We are so ignorant. I’m so angry. There’s so much shit happening in the world. And we all let it happen.

I’m reeling in shock from what I’ve just read about what’s happening in West Africa. Well, yes, I love current affairs and TIME magazine and all that wordy crap. And yes I’m a dork. But moving on.

You may think “Yeah, yeah, they have no food, no water, they are skinny, they can’t read and there’s AIDS. Can you tell me something that I don’t already know?”

But this more than that. It’s not just sad or heart-wrenching. It’s scary.

Everyone’s involved in this. And the scary thing is that we don’t know it.

This seems pretty ridiculous and heavy. It shouldn’t be on the average person blog. But I can’t help it. I’m so disturbed. I’m going to write an entry here soon about this. You have been warned.

In my 17685^th essay here, I am going to talk about my deteriorating self-esteem. Brace yourselves.

Well I don’t exactly know how to beat around the bush for this one, so I’m going to spit out the sorry truth. And the sorry truth is that I feel so worthless sometimes. Not that I’m blaming God or anyone for that. Nor do I expect any heavenly assistance for this because this is my own stupid problem. But that’s the sorry truth right there.

And the sorry truth gets sorrier: I especially have a problem with good-looking or “cool” people.

You see, whenever I speak to good-looking people or “cool” people, I automatically feel that I don’t deserve to speak to them. I feel unworthy to occupy their time. Why should they waste their time talking to losers like me? What ensues physically is that I start to clam up and babble lame things like “The weather’s so shitty”. And that probably seals the deal for them because they clam up too and give me weird looks. They’re probably thinking, “No, you’re shitty. And boring. This is the end of our conversation.”

Which really doesn’t help my self-esteem at all.

And it hurts when people stereotype you and assume that there’s nothing more to you. That you’re just a nerdy-pants who looks nerdy and lives nerdily ever after. Which may be true to a certain extent. But every nerdy-pants, though he/she may be as flat and boring as a coin, does have two sides, no?

Take for example the schoolmate who only bothers to talk to you to:

1. Find out about your grades
2. Ask if you study every day (which, for clarification, is a NO)
3. Find out about the day’s homework
4. Copy your homework

and thereafter assume that you do not exist.

I’m starting to think that all this has a link with my slouch, which has more or less reduced my backbone shape to that of a prawn’s. I’m not a Hunchback of Notre Dame yet though. Might reach that level in a few year’s time.

To conclude this depressing essay, I’d just like to say that it’s only human nature to judge and stereotype. For example I’m judging those “cool” people myself and assuming that they’re dismissing me. And similarly others judge me and assume that my main goal in life is to finish my homework. So this is how karma works then. I’ll just swallow my pride, lower my head and walk along. And maybe secretly swallow some potato chips as well.

As you can tell from my mundane ramblings, there is nothing spectacular about being Jennyspeaks. I’ve not had any unwanted pregnancies, wardrobe malfunctions, nipple piercings or anything that is remotely “cool” in the dictionary of Teenage-dom. And in teenage terms I’m probably best defined as “uncool”.

But maybe next year on the 14^th of January, I might be an ounce less uncool than I was before. Just maybe.

That’s because the rock band that I’ve been obsessing over ever since I started producing oestrogen is finally coming to Singapore. And locked up in my drawer lies the golden (free standing) ticket to their concert. Which had me digging into my retirement account.

Green Day Live in Singapore.

14^th January 2010.

Singapore Indoor Stadium.

*falls to the ground in reverence*

Sometimes I feel that I’m slowly morphing into a middle-aged housewife.

I had a relatively carefree childhood, one that honed my free-spirited character. I didn’t understand the rationale of cleanliness (why clean something when it’s going to get dirty again?) and I could never understand my mother’s preoccupation with plastic flowers and vases.

