The Move

babe... your whole existence is one constant, lovely surprise

I will finally have a private space of my own, nestled within a tiny building on a paperbark tree-lined street in a quaint suburb East of Melbourne CBD, with an Eastwardly facing window that overlooks a tiny patch of earth and a fence on the outside, with wooden floorboards and a resident cat who purrs in the morning for his breakfast.

But most importantly, the boyfriend will be living just an arm’s length away from me, in the next room.

Tomorrow, for the first time in my life, I will have a room to call my own, in the same house I will share with my partner.

I've never felt like this before. What is this feeling?

I've told myself that I will be responsible and courteous and a good housemate on top of being a good husband. I will do all the things that I've done in the past, like blasting the toilets with Domestos on a regular basis and arranging everything in the room in a chaotic but reasonably neat manner. I'll start flower arranging again after a very very VERY long break of 11 years, and I'll feed the cat and do the laundry. I'll cook delicious meals on the stovetop and occasionally visit the boyfriend in his room just to look at him while he's fast asleep.

I want this to work so bad, I want us to work so bad. Tomorrow I start a new chapter in my life, and I'm just not sure if I'm up to it.

After all, it has been a long LONG time since I felt this secure.

It's been forever since I felt loved like this.

Summer

Summer is here. Finally.

Dollops

One teaspoon in the morning, two teaspoons before you go to bed

Grandma always had her secret remedies for whenever I was sick. Be it a fever or a cough, an ulcer or a chest pain, she'd know what to do.

She'll reach into the cabinet and pull out her wooden box made of Javanese teak, carefully dusting away the layer of dirt that had accumulated on its surface with a kitchen towel. She would then open it to reveal a whole collection of herbs, spices and animal parts, some more distasteful than others like snake skin and lizard tail.

Grandma's best friend in town was the local Chinese shopkeeper who sold ingredients for traditional Chinese remedies, apart from junk food and toiletries that he also sold for side income. His store is set in a pre-war building with stains on the wall and cobwebs in the corners. From floor to ceiling there were drawers upon drawers of dried ingredients, ranging from dried leaves, beans, nuts, a hundred different types of powdery substances, a few dozen types of smelly dried fungi and huge jars of roots and twigs from unknown shrubs; he had it all, stored away in wooden drawers marked with Chinese characters. He provided grandma with all the essential ingredients for any ailment imaginable; from providing relief for my brother's asthma to relieving my mother's back pains.

I thought grandma was a witch; I watched a lot of Hollywood movies as a kid and I swear I thought she made magical potions that turned kids into rats if they were nasty.

Her most famous remedy was Loh Hon Guo with sugarcane, lotus seeds, longan fruits, bits of bark and white fungus. Whenever the sun was hot and the air was dry, she'd automatically brew a pot of this fowl smelling brown liquid made up of these ingredients to combat the heat, and I loved it not only because I felt cool after drinking it but because it tasted yummy despite the rotting stench it made while boiling on the stovetop.

Even mom did not trust the doctor for minor ailments like coughs and colds. She'd follow grandma's instructions and boil chicken soup with herbal additives for me and my brother if we ever fell sick, and only considered taking us to the doctor after traditional remedies were proven ineffective.

My mother was a woman of science. She thought science in schools and had a BSc from her days in university, but she still chose traditional remedies over many other modern alternatives such as antibiotics and Celebrex. As a result, I was a kid who grew up alongside Panadol and essence of seahorse, with the latter being the preferred choice of medication.

And boy did they work. I remember having a terrible fever while grandma was away for the weekend and mom did not have time to prepare Chinese medicine for me so she took me to a doctor instead. I was sick for a further three days eating some bloody pink medicine from a plastic bottle, but when grandma came back she immediately worked her magic and in one day the fever was gone thanks to a few rootlets from China, mushrooms from Thailand, red dates from Pakistan and some leaves from our backyard.

