The Effortless Beauty

Was trawling through my old (other) blog, looking for something I’d written. Couldn’t find it but did find this instead. Good always wins the day, and don’t you forget it. Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter and Narnia would all be out of business if it didn’t.

A sort of belated twisted tribute to Mother’s Day – and my immense gratitude for all things contraceptive:

Someone started talking about babies again the other day, which made me only contort my face in a kind of squeamishness.

JA exclaimed, “OH! OHHHHHH! YOU HAVE TO READ THIS” and plopped this article, I am nobody’s mother and never will be, in my inbox.

It’s rummy, really, coming across these articles lately that prove to myself that I’m not the only one in the world with these strange thoughts because oh boy! have I heard that accusation enough times that I’m selfish for not wanting children.

I’ve just never been one of those people who wanted children. It’s never excited me. I don’t look upon other people’s sprogs and think, longingly, with an ache in my heart that I wish I had one too.

I know, I know, I’ve written about this before – many times – but coming across this article made me celebrate all over again for the fact that I have never wanted children and there’s nothing wrong with me for it.

I’ll never forget how, about two years ago, I went on a crazy hunt around town for someone to tie my tubes. Chop ‘em off, burn ‘em, tie ‘em up. Keep those little bastard eggs where they belong – in the ovaries, ne’er to come out and see the light of the uterus. Stay in there, you sick fellas, and die away as you should.

Nobody would agree to do it. I went to about five gynaecologists, a couple of family doctors and even a doctor friend, who only laughed at me and told me I was crazy, that she would never do it for me even if she could.

They all told me I would change my mind, and give me plenty of stories about this sister-in-law or that friend who had been adamant about not wanting children and then finally decided, age 40, that they would try for kids. And now they live happily ever after, with their 2.5 children, the house in Desa Park City and weekend shopping trips to Carrefour. (Cynical, what!)

That’s fine. I’m happy for them, yay. But I really know I don’t want kids. I’m not your sister-in-law. Just do it, won’t you?

No, we won’t. It’s not ethical.

A particularly encouraging experience, with one of the dowdy old gynaecologists I went to see: Actually, it was a pretty stupid place to go to from the outset. This doctor was a specialist in one of these rah-lah fertility centers, known for being one of the largest and best in the city. Of course he’s not going to want to chop up my reproductive system when they’re actively promoting, making money and spending millions in research to MAKE WOMEN PREGNANT. That waiting room alone was a whole kind of fertility planet of its own, full of those sickeningly joyous pregnant women and their sadder barren sisters trying desperately to fill up their wombs with lots of baby goodness.

I went to register at the front desk. The nurse looked at me, cocked her eye and looked behind me. “Where’s your husband?”

I said, “I don’t have one” which made her look very confused. I think she might actually have looked irritated. This was beginning to worry me already. Why should a woman be accompanied by her husband to a gynaecologist? The last I checked single women and lesbians have ovaries too!

The pregnant women gave me very odd looks, like they were trying to figure out why I was here and why I too didn’t have a limp, bespeckled man by my side or a bumped up stomach.

Finally, after 30 dreadful minutes of waiting in a room full of pregnant women and almost-foetuses, I got to see the doctor – a lame excuse of a man with too-big mustard-coloured trousers and an ugly tie. Why did I book him to see this guy again??

Then began a painful 20 minutes, trying to convince him to give me a tubal ligation and that really, I didn’t want children and really, I would just like to have sex without worrying about getting pregnant.

It began a proper debate, hated and adamant – him shaking his head with a vehemence to match a bulldog and me with the passionate ranting of a crazed woman.

He said there were many other contraceptive methods I could use. I said those still presented too high a risk of possible pregnancy.

He sighed loudly and said, “Tubal ligation isn’t 100% safe either. Nothing is a guaranteed contraception except celibacy.”

Blink, blink.

Well, yeah… But.

