personal epics

Some people we meet loom larger than life.

As a young girl, they were mostly fictional. Christopher Reeves playing Superman-
his dark brooding but kind eyes and that straying lock of hair - Back to the Future star Michael J.Fox in spite of his comparatively diminutive size was god-like to my pre-pubescent eyes.

As a teenager besotted with Shakespeare, Hamlet and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre inspired in me the yearning for the pathos of melodrama - I began to configure myself after the elements of a tragic heroine. Of course on hindsight I appeared more like the comic farce, the tragic queen parodied, a clown. (all things considering what kinds of tragedy can a middle-class, English-ed, over-achieving Singaporean girl really go through?)

At the age of 21, returning from years away in the UK, I find that my parents look...
smaller... no longer the looming figures of authority they once were.

Yet, my father's life story and his personality suddenly took on proportions I had never before experienced ...... as the ex-parent, he was more equal now in some ways, but so worthy of reverence because other people can't stop heaping praises on him.

2 nights ago a dearly beloved Reverand David Chan passed away at 9pm after suffering heart attack while he presided over the wake service of another elder in my church,
- and the mortality of fathers hit home.

I was heartbroken to see the tears we fought back, the whole lot of us - choir members who have taken him for granted as a permanent fixture in the church - and I thought about my own father who turns 64 next year who will one day also leave me.

My conclusions...

My father is larger than life, his story is an epic that I will carry with me for the rest of my life, he is every bit as real, every bit as awe-inspiring as the fictional characters cardinally responsible for moulding my mind my whole life.

On the side...

Heard yesterday at one history lesson that towards the end of the 19th century, Erik H.Eriksson derived a whole Freudian psycho-historical perspective on Martin Luther based on Luther's trauma and obsession with his own father. It seems that in one sweeping psychoanalysis the entire Protestant movement founded on "justification by faith" may possibly be denigraded as one man's resolution in never feeling worthy enough for his own uncompromising father.

It's a skewed way of looking at a person's motivations and I felt offended that even if some of it were true we can discount an entire movement that is theologically founded on essentially God's Word.

But the idea kinda sticks:

Why do we make epics of heroes and villains - Oliver Stone of the "Platoon" and "Nixon" fame is about to release one about Alexander the Great - when they are all around us?

Historical characters, with their tragic flaws and mighty conquests make great epics.

But personal epics require effort of gargantuan proportions to get noticed.

Both equally worthy to be remembered.


For Rev. Chan:

"You have run the good race, you have fought the good fight. You have kept the faith. Well done, my child, well done." - choral piece entitled "Well done, my child".

2nd fitting

Naked in the changing room.

shed clothes, fluorescent bulbs underboard, underfoot.
Full-length mirror.
White light - Imperfections exposed.

A single, almost luminescent gown - duchess satin embroidered in silver thread
- embellished with beading across the bodice of the bustier hangs off the wall -
splendid in length - virginal in conception.

I stare -
first at my all too inadequate bust - feet warmed by floorboard lights -
but nipples react in shock to the wafts of air-con'd air
- or fear at its sudden exposure - such brightness!
- then at the gown that was to be called mine.

Two oversized "padding" thingies hang mockingly inside the lining -
sewn on to fill out the gown where my body fails.

False advertising.

I try it on - and nakedness is covered - warmth regained,
and along with it a returned illusion of self-esteem.

Confidence to step beyond the curtain once more.

Smile. Quick, smile now and look the part of radiant bride!

Fiance & friend equipped with camera and handycam smile back.

The packaging is complete.

Though the branding needs more working on.

3rd fitting: 24 May.

How people grow.

There several things in my opinion that make life worth living for, and one of them is good dinner conversations.

If it is a good dinner conversation with someone you just met - it promises a lifetime of good conversations, and even great friendship.

But where the friendship has already endured through many years of growing pains (jc friends fall into this category in particular) and solidified with our shared life experiences - then a dinner together is guaranteed to bring back lots of laughter and reminiscing.

Last night's re-union with 3 of my deaest girlfriends was made even more momentous with the attendance of our history teacher, Mr M.

(Mr M. is British, gangly and tall. He's in his late forties and is married to a life of teaching, and reading. Throw any subject at all at him, ranging from the Reformation to how to feed birds, and he can keep you entertained for hours on end. He also happens to be quite well-travelled thanks to his many years of taking history students all across the African and European continent, so once in a while the cultural gaffes and odd misadventures he commits as a bumbling british tourist slips out of the bag and delights his listeners no end.)

we were first to arrive at Sanur, a relatively affordable Indonesian restaurant at the top of the 4th level in Ngee Ann City, and the last table to leave.

