Me

Most days I feel like I am constantly abusing or punishing myself for something. The only problem is I don't know what that something is.

Maybe it is for the one night stands which I thought will make me feel better but only made me feel worse.

Maybe it is for the times I could have made a difference in someone's life but I didn't.

Maybe it is just for the reason that I am never satisfied with myself.

Maybe it is just because I plain hate myself and I am constantly at war with my soul.

It is on days of such that I do impulsive things so that I don't have to look like myself. So if anyone is wondering about the dyed hair, there's your answer. Last Sunday after torturing myself in the gym, I decided I just decided I did not like the person in the mirror so I got a haircut and changed my hair colour. I don't feel like I am living for myself, like I am some perverted caricature person that my peers, family and society expect me to be.

And so I go on day after day denying myself the enjoyment of life. Little things I could always do to make myself feel better, like go on a holiday. But I keep telling myself I cannot afford it even though I know very well I could. It would set finances back for a few months but do I really need to be so thrifty? And there are the occasions that I keep feeding myself junk simply because I feel stressed and depressed only to regret it later on. All it takes is someone telling me that I have put on weight and I will feel like I have put on a 100lbs. Rejection makes me feel like I am unwanted and ugly. Acceptance fills me with dread and phobia.

Right now I just don't feel like doing anything. I know I am not happy but I don't know what can cheer me up. I just feel like going home, strip off everything and hide under the covers, sleep and never wake up.

Garden Of Souls

People will say I am morbid but I love cemeteries. Sure they are places of death and mourning but they are also very peaceful. Back in my hometown, I used to live walking distance from a chinese cemetery probably as old as the town itself judging from some of the crumbling tombstones. It's a pity I don't know how to read chinese or I would know this for sure. There were evenings which I would spend jogging at the cemetery rather than the noisy human infested Lake Gardens.

Don't I find it scary? I guess not. In fact after a while, the dead almost seem like old friends with their familiar tombs. Like one of those crazy in your head moments from Six Feet Under where characters speak with the dead, you can almost imagine them lounging among their graves greeting you as you go by. I guess that is why some people call cemeteries, gardens of souls. Of course I have never seen anything out of the ordinary amidst the broken stones so I generally think the whole concept of cemeteries being horrible places is pure codswollop perpetuated by Hollywood horror films. Nothing much other than the occasional squirrel, some monkeys and yes, even farm animals like chickens, cows and goats live among the dead - which can be a real nuisance if you ever seen the size of cow crap.

I think jogging in the cemetery is among one of the things I missed the most after starting life in KL.

He Will Be Loved

I must have at least seen this video a dozen times with no audio, thanks to Fitness First's Astro broadcast. For those who are not familiar with this, you have to plug in headphones to sockets mounted on the treadmills, steppers and exercise bikes to get the audio of at least six different channels that they have on different TV sets at the same time. Because I rarely if ever use the aforementioned machines I don't get to hear whatever I am watching, so using my imagination to fill in the gaps have become somewhat a norm.

So anyway this particular video tends to get a lot of airplay whenever I am either working out with weights or waiting to do my class. Every time I see it I've always wondered who the hot guy in the video was. Before you shriek how can I not know who that is, let me finish my story first OK? My imagination tends to lend him a deep sexy masculine voice not unlike that of Chris Daughtry or perhaps J.D. Fortune of INXS. The music, judging from the video, I would imagine it to be somewhat along the lines of INXS or U2. As for some reason I always seem to be missing out the credits displayed at the start or end of the video, I didn't even know what band or who the singer was.

OK now you can shriek at my ignorance. Only did I realise last night that I was oogling at the lead member of the band (for three months at least), whose music drives me up the wall and makes me switch stations everytime they play on radio - Maroon 5. I was oogling at Adam Levine, whose voice makes me want to strangle the owner. Seriously, it's a crime for such a handsome face to have such an irritating voice. It's like David Beckham, such a manly face (I still think he's gay though), but with a voice that induces an imagination of me slapping him repeatedly with my sandals. What... I never really liked them so I never did bother to find out how they all looked like OK? And despite the irony that I now find the lead singer highly attractive does not change my opinion that the music is like fingernails across a blackboard to my ears. Can God like switch his body with that of new INXS frontman J.D. Fortune? Don't get me wrong, J.D. Fortune is hot but looks totally gay. Besides I think that will make me appreciate Adam Levine more.

The Fool

I don't know what has gotten into me or why I agreed to the date. Maybe it was at first I thought he was cute in picture and most importantly he had a nice personality. Then when I met him and he turned out not as cute as I thought he would be. But he could be, if I put him in one of my classes everyday for the next 3 months. I know, call me superficial but I think in recent years I have learned to accept that all living things are biologically superficial. It helps strengthen the gene pool. Natural selection favours the strong and the pretty, though being gay kind of negates that theory since we don't breed. We just imitate the act.

Anyway, I don't think I am ready after my disastrous attempt at a relationship 3 months ago. Considering the guy himself seems to able to talk about nothing but his ex. Who is he kidding, he is barely over his ex. Everything he liked about me, he compared to his ex, down to how my weight feels the same on his motorbike. Yes, he took me on a "joyride" on his motorbike. It was so romantic I could have threw up from how cliche it was but I felt nothing because I just didn't feel physically attracted to him. Being a piscean as well makes him a bit way too intense for my liking. I seem to have an affinity to these fish types and in the end they always make me feel like I want to go on a morphine induced coma for the rest of my life. The other thing being he didn't even realise he had a piece of vegetable stuck between his teeth for the whole duration of time he was speaking to me since dinner and that he forgot to zip his pants after a visit to the men's room. Me being too polite, just kept my mouth shut and had my Ally McBeal moments in silence.

Which boils down to the question, why did I even agree to it. Maybe I am being too nice to say no. I told him to expect nothing, that it was nothing but just a try at dating. It that warning enough? Or perhaps I am being too judgmental of his appearance to let it overshadow his nicer personality? So maybe I am not wrong to give him a small chance, right? RIGHT?

In Memoriam

Luciano Pavarotti
1935 - 2007

Impermanence

There is a scene from Neil Gaiman's Endless Nights (yes that is what my blog's name is based on) in the story Destruction on the Peninsula, where an archaeologist often have visions of a post apocalyptic hell in which everything is in ruins and every person on the street was dead and decomposing. For the past week since Robin's death I have often returned to the memory of his disturbingly "restored" corpse lying in the casket. I am no stranger to the topic of death but it's often like a revisit through an old photo album of the subject whenever someone close passes on. And then I imagine the body decomposing underneath the silent earth in its claustrophobic box. In the enclosed oxygen deprived environment it would probably mummify. In a few years, the casket will eventually give way to rot, finally allowing further decomposition to continue. In a decade or so, nothing left but bones. In a few hundred years, the gravestone would have weathered, perhaps rendering the identity of the grave occupant anonymous. A thousand years, nothing more than graying bones. All those who have lived with his memory had long since been lost - me included.

I stepped into the gym and after a grueling workout, I stood on the balcony surveying the floor. Overweight people huffing and puffing on the treadmills while the others half-heartedly heaving on the various exercise machines. Their personal trainers stood by, goading them on. Pretty people with their fine sinewy bodies effortlessly punishing their bodies to further perfection. Suddenly before my eyes, all of them became decayed corpses, dead, jaws slack and opened - worm food. As pretty as we are now, we will all come to the same destination eventually. Death waits at the crossroads with a patient smile. I echoed her smile.