I see ‘em!

As a tribute to the cute Tutu pictures on Mushroomhead Choomchoom Adeline’s blog, I, together with my new friends Abooga and Chickchick, have on a 12 dollar budget filmed a short story called: Total eclipse of the Sun. The 12 lolas is how much I paid for the Pangpang Lion and the Sourfaced one from Hush-hush at Taka. There was 50% discount at a 3hr Happy hour sale! Woohoo!

Yupz that’s about it, my first stab at a comic strip. If you love Abooga and Chickchick, feel free to request for more strips. hehehe. But til now Abooga only knows how to pounce on Chickchick la.

Btw, this is filmed on the milk plains of pillow land, aka my bed, using a Canon Powershot A75. No round animals were harmed in the process of filming.

When I stepped back to Mayflower for my attachment briefing today, our previous CT who took us under her wing last year was saying goodbye to us. It was the last day of her 38 year career.

My immediate impression was that she was finally free of her old life. I use the word ‘life’ because from knowing her the previous year, school was beyond the drudgeries of disciplining children, marking books etc; it was even beyond all the rewarding intrinsic stuff like pride that MOE sells us. It was most basically her life.

It seems that people of our day and for much time into the past have been used to wearing ‘uniforms’. This ‘uniform’, as one of my tutors said, is the profession that one takes, and extends into one’s life. By extension, I mean the principles (or lack of) and guiding ethos that most cannot shake off even after work.

In this day and age, we are fortunate that we have our choice of profession. Often, our character would be paired to our profession. Career, choice and character are spoken in the same breath. The brave join the army or become artistes, the meticulous become doctors or mastermind criminals, the people-people become teachers or join multi-level marketing. In the past and at places til now, jobs are paired by one’s social standing and family background. People are born slaves, forced to inherit businesses, sold to jobs. But I digress. My point is that jobs, with the advent of more human freedoms, now can run parallel with how we run our lives.

Where do the most commited and talented draw the line then? Does their dedication and gift mean they no longer have what they call a ‘normal’ life outside of work? Like for my today-retiring Mrs Ho, can they never change out of their uniform? She had realised this..

That’s when she decided to retire.

In reality, this brings to mind Japan’s PM Kozuimi’s (pardon my spelling, but I doubt he’s reading) visit to China and his visit to a Japanese shrine to honour his country’s dead soldiers. The Chinese screamed. He defended that he was visiting it as an individual rather than representing his country as the PM. There is a great divide of murky sea where one’s job end and the rights of an individual. Less remote from our reality: can a teacher smoke outside the school? Can one take off the uniform?

Haha, this is becoming Spiderman territory man..

Well for me I suppose it is what one thinks of one’s life and who or what he/she dedicates it to. Most of the heroic and the great spend their lives living their work. Most, to the point of obsession, and even beyond. Da Vinci’s code of living his life was not in search of ‘What is the meaning of life?’. Rather, it was ‘How can I make my life more meaningful?’. Thus I suppose we all have to dedicate our own lives to our own meaning. Keeping a home together as a homemaker needs as much dedication as an empire-maker.

And for Mrs Ho, she’s retiring to claim a new life that she deserves; that of caring for her three children. I hope she’ll be a good teacher to them.

Vietnam. To me, it was about a legacy of war and delicate people. Having visited it, it stands out for its art. I visited Ho Chi Minh City and it is a fascinating city of poverty and also new art. It’s a compelling mix. When I first arrived, amazing copies of western paintings astounded me in the city center. Botero, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Monet were to put it, de rigeur, to put the sentence in the mood. To expose my biased eye, I sadly passed over the paintings of local and original content. The center was also home to great embroidered silk screens and, for lack of a better phrase, cloth and silk the colors of,  exploded parrots. They make you wonder why you continue to think they are poor despite them having such a delicate appreciation of art.

So I asked myself, ‘Oh Mark why is this so?’. A familar but decidedly gruffer voiced replied: ‘You despise poverty’.

Ah so. So it was me. Again.

