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For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops.

The same is true of the laugh. "

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot.


It's a good quote, one that I like to believe. It gives me a sense of perspective on my own life. When I'm feeling down, I remember that the rest of the world is still in balance and eventually I'll pass the tears on to someone else and maybe even become one of the laughers.

On 25th June 2009 though, I found it impossible to believe that the world's tears hadn't increased a little.

I may appear to be 3 weeks too late to eulogise, but the fact is that Michael Jackson is still dead, yet to be buried and the world continues to mourn. He was one of the few, maybe the only one, who could disturb an entire planet's equilibrium so completely.

I can't paper over the fact that many were unmoved or even managed to find humour in his passing, but even they can't deny his impact on the world. His lyrics, his music, his choreography, his humanitarian work, his videos, his complete dedication to what he did - whether or not you personally admired him, the odds are that he inspired someone you do.

When I analyse my own grief, what really amplified my feelings was a complete sense of shock. Michael Jackson has always been an icon to me, but never a man. With each brilliant new piece of music, with each glittering outfit, with each unparalled performance, ground-breaking music video, freakish piece of behaviour, surgical procedure, accusation of child molestation... he drew further and further away from the people I see around myself every day, what I define as human and furthermore what I define as mortal.

Yes, as ludicrous as it sounds, I just never imagined he could die and I still can not conceive that all he was is now just a rotting corpse.

And yet, as I typed that, I knew it wasn't true. Because a vast majority of what he was is within his music, and that will live on forever...

RIP MJ

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I've been through break ups before which kind of felt like having a haircut (which sounds offensive, but let's face it, haircuts can be quite traumatic). Then there was that break up where I felt like my still-beating heart was being slowly ripped out of my chest and chewed up by teeny little meece right in front of my eyes (those meece were vicious and rude!). But in between those, there also exists a kind of break up which is more like having a limb sawn off your body (maybe it's a gangrenous limb and you secretly know it's for the best, but it's also painful and scary).

The question now is, who would want to date a paraplegic girl with choppy hair, and a lump of coal for a heart???

I make myself feel better by watching The Hills.

Also, my kitten is getting his nuts chopped off tomorrow, so things could really be a lot worse.

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AGH! Where have I been???

Well, first of all, you need to calm down. Seriously. The main thing is that I'm back, right?
And secondly, well I suppose I've been nowhere. Just floating along, walking on sunshine, dancing on air, other such things which - were they not metaphors - would probably leave one with a broken spine and/or dead. And despite parts of me feeling distinctly numb, I'm quite pleased to report that I'm physically quite well and certainly very much alive.

I had intended to write a post at the beginning of the year to tell you all that I don't believe in New Year's Resolutions... Well I mean, I do believe that they exist, they're not like fairies or anything, but I just don't really believe in making them. I think if you have a list of 10 things which you know you ought to change about yourself, why wait until 1st January? You need to have that resolve all year round, it doesn't work if you only have it on one day. Unfortunately, my resolve to write that blog wasn't strong enough to bring me here in time, so I sort of missed the moment.

Then, when the craze took off, I wanted to write about what a pointless pointless sorry waste of life I think Twitter is. But then my cousin took the words right out of my mouth (and turned them into more clever, articulate words). So again, the moment was gone.

In between those times, I was occupied with being content and happy in my life for the first time in a long time and just didn't feel the need to blog. Fortunately, I'm now positively morose, so you can expect me to be updating a lot more frequently.

And before I leave, I know you only come here to look at the photos, so here's one I made earlier:

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maternal

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Hmm, ok, this is kind of awkward. It would appear that we've ticked over into 2009 and I've still yet to blog about my 25th birthday last September. To be fair, I'm reaching the age now where it would probably be best if I stopped drawing attention to my acceleration towards 30/middle-age/death. Yes, it's probably time for me to adopt a more lady-like mystique around what age I happen to be, which will also come in handy as an excuse when - in the not so distant future - my fragile mind begins to disintegrate entirely and I can't actually remember what age I happen to be. As it is, I already have little to no recollection of the night in question, but I have photos. Look at them.

