This is the campfire that mocks the sun.

Over the weekend, my dad sent me an SMS reminding me to attend mass on Sunday and to please bring my brother along. Being the church-aversive Catholic I've become (and also because I was 90 shades of exhausted), I ignored the message. Today, he sent me another SMS asking which mass timing I went for. So I 'fessed up, and said residual fatigue from the last few days and anticipation of a ridiculously packed week ahead compelled me to stay at home and rest. This was followed by his reply saying: "WE NEED TO TALK." ...wtf? So I called him.

He feels that since he has already failed as a Catholic husband, he does not want to fail as a Catholic father, and hence wants to make sure that my brother and I solidfy our faith and become good, Catholic people. He admitted himself that he's hardly the role model for the Christian way of life (what with the divorce, nightly beers, smoking, tattoos and missing days of obligation and the like) but he wants us to remember that going to church is important, and that we should not be such lazy cradle Catholics. To this end, I'm willing to sacrifice. I've stopped going to church for the last 6 years because the older I got, the more I began to have questions and doubts about the faith. These questions have not been satisfactorily answered to this day, and every time I was there, I'd have this nauseating feeling that my uncertainties are proof enough that I just don't belong there. Why is it that two people of the opposite sex may fall in love and get married and live happily ever after, but two of the same sex cannot? What the fuck does "Hate the sin, not the sinner" mean? Being gay isn't a physical action like stealing, it's a physiological state. But okay, fuck that. I'm willing to sacrifice. I'm willing to sit my ass down in a pew every week if that's what makes my dad happy. I do believe in God, and in being a good person (as best as a flawed human being can be), and if I have to sit through an hour of Our Fathers and Hail Marys every weekend to be a good daughter in my father's eyes, then that's a small price to pay.

But then he mentioned how my brother and I should not take our religion for granted because our stepmother (Aunty Judy, or better known as AJ) desperately wants to be a Catholic but can never be one. This is because the church does not recognize civil divorce and separation, and the only way a divorced person may marry again in church is if they go through a tedious process to annul the marriage. This application will make its way through the church's hierarchy, ultimately being approved by the Pope himself. Because my father has not gotten this "religious annulment", my dad and stepmother are technically committing adultery and living in sin. "What God has joined, let no man put asunder" and all that bullcrap. So, my father has not received communion for the last 9 years, AJ has not been baptized and they will never be able to get married in church. I've known this for awhile now, but when he brought this up in conversation to make the point that my brother and I should be grateful to have been accepted into this exclusive blessed circle, I damn near lost it.

Why on earth would I want to be part of a religion which is putting my loved ones through pain and hardship? Am I to simply accept that these are hard and fast rules that the Catholic church abides by, and not question the fundamental ideas behind them? The bible was written by human beings, it is not divine script. The church is made up of human beings, mass is not conducted by angels and seraphim and Jesus. I'll be the first to admit that my knowledge of the ins and outs of Catholicism is hardly extensive, but come the fuck on. One of the areas in which we're schooled in in Sunday school is "Apologetics", which is sort of like a huge FAQ sheet they give you the answers to and which you may use to answer questions from non-Catholics. This is where I learnt, if memory serves me correctly, that the Catholic church prides itself on being "better" than other Christian denominations because we combine script with practice. Where other Christian churches interpret the bible verbatim, the Catholic church uses a practical implementation to its teachings. So, for example, Exodus 20: 1-17 talks about the commandments, and the first 2 are:

1. You shall have no other gods before me.
 
2. You shall not make for yourself any carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them.

Now, if your spouse's grandmother passes away and they give her a traditional Buddhist funeral, keeping these two commandments means that you are not allowed, as a Christian, to offer incense or burn joss-sticks for her. Some Christians actually say that "Yeah, I'm sorry but I'm not allowed. Let my friends and I do a prayer session for her instead, okay?" Go fuck yourself. You cannot hold 3 joss-sticks because your god forbids it? Any god that says you cannot show compassion and respect for the dead because they are of another religion isn't worth the worship, in my opinion. But the Catholic church says go ahead. Go ahead because what you are doing is not disrespecting your religion, it is simply keeping harmony within the family, and is done as a gesture of kindness and goodwill. Which is noteworthy and I admire that. But if there is wiggle-room here, why is it there isn't any when it comes to divorce and remarriage? If my dad hadn't left and my parents were still together, I'd bet my bottom dollar that my brother and I would have to deal with fighting and screaming and cold wars every other day, and we'd both be damaged beyond belief. It seems nothing short of ludicrous that the church would expect two unhappy parents to continue living together and be miserable for the rest of their lives, than break one sacrament.

In my old age (haha), I have come to be of the firm belief that nothing is more important than family. My family is everything to me, and anyone who fucks with them is asking to be murdered. My dad says that his experience and my experience are completely different matters, but they can't be separated. How can I separate what I feel towards my religion and how my religion is treating my family? How my dad can expect me to endorse and celebrate a religion which is causing him and my stepmum so much pain is just beyond me. I've told him time and time again that there's nothing to feel guilty about, that the only thing stopping him from receiving communion and getting married again in church is his own conscience. I've told him that I forgive him, that my brother forgives him, and that my mum probably won't but hey, you can't have it all. Sometimes you gotta live with what you can get, and forgive yourself for those terrible mistakes. What can the fucking priests do if he takes communion? Arrest him? Blacklist him? Say prayers until he bursts into flames for such blasphemy? Excuse me, my toes are laughing. But my dad just won't listen to me. He's so rooted in his belief that he needs the approval of the higher-ups in order to truly have a "legitimate" marriage. And now he wants me to say I believe in the same.