However as I grew older, I began to feel the weight of the burdens that are associated with running and maintaining a home. Now don’t get me wrong, I do not have any particularly strong desires to behave like a housewife/homeowner. I’m just a kid. But still, being the only other person around at home to help my single mother slowly elevated my status from being “mummy’s little helper” to “mummy’s only helper”. I still did not give much thought to the weight of my role, until last month when my mother’s arthritic stabs took a turn for the worse.

And then I began to grasp the enormity of my responsibilities when my mother could no longer perform to her “full capacity”. I took charge of grocery shopping and minor chores like sweeping and dusting. In a bid to lessen the laundry load, I picked clothes carefully, opting for jeans so I could wear them a few times. I tried ways and means to earn extra cash so that my mother didn’t have to fund my transport.

I felt rather old among my friends, because while they yakked I would be making mental grocery lists or deliberating on whether the table fan needed cleaning or not. It was altogether pretty odd behaviour for an adolescent. Perhaps the one good thing that came out of my mental preoccupation with domestic matters was that I pondered less about what I could eat next.

What ensued was a period of mental torture because by nature I am a social creature. I pretty much hate pottering about the house when I know that concurrently my friends are at the beach having a barbeque. Or accompanying my mother to ogle at different sewing machines when I have no inclination towards such objects whatsoever. But I knew that as a daughter I had some filial duties and my mother depended on me. And so I suppressed my urge to slash those damn plastic flowers and did what I had to do.

In my mother’s calendar, Christmas is coming soon. And that doesn’t signal Christmas shopping but rather cleaning and pimping the house for bloodthirsty relatives. To be fair, the house isn’t in fantastic shape either. And that fact kind of hit home when things began to malfunction back-to-back, lizards began strutting around like they owned the house and cobwebs hung like chandeliers.

Here’s a glimpse of the To-Do list:

1. Clean and throw out kitchen storage cabinet
2. Clear out the storeroom and throw all the junk
3. Clear the ancient pots in the oven (with ancient food in them)
4. Cleaning of display cabinet and water pipes
5. Dispose sofa and clean the area
6. Clean behind the TV set
7. Install the DVD player
8. Install ceiling lights and clean up the aftermath
9. Dispose bedroom bookshelf and clean up
10. Empty and shift plastic cabinets to the kitchen
11. Sort out clothes, arrange in new wardrobe
12. Send the sewing machine for repair
13. Buy material for new curtains
14. Clean Kitchen cabinets and chest of drawers
15. Sell VCR, DVD Player and Desktop Computer to Karang Guni
16. Buy  full-length mirror and install it
17. Paint ceiling

And it goes without saying that I have a part to play in all of the above. Oh well, I guess that Mummy’s Only Helper has to come to the rescue!

“Who is Jennyspeaks?”

I first posed myself that question some two years ago, on a greasy Wednesday night. As I sat in front of the computer, fingers hovering the keyboard, there was a tinge of nervous excitement gnawing me inside. After all, it was my maiden foray into this strange activity called “blogging”. Besides, I had inherited my mother’s anti-technology genes, which only made me wary of anything electronic.

But with that question, I was free to pave the way for who I was going to be. I could single-handedly sculpt this character through my posts. I was going to have this faceless, anonymous, virtual mouthpiece. And with it I could let loose the many ideas, emotions and thoughts that were writhing around in my head.

When I finished the “answer key“ in my first post, I was smugly satisfied. I was pleased that I had managed to condense my very self into 320 words. I was also pretty sure that this was the real me, the unchanging Jennyspeaks, the young and restless lass who would be like that forever and ever, amen.

Of course that was rubbish. That answer key quickly became obsolete.

Some two years and 99 posts later, a very different Jennyspeaks is here before you.

In the weeks leading up to my 2^nd year Blogging Anniversary (a personal achievement, something to be celebrated, for someone who has never quite gotten over her fear over HTML), I was rootling around my Archives.

After looking through my old posts, I had only one conclusion: Jennyspeaks was f**king awesome. (This may not be a very reliable assessment considering that I am Jennyspeaks.)