I was still insistent. I wanted to be sure. Just cut the damn tubes already. I’ll sign whatever whatever you want me to sign to exempt the hospital, you, the nurses, the scalpel from any blame should I ever change my mind (and I won’t). Anyway, there’s always in-vitro if I get really desperate (which I won’t).

The doctor started to look insulted. He looked me straight in the eye and said, “The only way I would do this for you is if you go to a psychiatrist and he writes a recommendation that this is the only thing that will help your mental wellbeing.”

Was he fucking calling me a loony bin?

Well, yes, I think so.

After all that, being insulted and not agreeing to do what I asked him to, the baggy doctor slaps me a giant bill. Gee, thanks. So now I have to pay you too for calling me crazy.

And I did pay the bill too, with all my Tubes, Ovaries the whole bloody Uterus still in tact. I really am crazy.

All the better I don’t have children init?

I’ve been single for about 9 months now – yay! whee! – and thankfully, still enjoying that nice quiet in my head.

Sometimes though, I run those little may-what-if thoughts in my head, like, “Oh, but wouldn’t it be nice to have someone’s hand to hold?”

I think this sometimes when I’m about to go to bed. I jump into all the fluff and puff of a giant comforter – cosy warm on the inside, deliciously freezing air-con chill on the outside – and imagine for a moment how nice it would be to have someone lying next to me, someone to snuggle with, someone to put his arm around me as we fall asleep.

I imagine it to be like those scenes in the movies you know, where you look beautifully, glamorously comfortable, all tucked up in the right nooks, hair falling casually over your eyes in the casual, loving je-ne-sais-quoi of a romantic cuddle. I dream up a white, dreamy, Hugh-Grant Meg-Ryan rom-com kind of scene that looks a little like this:

Then, there’s a rude voice in my head that shouts, “Where got such thing?” and I wake up, out of my dozy, wasted, idiot-girl stupor.

I’ve come to accept that I can’t always fight the voices in my head – as rude as they might be, they’re also often right.

See, the reality of sleeping next to someone is – and I only know this too well from every relationship I’ve been in - I fucking hate it.

I don’t want to share my space with anyone. Look, I got myself a queen sized bed because I wanted a big bed for me, not for someone else to sleep in it. I want to be able to sprawl in any direction, not just be allocated my 50% of the mattress, demarcated like the Berlin wall.

I don’t want to share my blanket. I want to be able to use up the whole comforter and bunch the whole thing up around me whenever I want in the middle of the night. I want the option to sleep on all the pillows all at once; not have to divide them nicely into that sickening his and hers.

And that supposedly romantic snuggling  – what a crock of shit. I just don’t get how people can stand it. First of all, it’s damn hot having someone pressed right up against you. After about half an hour sleeping stuck to each other like a pair of melted jellybabies, it doesn’t feel so cosy anymore. You’re sweating away and turning into a giant gloop.

Then, I don’t like someone tangling their legs in mine because it’s just fricking uncomfortable isn’t it? Who sleeps with their legs contorted like that? Come on. I’m not liquorice Twizzler.

I also have sinuses; I really don’t need any more restrictions on breathing from having a heavy arm draped across my chest. Like, please, really, just fucking get out of my space already. The bed is so big, do you absolutely have to jam yourself right up next to me? I won’t run away in the middle of the night, I promise. You don’t have to lock me in.

I’ve also been with men who have the uncanny ability of inching their way nearer and nearer my side of the bed throughout the night. Finally, at about 4am, I’m desperately clinging on to the edge of the mattress, my feet braced against the wood panelling of sides of the bed to keep me from falling off. Didn’t I already say, fucking get out of my space, arg.

They’re also the kind who sleep like they’re dead. And have atrocious taste in ringtones. So their phones start blasting some terrible tone in the middle of the night or too-early-in-the-morning, and they don’t hear a thing. The phone rings and screeches and clangs and sings, and they can’t bloody hear it. They’ve also tucked it somewhere impossible, or knocked it about while they’re sleeping. So not only is there the equivalent of some bad Hokkien karaoke coming out from somewhere in the great dark abyss of the room, you can’t actually find the damn thing to turn it off.

