Botanical Garden Shots

 
Today Carem and I decided to do another outdoor shoot. The venue was at the Botanical Garden somewhere in Rimba (I think). Our models (whom we had to coerce) were Regie and Tin-tin. I'm supposed to be the one behind the camera but then Carem forgot to bring her SD card with her so I offered my camera and sneaked a few chances of being shot. So, behold.

On trying to show how it's done (to Tin-tin who's never done any photo shoot). Lovely shot though. And yes, that's Proust.

The very shy first timer.

And the not so shy-just-shoot-me-damnit, Regie.

Bukit Shabandar

We had to drag a friend to Bukit Shabandar under the pretense of a photoshoot (despite the awful rainy weather) before sending her to a party we've been organizing in secret for the past few days. It's my first time to come here as I usually turn down invitations for a hike or a run or anything physically exhausting in this place. So, yes. The lady who took my photos is the one whom we're throwing a party for. Her boy friend also proposed to her today. Thanks, Carem. Many beautiful and fruitful years with you and Gian.

Happy 6th

 

  Another year that we nearly failed to celebrate. More to come ...

The Beef Noodle Mee at Kitaro Japanese Restaurant

Sashimi at Kitaro Japanese Restaurant

Green Tea Latte

"

Thanks, Regie for the drink.

HONY

 

"I asked her for a piece of advice. She reached in her purse, pulled out a piece of paper, and handed it to me. It said this:

Life isn't fair, but it's still good. Life is too short-- enjoy it. Cry with someone. It's more healing than crying alone. Make peace with your past so it won't screw up the present and the future. It's OK to let your children see you cry.
Don't compare your life to others. You have no idea what their journey is all about. If a relationship has to be secret, you shouldn't be in it. 

 
Take a deep breath, it calms the mind. Everything can change in the blink of an eye. It's never too late to be happy. But it's all up to you and no one else. When it comes time to go after what you love in life, don't take no for an answer. Burn the nice candles, use the nice sheets, wear the nice lingerie, wear the nice clothes. Don't save it for a special occasion. Today is special.

 
Over prepare, then go with the flow. No one is in charge of your happiness but you. Frame every so-called disaster with these words: 'In five years will this matter?' Always choose life. Forgive but don't forget. Time heals almost everything. Give time, time. However good or bad a situation is, it will change. All that truly matters in the end is that you loved.

 
If we all threw our problems in a pile and we saw everyone else's, we'd grab our's back. Envy is a waste of time. Accept what you already have, not what you need. Yield. Friends are the family we choose. Life isn't tied with a bow, but it's still a gift."

                                                       ----from "Humans of New York".

Cupcake Boy

Vanilla Muffins with Strawberry Frosting baked by Regie.

Years and finally an Ocean

A few days ago, you mentioned about leaving Brunei for good. My response was of course tinged with a bit of sentimentality brushed with the best jokey attitude I could muster because I didn't want to break into tears before we even had dinner. But you already knew that about me, how I jest by default. I could name a hundred more who does. But it's hard being a goof especially at times when I find myself on my own. The meals I had to take alone, the decisions I had to do on my own, of how I should style my hair, of how I am to wash my own dirty laundry from now on and of how my room will only be flecked with my own strands of hair, how it's gonna bear a single guys's mess or a lonely man's stench. For once, silence becomes unbearable. How there used to be tons of things to do, things to tick off a list, songs to sing, books to read, little wonders to write about, stuff to do in order to survive the daily grind of boring routines or to distract me from these heartbreaking moments. How I never seem to find the reason to accomplish any these anymore (or yet). Then comes the loneliness, palpable, bestial, aged and familiar but of which I kept brushing aside. Today, I took a faulty turn on a block as I absent-mindedly drove to breakfast at 6:30 am. One time I switched engines the way you warn me never, ever to and as usual the car took a deathly choke and stopped in the middle of a round about. There was only your nagging voice amidst the heartspin of honkings and angry looks. They must think me insane. How many of them can figure how desperately lost I am? It took me time to press the hazzard button. It took till your nagging voice (with exclamation points) rang in my head. Because in the heart of things, love, there is you. That is why I dread this separation like I dread many things that I knew has left me empty and scarred. I dread the many things after it. But here I am, conveniently opening the door for you because that's what one does, right? How I used to watch you walk off, many a times and  how you sometimes look back with that smile that never seems to say "goodbye" or break anybody's heart but instead bore a gentleness that makes me feel the least deserving person. But how I delight at the fact that at some point, I became the reason why it grew to become sweeter and more gentle as the years walk by. There were years between us until finally an ocean had to grow within it. That the boat may travel safe and steady for you. May the seasons be gentle with you. Remember the moments when it felt like a joyous Bach counterpoint, an Elgar melody or a redeeming Beethoven symphony. Remember, remember how I loved you dearly. 

June 9, 2014

On Nabokov's "Speak, Memory"

Here is one book which I wish didn't have to end at all. Vladimir Nabokov recounts the treasured items of his past; his pampered childhood, his highborn ancestry, his artistic developments, his travels (with his family and later on in a forced exile during the Bolshevik Revolution), the many things that has escaped me as I blush over his luscious and shocking book "Lolita" many caffeinated afternoons ago. That the literary man when he is not bent on pen and paper, composing the best written narratives, is a lover of butterflies. He has devoted many hours since childhood in isolation, scouring floras in search for winged insects and various slugs, studying them and later authored an undiscovered species the Plebejus (Lysandra) cormion Nabokov. Apart from being one of the prominent writers of the 20th century, Nabokov is a synesthete. Pages were devoted to this queer condition of "sensory appetite" (well-written pages, with photographic clarity of a scientist and practiced flourish of a literati). I envy his prose: tender, sophisticated, meticulous in every sentence in uncovering the past "as if seeing through carefully wiped lenses of time", a voice reminiscent of the earliest literary pleasures I've had. I've never burned as much as I did with "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul." Yes, as with my early loves, I never got over it. I don't think I could ever put into words just how much I enjoyed this book (to think this was something that's been on the "to be read pile" since 2012).

****

"In thinking of my successive tutors, I am concerned less with the queer dissonances they introduced into my young life than with the essential stability and completeness of that life. I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past. I like to imagine, in consummation and resolution of those jangling chords, something as enduring, in retrospect, as the long table that on summer birthdays and namedays used to be laid for afternoon chocolate out of doors, in an alley of birches, limes and maples at its debouchment on the smooth-sounded space of the garden proper that separated the park and the house. I see the tablecloth and the faces of seated people sharing in the animation of light and shade beneath a moving, a fabulous foliage, exaggerated, no doubt, by the same faculty of impassioned commemoration, of ceaseless return, that makes me always approach that banquet table from the outside, from the depths of the park- . . ." -- Speak, Memory

"The act of vividly recalling a patch of the past is something that I seem to have been performing with utmost zest all my life, and I have reason to believe that this almost pathological keenness of the retrospective faculty is a hereditary trait." -- Vladimir Nabokov, "Speak, Memory"

 "I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness-- in a landscape selected at random-- is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern-- to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal."-- Vladimir Nabokov, "Speak, Memory"

"While scientists sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time."-- from the pages of "Speak, Memory"