thinkcink.net

Scene: Lights suddenly black out.

“Argh, they always do this. But this is earlier than usual. I thought they normally do it at 11pm!” I continue typing furiously on my keyboard, hoping to finish that one last email before I will again pack up in the dark and escape.

“Oh you’re still around? I’ll go switch the lights on again.”

“Yay thanks!” Thank goodness I have someone else with me.

[Lights go on for a while, flicker, and then go off again.]

“I turned them on! I don’t know why they went off again. Woah, this is creeping me out.”

The boy then scrambles to switch them on again, and this time, the lights stay on.

But a chill remains on my skin. I really ought to go home soon…

…expecting the usual dinner-less late night in the office, and then being summoned to the function room where food was abundant.

An earlier event had over-catered, and a kind soul decided to come upstairs to invite whoever working overtime to have some dinner.

It was a bizzarre gathering of the caterer’s workers (who strangely enough were very enthusiastic about the fruit platter) and colleagues, with random people carting off styrofoam boxes of beef stew, broccoli, stuffed eggplant, shrimp curry, pineapple rice, char kuay teow et cetera et cetera.

Someone I met randomly at a social event asks, oh you were Malaysian? Why did you come to Singapore? You buy that meritocracy crap?

Yes I do, I answered quite plainly. Though what I really wanted to say was…

As someone who has no connections to the rich or powerful of this country but nonetheless received a generous scholarship to study overseas *even though* she is born a Malaysian - yes I buy that meritocracy crap.

More importantly, I think coming to this country as a foreigner and being treated like a decent human being who has something worthy to contribute makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. I would never break my bond - not only because I’m too cheapskate to pay a big chunk of money for the privilege of choice. But because of that warm-and-fuzzy-ness, from being valued.

It’s also the poor kampong girl in me perhaps.

I remember my grandmother’s wood-walled and tin-roofed house, where I used to peer down the shit hole (literally) and wonder in horror if the hole would be filled if everyone in the family had serious diarrhea. We didn’t have a flush toilet.

I remember a lovely childhood where I climbed trees and learnt Bahasa Melayu in kindergarten, took naps and ate little biscuits with icing on top. After a trip to my childhood neighbourhood a few years ago, I know now I have blocked out memories of the run-down playground with rusty swings and puddles of water by the slide, shabby houses and creepy lights on the roads.

I don’t quibble with people who want a better life, and I know the natural inclination is to push the government to do more, to give more. But coming from where I was born and where I’ve been, I guess I am a little more appreciative of what I already have.

No, wait, I take that back. It doesn’t take a comparison with another country, Malaysia or otherwise, to be appreciative. It takes a little bit of soul-searching.

So yes, buddy, I buy that meritocracy crap. In fact, I buy the whole This Is A Good Country crap.

People say that every girl grows up to become her mother.

It’s a horribly repulsive thought, particularly when my mother is cruel towards me. When she employs passive aggressive tactics on me that make me hate myself then her. And I think, I am not like her. I will never be like her.

I’d rather be my father. He is giving, reasonable, rational, humble and above all, generous. I have always thought I am more like my father. I want to be my father.

It gets to me, that my mother puts herself in a mindset that doubles the work it takes to be happy. She over-analyses, while I would have thought it easier to give others the benefit of doubt. She bears too many grudges, while I prefer to live and let live. She has too few personal friends and often complains that I have too many.

But I have grown up (finally!) and she has grown old. She has mellowed, and in reaction to her frighteningly frail moments, I have at times become possessed. By the spirit of my mother of the old times.

Fiercely loyal. Principled and stubborn. Exacting. Over-protective. Passionate. Sharp-tongued. Fiery. Soft-hearted.

It occurs to me, that it was under her wing of generous love, that I could grow to be the person that I am. That I need not fight her. That I do not have to suffer as much as she did. That I am at liberty to think I deserve better. That I can now fight for her.

Happy birthday mom. It should get easier now.

These two weeks have been a whiz-by of utter madness.  Numerous weddings, visits by overseas friends (more about that later), way too much wine-n-dining and too little aerobic exercise.

So one day, I wrote on my facebook, “I feel like a whale.”

It sparked off this chain of comments:

“How does a whale feel?”

“Like Cindy”

“You feel like you were speared and devoured by a bunch of Japanese?”

“She blows”

And then last but not least,

“A whale (I’d imagine) would feel quite at ease with the world, unhurried in the way only surpassed by the giant sequoia or the creosote bush, or maybe non-volcanic mountains.  A whale does not get hurt easily either. Hence whale song is a mainstay of homeopathy and Wiccan practices.”

Soon after I announced the loss of my archives, Angel sent me a message on my phone, “Check your email!”

And there, I found a sea of new emails, all from her. And lo and behold, they were my old entries!

As it turns out, she was subscribed to my blog via Google Reader and when she realised that the old entries were still showing up on the Reader, she took it upon herself to forward me all of them. Each and single one of them, one at a time.

By the time I came to realise what she was doing, she had already sent me more than a hundred entries.

We then launched this major rescue operation, me starting with the oldest entries and her working backwards from the newest. It was a process complicated by the fact that some anti-spam mechanism in google stopped us from sending more than 100 emails from our accounts so I had to create another gmail account, and Angel had to use her mother’s.

At the end of the it all, after saving as many as we could - not all could be rescued, because the Reader carried only up to 360 entries - I had to laugh. It was a ridiculously tedious process, but we were in this manic frenzy.  So worried, we were, that the Reader might refresh itself and all the old entries be gone again.  Imagine sending 360 emails, one at a time - we took about 90 minutes, so that’s one email every 15 seconds. Madness!

As I told Angel - as you must realise by now, she’s not really called Angel - it put a comic spin to my blog tragedy. It didn’t matter how much of my archives could be saved, but picture these two girl, both equally tech-unsavvy, going crazy squirreling away my blog entries in defiance of the Technology Monster. Hilarious!

More importantly, I was touched. Thank you, my friend. ”I love your blog too,” Angel said. Aww. My blog loves you too.

I didn’t intentionally disappear. I was having problems with my blog for the longest time. I couldn’t log in to post anything and quite honestly the technology boggles the faux-engineer me.

In a fit of frustration, I deleted my entire blog and reinstalled wordpress.

I thought I had backed up my archives, but when I tried to import the sql into this new set-up, it killed the blog again. So obviously there’s some serious incompatability issue that the geeky me of early days would have relished fixing.

But the person I am today is just annoyed. And I must admit, terrified.

So here goes. Starting afresh. My old blog has died. In the coming days, I will try to fix up a more palatable layout and fill up these pages with more words so it doesn’t look so bare and lonely. In the days when my blog was down, I have been writing anyway, I just need to type those paper entries in. (Of course, there’s something karmic about how I was roaring with wild thoughts and creative expressions these two weeks when my writing canvas was being a brat, than when it was sweet and pleaded for my lovin’.)

So my problem is fixed for now, but I am not jumping with joy. A layout revamp was long overdue anyway, I don’t care about losing my red candle. But I miss my archive of old entries - I remember the last entry was dated 18 September, but I forget what it was about.  It’s like the last kiss before a break up, only you didn’t know it was going to be the last.

A month from now, will I remember what I might have been like in June 2007?  Or December 2006?  Or April 2005, when I first launched this site? It feels like I have lost not only part of my past, but my entire writing portfolio.

If I don’t manage to revive my back-up copy, what am I do? I have a sinking feeling that I have lost everything. 3 years and more than 500 entries lost in a sql file that makes no sense without the code to read it.

I feel naked. And incredibly sad.