Wednesday, January 27, 2021

Fresh Stale Woes In The New Year

Hey guys, how is your January going? Is it a surprise if I say mine is not good? I think most of my posts are filled with despair so I guess another post saying that things suck is on brand. What happened? Well I experienced something which I feel is unjust. It pisses me so much, still does. It doesn't happen to me alone and when I saw what happened to a particular person, the level of unfairness just broke my heart even more. Thinking of this unfairness can still rile me up. In addition to that, I found out something happened that is totally embarrrasing to me and also makes me feel like I've been backstabbed. I don't know if I'm supposed to know what was said, but I do and you know how sometime maybe you're dumb, like you know that person has done unkind things to you and yet why are you still disappointed and surprised now that the same person do these kind of things to you? I am that dumb I guess because I was pretty down when I was told. Some people can just put their interest above all. I happen to prefer people who consciously try to be kind and though I fail often, I do try to do good. So what's now. The ideal solution would be to extract myself out of this situation asap. That can be complicated and dependent on whether you find a door and God allows you to walk through it. My mom though told me to let it go, to let what happened in the past be in the past, basically she's telling me to move on in terms of dissatisfaction, anger, frustration, and profound sadness. She told me all those people who have done us wrong will get their own comeuppance. All these shitty things do make me think that perhaps this is me right now getting my bad karma too. After a conversation with my mom where I think she felt I was overly troubled by the situation and she wanted to make sure that I was okay and can let it go, I felt thankful that I still have a mother and she's like my priest :D I know me and I know I don't let go things easily and since I remember things, these things are likely to float over and over. Maybe this year is the year where I should just have to accept all the knives being thrown at me (and I foresee there will be a lot of them) and just be mentally impervious to the assaults and not waste a breath on unwinnable battles. If that is the lesson God wants me to learn, it will be a tough one :(

Okay that's that, fuck that shit. Let me tell you something that I did or still doing. I'm still reading Girl, Woman, Other which is a collection of stories about different women of colours in the UK. I like the stories, so much so that I find it unsatisifying sometimes when the stories end because I want to learn more about these people. One thing that I realize reading this book is as much as I read and watch things about people of colours, there's so much that I did not get and perhaps still may not understand about people of colours, especially the struggle of the women. I also finished watching HBO's I May Destroy You while reading the book and since the main character is a black girl in the UK, I found that there's some connecting theme with the book. Especially since there are characters in Girl, Woman, Other who have to deal with rape and sexual assault just like what the main character in I May Destroy You, Arabella, had to deal with. I May Destroy You is pretty exceptional. There are moments when it made me think of HBO's Girls in terms of the frankness of telling the viewers that these characters are just so messed up, but Girls is so light in comparison and I May Destroy You feels brave in its storytelling. In I May Destroy You, Arabella, was drugged and she was sexually assaulted but because it was such a haze, she wasn't sure what it was. Her character made me think of a girl I once knew, they both were creative and free-spirited and I really hope such things never happened to her. I May Destroy You also showed a guy being raped by a guy he met in hooking-up app and that was so uncomfortable to watch. It was maybe the first time for me seeing a gay rape. It was sad to watch the person having to process if what happened was sexual assault or not because they had had sex just some time before the assault. When he finally had the courage to report it to the police, the line of questioning was quite demoralizing. I want to say No always means NO!, but then if you said yes for the first 1 or 2 times and carried on with it and then around 30 minutes later you said no for the third act, things can get murky? Anyways, I have a lot of sympathy for people who have to deal with such a traumatic experience. I don't know if I can survive it. It's good that I May Destroy You ends on an hopeful note.

Another thing that I finished watching was Raised by Wolves. It's in HBO Max which makes me confused. Does thing in HBO Max appear in HBO? It doesn't seem so. Why does HBO have to make it so annoying for people? Now, Raised by Wolves, I have to admit, after the first episode I was like, no, this is not that interesting. Lucky for me, when I start something, I often just have to see it through, so I stayed for the second episode and then it got better and I became invested. By the end of the season, I cannot wait for the next one. I really do want to see what happens to this android mother and father who were tasked to raise human kids in a new planet after earth was destroyed by a war between the atheists and a weirdly God believing religion or cult. There's a lot of weirdness in the series and it even carries to the opening theme song which sounds rather weird but also nice at the same time and I love love the lyric of the song. Often time I would skip opening theme, but for this one I kinda listened through it all every time. Below is the beautiful lyric of the opening song:

the door that finally opens
with light flooding in
spilling out on the floor
the core that nevеr was
now it will be
the bones of what was thеre before
every step, every beat
every thought, every breath
everything is longing
pulling you from the sky
just like love will do
pulling you from the ground
just like love will do

I will make this post rather long, telling you things I did, so at least there's content :D I didn't do anything particularly special last December in the holiday season. I did go to Gardens by the Bay and visited the Floral Fantasy section for the first time. It was okay, not very big and so it didn't take a long time to explore it. All entrances were time based and when I went to the Flower Dome, there was quite a queue even with the time slot. I was thinking, gosh there's a lot of people. All and all, it was an okay visit, nothing spectacular. The only reason I did it was because I was like, you need to do something different and move a bit. For pictures from the visit you can go here.

Then this month, I also made a visit to the S.E.A. Aquarium. Gosh that place and many places in Singapore are expensive. Being that I'm not a citizen, I don't get this 100 SGD allowance given by the government to its citizens so that they can play tourist in their own country. One could argue I should just be thankful that there's often a reduced price for permanent residents which I am entitled to, but yeah I would have like some extra money to spend. These are frightening times for financial stability. I do think we must be prudent in our spending. I for one is starting the year worse off financially :'( Yeah, I have much to complain *sigh* Anyways so I had to pay 32 SGD for S.E.A. Aquarium and it included a snack voucher which I exchanged for a cookie and a 5-dollar retail voucher which I used to buy a small magnet that cost 8 SGD originally. The price is an abomination I have to say. I mean for 8 dollars, you can get two simple but decent meals. It's just too expensive. Anyways, the aquarium was quite empty, so it's a pretty nice visit. I still don't take good pictures. For pictures from the visit you can go here.

:) eKa @ 9:26:00 PM • 0 comments