Gender stereotypes

In my early teens, I realised that I tended to think of God as male. And, wanting to counter what I saw as yet another symptom of stealth male domination and the patriarchal nature of society in order to subvert the feminine position in society (yes, I saw life being played out as a constant struggle for dominance between the sexes), I consciously tried to imagine God as female. "She", I articulated in my head to myself.

But it didn't work. Although I am quite happy to define a God for myself rather than accept a convenient cookie-cutter off-the-shelf 'God' that is readily available from the religions of the times, for some reason, even to me, God is always male, just as the embodiment of Fate/Destiny/Life is immutably female.

Today, that curious fact came to mind again, and I wondered why that was the case. Maybe, I conjecture, it is because Fate/Destiny/Life is capricious, unpredictable, much like the stereotype of Women.

And since God is the being you turn to in times of trouble for comfort, consolation, strength, God has to be bedrock of stability and constance. I cannot conceive of a God who would turn me away. And therefore, he must be male.

And thus, I'm beginning to come to realise exactly how deeply rooted gender stereotypes are. Disturbing...

I save therefore I shop

So, in the bright daylight of the morning, I have decided to stay on for one more night. Partly because the flight prices have inched up even further, and it is beyond what I feel I can justify for the cost of being capricious. Plus, I have persuaded myself that the amount that I have saved by not taking an earlier flight is "found money" and therefore I can go shopping! :D

Farewell Firenze?

This is my second or third last night in Italy. It has been 9 days since I've set off from London on this solo Italian trip. Initially I had been very gung-ho, booking the first flight back in on Tuesday morning, with the intention of going straight in to work (late) from the airport.

But as the days pass, I find myself being more tired than expected, and more travel-weary than I would have imagined given the relative shortness of the trip, and the fact that it is, after all, in a tourist magnet developed country with decent infrastructure, even though people don't generally speak English.

Yet somehow, I long for home. I long for my warm bed, creature comforts, for not feeling terrible about being anti-social. Most people in the hostels seem to travel in groups, or at least in pairs. And everyone seems to be able to meet new people, chat, and get along.

Myself, I find myself feeling knackered at the end of the night. And generally not up for the strain of meeting new people, engaging in social chit chat. Although, when I have been approached and therefore made the effort to actually engage, I find the experiences actually fun and enjoyable.

My shyness and general independence or aloofness is holding me back from fully experiencing the full adventure that is solo travelling.

This trip has been a good learning experience though. I find that I like myself, but not enough to spend 10 days alone in my company. I find that, whereas in the past, whenever I had an extended period of free time, especially when on the 6 hour bus journeys shuttling back and forth between Malaysia and Singapore, I used to think a lot and brood, and 9 times out of 10 would end up crying, until, tired out by the tears, I would fall asleep; this time though, I still think, but I am happier, far more balanced (though still a long way from being in a state of bovine contentment). I do not cry. I look at my life, where I am going, with relative detachment.

Or maybe it is because I have either fewer things to be sad about or more things to be happy about.

I don't know if I should stay here and face more demons. Or return home tomorrow, at the high cost of booking a new flight.

There is cotton wool in my head right now, I will decide tomorrow.

Lost girl in the City

I rarely watch TV. But I love American sitcoms like My So-Called Life, Friends, Ally McBeal, Sex and the City, Desperate Housewives. Really mainstream prime time pre-packaged, glossy, bite-sized caricatures of the American Life, which probably has nothing to do with reality of course.

And even then, I have never watched all the episodes of any of the shows, much less in chronological order. I catch random re-run episodes whenever I'm back in Malaysia and it's on TV, or on inter-continental flights, or whenever it happens to be played in UK TV (some time during the weekend. Morning, night—I'm not quite sure).

But on my trip to Vietnam last June, I bought the pirated version of the entire set of Sex and the City DVDs for US$1 per piece. The shop assistant assured me in heavily-accented English that it was all okay, no problem. As it turned out, the DVDs were badly labelled in Chinese (at least something I can read), some disks were unreadable, and the order of some of the episodes were messed up, and some episodes I suspect were just missing altogether.

Luckily, one of my housemates had most of the seasons, the original versions no less. And so over the course of the past few weeks, months, I've managed to watch most of SATC, in approximately the right order (less Season 2). He didn't have Season 6, which I had in my pirated collection, mislabelled as Season 7.

