-is mildly mortified-

*

It always comes down to the people, doesn’t it?

I like my colleagues. I very much like my marketing manager, who is acerbically wry and suitably jaded for someone whose job is to churn out appropriate rubbish for the press, while still managing to be really personable and easy to get along with - no mean feat for a cynical person - and this is fortunate, because he’s my line manager at the moment. The other interns, and the temp development officer who just started a week after I did, are very lovely. We chat easily on pub nights and are beginning those slow, slow agonising painful steps towards getting to know new people.

Nothing changes the fact, however, that my nakama are all far away. Some are closer - some are close enough for spur-of-the-moment visits, frequent or infrequent, and I am very grateful for that; more and more though my thoughts keep dwelling on the people I love who aren’t here with me in London, which is… all the people I love.

I keep thinking, I want to see ____, I want to be with ______, I wish _______ were here, I really want to hear from _______, I wonder what ________ is doing now (insert various names as thoughts wander). Sometimes it’s people I’ve not seen or talked to for ages, sometimes people I’ve chatted with just lately, sometimes, even, people I’ve seen lately; maybe it’s the recent memory of the meeting that puts them oddly in the forefront of my mind. There are friends with whom I feel I have only kept up a friendship because we have both made the effort to keep in contact somehow, there are friends with whom I know I’ll always fall right back into intimate conversation when we next speak even though we’ve not talked in months and months, there are friends (this category is largely Yorkies) whom I feel irrationally very fond of despite the short, short time we’ve had to get to know each other. I think of all of you, often. I miss you.

It’s a strange addiction: the more I keep thinking of people, the more I can’t stop. It’s like the thoughts themselves provide some phantom company; a summoned shadow of the person missed that makes me feel, for a moment, like they’re there.

You can’t make me dance around
But your two-step makes my chest pound
Just lay me down
As you float away into the shimmer lights

At least I get to speak with some RSC people. That’s quite cool, right? And every future contact, even if in an interview context, is a precious precious one - a fact I am fast learning in this industry.

*

To dredge up a very old cliche about every big city, I feel like London has two faces, and most people only see one. There is beautiful, glamorous central London, the London of Harrods, Hyde Park, Oxford Street, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, Covent Garden, Trafalgar Square, Tower Bridge, Buckingham Palace, the National Gallery, the British Museum, the West End… I could go on forever but you know what I mean, the whole world knows what I mean. It’s the London everybody knows even without having been here and the London everybody sees first when they do come here. Even less shiny locales such as Camden, Greenwich, Borough and Portobello Road Markets, have all been subsumed into the sprawling, mythic umbrella of London’s exoskeleton.

And then there’s the other London. It’s almost Neverwhere-like, maybe, in how screamingly obvious it is yet also so easy to miss. There’s the London where people live and work and buy their groceries and pay their bills, where the pavements are sparsely littered with small, dense, dimly lit 24-hour convenience and grocery stores selling vegetables in boxes outside, where I catch the same bus 5 days a week and hurriedly take my coffee along the way because I’m always running too late in the mornings to drink it at home. My neighbourhood is about as untouristy as you could possibly get in London (nobody, but nobody, would come here unless they lived or worked here), and there is a delightful gritty earthiness about it all. There’s no hint of the grand or the legendary, no hint of historical significance, no dizzying cultural heights or glitzy lit-up shopfronts… just a bunch of everyday people going about everyday things.

This is the London I’ve been living in and slowly getting to know over the past month, and a part of me is growing strangely, bizarrely attached to it. On the whole, I still can’t shake the feeling that I’m only passing through this city, that it isn’t really home because I’ll be leaving it one day, that it’s only a pitstop in the journey I’m taking. But there is an undeniable charm and real, raw, honest vigour about this London when you set it beside the other one. I never thought I’d say this of this city, but I could really grow, if not to love it, then at least not to dread it entirely.

I have so much to say about life in London so far that I wouldn’t be surprised if I had to break it into two posts - but work always leaves me exhausted and it will have to come this weekend instead. ♥

i don’t want to be whiny and all “nobody understands meeeeee” because that’s ridiculous and childish and i know it. but is it really honestly so strange to be this nervous about something, even if it’s a path i chose and forged out for myself? of course i wouldn’t be nervous, were i moving back to singapore to take a comfortable paid job there, but this is a whole different ballpark and yes i am terrified. i can’t explain it, i know i’ve nothing to fear, and yet - i fear.

i can feel myself all on edge and irritable and frustrated, mostly with myself for being like that; i am so, so tense right now i could snap. and it is probably all my fault - as everyone keeps telling me, i’m just overthinking it all and it will be fine once i get there. but for now, for now, on this last night in york, let me be afraid without feeling bad for it.