So, no. This great snuggle fantasy is a big bloody lie and I’m not having any of it. Next time I get into a relationship (hah! as if!) , I’ll be sure to get him his own sleeping bag for the floor. The bed, the space, the breathing is all mine.

Jean Ai, sitting across the table with a big smirk on her face, just said to me, “Your blog posts are only ever about Dharma, boys or makeup.”

Damn straight, bitch.

I have to find some way to reiterate how much I hate Monlam and wish he would one day just accidentally drop off the edge of a very steep cliff.

I just logged onto Facebook and, just to be sadistic (or smug, depending on how you look at it), went to have a look at his wall.

Idiot Facebook says to me, Monlam subscribes to your public posts. If you know Monlam, send him a friend request or message him.

No, I DON’T want to send him a friend request or message him. Fuck off. I’m offended, Facebook. How insensitive.

I am however, feeling rather smug about the fact that he subscribes to my public posts. He’ll get to see just how much better my life is after he left. That’s right, asshole – stay in Delhi and keep trying to make a career out of selling turquoise. You’re such a winner.

I know I’m like really, really super behind on this and like, hello, this is so like last year already, but I’ve recently rediscovered Adele and she’s now my favourite person of the month. I’m very aware like that you see – I hear her songs on the radio and sing along – la la la – but don’t listen properly and have no idea what she’s actually singing about.

The other day though, I decided to turn up the awareness dial a little more than normal and had a proper listen to Someone Like You. I’ve since been driving everyone mad listening to it constantly on repeat. I’m constantly bowled over by it each time I hear it. It’s just so amazing – so much soul, so much longing, every word speaking straight to your heart. I’ve also been looking it up everywhere on YouTube, because I’m obsessive like that… A sampler, of some new favourites:

Step out for a moment though – beyond the emotion and the power of the incredible Adele – and have a think about how we might, if at all, relate to this song in any way. I’m sure anyone with half a social circle and a penchant for relationships would have had some kind of heartbreaking experience. Different degrees and intensities of course, but enough to perhaps know what Adele is talking about.

Me, though…

Ah, well. I’ve had some good relationships, but none so incredible, so awesomely mind-blowing that I would go back to look them up, turn up uninvited and want to “find someone like you.” No thank you, I would never want to be with someone like that last one. Not with a 10 foot pole.

I don’t think I’ve ever come out of a relationship wishing that it would last longer or that I could revisit it and be there again. Actually, mostly, it’s always been quite the opposite – when I leave a relationship, I feel like I’ve stepped out from confinement in a 3x3foot box and into a big 30-acre piece of vast green land. Finally, I feel, I can breathe again. Ohhhh, so this is what it feels like to be alone again. And thank fuck for that.

I don’t know if this is something unfortunate, or a place to be grateful for being in. People talk often of that One Great Love bollocks – the monumental love that defines and changes your life forever. The Josephines to the Napoleons; the Anne Boleyns to the King Henrys; the Troiluses and Cressidas. I don’t think I’ll ever know how it would feel to love someone that intensely, that deeply, that much. I’m not sure I would want my whole life to be defined and shaped by a relationship with someone; or that I’d want to be in something that would make or break my day the way those romantic lovers of old suffered or loved. I have never really understood why anyone would allow all of their happiness or sadness to hinge on just a single person.

More often than not, the most intense, most powerful of relationships are also the most destructive – how many people do you know in turbulent relationships, who love as intensely as they hurt? Who come out of what is supposed to be the most profoundly happy years of their lives emotionally beaten up and exhausted? Think Closer the movie – so full of how much people destroy each other in the name of love. What makes all that worth it? Is it that worth it?