Needless to say, the phone-call wasn't too pleasant and the words "fucking ridiculous", "sin is the denial of love" and "fine, let me sit down and talk to a priest" were used. So I suppose, at some point in the next month, I'll be somewhere in the east being exorcised.


The 10 commandments can be summarized into just one: "Love each other, as I have loved you." I know this sounds all New Testament and hippie love, but it's the plain and simple truth. You don't need a dogma, you don't need to go to church every weekend because that is your moral obligation, you don't need an annulment from the Pope so that you can show St Peter at the pearly gates that "See, my paperwork is in order". What you need is enough of a moral compass to tell you when you've done right and when you've done wrong, a conscience strong enough to force you to make amends when you've hurt others, and the presence of mind to live your life avoiding doing wrong in the first place. I'm no angel, and I'll be the first to admit it. But it's worse kneeling for a religion which preaches teachings I cannot believe than going every Sunday just to make my father happy. That priest doesn't know what's coming.

We were lying together in the dark. The candle had burned out. Outside the wind was whipping the canvas on the deckchairs. I could hear a plastic tumbler blowing round and round.
        You were sleeping.
        Why does nothing matter as much as this?
        How do you seem to write me to myself?
        I am a message. You change the meaning.
        I am a map that you redraw.

Follow it. The buried treasure is really there. What exists and what might exist are windowed together at the core of reality. All the separations and divisions and blind alleys and impossibilities that seem so central to life are happening at its outer edges. If I could follow the map further and if I could refuse the false endings (the false starts don't matter), I could find the place where time stops. Where death stops. Where love is.
        Beyond time, beyond death, love is. Time and death cannot wear it away.
        I love you.

I don't think I know how to write anymore. I don't know if anyone else feels this way, but Life has become so bitesized (if blogging is like eating a meal, Twitter is a multi-vitamin) and 'convenient' that all the thinking I really do consists of everyday things like what to have for lunch, should I take the bus or the likely-to-break-down-and-kill-me train, what groceries do I have to buy and the list goes on. It doesn't help that I've so many bloody things to worry about and plan for that when I do write, it's in a tiny notebook I keep next to my bed so I can scribble reminders like a list of chores or a company which hasn't paid me. It doesn't help that the weather these days makes me wish I was living by myself in a one-room apartment in New York City with a furry Ragamuffin named Maxxie and writing depression-inducing-but-god-so-beautiful pieces of prose I would eventually, biting back my pride, sell to an underground/indie/scene magazine so as to fund my coke addiction/cigarettes/body modifications and feed Maxxie the cat. Because isn't that what Life is? Creation and beauty and pain and humanity and existentialism and blah dee fucking blah. Sure, I would still be an insignificant speck in the Great Cosmos, and most definitely, I'd still die unrecognized and unremarkable, but I would at least be living under the delusion that I was creating art, that I was something goddamned special because I, unlike the other 7 billion pedestrian, unthinking, creativity-retarded human beings on this godforsaken planet, Knew. And, and, better yet, Felt.

But I don't have any delusions now. What I have is a home to manage (and that sounds so simple but what it really means is gas bill, electricity bill, water bill, groceries, cat food, housework and the list goes on), a relationship to tend to, a family which needs me, jobs which mostly fucking suck with companies which mostly fucking suck too, and a goal which seems to be getting further and further out of reach. What is there to write about that will not end up a bourgeois rant or letter of complaint? I suppose I could take a day to wear my writer's best (big ass spectacles, a scarf around my neck and a pair of shoes other than the flipflops I live in), sit at a Starbucks with a hot latte (hot, because iced drinks just don't have street cred, yo), pick a (hot) random stranger and try to write a story. Or maybe even write about something conceptual like Truth, or the world's favourite, Love. Or, oh yes, I know what you're thinking, go to the library and READ A BOOK! But that would be Pretense. And the one thing worst than being Ridiculously-In-Love-With-The-Crap-Of-The-World would be Faking it.

And so what if I did do those things? I'm not that person anymore. I'm not a 20-year-old in my sophomore year reading Irigaray or Steinbeck or Thoreau or Keats. God, I can't even remember their names. I think I was too naive and optimistic to think it could happen but here it is, in all its dastardly, fluoroscent glory, Growing Up. 3 years is all it took, man. 3 years to get sick of reading, to get saddled with responsibilities and worries, to unwittingly and completely fucking voluntarily, by the way, turn into what I'd hoped I'd die before I'd ever become.



... I blame this feeling of discontent and bitterness on the NTU guy who called me 2 days ago for an employment survey and could not seem to grasp the concept that a) I'm a freelance actor/talent/model and therefore do not have permanent/part-time/contract-based employment, and b) I don't have a fixed monthly income and there is no way I can estimate next month's. Thank you, Nanyang Technological University, for making me feel more than a little inadequate and pathetic. You may have given me a few great experiences and about 5 awesome friends but fucking hell, that's nothing I couldn't have found at Butter Factory with a bottle of Belvedere.



I need weather like this so I can go to the beach with friends and vodka and cigarettes and pretend, for one afternoon, that I haven't gone completely batshit crazy and that I am still young enough and glamorous enough and brilliant enough to make the world shine again.

"It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous."

Found an old picture of me (circa early 2010, maybe) & decided to, in light of SWC's annoying Postcolonial Literature exam format tomorrow, Compare & Contrast.