flights

I just watched the end of Something’s Gotta Give, and I was pleasantly surprised to see a good performance out of the reliably wooden, Keanu Reeves.

Alright, I only caught the last 15 minutes or so, but in his bits, Keanu had to manage subtlety. He arrives at a Parisian bistro to meet the older woman (Diane Keaton) he loves, to find that her old flame (Jack Nicholson) is seated across from her. Keanu sits down beside Diane Keaton, and over the course of the meal, he gradually realises she is still in love with Nicholson.

And he has to communicate this to the audience… with his face.

And he does this perfectly, and (I’ll say it again) with subtlety.

In our glib little discourses on pop culture, we come to rely on opportunities to make fun of things like the acting prowess of Keanu Reeves, and I imagine that some people are disappointed to see him defy their expectations.

I imagine plenty of these people could watch Something’s Gotta Give and deny that he actually did defy them.

But I say, go Keanu.

I had to check out of Fraser Suites this morning, even though I’m not leaving Singapore until tomorrow.

After staying there for nine months (minus the Month of May), it seems my room was not available for one more night.

A while ago, Thavy said I could stay with her anytime I want, so I tried yesterday to take her up on her offer. She’s got a very comfortable (two-bedroom?) flat just down the road from Fraser Suites. She’s also a whiplash-inducing hottie of a girl, an amazing cook and an all around rockstar of a person.

Unfortuneately for me (but lovely for her), she’s stateside right now for her sister’s wedding.

So I’ve booked a room at Raffles, The Plaza, where my brother in law always stays. They’ve put me on the sixth floor of the North Tower, and my room faces a little garden with some bamboo and a flourishing rhododendron. There are no other rooms overlooking this garden – on the sixth floor anyway – so it feels like I’m in my own private villa.

Nice place to spend my last night in Singapore.

I had planned to travel a bit in the region – Cambodia or possibly Vietnam again – before returning home to San Francisco, but it’s the middle of the rainy season across this part of the globe. So between the gloomy weather and my utter eagerness to return home, I’m flying to San Francisco tomorrow.

She was walking a few steps ahead of me, on the the way back to the hotel from the market on the ground floor. I’d seen her around, but I hadn’t met her. She held the door for me, which created a bit of an awkward moment, because I was suddenly just a step in front of her in the empty coridor. I broke the silence.

“I’ll get the next one.” I held the next door for her, and we shared the elevator. She commented on the quantity of bottled water in my shopping bags, and I made a lame joke about having a pet fish (or maybe it was about being part fish).

She had a sweet laugh, and I’m a sucker for a Japanese accent.

A few days later, I got my follow-up opportunity by the hotel pool, and I asked her out – for coffee, dinner, drinks, whatever.

One night, late, she texted me to ask if she could come over – in her pjs.

I’ve been spending every night with her for a few weeks now. When we talk, her soft full lips always reveal the hint of a smile, and her eyes have a brightness to them that makes it hard to look away. Kissable is the word. And I love her body. Wrapping my arm around her petite waist.

For the past few nights, my j-girl has been working very late, so she hasn’t wanted to sleep over. And the last two times she came over it was “only to sleep.”

Maybe she doesn’t like me “that way” anymore. Maybe she’s just tired from working too hard. Maybe she’s on her period and doesn’t want to tell me. Maybe she’s being Japanese (or a woman, for that matter) in a way that I (as a gai-jin and a man) can’t understand.

Anyway, I’m not really sure where this little fling is going, or whether it’s going anywhere. It’s too early to tell, as the fortune teller said.

A while ago I asked her a question, during a playful exchange of words after sex.

“Don’t you think it’s a little strange to spend so much time with someone, to really enjoy each other for a month or two, and then just say ‘goodbye’ at the end?”

A pause and a smile.

“Nope.”

I recently went to see a fortune teller named Marwan. Three of my colleagues visited him the week before me, on a referral from our pixel elf, May.

My colleagues were amazed and sort of freaked out by how accurate – and specific he was, without any input from them at all. So I couldn’t pass it up.

I had a sort of double motive for going. My life feels very up-in-the-air right now. My time on this project is coming to an end, and I’ll be returning to the US in a few weeks. I wanted to see what Marwan would say about this moment in my life.

I also thought it would be a bit of fun.

I told him literally nothing about myself, and he started talking right away about how I was shortly going to return home after an extended period away – about eight months, he said.

Bingo.

He said I had mixed feelings about returning home, and that my life felt transient and very up-in-the-air at the moment.

Bingo.