I’m not here to slate romance or destroy all notions of relationships. I’m questioning what it means to be in that kind of relationship that consumes and tires you so thoroughly – what it takes to be in something like this, what it feels like and whether it’s really all that much cut out to be? Is it worth it? And what makes it worth it?

For now, I’m still enjoying all that clear space in and around my head, the quiet openness that allows you to Think Love Hate Feel Wonder Experience any and everything that comes your way. For now, thinking of exes serves more to remind myself of why I will never want a relationship again than whether I’d want to start that elusive search again for “someone like you.” (Pffft. No thanks. I’d rather eat my shoe.)

Adele still rocks and her music is incredible. I love her for all she makes and brings of our capacity to love, experience, feel and learn; and more importantly for inciting us to question our own feelings of and towards love and lovers. Most of all, I think, the greatness of her songs, or her, is the very fact that someone could feel so completely opposite to what she sings about, and yet still feel like the understand every last emotion she expresses. Also, that she’s made me even consider – for the slightest moment – wanting to love someone again.

Should I, shouldn’t I?

Nah.

As far as desire goes, I think most of us are quite full of it – we run on it, like gas. It’s what fuels us to do what we do, good, bad, ugly and all the in betweens. Buddhist scriptures describe us as existing in a desire realm – we are born as a result of desire and then we live our whole lives in desire, clamouring clamouring after things we think we love, we must have, we cannot exist without.

Now here’s the tricky thing. Desire isn’t just a pair of Calvin Klein jeans, or a new shiny bottle of perfume; it isn’t necessarily anything sexual or about wanting-needing-having relationships. It isn’t just about the desire for physical things, things you can touch or taste or see.

Desirous people aren’t just the ones who are loud and obnoxious, bright, in-your-face, promiscuous or materialistic. Desire could also be something quiet but equally strong. Desire could manifest as a silent but overwhelming need for acceptance, or to be left alone, to do nothing, to have things done only the way *I* want things to be done. The desire in a passive introvert – for comfort, for quietness, for preserving our precious reputations – could well be as strong as it is in an extrovert.

Boy, do I know about desire. As far as the list goes, I’m in need – a desperate want – of everything all the time. I want. I want. I want. I want pleasures. I want sleep. I want to be beautiful, I to be surrounded only by beautiful things. I want comforts. I want reputation and fame. I want friendship. I want love.

Want.

Luckily, for a girl like me, I’ve gotten just about everything I’ve ever wanted in life and this suits me just fine. It lets me just keep on wanting because everytime I WANT, I also GET. A good equation.

Well, not really. Not forever.

Rinpoche gave me a slap on the head the other day, the way Lamas are supposed to do to wake us up from our little stupors. Like, oh… okay, now I get it. Like, d’oh.

It was one of those evenings that Rinpoche put on a video for us to watch. An incredibly Strange-But-True account of reincarnation – how a little boy came back with constant, persistent memories of fighter planes, Morse code and being under attack. Regression therapy eventually led him back to who he was before, where he gave exact details of who he was, his name, what his home looked like, the names of his parents, the surroundings of his village and the harrowing, traumatic account of being shot down as he flew a war plane over Germany. Checking the annals of World War II archives pinpointed exactly the man that this boy was claiming he was. This isn’t even about being Buddhist or wotever. It’s about this little English kid growing up with weird deja-vu experiences every single day of his life until he finally traced back who he was. Watch here!

So we’re sitting in Rinpoche’s room talking about reincarnation. Yah yah yah reincarnation, past lives, future lives – what else would Buddhists and their Guru be talking about right? Wrong. It’s not just about that. While reincarnation and karma forms the cornerstone of every Buddhist teaching, it’s not just some trip on what we were before or where we’re going to next. Actually, it’s about what we’re doing right here, right now – buying that nth bottle of perfume, say; going for the xth number of surgery to make ourselves more beautiful; entering that xyzth meeting in the past month to strike yet another business deal to make yet another bundle of cash.