Traditional medication was fucking expensive though, and some of them tasted putrid (like carbon tablets and pohchai pills for diaohrrea) but nevertheless they beat any modern medication out there because they did not have the side effects that modern medication had. I was the only one in my class who drank black chicken ginseng essence to 'boost the immune system and alertness for exams'. Other kids just had Nestle Ice Cream.

Grandma's secret recipes were good against combating ailments of the body, but I don't think they were effective against any other problem.

I've come across many situations in my daily life where no medication you ingest would help solve the problem. From severe outbreaks of depression to mental illness due to the stress of exams, traditional Chinese medication could only help to calm me but not solve the problem. Gone are the days when I could safely rely on 4000 year old magical remedies; I had to depend on other methods of 'curing' myself some of which involved very desperate measures that I will not outline here.

But today someone very dear to me was facing a lot of difficulty and needed some sort of miraculous cure yet I had no Javanese teak box to pull out of the cabinet; I had no black chicken essence to give him that would magically sort out all the problems or green snake liver oil to take away the pain. I could not brew a magical potion that would make the day better for him although I wished with all my heart that this was possible.

I even had no words to offer him for comfort, or a hand to hold in case he felt threatened or lonely. I had no shoulder to lend him to cry on, or kisses to give him to make him feel loved.

I did not have the powers of my grandma to 'cure' him or 'solve his problems' but instead I just sat there on my bed listening at the other end of the telephone line to the situation which was beyond my control and beyond ‘treatment’.

Unlike grandma who could zap away an illness as soon as it popped up because she always had her recipes with her, I was unprepared and unable to offer any form of help, much less assurance that tomorrow would be better than today or that the problem would be solved eventually. Those 20 minutes on the phone left me feeling useless and helpless because I did not have a solution stored away in a jar which I could pour into a pot and brew away for an instant cure.

All I had were tears for me and for him, and a bucket-full of worry.

I wish I had a cure for his problems. A solution. A love so strong that it wipes out all the suffering and keeps him safe.

I can still remember grandma putting a yellow paste on my bicycle wound while I screamed in agony, telling me that it was the best she could do to help and there was no other way out other than the painful way.

I wish I did not have to tell him the same, because I cannot bring myself to be in this position.

I cannot bring myself to be helpless.

Clutter

Exams fuck my system up.

I mean, really, every time there's a major exam round the corner I tend to get cramps in my belly and pornographic thoughts in my head. I do the things I’d normally not do during normal periods in my life, and I resort to extremities that keep people away during the course of my preparation prior to the examinations.

When I'm not self absorbed between the mountain of books and lecture notes in front of my face, I'm in bed fast asleep catching a quick 'nap' that ranges from 5 minutes to seventeen hours. At times, I wake up in the middle of those 'naps' and find myself flat faced on my books, wondering how I got there and why the clock seems to show the time six hours in advance from when I last saw it.

And now that spring is around the corner and daylight savings is in effect, the alternation of day/night further fucks me up. It's still bright at 8pm, and the sun rises at 5am. My biological clock struggles to make sense of all the daylight, at times depriving myself of the sleep to keep up with the number of hours awake in the light against the number of hours asleep in the dark like I am normally used to.

Since high school I've reverted to pleasure foods to soothe my aching forehead, often choosing the sweetest foods available to man. The only explanation for this is that at full capacity my brain gorges on whatever supplies of glucose I supply it with because I neither gain nor lose a pound after the exams are over. When I was 14 the trend was to drink lots of extremely thick cordial and eat a ton of marshmallows. Now I tend to stick more to chocolate.

And when I say chocolate, I don't mean the small puny 65g Mars Bars you can get off the shelves at 7-Eleven.

I ingest an average of 750g of chocolate per day everyday for about a week leading up to the exam, with consumption peaking during exam periods and then tapering off to 0g right after my last paper.

And FYI a standard Cadbury 'brick' of chocolate is 250g.

I tend to focus more on the chocolates that have nuts in them because I like the texture of crushed nuts against the soft sweet chocolate, although solid dairy milk is fine too.

