so. apparently my dad couldnt get tickets and we arent leaving singapore this friday, so that means ill miss a coupla days’ worth of classes. i aint sweatin it though.

god am so tired i ust fell asleep with the latpot in front oggf me fuck it spelling check ijm going to sleep now

irony is something im used to having in my life.

i was supposed to fly off to toronto last friday – the day of my operation – but a week later im still here. my new flight is this coming friday, the 2nd of september.

today i went out twice; once to church and then for brunch with denise n kaii, followed by a playstation marathon at her place, and then later with my parents for dinner and a spooky drive down seletar through dimly lit reservoir roads and army base-hugging meandering lanes.

when i was in bed all i wanted was to get out and do stuff, to go out everyday and spend time with my friends before i fly off.

now im good enough to walk around i just feel strangely empty. ive got no plans and, funnily enough, no intent whatsoever to make them.

ironically, i feel that im in limbo now between singapore and canada. for the past week and a half, well, over the past week and a half i feel that, in the absence of my friends, ive already left the country. its just been me at home.

im not gone yet but i feel that ive moved on in this week, and today when i met denise n kai it was like meeting old friend again after a long time; ironically this week’s the longest ive spent without hanging out with either of those two in the past year or two, and guess what – im gonna be flying off for quite a while, actually. two years minimum, and maybe four or so tops.

im not even in a proper state to explain what im feeling now – its this strange emo post-departure feeling but im already feeling that ive left; any meeting with my friends now will be a meeting of friends who havent met in a while but funnily enough, itll be a farewell too.

i wish i was in a state to make more sense but my whole vibe’s been schmuggobbled into a mucky ziggy-zaggy mess of angstily scribbled-at-3am-the-night-before-a-major-exam wordless formless gibberish.

…okay so apparently im supposed to wear my leg brace on 24/7 and only take it off to do physio exercises and bathe; something ive, at the risk of sounding himboish again, so, like, totally not been doing since one of the nurses at the hospital said it would be cool to take it off when i got out.

i dont think my physiotherapist was in the very least happy when i told her that, but well yeah it wasnt my fault to start with, too. so there.

this – getting my knee back in working condition – is becoming a full-time thing now, and today i realised how little i actually knew about getting my act together. in fact i realised that i was going about doing shit absolutely the wrong way, with the silly result of putting undue pressure on my knee.

it helps too that my physiotherapist is pretty, behind those frumpy blue robe-things. why are some medical uniforms, like the in-ward nurses’ ones, for example, fit snugly and curve-hug while others mushroom you utterly into pure, poofy auntie-at-the-markettiness? its a travesty, i swear it is.

in other non-injury joel news, of which there isnt terribly much… mr joel says he’s gonna be out this weekend since he’s been stuck at home or in a hospital bed for a week and its driving him nuts.

much as im touched by my family helping me do stuff, since moving around on my feet prior to today has hurt like a major biatch, first from the burning surgical wounds and then from the bitingly swollen and off-coloured shin; the result of, i suspect, leaving an ice-pack on my knee and falling asleep, and consequently waking up to a soggy bed and still-cold water bag schlumped on my knee, which was followed by me realising the following morning that the act of standing up from a lying position was pure agony since blood flowing down through my shin to my toes caused a searing, piercing, shrieking sensation to scream up my spine, unrelentingly revertebrating at every uh, vertebrae, in a painful message which loosely translates to: “You brought this on yourself, numbnuts.”

“Yeah, right,” you cynical neutered donkeys must be thinking. my unchartered tendency to exaggerrate notwitstanding, i challenge you to wrap your knees in ice after major knee surgery and go to sleep with them on. you wake up the next day and tell me what a bitch it is.

Word of The Day for Mr Joel – vainglorious.
what a word. it means being really big headed, vain and self-obsessed. what a word though; it combines two words just like that and you get this really gangsta new one which pretty much, literally, speaks for itself.

allrighty. down to business.

i was supposed to fly off last friday; unfortunately, due to my knee injury, i had reconstructive knee surgery at sgh on friday morning. so now ill fly off real early next month instead.

i got discharged on sunday morning and those two days in the ward were the longest of my entire life. the first night – friday night – after the surgery was hell. utter agony. in between the four-hourly painkillers, which gave me an hour or two’s respite from the burning in my knee, i stared at the ceiling and counted down the minutes to the next scheduled painkiller. i couldnt even fidget since every move i made was another hammer blow on the nail of pain vengefully lodged in my psyche. uh. yeah. it just hurt like heck.

on saturday morning i had physiotherapy, where i learnt how to walk around on crutches. i can proudly say that ive improved so much since then, and can at least move around with a lot less difficulty than my initial attempt.

gwen showed up that morning in the physio room to see how i was doing, but the well-meant surprise was lost on me since i was in pain and really embarrassed she even showed up, and i hadnt had much sleep the night before and… sheesh… i think i snarled at her a coupla times when the pain really got to me, which i still feel horrible about.

i did the same to my parents, which i feel equally bad about, though at the time it felt really justified since they were being hella fussy and all, like most parents would do when their kid just had major knee surgery, right? man.

yee-uh. so i’ve been at home since sunday, feeling feverishly cold in the constant rain, feeling really bummed and chained to this huge-ass immobile swollen leg.

i wanna go out, i wanna get out of the house and i wanna get off my bed…

on a brighter note, i had a really amazing dinner last wednesday night with erin at da paolo’s pizza bar in holland v. its a pretty amazing place with hella good pizza – just dont order wine or some similar wallet-burning-beverage.

oh to be whole again and to be able to move about.

i need a tai tai. with a big car.

okay this is a test, this is a test – hope this works – since last night i couldnt post anything….

