered, I think, was that he had simply fallen out of love with me. And though he still cared for me as a good friend he would like to keep, he was feeling trapped in a relationship he had no courage to back out of. I was simply not the guy that he thought I was -- too childish and immature, too lazy, too unadventurous, too fat and maybe this: too nice. I should have realised this, given his penchant for "bastard"-type role models in life, like the brilliant but stand-offish Taiwanese songwriter Bobby Chen.

He said that he considered just leaving me a note and disappearing from my life, forever unreachable. But he decided that he owed me more than that, and decided to explain exactly why he was leaving. He said that he would still take my calls (and he has) in order to help me get through this. He said that for once in his life, he wanted to stop running away from his problems. And that he still wants to be friends, if I would let him.

Friends rallied around as soon as it happened. The verdict from most of them was that he was too young, just 22, when I met him. Tethered to a relationship just when life should be most unpredictable and exciting, something like this was bound to happen. A few listened to the long-winded explanation wordlessly, as if to comtemplate other reasons that had possibly been left unsaid. Could it have been something you did, which got back to him? Could he be seeing someone else, given that he has now all but disappeared from public view?

He told me that he is now one of two tenants in a flat owned by a gay couple he befriended on Fridae. He refuses to say who they are. I guess the theories could well be true but they are, for now, hardly relevant. I believe he has been honest with me, but if it turns out that he hasn't, so be it.

There are many things that I could be similarly angry about -- like the fact that he never liked to talk about problems which had no solution and always tended to let things snowball. He'd get irritated if I probed further, and the result was that I learnt to leave things be and hope things improved on their own. The fact that I was not given a second chance, and remained (mostly) unaware of the seriousness of the problems. But I've lost the energy to be angry about anything anymore because it just won't make any difference to the outcome. Once he has made up his mind, it's hard to change it.

The fact is: I lost the game fair and square. No one snatched him away from my grasp, and even though some people sowed seeds of discord, we never took any of it seriously. There were hints of trouble (stray comments he made, the drifting apart of the last 6 months) but I didn't take them seriously enough. He was partly responsible, so was I. In the end, could it have been any different? If he raised those fundamental problems, would our relationship still have been as happily smooth and drama-free as it was? I guess we both messed up in our own ways. And in leaving, he has also been fair to me.

All this is quite separate, of course, from dealing with the giant hole in my life that his leaving has created. After almost 6 years together, his imprint is on nearly everything. And no matter what anyone says, his leaving came as a total shock to me.

Within 2 weeks, I found myself booked on a last minute flight to London, to think about things and regroup. London is the one place I could think of that doesn't hold memories of C., who hated to travel to any Western country. It's also the one place which represents the person that I was before I met him -- a slightly insecure boy trying to hold it together as an adult, wondering what lies in store in life and love, looking on in amazement at the cultural smogasbord on offer all over the city at any time. Listening to quintessential London bands Everything But The Girl and Saint Etienne as I waited for, and changed, trains on the Underground, walking the length of Shaftesbury Avenue to the Virgin Megastore on Tottenham Court Road, it all came back to me. I'm not sure whether I prefer the pre-C. me or the post-C. me, but it was good to be reminded that both exist. Despite the odd bout of depression, it was a good two weeks of shopping, clubbing, meeting new people and catching up with old friends.

Now I'm back and a life without C. properly begins -- rather unsteadily if events of this past weekend in Singapore are any guide. Somehow I'll get through it, and it starts by holding onto concrete things which I know that I still have -- friends, music, my work and my 80kg weight (still my proudest achievement to date). One step at a time, I suppose, with only songs on the CD player signposting the changes.

Look at you now, you're disenchanted
Can't believe how things can change
Take a little out of life and things get strange
Now you find the wishes you were granted
Things you thought were in your hands
Have slipped away
How much can you withstand?
... and everything is at a standstill
Where's someone who'll be on hand till
you're no longer disenchanted
thinking everything is wrong?
You know you're not the only one to wait so long.
I wonder, can you try again
Are you that strong?
- "Disenchanted", Everything But The Girl