If you do the math, and assuming an average of 34.3g of fat per 100g chocolate, I consume around 17MJ (Mega joules, or 17x10^6 joules) of energy during every exam period JUST FROM CHOCOLATE. This does not include the other fatty foods I pig out on, such as oily noodles from the local Chinese take-away or ice cream that I eat by the tubs or even the occasional slice of cake with extra whipped cream after six hours of studying math. An average male uses around 10kJ of energy per day (factoring in light exercise and normal daily activities, such as toilet poops)

Cadbury pays its employees well because of ardent supporters like me.

As of today, in seven days leading up to the exam I've bought 6.5kg of Cadbury and consumed 5kg of it. That's 20 standard bricks of Cadbury, and almost 1/10th my body weight in kilos.

There's this old belief that chocolate increases sex drive. I may not know the true details of the research that led to that conclusion but I got to admit, I become quite wild during the exam period. When it doesn't involve seven DIY sessions on a DAILY basis, I'd be scanning through the realms of cyberspace hunting down every speck of good porn that's available for free. I've amassed my greatest porn collections during exam periods, something to the tune of 75GB of full length DVD quality videos over the past three years. And that doesn't even include the 10,000 or so nude pictures of men that I have and a further three hundred or so 'sample clips' from free websites. Collectively, the porn I obtain during an exam period sustains me for the next six months although this has been known to vary to a great degree depending on the year's 'harvest' and the quality of the movies.

Right now I'm in the midst of collecting porn of film stars, although most idiotic sites make it difficult by requesting for your credit card number in return.

If there's a better time to borrow off from my collection, it is one week before any major exam when I start putting the old collection into 'archives'.

Don't blame me. Blame my balls.

When the telly is not blazing away or the music blaring in my ear from my headphones, I'm most probably doing anything but studying. There seems to be a correlation between my need for noise and my ability to study. I couldn't study in a public library; I'd get too distracted by the silence.

My room bears the brunt of my frequent whining and mood swings. Often there's a spare chocolate wrapper hidden away between the pillows, or some crumbs on the floor, or a thousand A4 sized printouts scattered in organised chaos, all cluttered around my room.

Looking around me I can easily make out bits of nuts under the table, stacks of books everywhere all opened to random pages and showing grave signs of highlighting abuse, incomprehensible scribbles of working and answers to pass exam papers scattered over the floor, bits of chewing gum wrapper rolled into tiny balls sitting amongst the huge clutter on my desk that has old newspaper, gay magazines, bits of dried up marigold flowers I picked from the side of the road three days earlier and shells from an excursion scattered across the table top, smears of moisturiser across the bottom of my desk when I was too lazy to grab a paper towel to wipe off the excess from my fingers, some flakes of tissue paper from goodness knows where strewn over the carpet, a crumpled pile of laundry from last week's wash that I've not bothered to fold, dust bunnies in every direction because I've not bothered to vacuum for two weeks and last but not least, scribbles of 'I Love You' on a chemistry journal that I was reading with hundreds of tiny hearts scattered around the pages in various colours ranging from red to green to blue.

In true exam tradition, I work best at night, usually burning on until the wee hours of the morning before calling it a day. Daylight has adverse effects on my ability to absorb information, notwithstanding the urge finish reading the stacks and stacks of material that I’m required to read. I am extremely prone to distraction when it comes to studying, even if it means running up and down the staircase to open and close the fridge door repeatedly, hoping I'd find some treasure inside every time I take a peek.

I find that of all the techniques I use to study, the most effective involves regurgitation of material that I've learned. I'd suck up a ton of information a few days prior to the exam and vomit it all out onto the exam paper. Directly after the exam has concluded, I spend half the day unloading all the facts from my head to make space for the facts required on the next paper. Usually this works best when there is a day or two between exams because it gives me time to unload, recover, then regurgitate again, although I don't have this privilege this semester because all my fucking exams are back to back.