So let’s say you’re a rich person in this life. You have everything you want and because of that, your life becomes defined by all the things you have, you want, you accumulate, you spend on. Your fears are anchored on what would happen if you lost that wealth; your hopes lean on what you can do when you get more wealth.

Or maybe you’re a beautiful person – you are loved for your beauty, you get your way because of your beauty. With a beautiful face, you gain status, wealth, reputation, adoration, love, friendship, sex, lots of approval, you’re accepted into every social circle in the world. Really, you don’t have to lift a finger for anything – people acquiesce to your every wish just because they feel they couldn’t disappoint someone as beautiful as you.

Or, most subtly, you’re a person who just always wants reputation, recognition, FACE. Your whole life becomes about protecting your reputation, grooming it to make it better, covering your mistakes and lying to shield yourself from criticism. Being acknowledged, having fans makes you happy; not getting credit or attention sinks you into a depression. Your entire existence, really, hinges solely on the what everyone else thinks of you.

Enough scenarios for you to chew on there. There’s a million other possible personality quirks and combinations out there and we can be damn well sure that we’ve all got something we’re wanting, hung up on or attached to.

So, okay, you mightn’t think there’s anything wrong with all these things. “But I’m a good person!” you declare, smugly. “What’s wrong with being obsessed with how beautiful I am? I’m not hurting anyone, what.”

Sure you’re not. But the biggest smack you’ll end up giving to anyone’s pretty face is yourself. Here’s why, Snow White:

Things are dandy now while you ARE still beautiful. But that doesn’t last forever. One day, you will also be old, you’ll also get wrinkled, you’ll also become ordinary. One day, another 21 year old will be more beautiful than you and get her way faster than you because of it. One day, you – like all the rest of us poor mugs – will die. This isn’t being morbid. This is being real. Get over your shock and get with the programme.

And then you come back – perhaps not as a beautiful person; perhaps even as someone who’s really quite ugly, deformed, this time avoided for her looks.

The entire basis you operated out from – your beauty, your looks, your fair face – is no more there. All that you have been used to Doing Getting Acting because of your beauty cannot work anymore and cannot bring you the things you need or want. Everything that was important and central to you before is no longer there. But the attitudes, the feelings, the tendencies and habits that arise from your mind – that sole consistent factor that travels across your lifetimes – are still there.

So, you suffer. There’s a big gap between who you were / how you lived THEN, and who you are / how you’re living NOW.

In that next life, perhaps (and the perhaps is precisely that chance we can never be sure of and don’t want to take), you will never get your way, nobody will look at you, people shun you. The very thing you loved, enjoyed, used – your looks – is now the very thing that will cause you to feel loneliness and pain.

And so on, for the man who operates out of his wealth or the girl who operates out of her want of fame – in every single case, you risk coming back in a place or a situation that doesn’t give you what you have operated out of your entire (previous) life.

A gross comparison: It’s like being given a beautiful fur coat while you’re living in Alaska. You love it for its warmth, comfort and protection from the cold and do everything you can to preserve it. Then, you migrate to across the world to a place like damnbloodyhot Malaysia.  That very same thing you Loved Cherished Preserved becomes something that creates discomfort, suffering, aversion.

Much as we think we’re immortal, we’re really not. Face it. Learn it. Understand that single truth that nobody can deny. We’re not vampires. Robert Pattinson isn’t either, no matter how much we might love the idea that he is. One day, all our beauty, our wealth, our reputation, our Beautiful Beautiful Things will all be gone. We can’t take any of it with us – the huge law cases around the world contesting dead people’s wills is enough evidence of this stark fact.

So look, much as we think we’re the fucking bee’s knees now, one day we won’t be. One day, the bees’ cousins will be crawling about inside our empty eye sockets as we rot away in the ground.  One day, we may well be born with the curse of being an ugly girl. Being beautiful alone doesn’t create the karmic causes to be born beautiful again you know – you don’t really come out of a Mattel factory.

