life has to go on

I had a great day today.

I bought ' The Glass Bead Game ' by Herman Hesse today...it is a fictional biography about an intellectual, set in the twenty third Century...The book is about the complexity of intellectual life and the emotional insecurities of the mentally gifted...Haiz...someimes i think too smart oso not good..."dio bor"? (lit.translation: "correct or not?") There always seems to be some kind of tension between the man-on-the-street and the scholar/artist/philosopher/scientist who is imbued with an extra layer of consciousness...

I followed my mum to buy some stuff from a market near Bugis...went to a dank and dusty dried goods shop.The air was very bad and the whole place stank of soiled underwear...flies were all over, having little feeding frenzies on top of mountains of shrivelled dried prawns...everything looked really crinkled up...there was something that looked like an aborted foetus in a glass jar filled with piss...oh, and some phallic-looking sea cucumbers...yuck...After my mum chose what she wanted (which was like, a pile of torrid black fungus), the lady boss ( who looked like a Harpy with super gao make up.) shrieked,

"Oi! sio ber! ka kin kah ji kor auntie siu lui!!!!" falsetto crescendo
(lit. translation: Hey! go and collect money from this woman! and make it snappy babes!)

At the word "Sio Ber"...it seemed as if the malodorous clouds had parted and a ray of sunshine was pouring forth from the chalice of Heaven...Life flowed back into my downcast face as my eager eyes became eagle eyes...I scanned the area with the felicity of a bloodhound to locate the elusive "Sio Ber" ...

Could it be that some young and radiantly fresh Nymphet was right here within this squalor? Waiting to be rescued from the mountains of shrivelled hei bee and her Harpy of an aunt by a valiant knight like yours truly? Gosh...it's almost like Rapunzel...and by the way, i hope she has long hair too...

My eyes roved frantically...as i turned...

only to find myself coming face to face with a lao lian.

" Auntie! Sa chap kor...gum xia! Lai...wa sang le ji pow kek huay...le ka ki teng chu ban-ban lim hor!"

Enough said...i can't even be bothered to translate.

Next on my agenda was lunch with grandma...Grandma hasn't fully recovered from stroke...recently her memory is becoming a little cranky too...

she called me 'Brandon'...and called Brandon 'Derrick'....which gave us the creeps cos there's no Derrick in our family.

Sometimes I think fate is macabre...i've seen photos of my grandma as a young woman looking absolutely gorgeous against the backdrop of the Niagara Falls, the Sakura showers in Hokkaido and the natural splendour of the Grand Canyon...I guess that young lady never expected the day when she would be wheelchair bound...with liver spots and collapsing teeth...getting all her grandchildrens' names mixed up...but i think my grandma is very lucky...cos she gets to live in a big, spacious mansion in Bukit Timah...with her entourage of children, grandchildren and Filipino maids loving her and fussing over her despite her liver spots and collapsed teeth...If you watch enough Channel 8 you will know that lots of old people in her situation are not as fortunate as her.

I basically slept the afternoon away...was really tired after that long, long jog in the morning...

In essence it was a beautiful day....I thought the apocalypse had come last saturday night...but i'm glad that life went on as usual...hopefully,things stay as bright as today for some time to come.