Continuous study has NEVER worked for me. The teachers in high school lied. Studying throughout the year DOESN'T help you pass the exam. Cramming at the very last minute does.

After the completion of any paper, it is my duty to inform the world of the mistakes that they've made and brag about my achievements during the exam, using words such as 'fucking easy' and 'bloody closed one eye' to further enhance my vocabulary. I occasionally toss in a sarcastic laugh during the exam to freak out the people around me, even though I know that I'm staring at a nightmare paper. I have been known to crush people with the 'right answers' to the difficult questions, and whine about how silly I was for forgetting to put a comma or a full-stop. Usually my most simple mistakes like misspelling the word 'dictyostelids' are exaggerated to a factor of 1000% to make the people around me freak out, and my gravest mistakes are cast away from the conversation because I have confidence that everyone else must have made the same mistake as me and therefore the moderation of marks in calculating the average score will still be in my favour.

Don't blame me for being an airhead. I put a lot of chocolate and porn into getting where I am, so piss off.

The most glorious event of all is when the exam comes to an end, when I finally unload all the information I've stored for the sake of passing. System returns to normal capacity and my room gradually tidies itself up, in anticipation for the next round of exams that will repeat the cycle.

And of course, this year there will be a much needed break together with the boyfriend.

God, I love exams.

Flemington Races

It is that time of the year where young girls spend their pocket money to buy Gucci and Miu Miu and boys steal suits out of their father's closet to show off to their mates that they wear Loro Piana. It is a time where there's a REASON to dress up and walk around the city to see-and-be-seen, even though that reason involves four-legged animals being spanked on the butt to run around in a large circle with everybody cheering so that it passes the finish line first.

Then again it must be a good excuse to dress up, noting the number of young girls forcing their way into shoes one size smaller than they can actually bear, and hoofing around like the horses themselves because they have not been trained to walk in heels. Never mind the blisters and the aching toes; it is that time of the year to wear four inches and put Harajuku girls to shame.

For the kids, it is a time to look like little Ms. Britney or little Mr. Elton John. You have to forgive these young minds for thinking that nacre skirts and turquoise sunnies go together with auburn hair accessories that look like feathers plucked out of a poor rooster from the backyard. They know no better.

As for a certain few people from the older generation, it is a time to rekindle one’s marriage (or lack thereof) by pretending that everything is okay even though you know tomorrow he’s calling the lawyers to settle the divorce. It is a time to walk around and smile to everyone you meet in your newly bought clothes, even though you are well past retirement and haven’t repaid the mortgage.

And a select few dress up just because. These people are the happiest of the lot. They are not hard to spot; you can see it in their genuine smiles and faces.

Everybody is dressed up for the races; each wearing their own interpretation of 'beauty' and 'style' though some are more questionable than others. Some 'follow the crowd' by purchasing hats from the race grounds, oblivious to the fact that a hundred other people have the exact same hats like them, while others have custom made and elaborate hairpieces complete with garlands, feathers, ribbons and sparkles to 'stand out'.

A majority of the men are poorly dressed, donning expensive Ralph Lauren ties with cheap suits all looking smug and business-like. I wonder why there is this disparity between men and women; men can't look flamboyant for fear or being called gay, and women can't look simple for fear of being called simple.

And amidst the huge crowd of girlfriends and their boyfriends, parents and children, husbands and wives, friends and their mates, a certain few in the crowd stand out among others, a certain few without a partner or a friend.

They stand alone, not worrying whether they’re missing out on any fun or company; enjoying the environment and the scenery just as much as everybody else.

These are the people who stand out most in the crowd, because you notice them even amongst a hundred other drunk/tipsy young men and women who are busy singing the national anthem backwards after too many VB’s.

Failure

I find that, after all the struggle to get here, I am finally feeling the twitch, the mood in my fingers and the sense of my soul; I can tell I'm not worthy of praise or compliment for the things I've done in Melbourne, or lack thereof.