In the 3 hours we sat there, we talked about getting married, about the difference between marrying a Singaporean man and the allure of the Caucasian male - where Mr M correctly interjected and questioned the need to pigeon-hole "singaporean men" and along with that the "caucasion male" - we talked about our plans for the future (something I find only girls tend to talk about, or am I stereotyping again).

We remembered falling asleep in history class, and how we'd love to revisit those years in junior college again just so that we can undo the precious hours of history lessons we slept through.

We asked Mr M. how much of us he remembered. And how he found us now. Have we aged? Do we look different? Have we become better people?

And this was what he said (as badly paraphrased as it can get, but I try to get the point across):

"There are some students who come back to visit who do drastically change - their appearance, sometimes their accents, but I don't always like the way they have changed. some of them, I actually thought found to be at their best when they were 17 or 18. .... more open to ideas, more searching, more hungry to question the things that other people take for granted."

"Some people get narrower as they get older," he says, gesturing with his hands the metaphorical thinning that sometimes take place.

What happens between the age of 17 and 26, or 30, 65 for that matter? Somewhere along the line, we decide that this is the way we want to see the world, this set of values is what we are comfortable with and we decide we'll stick by it, no matter what. And that's how people grow narrower.

Fewer questions, less anger. Less anger, fewer disappointments, less disillusionment.

Less pain.

I wondered at what he said ... still do. Have I become narrower as I get older?

At some point in her past, brainjuice remembers actively and carefully shedding the years of Singaporean Asian values that she made herself see as shackles of a chauvinist culture that had little relevance to the here and the now. She was free! Alone in the London! A young lady with time to kill and a virginity to lose! An English Lit student. To get her Lit honours she HAD to see what western disillusionment/ western decadence was all about. She had to have her heart broken. She had to find out what LOVE!!! was. She had to question the small-mindedness of Christian mores of the East. How else to invoke the spirit of transcendentalism of Hemingway, the learned cynicism of Oscar Wilde? She was free to be wild.

But I look on it now not with a triumphant cry of "I've lived!", but a deepening sense that all the events that unfolded had so much more questions than answers for me. More shame than pride. More brokenness than healing. A diseased love. Disorientation. What is there to gain in all that?

Today I put on my face every morning - stand before an audience of 26 every other hour and talk about the way they should see things. How they should, or more specifically should NOT live. I teach because although something inside me wants them to see for themselves, I hope against all hopes that they can be spared from some of the pain we talk about in class in intellectual, academic discourse. Because behind that face and under the thinking hat I'm afraid my own pain will spill over and give me away.

Does that mean I'm narrower now?

To-do list

Things to accomplish today before I call it a day:

1. Target to mark 10 scripts. Just 10!

2. Organise my desk and locate lost - instructions to students to maintain and organise their files, marking scheme, vcd on "10 Things I hate about you", sock.

3. Coordinate with bookshop lady on the number of files going out to each class, and then with the printing lady on the print-outs students need to get - content page, instructions, common grammar errors.... etc. etc.

4. Get in touch with creative director of documentary to sort out filming dates for band sections, choir sections, big-gun interviewees.

5. Call dive shop to fix advanced theory briefing for tomorrow night. Dayang here I come!!!

6. Come up with list of brilliant AQ questions based on Michael Moore's startlingly insightful docu-movie, "Bowling for Columbine" that will evaluate students' comprehension of issues concerning cultural mores, media influence and the ironies that abound in the U.S. of A.

Things to do today when there's time:

1. Pray - reflect on the Easter weekend past. And on movie "Passion" that fiance finally agreed to watch with me after watching Hellboy on Friday night - his interest piqued by watching the trailer for the movie while I queeued at the drinks line.

(Friend: So you spent Good Friday in church?

Us: Nope - we watched Hellboy!)


2. Finish reading Dan Brown's Deception Point... just coming to the part where the startling NASA discovery of a meteorite in the North Arctic Circle that provides certain proof of extra-terrestial life turns out to be an elaborate fraud. Oops hope didn't spoil it for anyone!!!

3. Go for run round school at 5pm.

4. Self-flagellate. To think, an English teacher like me using the word "slided" not once, not twice but three times when the past tense of "slide" is "slid"! Shocking.

which reminds me...

4. Confess to P and VP about the little "accident" with the piano key last Wednesday.


And they say teachers have no life.... pooh!