So hard to find my way,
Now that I’m all on my own.
I saw you just the other day,
My how you have grown,
Cast my memory back there, Lord
Sometime I’m overcome thinking ’bout
Making love in the green grass
Behind the stadium with you
My brown eyed girl
You my brown eyed girl

- Van Morrison, “Brown-Eyed Girl”

I had a whole long draft typed up, about everything I am feeling this last weekend before leaving York, with all my stuff in boxes and bags once again, but somehow it never reached a stage where I felt it could be published. All the words just seemed so useless; no matter how much I wrote and rewrote whole sentences, paragraphs, I simply couldn’t - still can’t - really, really put across how I feel. So much has happened so quickly over the past two weeks.

And then “Brown-Eyed Girl” came on the radio and I thought, this is it. This is how I feel.

Do you remember when we used to sing
Sha la la la la la la la la la la te da.

Do you remember? I hope I never forget.

is it really so bad, not knowing what’s going to happen to you? part of me is scared out of my wits, and part of me is - well - excited. it’s the first time in my entire life i’m not following a plan that’s been set out for me. it’s the first time i’m choosing the hard, hard path. so i can’t tell you for certain where i’m going to be in a month’s, a fortnight’s time, so i haven’t anything concrete beyond getting through the next 24 hours… and is it really so bad?

i don’t know what to think. i’m just really small, right now, and the world seems very big.

I’ve been listening to a great deal of Japanese music lately; in fact I’ve been listening almost exclusively to it, except when I think I should take a break and put on my entire library for a while. In particular, Jpop groups Kanjani8 and NEWS have been dominating my airtime. I think I’ve actually created a playlist that consists exclusively of the songs I have from them (plus one invading Arashi song). And I don’t really have a lot - maybe 30ish - so you can imagine how many bajillion times I’ve heard each individual song by now, but I’m still not tired of them.

It dawned on me yesterday, while watching a NEWS concert DVD with English subtitles (thus being the first time I’ve actually seen what the lyrics mean in English, I have no idea what I’m singing along to in Japanese most of the time), that actually, if these songs were written in English with exactly the same tune and arrangement, I would probably hate the large majority of them - or at least be indifferent towards. This is because most of the lyrics turned out to be pretty inane, and as far as English songs go… even if everything else about it is wonderful, I have a lot of difficulty really loving songs with bad lyrics. I’m talking lines like “show me your secret paradise, baby” and “let’s dance and throw off our clothes” - which admittedly sound better in Japanese, but still!

Yet - I still love my trashy Jpop songs. It’s totally inexplicable. I know the lyrics are ridiculous, but the tunes are brilliant. They absolutely define catchy and the singing is good (surprisingly, Japanese manufactured boybands can indeed sing). Which makes me wonder what it is that makes me like a song, and whether listening to foreign songs is actually a better barometer of what your tastes are in music, pure music, sans words and meaning and inflection. Or are lyrics and music inextricable from each other? Then why is it that I like these songs in Japanese but not if they were in English? I have no idea, honestly.

‘I should like to save the Shire, if I could - though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them. But I don’t feel like that now. I feel that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again.’

- Frodo Baggins in The Fellowship of the Ring

Leave it to my comfort reading to know exactly how I feel. This, right here, is exactly what home is I think; Frodo’s not being sentimental and soppy but he isn’t being cruel either, it’s just plain and honest and absolutely utterly true.

Every time I come home is like going through an alternate reality time warp, when I’m suddenly four, five years younger and have nothing much more to worry about than getting my work done, eating and sleeping, because my parents are here to run the house, my siblings are here for company, and even though everyone’s older now and they interact with each other differently, I’m picking up where we left off long ago. It’s like nothing ever changes, except that my brother gets taller and my father gets more grey hairs.

Sometimes I want to shake my brother silly, sometimes it bugs me that my sister keeps missing her morning classes, sometimes I wish that my dad would let me drive and that my mom wouldn’t put my laundry in everyone else’s wardrobes. But ultimately, even if I occasionally think an invasion of dragons wouldn’t be unwelcome, they’re still home, and they’re always going to be here, and wherever I go or whatever I do, they aren’t going to care and they won’t stop being my firm foothold. And maybe that’s what home really is.

*

Maybe I didn’t treat you
Quite as good as I should have
Maybe I didn’t love you
Quite as often as I could have
Little things I should have said and done
I just never took the time

Little things I should have said and done
I just never took the time
You were always on my mind
You are always on my mind
You are always on my mind

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