He said he thought I’d recently met a girl – Japanese maybe. He said it was too early to tell whether this Japanese girl would become significant in my life. He said he thought she liked me, but mainly she liked the sex. :)

He said that sometime in the next six months I’d be entertaining job offers I’d recieve through some contacts in Japan. He didn’t say for sure whether he thought I’d end up working there, but in any case, he said Japan would be a good place for me.

He talked about a “court case” I was involved in. He said it’s good that this court case went smoothly and was coming to a close. I had no idea what he could possibly be talking about, but then he said it had to do with a woman I’d been with for a long time. A divorce maybe, he said.

Bingo.

He talked about my parents and my brother. He said my father’s health was unpredictable right now – that he’d require hospitalization for something in the near future. He said he didn’t think it would be serious.

He talked about how my father and my brother had a big falling out recently, and he said it was mostly because of the woman my father is married to. Not your mother, he said.

He said that within the next year, I’d be partnering with some people to buy real estate – on the third floor of a building, facing the sea, a half hour outside San Francisco. He said I wouldn’t live there. I’d buy it strictly as an investment.

He said that I’d left a weaker self – and a lot of drama – behind about eight months ago, when I left my country.

He said that I tend to follow my emotions too much and I need to make sure I use my brain more.

But, he said, I need to be fearless.

You know your work has gone to a bad place when you feel guilty for working only a half day… on a Sunday.

Which is exactly what I did today.

I’ve been neglecting this blog, emails from friends and family, and all my hobbies really, not to mention my own health and well-being, for weeks.

My thoughts aren’t completely consumed by work, but my time is. I have plenty of things to write about. Things occur to me all day, but by the time I find a few free minutes, I often don’t have the mental energy to write, or the will to spend one more minute in front of my computer.

That is, if I even remember what I wanted to write about in the first place.

A while ago I lamented mildly here about how I don’t feel like I can be completely candid in this blog. My friends, colleagues and family are reading, and there are certain things I can’t – or shouldn’t – say. (In any case, they used to read my blog, back when I used to post often and write something interesting once in a while. But that’s another story.)

That post was in a way about honesty, and in it I sort of suggested I’m afraid of embarassing myself or shocking people who (think they) know me. But when I really think about it, that’s not actually what bothers me, inquiring emails from my mom notwithstanding :)

So much of my life occurs with people I know, and I’d like to be able to reveal more about my interactions with them. But with me as the common denominator, they would recognise themselves (and each other) in my vignettes and observations, even if I used pseudonyms. Many of them would not have a problem with that, but enough of them would.

This concern motivated me once to use just the initial “L” to refer to my friend Leilani in a harmless enough post. She sent me an email the next day that said basically, “‘L’ makes it sound creepy. Just use my name.” We laughed about it, but she was right.

I don’t have a lot of shocking or embarassing things to say, but I’d like to be able to say certain things about my clients or my employer, for example, without fear of repercussions. Again, even if I used fictional company names and pseudonyms, my colleagues and clients would recognise themselves because they know who I am.

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with a friend online. It was very late at night on her side of the planet, and I asked her what she was doing up so late. She told me she was posting to her blog. I didn’t know she had a blog, and I asked her for the URL.

“I don’t give that out,” she said.

She went on to tell me that she used to have a blog that all her friends and family followed, but she felt so constrained by the fear of freaking her parents and colleagues out that she abandoned her blog and started a secret one.

“It’s not hard to find, but don’t tell me if you find it.”

I had thought about doing the same thing, and possibly going so far to disguise myself and the people I write about. But in some ways that kind of anonymity feels like it would go against some unwritten rule of blogging. Of course that’s not true, and I think I’ll probably do it at some point.

On that note, it’s interesting in my previous post that I singled out Sarong Party Girl as the quintessential fearless blogger. Some things went down with her recently that made me look more closely at that pronouncement.

At that time she was fairly careful about her privacy. She uses pseudonyms like “Mr. Big” and “D” for the people in her life, and she is happy to be known only as SPG or Izzy, the name she uses to sign each post. So, anonymity.

Recently, though, she posted some nude pictures of herself – really lovely, tastful ones and not really anything I’d call porn – and the Singapore press jumped all over it. There were at least two articles in the Straits Times and at least one in the New Paper.

As a side note, it’s pretty funny given the life she leads and writes about that one tastful topless picture was the thing that crossed Singapore’s line of decency.

So she’s essentially been outed now, and that hasn’t stopped her or even slowed her down. I’m guessing that even her parents know everything at this point.

After an obligatory two weeks of responding to stir and scandal, she’s back to writing about the things that make her blog great. It’s better than ever in fact.

Fearlessness.

I jetted off to Bali over the weekend to visit my sister (who’s there for a month with her husband and their four kids) and also to do a bit of diving.