One day, we may we may be born poor and never have the opportunities to even learn how to make money. All that wealth, the spending, the rolls of cash we boast in the bulges of our purses become only something we might think of as a distant impossibility.

One day, we may be born mutes, with never an opportunity to speak up for ourselves, defend any reputation or protect our faces. The reputations we worked so hard to preserve in this life perhaps become invisible, non-descript, indistinct in the next, because we just cannot make ourselves heard.

There’s a choice we can make now, a little gamble, like the biggest game show of our lives:

- Keep everything exactly the way it is – be obsessed with your beauty, relationships, wealth, everything everything – and risk losing it all completely, nada, back to zero in that bank account of Life (with a capital L)

OR

- Let go of your obsession with it now, live peacefully and die freely with no encumbrances. (Letting go doesn’t mean you have to give it up – it doesn’t mean you go live on the streets and scratch up your face with a blade – it just means you start not operating solely out of that and being so attached to having it / needing it).

The only thing we take with us, that travels across lifetimes and galaxies, is our mind (soul / spirit or however you wish to call it). Surely, it makes far more sense to develop that instead – to invest our efforts, time, love, attention towards strengthening the mind, opening it, freeing it from hangups, creating qualities within it that will really endure and see us through every kind of situation – love, patience, generosity, resilience, courage and all those other bright things.

Easier said than done, I know (says the girl who spent all of yesterday craving vodka and crisps and wanting to beat someone’s face in). We’re not going to be able to let go of all of it overnight (well, maybe some extraordinary people can – it has happened before in legends of old), but I think it helps just to be aware of what these things really mean in our lives and where it really gets us.

To think Will this matter in 5 years? 10 years? 20 years? WHEN I’M DEAD? is a helpful place to start perhaps. And to realise that everything goes away in the end. Nothing except your mind belongs to you: not your physical things, not your body, not even the opinions that people have of you. So why do we spend so very, very much time – almost our entire lives – preserving something that isn’t ours?

Righty-ho. That was a long post, whew. Taken me all afternoon and probably another whole week for it to digest.

So.

A takeaway summary: Love the things you have and the person you are but forgoodnessakes don’t make it your entire mode of being. Having said that, live free this weekend. Loosen the strings you’ve tied on your attachments, just a little so you can breathe better.

And then feel for a moment what it’s like to own nothing – but to live with the possibility of havingdoingliving everything in the world.

I’ve been in a kind of manic rage the whole of today. There’s no reason for it really – it just feels like all anyone has to do is say something stupid and I’d bash a hole through their head. Not a very beautiful, spiritual thing to do, is it?. No, it isn’t.

It doesn’t help too that I’ve been obsessively listening to Adele’s Someone Like You, which, for all is excellent – it’s amazing amazing amazing! – did make me feel about 189,000 notches more depressed. I never even had a boyfriend who’s made me feel that way – mostly I just want to tear out their eyes and say byebye forever – but heck, Adele is amazing enough to make you feel sad for something you’ve never felt sad for.

And the bad mood was already a great blank canvas for chucking more miserable shitty feelings onto it anyways. Angry sad girl music doesn’t help you vent; it just makes you an even angrier girl.

Of all days to be feeling mad and bad, we had a very large, very long meeting today, with about 30 other people – this doesn’t help rage of course, because when I’m in this mood, I feel like everybody is stupid and incompetent and should just go back under the rock they came from and rot. When they open their mouths to talk (which of course is going to happen, it’s a bloody meeting, isn’t it?), I think constantly, like two giant speakers  only I can hear, “Did you really just fucking say that?!” For 6 hours, I squirm in my seat because I feel I might bite off my own tongue from all the madness sloshing about in my head.

I developed this really unnatural longing for vodka in the middle of the meeting – like just one really big glass of it would make everything feel better again. But like, heLLOOOOOooo!, where am I going to find vodka in the middle of this conference room in the middle of the afternoon?

No vodka.