Getting the financial resources to study here was an event on its own, something I should congratulate myself for, but I’m not. I only view those around me with envy because of the privilege they have in being the son/daughter of wealthy parents, not needing to struggle or worry that tomorrow the only thing they’ll have for breakfast lunch and dinner is stale bread. In comparison, I deny myself the happiness of success, but I cannot help myself from thinking how easy it must be for these people to be secure, how easy it must be to see money falling into their bank accounts with no labour or hardship to obtain it, whilst I struggle away flipping burgers so that I can earn enough to feed myself which, in the end, I do not do anyway.

I set out to this city with the intention of making something happen for myself; of making something new out of the situation that was then beyond my control. I told myself, lavish parties, drunken nights outside with cute boys equally as drunk as me, all huddled together in a safe space where I wouldn't feel left out.

I told myself, mountainous excursions to Never Never land, where dry creeks and sandy shores dwell, to entice the inner need to travel and to experience the Earth as my right and my will. To set out on a journey of exploration of this continent and those beyond me, just as I had dreamt to do as a child. To be able to collect stamps on my passport and be able to brag about lands I have visited where many others have never heard of, such as Tallygaroopna.

To traverse the inner thoughts of the people who are unlike me, who think in different spectrums and who see the world in a different light. Those who know not of hardship and suffering, and those who know more of it. To accompany those who are familiar to their own private spaces and to explore further together with those who do not know themselves.

To run in the grass, to climb the trees to pick apples ripe of the branches, to swim in the ocean and bake on the beach; to earn in the capacity that I cannot in my homeland, and to use those earnings to explore further territories which were once too distant or too expensive to be given thought.

And yet today, I find myself sitting here at my desk, grinding away at books as though they were the only thing that mattered. I have failed myself socially by excluding myself from all the grandeur that Melbourne has to offer; from springtime carnivals and birthdays (with pretentious people at pretentious places), declining invitations to dinners and social events that include, but are not limited to, drinking, smoking, canoeing down the Yarra in a tugboat, observing the birds at Cranbourne Botanical Gardens, bed and breakfast in Phillip Island, and doing the whole Great Ocean Road tourist thingy.

I try so hard to get the results that I want to get, setting high standards for myself more, now and again, even though they seem unrealistic even to my own conscience. I constantly tell myself that I can do it and I work very hard to achieve the academic fulfillment that I am obliged to achieve under my scholarship, all whilst observing other people glide past me with passes and the look of nonchalance on their face because their father will settle the invoice without a word if they fail a subject or if they need to change their course.

And not only socially but physically, I have failed myself by sleep deprivation, obscure eating habits that include the ever-so-frequent packet of instant noodles and MSG soup, less gym activity and more time wasters such as chatting on MSN with no end in sight; studying for the sake of passing the exams and keeping my scholarship from being revoked, working for the sake of getting enough money each month so that I can spend it all on keeping my health up to check due to my horrible sleep patterns and lifestyle.

I told myself, I am going to change. I am going to get better. I still believe there is medicine that will cure me, though I’m not sure how to get hold of it.

And now with the exams coming around the corner, I use that as the excuse for my lack of mental and physical wellbeing. I blame it for the frequent outbursts of temper that I unleash upon the people who care for me, I blame it for my sleep-when-the-sun-starts-to-rise habits and the filed edges on my nails from over-biting them, I blame it for the white hairs on my head and the wrinkles on my cheeks even though I know that I brought most of these things upon myself without the exam to beckon me towards them.

I struggle to lie to myself, struggle to evade the root of the problem which is MYSELF.

Yet the only consolation I give myself is the lack of jumping into mood swings and carrying the whole world down into my vortex of unhappiness. I no longer weigh people down with my problems quite in the same way as I used to, and I actually smile much more at things I don't usually smile at, such as at the ridiculous price of a bowl of Wan Tan Mee in Chinatown.

What else I have set out to be, however, I have not achieved.

I am not a failure, I just have a lot of it.