Anyway, I have very exciting news, since in the time I've been away from these pages I've had not one, but two gorgeous babies!
For those of you who are smart enough to realise that I don't have the gestation period of a field mouse, yes, well done, they are not in fact human babies. But they are a million times better.

VW EOS

Mordecai (Hebrew: Warrior ) AKA Momo (Japanese: Peach)

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I'm a terrible person. I know. I'm sorry. Luring you in with tantalising promises of sordid mini-skirt action and then disappearing without a trace for over a month was pretty poor of me. The truth is, I wasn't in fact able to attend the 'Mini-Skirt Fever' party, as I was too busy nursing injuries sustained during this year's SEGA Company Conference. Now, I'm not sure what other companies do during their off-sites, but SEGA seem hell-bent on forcing me to use (and break) parts of my body which I wasn't even really aware existed, on an annual basis. To be honest, I wasn't sure I'd ever walk again, let alone attend another party.

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I don’t particularly believe in beginnings or endings. Even someone as obsessed with categorising things as I am can quite clearly see that life doesn’t fit into neat little boxes. All the same, I can feel something distinctly new filtering through the air right now, as subtle yet undeniable as one season passing into the next. And for once, I feel like I can turn my head to face the glow of the future, not afraid but excited.

Whilst I'm prancing around in the fairy dust of time (which we can only hope doesn't turn out to be asbestos particles floating down from the ceiling), the London Chinese society parties are continuing to ramp up with reckless abandon. My events calendar is now filled pretty much until Spring ’09, with a host of themed parties which are nothing more than increasingly brazen and transparent excuses to get the female guests to wear increasingly brazen and transparent clothing. The announcement of this Friday’s ‘Mini Skirt Fever’ party struck me as particularly pathetic. Then again, since I am often to be found parading around in ensembles so revealing that those around me feel compelled to take me aside and explain the difference between a ‘dress’ and a ‘slightly long top’, I can hardly take the moral high ground. Also, if I were to stand on the moral high ground you would be able to see up my skirt, and that would be indecent.

To tide you over whilst you salivate over the prospect of being struck down by Mini Skirt SARS in the not too distant future, here come the pictures from our last two nights out.

Beauty & The Geek (a fun, if slighty stolen, theme)






Fancy Dress (not even really a theme)

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Having wasted the chance to blog about my latest trip to Singapore whilst I was actually out there, I’m now back for the retrospective. 

Ever since I was a child, I’ve regarded Singapore as a city in stasis, a place which never changes. Considering the fact that a new development crops up somewhere in the city every 40 seconds, this was obviously a ludicrous notion powered by the myopic imagination of a 7 year old. Nevertheless, every year I would come back and the house would look exactly the same, my room would smell exactly the same, my Grandpa would be sitting in exactly the same chair, rubbing his belly in exactly the same way, telling exactly the same story about how he used to chase my sister with an electric razor when she was small. This year, Singapore without Grandpa seemed completely different. I felt like walking up to strangers in the street and asking them why they didn’t seem to have noticed. 

That old house, which has remained virtually unchanged for four generations, is now about to undergo a well deserved make-over and I probably won’t be back in Singapore until it’s done. So when the movers came to clear out the last of the furniture and it was time for me to say goodbye, I thought that I would feel sad. But the truth is, it was a lot sadder saying goodbye when we had to leave Grandpa behind. 

But enough with the melancholia! Rather than wasting the vacation entertaining morbid thoughts, I decided to make the most of it, especially by spending as much time with Zen as possible. Although we’re separated by so many miles of land and sea, she will always be the sister I never had – I miss you!