So I had to make myself some pure herbal organic squeaky clean peppermint tea instead, which only made me more irritated.

After the meeting, I have to go home and compile a 250 page document,  made up of reports submitted by a whole bunch of people. This is more cause for irritation of course, because many of these stupid, incompetent people who should just crawl back under their rocks and rot submit incomplete reports, or present them so badly that the document could form its own entirely new movement of postmodern art. Do I look like a fucking primary school teacher correcting your paragraphs?!

I’m past the vodka by now. The cravings have changed to a desperate wanting of crisps.

But of course there aren’t any crisps at home. The only near enough is an old bag of those really holy schmoly goody goody healthy pretzels -  just doesn’t cut it, it never does. I get mad myself for even buying something like that instead of a really big bad ass packet of Ruffles.

I try to ignore the crisps pounding about inside my head and finish up the document first. Maybe after that – as the biggest reward of the day! – I’d drag myself out and buy a packet of crisps.

In between, I recite the Eight Verses of Thought Transformation (three times, for emphasis) to try to make myself hate people a little less. It works for about 2 minutes until the crisp craving starts up again and I start feeling abusive because there aren’t any.

I decide to drink some water instead. Maybe that’ll work.

WTF. What kind of stupid person staves off a crisp craving with bottled water? What is wrong with you already?

I do the other half of my daily sadhana – sit in front of the Buddhas and say, “I know you have a lot of stuff going on but can you please just take all this shit in my head away?” I lay out my giant list of requests – clear my head, help me not beat up someone, let me speak well instead of spewing venom, let me a kind person (because kind people don’t go around all day wanting to extract violence on someone, do they?)

I swear the Buddhas look back at me incredulous and bored. They raise their eyebrows, “Like, seriously? You’re asking me to help you stop being a bitch? Just recite the verses another 110,000 times, okay?”

It’s 3am by now and I’m still needing crisps. I finally settle with a packet of custardy cream things, which proceed to crumble all over myself – a big open invitation to all the cockroaches of the neighbourhood. I’m now typing this in between crumbs.

It’s been a long day. It’s tiring being an angry witch. So I’m going to put on some of that new-agey flute music with bird sounds, and go to sleep.

Om mani peme hung – for good measure and the hope for some compassionate feelings.

Father has not only been buying clothes for me. He’s now also giving me fashion tips. A conversation, two days ago on Whatsapp (because he’s trendy like that and uses a smartphone):

Me: I do have quite weird style!

Dad: I know! But I am trying to tone you down with style and panache! One’s got to be fashionable but subtle and that’s class! A very English thing, quietly stylish.

Me: Yes, I’m quite tacky, aren’t I! haha!

Dad: Don’t cry out for attention! Simplicity is the best form of fashion.

Me: OMG now you’re giving me fashion tips.

Dad: Well, actually, the best fashion is what makes you feel good, that’s it! And comfortable!

Oh dear. My fashion sense must be terrible if even my father is telling me to get with the program and coaching me on style.

They say that dad was quite fashionable and good looking in his day. He was very proud of how very good looking he was. He keeps a photo of himself in his wallet and shows us sometimes. And, well, here he is, circa 1977:

I’m not quite sure I should be taking fashion tips from a Chinese man with an afro.

Big points and love for him trying to convert me into a style icon though.

Lots of love to you Gollum, if you’re reading this (And ps, you don’t have to type all in BIG LETTERS in the comments. I’ll show you how to make the fonts bigger on your computer).

My bedroom has reached new vertigo-inducing, nauseating, dizzying heights of mess:

I realised this only as I was stepping out the house the other morning. I almost shocked myself into realising how disgusting I had become.

In my defence though, there IS order to the chaos.

The pile on the far right are the clothes which have come back from laundry but not been properly arranged into the wardrobe yet.

The pile nearest the camera, next to that sick pink bag, are new clothes – mostly the 20 over new things that Dad got for me.

All the random shit on my bed is just there temporarily. They were tired, so they’re having a rest. They’ll be cleared by evening.

