Eden by Ina Rousseau

Somewhere in Eden, after all this time,
does there still stand, abandoned, like
a ruined city, gates sealed with grisly nails,
the luckless garden?

Is sultry day still followed there
by sultry dusk, sultry night,
where on the branches sallow and purple
the fruit hangs rotting?

Is there still, underground,
spreading like lace among the rocks
a network of unexploited lodes,
onyx and gold?

Through the lush greenery
their wash echoing afar
do there still flow the four glassy streams
of which no mortal drinks?

Somewhere in Eden, after all this time,
does there still stand, like a city in ruins,
forsaken, doomed to slow decay,
the failed garden?

Qixue

All together now ... awwwwwwwwww.

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Train stuff

Are people being to harsh on SMRT? There are problems but the train system is now 24 years old and honestly, some kind of accident was bound to happen sometime. Nobody died, people just had to eat dinner late or do their christmas shopping another day.
Not fun but not a disaster either.

what I do find unforgivable is that when a young thai girl fell on the tracks earlier this year and had to have both legs amputated, SMRT only offered her S$5000.00.... so disgusting that it beggars belief.

c'mon guys. If you just made a decent offer she wouldn't have had to take you to court. Plus since it's reached trial already, I'll bet your lawyer would have charged you 50 times of that by now. You could've just saved on your legal fees and paid her a bit more.

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Last weekend was sort of a washout. I got up at 7 and then promptly realised that I just wasn't going to make it out of the house. After breakfast, I went straight back to bed and stayed there for a time.

After lunch, a worried Mr Grey took me to see my 89 year old chinese sinseh. He looked at my tongue, felt my pulse - both wrists - and told me that I lacked qixue - blood and .....energy.

I'm still so tired. I honestly could roll into bed at any time and just sleep for 10 hours straight.

mood music

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Love this album and the folk rock rendition of familiar christmas hymns.

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My christmas present ... actually more like my bonus present to myself arrived! I have a weakness - a bad one - of falling for impractical but interesting dresses. Especially if the dress seems to refer to something.

In this case, the dress was all dreamy water colour pastels and looked like it was cut from a print of Monet's water lily paintings.

I saw it months ago and never thought i'd be able to afford it - its from some designer or other and hideously expensive. But hooray for sales! Specifically 85% discounts! That's how discounted the dress had to be before I could even consider it :( and even so, it's an awfully large amount of money for one very frivolous thing.

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ALSO, the present i ordered a month ago for... some people, arrived too! good week for postage and dhl eh?

Aural happiness

Mr Grey had a brain wave and refurbished a pair of extremely awesome sennheiser headphones for me and i've been glued to them ever since. I was so dubious about using gigantic headphones at first ... and then he dragged me to this geeky audio-phile type shop in the Adelphi (where else?) and made me sit down and audition a bunch of awesome headphones.

So now I have extremely awesome earphones that make me feel as though i'm standing in between the double bass and piano when listening to Norah Jones and Krall. You have no idea how happy this makes me; most nights when i get home, i have no energy for anything more than lying around and listening to music.

this started in medias res - the background to this is that I was once a $10-earphones-from-mustaffa-are-good-enough type of girl.

Hideously large and expensive earphones were... *ahem* unheard of in my world.

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Related but not quite.

Lately I've been listening to Mozart's Piano Sonata in E flat (with the aforementioned awesome head phones)and loving how shaded and mellow it is. Somehow I associate that kind of mellow lyricism with Schubert more than Mozart; Mozart is usually so cheery and skippy.

But this has been a Mozart year - ups and downs but with this general underlying thread of happiness - and I am so grateful.

Earlier in the year, I used to lie in my room listening sleepily while Mr Grey played Mozart's Piano Sonata in B Flat in the living hall.

Somehow, hearing mozart and chopin in the house again has helped connect up all the left over unhappy bits ... and I feel as though music has finally - and truly - re-entered my home again.

I make my living with words but at these times and with these things ... there are no words. I can only listen to the music over and over again, knowing that the notes express exactly and precisely how it is ...

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the only bit I really liked of Murakami's Norwegian Wood was where he talked about how the beatles song plugged the protagonist directly into the past.

I am unable to be objective about music in the same way. When it connects directly into a memory or feeling from the past, I can't tell you if it is good or bad music - only that it dredges up a whole well of meaning and history....

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