A palm of charcoal with oxygen to spare,
Your volatile hand holds a map to my air—
While trading love and thirst, our
atom exchange hits a quandary
Can we admit saliva and spit won’t cut it?
Or do we combust this madness,
fucking throw a match at it
(a freewrite farted out last night, using donated words: quandary, madness, throw, saliva, match)
Yesterday, I lent my voice to a shampoo model.
Today, I wore a pink dress and channeled an 83 year old tycoon.
Tomorrow, I’m a building.
Next week, I’ll be a full-on festival.
Next month, I am a vote.
If I’m lucky (and not asleep), I get to be me on weekends.
But for now, a self portrait on Instagram will just have to serve as a reminder.
- My heartfelt gratitude goes out to none other than the Malaysian taxpayers. It may have been a government initiative, but when I spend this voucher, I’ll look fondly at the book(s) on my shelf and recall how they were bought with your money.
- So I may have only found out class this morning was cancelled after a 40 minute journey to its front door (thanks, piece of A4 paper!), but if I hadn’t bothered getting out of bed, I would have never stumbled into some secondhand book sale. So thank you, Miss Kalai, for paving my way to this haul I scored for only RM40. It’s a good mix of books I’ve already read but never considered owning, books I will probably end up gifting, and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, star of the most recent movie night with my partner.
Malaysian book publisher Ezra Zaid was charged yesterday for just doing his job. It was such a sad World Book Day yesterday that I could only celebrate it today. I spread myself thin adding Don’t Limit My Lit to my list of projects last year, and I wish I did more to pick up its traction before Ezra was charged yesterday. Seriously. Co-admins are welcome.
#teamezrazaid
#madewithpaper, Aug 2012
I think they are coming to an agreement.
Also on Instagram. Sheer excitement from first getting an iPad last August. I drew this entirely with my fingers since I couldn’t afford a stylus yet. This photo draws from an old habit when I was younger where I’d substitute human heads with animals since I don’t know how to draw people. In hindsight, the marshmallow was ridiculously large, but my favourite detail from this was the hem of the pants and sleeves on the horse’s silhouette.
___
I doodle & draw; what I have I share on Sundays. I have no background or training in visual art, just interest & a desire for practice. #SundaySketchShare is part of a personal experiment on curiousity & creative discipline.
It sounds like the start of a bad joke: a feisty publicist, a writer hippie, & that guy from That Effing Show walk onto a stage…
This was last year, this was May, this was Scale and it was the Teacher’s Day edition (recorded as ever by The Wknd boys). The first Scale the month before had The Impatient Sisters & Shh… Diam! on the line-up. This edition of Scale had Liyana Fizi, Malaysia Ukulele Group (MUG), Francis Wolf… and us three, performing as “Ying”. (Here you can see Ying teman-ing Grace, the brain behind Scale)
So naturally, Faiq and I were quite unsure what business we had being onstage at all. But Ying— feeling a little the same way herself— roped us in so that she wouldn’t be onstage alone. So we started hanging out, made up a band name just for the show (The Ying-Yings), and tried to practice our nervousness away as much as we could up till that recording. We played three songs. I messed up to varying degrees in each. The crowd was very very kind.
We replaced the Portugese bridge in Little Joy’s original with a Bahasa bit related to teachers because we didn’t want to make it even more awkward singing in a language we didn’t know to a crowd who didn’t know it either. And also: it fits the theme! You may take note that I still can’t sing lead and play uke at the same time. Faiq sang (a wonderful) lead, Ying took middle backup & percussions, I played the uke & sang high.
By the end of the year, I found myself practicing for something quite different— I became first an intern, then a publicist myself. So this is a live recording with my boyfriend and the woman who would later be my boss. The three of us still joke about busking in the city some weekend night in the future.
This is the only photo I can find of our set anywhere besides the thumbnail up there by Grey Yeoh.
Liyana Fizi and Nicole Bihzhu walked up to Faiq separately after the show to rave about him TO HIS FACE, which was awesome. They both want to sing with him someday. Turns out Bihzhu was totally serious, because in September at No Black Tie this happened:
Liyana Fizi, your move next.