As I journeyed alone (ok accompanied by sweat stains a-many) to the outer rims of the city, the clean Perth-ish streets became somewhat like the Mexico I saw 10 yrs ago - the boundaries between the roads and walkways had no distinction and people huddled over dinner on pavements. wherever I went, I soon stuck out like the sore finger that the motorbike taxidudes hopefully raised at me from many streets away .

Soon the breathtaking art that I first experienced warped; it was like looking into a thick swirl of countless colours slowly mixed into a shiny black.

What was I to do? Soon !pirated! copies of exalted Penguin classics were stuffed in my face and the copies of painted masterpieces became gross mutants upon closer scrutiny. How did it happen? Soon, the picture of two Vietnamese farmers dwarfed by huge green acres of padi became soothing.

Was it me? The tourist that made this happen? The gangs of children forced by syndicates to beg instead of schooling, the generations of aspiring artists apeing western traditions that had no meaning to them? the talented embroidering foreign ‘Tintin’s and ‘Smurfs’ on their T-shirts. The snuffed breath of peddlers cursing at their cruel tourist idols that only seemed to self-describe as they chanted: ‘cheaper… noooo… cheaper!’

In the confines of my room when home, the unknown Vietnamese words on my T-shirt whispered secret stories, simplified into a picture of two outstretched hands, a dove and a bayonet that the phrase underlines. Perhaps until today Vietnam still remains a colony.

Piangz so serious? The t-shirt was cheap ok! half the color came out with the first soak le.

P.S: The beauty is that if anyone asks me, I say that I learnt they have a country embedded not with landmines, but with rich talent yet unearthed. Vietnam an arty place, who’d've known? [ed. another damn tourist and his preconceptions]

All lives are characterised by a past, and to me starting a first post makes me think of all the special moments in my life that I’d like to share and begin with. But where does one start? So I have decided that today is as good as any other day, for the feelings are dipped in the now and memory is yet shaded over by afterthought.

This blog will not be a diary of daily events, as my tutor in my primary school days told me, it is not what one does, but what are one’s attitudes towards things that make for good reading. Looking at my diary then, it actually did not warrant a second read. So hopefully this is one of the ground-rules I’ll keep by til the last (web-) page of this blog.

The next thing is that this is an open diary and so there will be some mush stuff that I do not wish to self-censure. Thus if you are not suppposed to be the one reading the stuff, I will have a ‘mushroom!’ alert so you can skip the part and make room to read the rest, without spoiling your appetite. Thus with this bit of housekeeping, maybe I’ll start.

Hoorayapididoo! Today is the 23rd month anniversary with mushroom! Choomchoom. Owing to my poor memory and a naive lack of guile, A. has (again) managed to win me by wishing me the occassion first. Perhaps to take a strange parallel, we are going to watch Batman Begins tonight, the director Chris Nolan having directed two of my fav shows, Memento and Insomnia. Is it some strange coincidence that A. always manages to bat off the snuffings of sleep and remember to msg/call me at the stroke of midnight on our monthly anniversaries? I think that a greater feat than Chris’ directing, and maybe A. has secretly watched the two movies and practised them to perfection on me.

On another note, I find myself at a weird task today, that perhaps by the machinations of a mind inclined to draw parallels, have found some meaning within. That is, I am doing photoshop on my grandparent’s passport photos. They are from my ‘dad’s side’ (sic) and I’ve never got to know them. Hence these black and white photo… what was their story? I find myself adding an absent shoulder to my grandma’s passport photo and overlapping it on my grandpa, while adding a collar to my grandpa’s photo that overexposure has diminished. Best of all perhaps, I have recombined both grandfolks together into a single picture. and again I think to myself, what is the secret history of their lives that noone can ever know? Maybe this blog might be a b/w photo of my life to my children? Hopefully they won’t have to do photoshop to put me together with my other half. Thus on a probably bizarre (to you) but strangely poignant note (to me) I end this entry as a tribute to a past unknown and a future of our own.

Wa solemn hor… err… Batman Begins! Ooraagghh!