So with me working virtually part-time over the past few weeks, I'd been watching the last episodes for the first time—"Let there be light", "The Ick factor", "Catch-38", "Out of the frying pan", "The cold war", "Splat!", "An American girl in Paris (Part une and part deux)"

It's strange, over the course of the seasons, especially in the last season, to watch as the four quintessentially neurotic swinging single New York girls, one by one, began maturing, resolving their issues, settling down. It might sound weird, talking about them as if they were real people, but I would never have imagined sharp-edged, cynical Miranda settling down, having a baby, moving to Brooklyn (God forbid!), and having her mother-in-law stay with her. Or Samantha finally being in a relationship, loving someone, opening herself to share herself with one special man. Or Carrie being all loved-up in coupledom for a long time sans commitment issues with the Russian, and of course the classic all-American romantic happy-ever-after denouement with Mr Big.

I have just finished watching the last few episodes. The show seemed to echo my real life, with my lovely girl friends through the years moving away, settling down. And so watching SATC has been a sobering process. Even TV characters grow up.

The games people play

Today, the Dutch boy who was with me at Pangaea on Thursday night, asked me: "So, did he call?"

I told him that he texted and I called (at cousin J's behest) to arrange the meet up because it was more convenient than to-ing and fro-ing with the texting. No no no no no, he tut-tutted. You look desperate if you call. You should never call, always always text, and you should wait and chill before texting.

I laughed. You have Got to be kidding! You're a guy. I thought only girls did that!

I have a sister, he replied.

I explained my "20-minute" rule to him. If I emailed a guy I fancied and he took 20 minutes to reply, then I must wait At Least 20 minutes before I emailed him back. Basically, I would mirror his pace, but the minimum response time would be determined by him.

He told me about his sister's "2-hour" rule—she never replies to a text before 2 hours have elapsed. He expounded: On average, a person checks his phone every half an hour. If I reply within half an hour, it would mean that I replied as soon as I got his text. However, if I wait until 2 hours have passed before I reply, it means that I have gotten the text, but I was too busy or otherwise pre-occupied to be bothered to reply immediately. You've got to play it cool, he advised.

There was more to come. And sometimes, said Dutch boy, you write deliberately unclear messages. You send a cryptic message to check his keen-ness: how quickly does he reply to clarify when he gets your text and goes "huh?" I was actually wide-eyed with awe. Here was the master game-player!

But to be honest, I like Thursday boy both well enough and not enough to play games with him. I like him well enough as a human being to actually want to get to know him, be friends, and not play games with him. And I don't like him enough romantically for me to care about the dating outcome or play stupid games with him.

Besides, I'm quite hopeless at these games. I mean... even the whole "20-minute" mirroring rule was taught to me by someone else. And I just don't have the time or patience to play head games (though some people will beg to differ).

And, truth be told, I would quite like to keep him as a friend (I'm always wanting to keep the loveliest boys as friends), but unfortunately, I think given the way we met and what I gather from his personality, this is likely to be a binary thing: yes we go out, no we don't see each other. Which is a shame. But, as I have said before, I will deal with that, if it ever comes to that, when the time comes.

For now, since he is my practice boy, I will try out the cryptic message thing on him tomorrow!

Land's End

Went to Cornwall with a girl from uni this Easter weekend. Penzance, Newlyn, Mousehole (yes, there's a village called Mousehole!), Land's End, St Ives, St Michael's Mount. 3 days of fresh air, sea breeze, rolling hills, craggy cliffs, glittering waters and so much walking. Taking random paths that happen to strike our imaginations, tunneling through undergrowth, muddy paths. Sitting on daisy-dotted grass carpets high above the surrounding sea, the sun gently warming me. Watching the surf hitting the rocks, breaking into white foam, the hypnotic motion of the waters surging, swirling among the rocks, ebbing. It was pure joy.

More photos to come. But for now, this is me (yes I'm still wearing my faithful old orange jacket)

Baby steps

Thursday night out on the town before the long Easter weekend. For the first time in my life, I gave my number out to a stranger, a guy I'd met and danced with at the club. Today, we had a three-hour coffee (orange juice for me), and for the first time in my life, I managed to avoid disaster—in other words, I managed to avoid:
1) bringing up/even mentioning The Ex,
2) talking about other guys
3) declaring in some shape or form that I either i) hate men, ii) hate kids, iii) hate marriage
I kept my defensive instincts in check, and, with some help, stopped hyperventilating and managed to stop persuading myself with a thousand and one reasons why the whole thing (him, taking this forward) is a bad idea.
I feel like I should win the Nobel Prize or something.
If nothing else comes of it, I'd have made a good first step in rehabilitating myself.

Remembrance

Some time ago, my cousin J, probably thinking I lacked spiritual guidance, passed me Deepak Chopra's "Seven spiritual laws of success" that she had borrowed for me from the library.

When I saw the title I did a double-take: You must be joking. But I decided to give it a go. It was a very slim book. I thought: who knows, maybe my salvation, if I needed deliverance, could very well come from its most beguilingly simple pages.