There isn’t actually any more space on the desk for working on, but it all holds precisely-placed things that are all very important and need to be there, okay?

Dammit, why the hell do I even have to justify what my room looks like anyway? I love it, I get it. My room, my mess – and that’s all that matters, intit?

Okay, so bye.

I have questionable taste in men. Positively atrocious actually. This is well established across every social circle I have ever been in since I was about 13. That last one, especially, sealed the fate of my reputation in everyone’s mind. So yes, I don’t do deny that – I do have abominable taste. All the better for me – it means I usually have no competition for the boys I want to marry. And heck, somebody’s gotta love the ugly people, right? Hah.

This must be said though:

While there have been some pretty horrid choices in my lifelong crush repertoire, there is a particular type of man that merits a more detailed explanation. There’s a bit of a theory to this, one I’ve tried and tested across a range of men, and which quite a few of my friends have agreed with too. See, it’s not always just about me having disastrous blind spots.

Now then.

There are some men out there, not terribly attractive, nothing special in the looks department. You wouldn’t notice a man like this even if there were only 3 people in the room (you being one of them) and he was standing right next to you.

But. Somewhere, beneath all that plainness, is a sort of extraordinary wonder boy – some kind of massive talent, a tremendous amount of unending intelligence or a crazy quiet passion for something amazing and creative. He could be a brilliant photographer, or an incredible historian who makes you salivate just by him talking crazily for an hour about his lifelong research of Russian history.Not that you particularly like photographs of trees or are even remotely interesting in the stories of dead Russians but but but these boys make it all come alive, they make it fascinating and beautiful and and and before you know it, you’re doodling your name with his surname and thinking about wedding cakes.

Case in point: Loh Seng Piow. (I love you really, so don’t be offended okay).

SP isn’t a Godfrey Gao (although actually, he believes he’s the best thing since sliced bread) and though he used to be some kind of amazing record-breaking high jumper in college, is now a big lump of dough.

Presenting….. SP, geek extraordinaire and the many pimples on his face (they take up a whole space of their own):

But.

SP is one of those special wonder boys, who occasionally do one of those spinny twirling things in the secret confines of his bedroom (so like Wonder Woman) and transforms, *PING* into a hero.

This happens on the rare occasions that actually opens his mouth, flex his vocal chords and SPEAKS. He’ll get up and give a speech so full of strength and power and passion that your panties get wet just listening to him talk. Men get a hard-on hearing him on a mic, birds stop flying to perch on a nearby roof beam to listen, rat stop mid way to the kitchen stunned by the tenor of his voice. It is instant LOVE and I begin to visualise what it might be to accept him as a lawfully wedded husband forever and ever.

Then, sometimes, also, he’ll go off into this magical little world with his camera – which suits everyone fine because then we don’t have to talk to him and he doesn’t have to talk to anyone. Off he goes, pimples, unflattery baggy trackpants and a bag full of camera gear. And then he produces pictures like these:

I am floored again, just looking up these pix and posting them up. I am also in love again with SP just by writing this post. I’m so easily impressed I know. I LOVE YOU SP, MARRY ME! Like now! We’ll have a cake and everything.

Okay, no, not really. The point of this blog post is not really about SP – as much as he’d like it to be. It’s about how men who may as well be trolls become instantly attractive the moment they reveal some kind of talent and amazing fervour for their art. I’m sorry I had to use SP as an example of a troll. I’m sure he won’t mind.

And I’m not the only one who thinks this okay. Not just one of Jamie’s crazy theories again. There are plenty of other girls (or rather gay men) who agree with this too. Yes, yes. It’s well true – an ape of a man becomes instantly likeable when you discover that he’s actually horrifically intelligent and gifted.

(The reverse is true too – that an incredible, floors-you-with-his-beauty, gorgeous kind of man can become a total slug the moment he opens his mouth and reveals how incredibly stupid he actually is).