you should date an illiterate girl

Date a girl who doesn’t read. Find her in the weary squalor of a Midwestern bar. Find her in the smoke, drunken sweat, and varicolored light of an upscale nightclub. Wherever you find her, find her smiling. Make sure that it lingers when the people that are talking to her look away. Engage her with unsentimental trivialities. Use pick-up lines and laugh inwardly. Take her outside when the night overstays its welcome. Ignore the palpable weight of fatigue. Kiss her in the rain under the weak glow of a streetlamp because you’ve seen it in film. Remark at its lack of significance. Take her to your apartment. Dispatch with making love. Fuck her.

Let the anxious contract you’ve unwittingly written evolve slowly and uncomfortably into a relationship. Find shared interests and common ground like sushi, and folk music. Build an impenetrable bastion upon that ground. Make it sacred. Retreat into it every time the air gets stale, or the evenings get long. Talk about nothing of significance. Do little thinking. Let the months pass unnoticed. Ask her to move in. Let her decorate. Get into fights about inconsequential things like how the fucking shower curtain needs to be closed so that it doesn’t fucking collect mold. Let a year pass unnoticed. Begin to notice.

Figure that you should probably get married because you will have wasted a lot of time otherwise. Take her to dinner on the forty-fifth floor at a restaurant far beyond your means. Make sure there is a beautiful view of the city. Sheepishly ask a waiter to bring her a glass of champagne with a modest ring in it. When she notices, propose to her with all of the enthusiasm and sincerity you can muster. Do not be overly concerned if you feel your heart leap through a pane of sheet glass. For that matter, do not be overly concerned if you cannot feel it at all. If there is applause, let it stagnate. If she cries, smile as if you’ve never been happier. If she doesn’t, smile all the same.

Let the years pass unnoticed. Get a career, not a job. Buy a house. Have two striking children. Try to raise them well. Fail, frequently. Lapse into a bored indifference. Lapse into an indifferent sadness. Have a mid-life crisis. Grow old. Wonder at your lack of achievement. Feel sometimes contented, but mostly vacant and ethereal. Feel, during walks, as if you might never return, or as if you might blow away on the wind. Contract a terminal illness. Die, but only after you observe that the girl who didn’t read never made your heart oscillate with any significant passion, that no one will write the story of your lives, and that she will die, too, with only a mild and tempered regret that nothing ever came of her capacity to love.

Do those things, god damnit, because nothing sucks worse than a girl who reads. Do it, I say, because a life in purgatory is better than a life in hell. Do it, because a girl who reads possesses a vocabulary that can describe that amorphous discontent as a life unfulfilled—a vocabulary that parses the innate beauty of the world and makes it an accessible necessity instead of an alien wonder. A girl who reads lays claim to a vocabulary that distinguishes between the specious and soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her, and the inarticulate desperation of someone who loves her too much. A vocabulary, god damnit, that makes my vacuous sophistry a cheap trick.

Do it, because a girl who reads understands syntax. Literature has taught her that moments of tenderness come in sporadic but knowable intervals. A girl who reads knows that life is not planar; she knows, and rightly demands, that the ebb comes along with the flow of disappointment. A girl who has read up on her syntax senses the irregular pauses—the hesitation of breath—endemic to a lie. A girl who reads perceives the difference between a parenthetical moment of anger and the entrenched habits of someone whose bitter cynicism will run on, run on well past any point of reason, or purpose, run on far after she has packed a suitcase and said a reluctant goodbye and she has decided that I am an ellipsis and not a period and run on and run on. Syntax that knows the rhythm and cadence of a life well lived.

Date a girl who doesn’t read because the girl who reads knows the importance of plot. She can trace out the demarcations of a prologue and the sharp ridges of a climax. She feels them in her skin. The girl who reads will be patient with an intermission and expedite a denouement. But of all things, the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end. She is comfortable with them. She has bid farewell to a thousand heroes with only a twinge of sadness.

Don’t date a girl who reads because girls who read are the storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in the corner of the café, you in the window of your room. You, who make my life so god damned difficult. The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am. You will not accept the life that I told of at the beginning of this piece. You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being storied. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train and take your Hemingway with you. I hate you. I really, really, really hate you.

Source: Thought Catalog

never again

just looked through my phone and i found this picture, taken last night probably by nat/van/ken. i think it encapsulates exactly how i’ve been feeling ALL DAY. sick and extremely HUNGOVER. i am never clubbing on a wednesday night again this term. pulled up by the side of the road to puke while driving to school this afternoon. honestly, the feeling of puking the next day, haven’t felt it in a long while but boy do i not miss it.

i told you once, i told you twice

another one of those crazy drunk nights xx

and just as a disclaimer, it’s not that all we do is club but somehow we take more pictures in clubs

right here, right now

toxic

you need to leave me alone,

you need to go away.

only when we’re young

this was the night we started drinking at 8 at KPO, headed to Butter, then to Zouk before finally ending up at the Living Room. When i crawled into bed, i remember looking at my phone, it was 8am and the sun was shining oh so brightly. i thought to myself, 12 hours of drinking, wow.. but heck, we’re only young once.

whaaaaaaaaaat, 23 already?!

d.lee, the first of us to hit 2-3.

hurry home, we need to start planning our bar

<3 you long time BT

 

these moments need to occur more

A few times in my life I’ve had moments of absolute clarity, when for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be.