In the end, while I thought some of it was somewhat cartoonish and unrealistic—like really, how does he expect me to spend at least 30 minutes each day meditating and not doing anything (and ideally twice— 30 minutes in the morning before work and 30 minutes after!)—the basic messages were simple and reminded me of my younger, more innocent, and empowered days. When I used to think much more, feel more deeply, and breathe in the rich oxygen of life that kept me loving it all—the good and the bad, ups and downs, through the dark valleys and bright plains.

The seven laws:

1) Law of Pure Potentiality

2) Law of Giving and Receiving

3) Law of Karma

4) Law of least effort

5) Law of Intention and desire

6) Law of detachment

7) Law of Dharma


Reference:
http://www.meaningoflife.i12.com/Chopra.htm

http://deepakchopra.wwwhubs.com/chopra4.htm

Cycles of life

I've come to the conclusion that how I feel about life and myself probably owes more to hormones than the objective reality of actual events/situations.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I was feeling all happy and bright and cheery. Thinking: I'm the luckiest girl in the world. Things are going so well for me, can life get any better. And that was when I came to this realisation that my hopefulness and buoyance was probably due to some one time surge of happy-hormones than anything else. Among other things, at that time I still remembered being somewhat disheartened about the direction my life was taking not too long before that time. And also, I was so exceptionally happy and contented, that I realised it had to be an anomaly. Thus, I mentally prepared myself for the downswing that I anticipated.

The first waves of the downcycle have begun to hit I suspect.

Breakdancing in Brixton

31st March, last Friday of the month. Braving a cold, I went to a breakdancing event called Throwdown Live at the Mass in Brixton. I thought it would be pretty rough or dangerous. But, surprisingly, as was the case in Stringfellows, it felt really safe. The boys were almost comically polite and respectful. Even tall, burly guys in singlets would step aside and very ceremoniously let my petite cousin and myself through doors. It felt very very Old World.

The breakdancers were a surprisingly mixed crowd—a veritable United Nations lot actually. Blacks, whites, possible Hispanics (my boy), Asians (as in Indians), Asians (as in Orientals), French Muslims who travelled all the way to breakdance in this event. And this was reflected in the crowd as well. A melting pot of cultures which dispelled my previous impression of breakdancing as a more afro/black event.

The breakdancing itself was fantastic. The stunts the boys and girls (yes there were girls) could do, floored me. Each breakdancer would take the floor and do yet another move that would amaze me further. I actually forgot to breathe a couple of times. One of the girls, "Angel" who won the 2-on-2 with her partner, could spin on her head for the longest time and do some pretty mean stunts. And her partner, which looked like one of the unlikeliest of guys turned out to be an amazing breakdancer with fairly athletic stunts.

And the guys were oh so fit. With A-fucking-mazing chiselled abs and to die for arms. Well... not all of them had drool-worthy arms. But I was just dying for my absolute favourite guy who turned out to be from Leeds (or at least he was dancing for Leeds in the 15-on-15 London vs Leeds), and another black guy also the most gorgeous physique ever. (note: both featured in photos below)

The great thing is, the boys are really passionate and serious about their breakdancing. Before the competition, they were concentrating on warming up and practicing. And some of them were really cheeky and enjoying themselves, smiling and dancing to the music. After the competition, instead of going off and sleazing girls, a lot of them just continued breakdancing and then after that, the Leeds boys just left, including my amazing part-Hispanic looking absolute favourite, and the geeky looking bespectacled boy. I was crushed.

I also discovered that out of the 15 people who danced for London, at least one was from Cambridge and at least four were from Paris. Hmm.... one wonders at the lack of genuine local London talent. There were three Oriental Asians dancing for London as well. And they were actually pretty good, I was well impressed. Although, two of the Asian boys still managed to be bean pole thin, despite the general athletic physiques of breakdancers. It's clearly a genetic thing.

As this was my initiation into the world of live breakdancing, I don't know much at all about it. But I gathered that the second Thursday of every month, there are Throwdown breakdancing battles at Plan B in Brixton, and that this was the launch of the Throwdown Live event at Mass on the last Friday of every month. Throwdown Live includes live hip hop and Drum & Bass acts (this past Friday saw a D&B act with an electric double-bass!—i didn't event know there were such things as electric double-basses) So, for the uninitiated, if you ever want to check it out, I would say: Go for it! I'm the meekest and most easily frightened of persons, but even I felt safe. And after the event (we left at 3 am because I was ill), the area was still brightly lit, there were quite a lot of people on the streets, and there were night bus services available. For more details on the scene, check out: http://www.throwdown.co.uk

Some pictures below. I also have some grainy footage of the breakdancing battles, especially of the 15-on-15.