We had perfect weather, and it was really great to see my sister and the kids. And the diving was unbelievable. Check out these pix taken with my brother-in-law’s camera (mostly by him).

My colleagues all seemed to give me a bit of the silent treatment when I returned to the office on Monday, but Leilani was probably right when she said I might just be guilt-tripping.

Raymond Seet, our dive instructor, is the Singapore embodiment of a “dude” – dark-skinned and constantly grinning, with the kind of impressively wild hairstyle that can only be achieved through years of salt water and wind exposure.

He led our group through the PADI theory class and the pool session – both of which I skipped, because I’d already passed the SSI version of these. I did show up for the final evening of quizzes and review sessions, and to finalise the itinerary for our trip to Malaysia.

As the de facto organiser and spokesman for our group of six, I was regularly tasked with extracting key information out of Raymond – when is the final exam?what time are we leaving? where are we going now?

Raymond has a way of evading even the simplest of questions. His favourite response seems to be, “um…later I tell you.” Sometimes he’d actually address my question, but always without answering it.

If I was sent to ask him, for example, the simple binary question, “are we paying for this meal, or are you paying for it?” I would return to our group scratching my head. “I think he said…”

This was sometimes frustrating but generally endeared him to us. The only time we lost our patience with him was during the harrowing death-ride to Mersing. All the vehicles on the road to Mersing drive rediculously fast for the road conditions, but Raymond seemed determined to be the fastest. He passed every other car, truck, van and motorcycle.

Ultimately, though, we were difficult customers, and we knew it. Raymond was very flexible and accommodating considering this. He worked around our schedules, provided us with door-to-door service for the entire learning process, and organised a really fun first dive trip – oil spills not withstanding.

Last Friday, eleven of us packed ourselves and our dive equipment into Raymond’s small van and headed off to Malaysia for the weekend. Our mission was to get our open water scuba certifications.

Six of us left Fraser Suites just after dinner. We stopped at Raymond’s office to pick up our rented gear and another couple of divers.

Next was a truly harrowing night ride to the port of Mersing in Malaysia. 100+ kph. Skidding around tight curves. Swerving in and out of the way of oncoming traffic as we passed every fast-moving car, truck, van and motorbike between Johor Bahru and Mersing.

We arrived at our boat at about 2:30am and tried to catch a few winks before the boat embarked for Tioman Island, but the mosquitoes were fierce. Three bites on my face and one inside my ear – not to mention eight or ten on my arms – were enough to guarantee a sleepless night. All of us did manage to doze off for most of the 3 hour ride to the island, once the boat started moving.

We had a quick breakfast on the island then headed out for our first dive – ever.

Into an oil spill.

Apparently, a sizeable spill occurred off of Johor Bahru last week, and some of it made its way over to our first dive site. To be fair, we couldn’t see the oil from the boat. It was only after we’d been in the water for a few minutes that we started to notice a scattering of sticky black droplets on the surface.

While we waited on the surface for our instruction, bits of the oil started to stick to our faces, hair, gear.

We descended to six or eight meters or so and went through a few skills for about 45 minutes. When we ascended to the surface, it seemed like the oil had cleared. But I was the first to swim to the boat, and as I reached to sweep the first clump of kelp out of my way, my arm and hand were suddenly covered in globs of thick, sticky oil.

Crude oil, as it turns out, is much more like tar. It’s sticky rather than greasy, and all the divers and snorklers on the boat were covered in it. Faces, arms, hair, wetsuits, bikinis and all our gear. We had to use diesel fuel as a solvent to get the stuff off our skin and out of our hair.

After the dive, we spent a few hours cleaning our gear and ate a small lunch before heading out for our second dive.

A while back, I met a woman named Sharon at a bar. I have to say, I have no memory of what she looks like. I can barely remember anything about her, but I have her number in my contacts list, and she sms’s me from time to time. From these text messages, I have learned that she is an avid diver.

As a side note, it’s interesting that I’ve maintained a steady – if very infrequent – sms correspondence with Sharon. I chatted with her just once in a bar. That’s all. And although I haven’t seen her since that first night – months ago – she said she would have agreed to go away with our group for a weekend dive trip, if she did not already have plans to go to Amsterdam. It’s possible she has a better memory of me than I do of her, but the likelier story is that we just mutually trust that since we exchanged numbers a long time ago, we must have found each other interesting or at least harmless enough.

Anyway, I bring up Sharon because she recommended a dive instructor in one of her text messages months ago. I couldn’t remember who it was though, and when I tried to contact her to get the name, she was already on her way to Amsterdam.

So we ended up with the man we call crazy Raymond, whom I met through a dive shop in Lucky Plaza.