: stolen from h’s tumblr

japan 2010

finally i shall get down to blogging about my recent trip to japan! it’s been quite a few weeks so the names of many places are fuzzy, i’ll do my best in trying to recall every little detail. in any case, this is going to be a picture massive entry (don’t we all love that?)

KYOTO

just slightly off osaka we took a train to Kyoto. this place is slightly rural, with very few high rise buildings. in fact our hotel only had 5/6 floors!

this was the pretty bed at Hyatt, i love the colours of the bed poster

for our first dinner we headed to a restaurant recommended by the hotel concierge and had awesome kaiseki

pretty decent i must say for the price we paid. if i’m not wrong it was around 90sing per person?

after that we decided to walk towards the Geisha town in hope of spotting some geishas. Unfortunately it was raining so we didn’t get to see any walking along the street.

this path is very distinct. the stones which line it are special in that when the geishas walk on then with their wooden clogs, a certain sound is made

geisha houses

more geisha houses!

and then we spotted some in action!

the next day we headed to Nara, that’s about 40 mins out of Kyoto’s city centre. beautiful and serene, it is famous for its deer park!

the deers are just roaming around

and my dad just had to pretend to kiss one....

amusing sign

todaiji temple

at night we headed to Arashimaya for the light festival which is held for about a week once a year. (we were very lucky to have caught it!)

they lined the streets with little lamps all the way to the 'village' centre

the individual lamps. what amazes me is how NO ONE would steal it? i mean i don't foresee this working in singapore!

the village centre was hustling and bustling with activity (most related to food of course)

making tofu!

sweet potato

the bamboo garden

the next day we headed to the Kiyomizu Temple. it’s the most famous temple in Kyoto itself. 

it’s on top of a hill so you can pretty much see the whole of Kyoto from up there

NAGOYA

a 1 hour + train trip later, we reached nagoya

their most famous eel rice. YUMMMM

one thing i really love about Japan is how their supermarkets are always SO ORGANISED, in such a pristine state!

had tea at this cafe which serves ALL SORTS of tarts

a slice of this white strawberry tart cost about 25$ if im not mistaken. i KID YOU NOT. crazy, it tasted just like normal strawberries!!

CRABS FOR DINNER

headed to the Nagoya Castle the next day

view from the top of the castle

TOKYO

our hotel in Tokyo

and again

i really liked the bathroom and how it was just a glass but it was slightly inconvenient when bathing

view from the room

shabu shabu at Zakuro (if i don’t recall wrongly). awesome beef but their appetizers were super yummy!

had dinner at 2 star michelin restaurant Sushi Kanesaka. the owner is the one who opened Shin-ji at Raffles Hotel in Singapore

Omotesando lit up at night

Dinner at Casita, a contemporary italian restaurant. all i have to say is that though it does not have any michelin stars, IT WAS BEYOND AWESOME.

Crepes at Joel Robuchon

we visited Odaiba. it’s kinda like Tokyo’s sentosa. it’s known as their water front park, has a few shopping centres, a ferris wheel and some other attractions. But the main attraction is the Rainbow Bridge and their ‘statute of liberty’

every time we come to tokyo, we ALWAYS go back to Imahan for beef. their steak is TO DIE FOR. i think we’ve been here about 4 times? they have never once disappointed us!

Lunch on the last day was at Beige, it is situated on the 10th floor of the Chanel Building along Ginza. Chanel tied up with Alain Ducasse to open this restaurant only because the culture in Japan is such that many women enjoy having lunch before heading out for their shopping. the waitor told us that on some days, the WHOLE restaurant is filled with women only!

wow, that took long….. i think about 80% of my pictures are on food. WE ARE SUCH GLUTTONS. lol, it was a great trip though!

btw, all my pictures (except maybe 1 or 2) were taken using the Canon S95 in AUTO mode. i just have to say how TRULY impressed i am at the quality, especially under low light conditions!

the most wonderful time of the year

christmas at Mark’s

we made jav take photos for us about um, 20391232 times? hahah

then it was Zouk for ferry corsten!

my very sexy best friend <3

t’was a good good night

then we made a random trip to Ku De Ta one night

the view was amaaazing

and mambo before school started

WHY MUST THE HOLIDAYS END? ):