well. here i am again, surrounded by boxes and bags, and suitcases, feeling a quaint mixture of dazed, disoriented, and optimistic, slightly confused by all the rapid changes in my living conditions lately, and really, really hoping this will be the last move i have to endure for at least a year.

(back with longer update when i am better acquainted with my surroundings)

if there is one thing my trip home and the past two days have taught me, it is that at the end of the day, the people matter most of all. i could have the best job in the world anywhere (and i do really love my job) and it wouldn’t keep me there if i didn’t have my family or my best friends around too. and what a family, what a group of friends i have. i couldn’t ask for more.

and if there is a second thing i have learned, it is that there is no such thing as the perfect place to be. here, i miss so many things about singapore and sydney, there, i miss things about england. wherever i go, i think, there will always be something or other i miss; fuzzy said to me after tea at coffee club that this feeling of passing through places and always being in transit was probably always going to be a permanent one, and i can’t help but think she was right. ironic, isn’t it, for someone who has been doing nothing but trying to find home for the past four years. maybe the answer i’ve finally found is that there is no home. there are only feelings, feelings of being home, feelings of belonging somewhere, and the people and things and memories that trigger them.

and there is no combination of words i could say

there are so many things i want to express, for which words will never be enough. reading terry pratchett’s nation in tasmania, and then watching it last night at the national theatre, brought that home to me all over again. i feared i would cry at the last scene, instead there were helpless, silent tears in my throat and a choked up dryness in my eyes. how do you put a name to this? how do you say hello, and goodbye, and hope to see you again soon, and i love you, in your own way – without using these words that so many people have used before you, to mean things that they feel, not that you feel? there is only so much i can pour into my christmas cards, into my smiles and gestures, and i don’t know if it is good enough.

My Wednesday and Thursday this week have basically vanished into air (literally), and my body clock is currently in some whacked-out timezone that is neither UK nor Australian, so I’m feeling pretty disoriented. But nothing beats the feeling of being back, of hanging out in my living room with my laptop with my siblings watching telly. Daddy took me out laptop shopping today followed by a trip to the Sydney Botanic Gardens to take advantage of the awesome warm weather, and we had lunch at Masuya, a family favourite Japanese restuarant in town; I also finally managed to satisfy my perpetual xiaolongbao craving with a trip to a new Shanghainese restaurant near our home, and we made plans to hit the beach tomorrow for some good fresh fish and chips, and pancakes later in the day (why yes, I have planned my days around food)!

Speaking of new laptops, I basically presented my dad with my very few specific requirements (must be able to play Dragon Age and NWN2, must have good sound, must have Win 7, doesn’t need to be that light/portable as I mostly just leave it at home anyway, must not be ugly), and he picked out this drop-dead sexy beauty for me:

Toshiba Qosmio X500

This, my friends, has to be the Mustang of laptops or something. It’s clearly built to be a gaming rig, hence its massive size and high-end specs, and I’m just hoping that my back won’t break lugging it back to Singapore and London, but dang it’s pretty. They’ve apparently been flying off the shelves so fast that they don’t even put it out on display in shops because then they’d just perpetually have no stock. We had to ask for it specifically. Thank goodness for the internets.

My dad’s l33t bargaining skills also resulted in us getting a copy of Dragon Age, a new pair of headphones, and a Logitech GX9 mouse thrown into the deal – for less than the RRP of the laptop. w00t! :D

I keep putting off blogging because I keep wanting to redesign, and I have ideas and all and even a Photoshop mockup (done ages ago), but there is no time on weekdays and always so much to do during the weekends. Once I start full-time work, it will only go downhill. Looks like it’s tomorrow or never, but in the meantime… there’s still today, and these words of wisdom from Mr Neil Gaiman himself, which Wee Zi first drew to my attention earlier this year and which I never got round to posting…

Hello, Mr. Neil.
This is my question: You lived most of your life in the UK but now live in the United States, right? Which one do you consider to be your home? And for that matter, what do you think classifies as a ‘home’?

I find myself remembering the Richard Burton (the actor, not the Arabian Nights one) line about “Home is where the books are”. And by that token, home is the one in the US.

But truly, even now, when I go to the UK I think, I’m going home. And when I go, er, home, I think I’m going to America. Probably why I’ve never taken citizenship…

But at the end of the day, I think Home is something you make, not something you find. Something you’re always leaving, and somewhere you’re always looking for or returning to. It’s part of growing up, and not the best part.

