okaaaay. alright. this is just ridiculous. my first platoon sergeant (i'm the platoon commander, the PS is my second in command) went and jumped off a building. he's alive still, don't worry. just released from detention barracks. his replacement just got into a car accident with a motorcyclist. said motorcyclist is now dead. replacement PS is undergoing police investigation, and is rather likely to end up in jail as well.

i'm starting to feel more than a little worried for the recruits who are coming in mid-december.
 
i walked home alone with you. 9:35 pm

  this is seriously retarded. www.hoopsandyoyo.com

oh holiday seasons indeed.
 
i walked home alone with you. 8:53 pm

  graaaagh. it's a singularly BLOODY ANNOYING feeling to want VERY HARD to sleep but not be able to, no matter what you do.
and such have been my nights so far for the past month or so. damn. anyway.

i phoned midori.

"i have to talk to you," i said. i have a million things to talk to you about. a million things we have to talk about. all i want in this world is you. i want to see you and talk. i want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning."

midori responded with a long, long silence - the silence of all the misty rain in the world falling on all the new-mown lawns of the world. forehead pressed against the glass, i shut my eyes and waited. at last, midori's voice broke into the silence: "where are you now?"

where was i now?

gripping the receiver, i raised my head and turned to see what lay beyond the phone box. where was i now? i had no idea. no idea at all. where was this place? all that flashed into my eyes were the countless shapes of people walking by to nowhere. again and again i called out for midori from the dead centre of this place that was no place.

that's how the book ends. oh and the strangest thing happened that day. i've never heard of the song norwegian wood before and neither have my parents (it's by the beatles) and so d sent it to me. the day after i heard it for the first time (and second, and third, and i lost count) my parents were sending me to camp, and the familiar lilting tunes of the song began playing on the radio. strange coincidence, don't you think? i think. anyway. off to try and sleep again. even the damn flu medicine doesn't make me sleepy. (er i actually have a flu. i'm not taking it for its sleep-inducing purposes. in case you were wondering. and since everyone seems to think i'm sunk deep in drug abuse and other illicit doings.)

 
i walked home alone with you. 12:57 am

  in response. to the previous comments by karen and lw: i agree that what midori (strawberry shortbread girl) says is utterly selfish, but you have to read the book to understand more of her character. she says the utterly weirdest things (like, something about wanting to climb a tree to pee on everybody below her) to incite a reaction from toru (protagonist), who is too caught up with naoko (the other girl, loosely, the one who wants to die) to notice that midori (representative of the will to live) is here as an escape from the past few years of his life that he's led in memory of his dead best friend kizuki (naoko's boyfriend, whom toru somewhat betrays by falling in love with naoko, but then again the three were inseparable in life and it was rather understandable that they'd seek each other for solace after kizuki's death). also, i find "So then I'd give him all the love he deserves for what he's done." the saving grace for midori's absurd statements.

ok you probably won't understand any of this, but i just had to defend her. heh. i like midori.
 
i walked home alone with you. 9:58 pm

  norwegian wood. it's an amazing book, and thus i found myself awake at 5.30am, still reading. goodness. this is me, for whom sleep is a necessity that cannot be forgone. and i -still- managed to crawl out of bed at 9am! goodness gracious me. what a change. but really, it's a beautiful book. please do me a favoour and borrow it from me after i'm done reading it a second time through (which i -am- going to do, immediately after i finish it the first time.)

more later. naoko and midori await.

here's a bit first though.

"That's the hard part," said Midori. She watched the rising smoke for a while, thinking. "I guess I've been waiting so long I'm looking for perfection. That makes it tough."

"Waiting for the perfect love?"

"No, even I know better than that. I'm looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness. Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortbread. And you stop everything you're doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortbread out to me. And I say I don't want it any more and throw it out of the window. That's what I'm looking
for."

"I'm not sure that has anything to do with love," I said with some amazement.

"It does," she said. "You just don't know it. There are times in a girl's life when things like that are incredibly important."

"Things like throwing strawberry shortbread out of the window?"

"Exactly. And when I do it, I want the man to apologize to me. 'Now I see, Midori. What a fool I've been! I should have known that you would lose your desire for strawberry shortbread. I have all the intelligence and sensitivity of a piece of donkey shit. To make it up to you, I'll go out and buy you something else. What would you like? Chocolate mousse? Cheesecake?'"

"So then what?"

"So then I'd give him all the love he deserves for what he's done."

"Sounds crazy to me."