Sheesh. I’ve spent much of the last coupla days in a hospital.

Apparently, when I fell last weekend and twisted my knee, or rather, when I twisted my knee in a freak-ass accident and fell, I messed up a shitload of stuff, namely…

• my ACL
• my meniscus
• and i sprained my MCL

yeah. which means surgery this weekend – friday – and a couple more days in singapore. i dont know if this is a good thing but ill treasure this time i have…

God does work in mysterious ways, doesn’t He.

knock knock knockin’ on heaven’s doo-oaaaar!!!

i had nightmares again.

last night i dreamt of a bone-white rabid pit bull terrier the size of a man, a hulking thug-like canine mass of matted dirty hair, muscle and jaw, its yellow teeth raw and bloody with rotting gore, two squinting bloodshot eyes spewing hateful bloodlust, a low, hungry, desperate growl emanating from its coarse, thick throat.

the dog loomed over an infant child, crying for its mother and, in all its immaculate innocence, completely unaware of the hellhound above wanting nothing more than to maul the child’s little body like a rag doll, to tear morsel upon morsel of sweet unknowingly succulent flesh, to bury its muzzle into the pool of warm blood spurting out from the child’s still-beating heart.

i remember the dog lashing out for the child. i remember leaping in front of the creature, grabbing the child and hugging it close to me, forming a protective cocoon around it, then placing it safely behind me, staring the thickly-muscled hound down, letting out a primitive snarl of my own.

i remember getting into a defensive stance, my hands in front of me, claw-like, ready to tear and dismember my enemy; i remember snarling with frenzied, animalistic abandon, my forgotten human consciousness blankly remembering the helpless child behind me.

i gnarled and gnashed my teeth at my canine adversary, getting down on all fours myself, saliva sickly dripping down the sides of my mouth, twisted into a carnivorous sneer. i remember turning around to see a woman running to the child behind me, i remember her picking up the child and holding it close to her bosom.

i remember turning back to the demon dog far too late, and feeling its putrid, rotting fangs sink roughly into my exposed neck. i remember my own warm liquid life oozing down my neck and spreading down my chest.

i don’t remember anything more.

oh God this shit is getting too vivid.

well well well… you know easily you forget your dreams? how when you jolt awake from your dream you have a powerful emotional backlash from your dream – strong fear or anxiety or whatever – but barely a minute from then, as you walk to the bathroom to wash up, barely a minute passes and you’re in front of the mirror looking at your puffy eyes and shaggy hair and… you abso-fuckin-lutely forget whatever it is you were dreaming about, even though the powerful emotion still lingers – you still feel amazingly shitty or wonderful or afraid?

happens. usually.

unless of course the second you are awake – that very second you open your eyes – by an act of sheer will and determination you force yourself to remember the details of the dream…

strangely enough though, without even putting any effort into remembering… i know i’ve had two hella weird -ss dreams over the last two days. i think the pain in my left knee is somehow unraveling the dusty shroud around my inner psyche, exposing the twisted maniacal jungle prince guerilla freedom fighter-wannabe inside.

first night – that’s saturday night – the night i hurt my knee i ironically have a powerful, long dream of me jogging. jogging, for heaven’s sake. jogging down this little winding dirt path, flanked by dew-soaked lush meadows effulgent in the warm golden rays of a rising sun. talk about rubbing it in… i’m a god-damned invalid and i dream about jogging. once i get my legs back first thing i’ll do is take a lovely run down the lake ontario, right into the warmth of summer.

last night though, it gets freaky. freaky. i dreamt i was back in the army. i had my 2 men with me – alain & ryan, who by the way are the fittest, toughest, most gangsta, most dependable troopers and friends anyone could ask for. unfortunately, alain and ryan weren’t guys in my dream – they were girls. female versions of my troopers. and they behaved exactly like they would in real life, kidded around with each other in the same way… except in a funky mirrored girly way.

anyway me and my uh, wo-men were hiding in the vegetation at the side of a dirt track, silently watching and monitoring this big-ass company of troops march past.

and as the troops marched they sang this helluva gay song… it sounded like church music or some 80s retro mambo-night shit, you know what im sayin’? real creepy shit, comin from ranks upon ranks of camouflaged troops.

(my men are girls…?)

anyway next thing i know i get this out of body experience, rudely jolting out of my head, and my vision rises from the body of my hiding-in-the-bushes-with-my-girls-recceing-the-company self and rise a hundred feet into the air – and my consciousness morphs into:

a warcraft 3 gauntleted hand.

now with my bird’s eye view of the jungle, i use the near god-like powers that come with my new existence as a mouse pointer and place buildings all over the jungle to support my troops.

i cleared trees and placed big guard towers at choke points. i slapped down an army barracks which churns out faceless rifle-carrying soldiers. i sent my harvesters to collect gold from a gold mine at the far side of the knoll i was on…

then i woke up with the monday morning sun in my face, remembering every single inane, depraved vivid detail.