 **twins!**


 
**nobody is straight in Singapore...** 



**Karaoke with our parents...**



 
**white dresses couldn't hide our sins**

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Having been back in Singapore for the last few days, I have come to the conclusion that the government will need to take swift action to implement something I like to call "Project Bearable Fucking Weather". This would be a two-stage development consisting of first covering the entire island of Singapore beneath a glass dome and then blasting air-con into every corner of the city. Especially corners where I happen to be. If energy resources should present a problem, I would suggest that sweatshop workers be commissioned to pedal little bicycles in underground caverns which would power the air-con 24/7. If this sounds neither humanitarianly nor technologically sound, that is because it isn't.

It would probably make sense now for me to post up some photos of me languishing in the Singaporean heat; however that would also deceitfully miss out everything else which happened in June, including Anna and Joe’s birthdays.

Rather predictably, these closely dated occasions were celebrated first by an expedition to YOYO, and then by a BBQ back at SPNA HQ (that is a lot of CAPS).

YOYO

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I kind of like the fact that every time there is a slight lull in the frequency of my journal posts, I can use work trips as my excuse... I’m thereby able to hide my innate laziness behind the façade of some kind of diligent travelling business woman. I love that shit!

My latest excursion took me across to the Land of the Rising Sun on a visit to our offices in Tokyo.

Team PR

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Three long weeks since we last met here on this very page, you and I. What can I say to defend this poor show?

Well the first week, I was over in LA for work and yes even though they do still have the internet out there, excuse me if I didn't feel much inclined to update my livejournal. I'm not a typing monkey, for Christ’s sake! Although... a typing monkey would be awesome, so if you know where I could get one, please do tell. With a monkey assistant, imagine how much more productive I’d be! My journal could be updated on a daily basis, and although we've yet to establish whether the typing monkey assistant would actually be literate or not, it would probably make very little difference to the overall quality of my updates, so who cares?

As for the other two weeks, these were filled with some unusually warm weather which prevented me from visiting these pages. For a London girl, born and bred under a huge black umbrella, it took me 6 to 8 days to actually believe what I was seeing with my own eyes, during which it was all I could do to remember to breathe, let alone update my livejournal. The fact that whoever is in charge of the climate control at work deemed it necessary to crank the air-con up to 11 at this time, did little to help my confusion. Luckily, although the constant cycle of being almost frozen to death during the day and slowly defrosted in the evenings has left me with some severe brain damage, I have lots of photos of the events which took place during this time.

So now it's over to Marcel, the typing monkey, who will come up with some amusing blurb to accompany the photos, hopefully resulting in much joy and laughter from us all.

Marcel

Arsenal 1 – 0 Everton



Personally, I find football to be a most barbaric activity, typical of the human race’s ceaseless need to divide itself into tribes and wage war against each other under the thinly veiled pretence of 'sport'. Of course, if I were forced to choose a team, Arsenal’s particular brand of Total Football and slick passing certainly appeal to me the most. Fortunately, I am a chimpanzee and therefore the notion of being forced to choose a team is quite preposterous. As for the coming week’s Champion’s League Final between Manchester United and Chelsea, the choice between either of the two as champions is quite literally “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue sea” to me.

Carwash Party



Why Gemma is forever insisting on attending parties with increasingly obscure and ludicrous themes is quite beyond me. Fortunately, she decided to forgo her initial intention to attend the party in a white terry-cloth romper from American Apparel, since quite frankly she would have looked ridiculous even if any of the other guests had chosen to wear fancy dress (which they had not).

Lydia’s Birthday 



The 5th of May saw the passing of Gemma’s mother’s birthday, for which occassion her two adorable dogs were also present. I happen to feel a particular affinity for these dogs since their breed is named Affenpinscher - from the German Affen, meaning ape. Incidentally, being a chimpanzee I am also an ape, not a monkey. Not that I’d expect any of you humans to deign to care that there is a distinct difference between the two.

First BBQ of 2008





Oh great. They had a barbeque, got drunk and got up to all kinds of hilarious mischief. I am really not getting paid enough for this nonsense. Someone get me a banana. Immediately!