- (from Neil’s blog)

As always, Neil totally nails it, better than I ever could even after years and years of struggling with my own words.

Recently, someone referred to the UK as my second home, in casual conversation; my immediate and instinctive response was that Sydney is my second home, and the UK just a place I’m passing through. It doesn’t really make any sense because I’ve spent most of the last five years in this country, and less than 6 months collectively in Sydney over the same period of time, and it gave me pause for thought. As for Singapore – I think I’ve spent even less time there than I have in Sydney, since 2004 at least, so why do I still think of it as my first home?

I think I’m a lot less emo and angsty about finding home now than I used to be (time will do that to you), but it doesn’t mean I don’t still think of it often, turn the question around in my mind, grapple with my lack of answers. And what Neil says here – it’s exactly how I feel about the UK, Singapore and Australia. When I fly to Singapore, I think, I’m going home. When I fly to Australia, I think, I’m going to my family. And when I fly here, to the one country where I actually have a residence (albeit rented) to call my own, and a semi-permanent correspondence address, I think… I’m going to England. Often, I think I’m going back to England, and that back is a pretty key word, but I never think I’m going home. I guess Neil is right (what am I saying? of course Neil is right. Neil is always right :P) that home is what we make, and home is what you’re looking for, what you want to return to. And I think a big part of my thinking of Singapore as home is that so much of who I am is based on my growing up there, and it represents, or is as close as a physical place can be to representing, the idea of a world I want to go back to. I know it’s not the same anymore and that it has changed, in many ways, so dramatically that it is no longer the world in my mind. But the idea of it, the memory of it -

(As for the books, let’s not even go into where mine are. I have no idea, in most cases, and this distresses me.)

悲しくて,寂しくて,でもしょうがないね。何もできなくて,だからできる物のことが,必ず一生懸命ながんばりなさい。

This entry began life in Japanese, as a means of writing practice, but I decided I should be merciful and not post two entries in a row in a language that most of you won’t be able to understand. So 英語 it is:

As a die-hard believer in the idea that keeping as busy as possible is the best cure for feelings of negativity, whether they be frustration, depression, dejection or general ennui, I have finally got round to doing something I’ve wanted to do pretty much ever since moving to London… sign up for Japanese lessons. I rather regret procrastinating this for such a long time because had I got started when I first came, I would be well into it by now. I guess in a way I hadn’t much of a choice because my position was so unsettled until lately, visa-wise, emotionally, physically, just with being here and how long I was going to be here.

Not being a complete beginner, I had to take a placement test so that they could slot me into an appropriate level, and this started off pretty disastrously with me not understanding the first question put to me (“did you have trouble finding this place?”), which frazzled me out so much I couldn’t say a lot of extremely simple things after that. And to my horrification there was so much I had forgotten, grammar and vocabulary wise, that questions on the written test I was sure would’ve been a breeze in secondary school had me taking wild stabs in the dark. Like “What did you do [something] dinner last night?”. The “something” would clearly be “before”, or “after”, or “during”, but for the life of me I could not remember what it was, and wound up putting some random action down in hopes it would fit the situation regardless of which it actually was (“本を読みました”!). So many of the questions were like that. My knowledge of particles flew completely out the window. I kept drawing blanks with vocabulary which I knew I should have understood perfectly.

I managed about 60% on the lower intermediate placement test somehow, despite not understanding more than half of it, which amazingly enough was good enough for the co-ordinator to let me into that level (maybe the fact that all my mistakes were in particles and conjugation and I got all the open-ended questions right was impressive?? who knows). But it was a really humbling experience, because I know I would easily have had 100% on that test when I was 16, and I’m now desperately trying to recover all my lost Japanese knowledge before my first lesson. I foresee massive embarrassment ahead when I find myself unable to write something like 寝る, which is common enough so that it will probably pop up and complicated enough for me to forget it…

In other news, I am going home for a couple of weeks at the end of the year, which is a bright shining light at the end of what is currently a very dark tunnel. And I have a massively important interview on Friday on which a lot, a LOT, is riding; Steffy has given me a very thorough lecture about what clothes and makeup to wear and what I need to last-minutely buy tomorrow to supplement my currently woeful wardrobe, and I need to end abruptly and sleep early because as she says:

早睡早起
购物好
后天面试没烦恼

（そう、おやすみ）

‘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.