"Well to me, that's what love is...for a certain kind of person, love begins from something tiny or silly. From something like that or it doesn't begin at all."

but if you think carefully about it, not all that crazy really.

 
i walked home alone with you. 11:41 pm

  haha. ok before i go off, this is damn funny. from the half that voted kerry.
 
i walked home alone with you. 2:09 am

  i know how to read, leh.

hmm. someone commented that my blog is very 'emo'. what emo? where? nooo la i'm such a cheery person. see? ----> =) i can smile. there. not emo.

alright i'm just bored.

i just bought two new books! i'm happy. it's been a while since i spent money on books. although it set me back by $50. but my friend said something like books don't count towards monthly expenditure. so i didn't spend any money. sigh. if only it really worked that way. i think books are so bloody expensive.

you know what? i think i shall go and read. when i'm done you can borrow. i'm nice that way. i'm also nice in many other ways but this is just one way that i'm nice in. next time i tell you more ways that i'm nice. anyway, books:

1. norwegian wood by haruki murakami (wah neh neh the cover on amazon is so ugly. mine is nicer. it's the one from the murakami link, the rightmost cover in the row. yeah the pretty girl on the white background. that's why i saw the book in the first place. pretty girl. hmm if i lend you this you'll smudge her face. ok not lending you this one.)

2. the line of beauty by alan hollinghurst (booker prize! ha. actually i'm quite amazed. they only announced the silly booker prize last month, and this here book that i have already has it printed on the front cover. so fast. WAH and now i look in the book and it says "this edition published 2005 by picador." time machine, man. this is cool. ok i'm not lending you this one.)

hmm that means none of you are getting anything. oh well too bad. maybe if you ask nicely.

and i'm not just trying to convince you that i'm intellectual, because if you know me, i'm just reading these for the sex. really really.

 
i walked home alone with you. 1:29 am

  eleven minutes. it's a book by paulo coelho, whose writing i'm really beginning to like. so far: the alchemist, veronika decides to die, eleven minutes, and the devil and miss prym. anyway.

She got to the airport, drank another cup of coffee and waited four hours
for her flight to paris, thinking all the time that he would arrive any moment,
because at some point before they fell asleep, she had told him the time of her
flight. that's how it always happened in films: at the last moment, when the
woman is about to board the plane, the man races up to her, puts his arms around
her and kisses her, and brings her back to his world, beneath the smiling,
indulgent gaze of the flight staff. the words 'the end' appear on the screen,
and the audience knows that, from then on, they will live happily ever after.

'films never tell you what happens next,' she thought, trying to console
herself. marriage, cooking, children, ever more infrequent sex, the discovery of
the first note from his mistress, the decision to confront him, his promise that
it will never happen again, the second note from another mistress, another
confrontation and this time a threat to leave him, this time the man reacts less
vehemently and merely tells her that he loves her. the third note from a third
mistress, and the decision to say nothing, to pretend that she knows nothing,
because he might tell her he doesn't love her anymore and that she's free to
leave.

no, films never show that. they finish before the real world. it's best not
to think too much about it.

well for the record, ralf does show up in the end. so hey.
 
i walked home alone with you. 4:10 pm

  it's been... 10 months, and 10 days ever since.
exactly half a year to the day that i last spoke to you.
50 more days to...another kind of anniversary.

i really don't want to dream about you anymore, you know. someone tell me how this is supposed to end. because, honestly, it's getting quite tiring. and yesterday's dream was...i don't know, bizarre. oh well.

it's pouring outside now and the sheets of rain force the streets into a quiet, lonely calm. it's all quite pretty really, as all the trees sway kind of surreally together and the rain just falls and falls.

i realise i miss you most just before i go to sleep, because that's when i'd say goodnight to you, and tell you that i love you.
 
i walked home alone with you. 2:29 pm

  and it would go something like this, i suppose. i was walking back and i just ran an imaginary telephone conversation through my head. and it sounded something like this. it's rather one-sided, because, oh well it just is.

"hi, m please? oh hey. hi, yeah it's me. j. i just called to say hi, and ask how you were doing. oh you're good? that's great, that's great. oh no it's nothing, just saying hi i guess. no, nothing else. well, have a good day then. um, yeah, thanks. goodbye. yeah, bye."

um, well, yeah, bye.
 
i walked home alone with you. 4:30 am

  simple thing, where have you gone. do you ever find that as you grow older, life begins getting so much more annoyingly complicated? i mean, people start looking into the little nuances of everything. interpersonal relationships become all the more difficult to keep clear. whatever happened to good old playground mates? i friend you, i don't friend you anymore, and tomorrow all the water pistols and sand pails just come out again into the little group pool.

all the strange dark little facets of the world that you wish you'd never known about begin to display themselves to you in so many tantalising ways, until they actually don't seem to be that wrong anymore.

hmm. well they do, just that...just that i don't know what. oh well.

ah fuck la.


 
i walked home alone with you. 2:01 am