But the point is. This blog has seen me evolve from a bipolar crow on amphetamines to a cynical depressive to a ??? now. In its posts I have confided terrible secrets and morbid emotions that I never had the courage to tell anyone about (including God). In typical no-holds barred fashion I have rattled off about everything from constipation to Amy Winehouse. I always prided myself as being a private person, but it is really ironic how this public space made me open up. These archives have now become precious and dear to me, because every single word I’ve uttered reminds me of what I was, and how far I’ve come.

And the thing that kept me going even on my lowest of days was the comments I received. Some of them made sense, some of them didn’t. But they all mattered anyway. It was affirming to get a comment from someone I didn’t know, because it reminded me that somewhere out there in our disconnected world, someone was listening to what I had to say.

Two years ago, I promised that I would continue the “answer key” as to who Jennyspeaks really was. I think it’s high time that I confront that question again.

Question: Who is Jennyspeaks?

Answer:

Jennyspeaks used to be a complex girl with complex wants and needs. Today she is still (if not more) complex, but has greatly simplified her wants and needs. Her bisexual tendencies have remained largely dormant since and she is happy about that.

She is still Eurasian and her parentage has not been altered. However while she used to not give a shit about her heritage, she now has a mild cultural/identity crisis.

Jennyspeaks’ faith in her maker has definitely become stronger since.

She has completely forgotten how to play the bass and the guitar, thanks to years of nerd-dom. She has not strummed a guitar ever since a steel string burst in her face while attempting to tune it. She is not in any musical group but has quietly penned several tunes since, on a voice recorder.

She believes that she isn’t racist. She hasn’t had a situation so far where she can test that belief.

She continues to hang out at the same old pigsty of an apartment block called her home. And it’s still cool.

Jennyspeaks has ceased having unhealthy obsessions over Green Day, much less any rock band. She just enjoys music and has a few favourites. Such as Green Day.

Jennyspeaks no longer aspires rock-stardom. In other words, she has become sensible and boring. Her sensible and boring career options journalism and broadcast media. She still hopes to brush up on her musical skills so that she can play music as a hobby. But secretly she hopes to be a writer.

(You are probably aware by now that this is a nerd speaking).

Jennyspeaks has reached the stage where she accepts that she cannot have a Gisele Bundchen figure and so she has stopped bothering about diets and calorie counting. She tries to exercise and maintain a figure that does not revolt people. She is content to be small, bite-sized and on the fleshy side.

She would still play catching, hide-and-seek and Old Maid… if only there was anyone who’d be willing to play with her.

Don’t bother totalling up your marks to see if you passed or failed the question. This answer key doesn’t prove anything because there’s no way you can compress an individual into a set amount of words. What’s written here today might be obsolete tomorrow… Who knows?

Ever had the feeling that you were just horribly inadequate? That you were neglecting everything and everyone around you?

I did.

I felt like a lousy friend. When I met up with my best friend yesterday after aeons, I realised how much I underestimated the significance of our friendship. I thought that I would be able to get along just fine with my life even though we met up erratically.

But after all the disappointments I’ve faced so far, after putting my faith in people that didn’t put their faith in me, it was such a blessing to see my old girlfriend waiting for me at the bus interchange. As reliable as clockwork. As sincere and real as she always was. It was just like the old times as we shared the grievances we both faced in our new lives. Spending the day with her totally made my day. It also reminded me that when the world ditches you, someone would be there you lift you out of the gutters.

I felt like a lousy daughter too. I was spending less and less time with my mother. And I knew that I was all that she had left. It sort of pained me to see her waiting up for me all alone when I came home late. The moment I stepped into the door till the instant when my head hit the pillow, my mum would bombard me from all sides, asking me about my day, offering me a supermarket full of food to eat, relating the full news bulletin to me, etc. All her small talk just screamed of loneliness.

But after all the empty chairs and distant faces, the fake smiles and manipulation, the using and the discarding, it was such a blessing to return to my pigsty of a home, and see a familiar face waiting for me. Someone who was joined at the hip with me, whether the both of us liked it or not. In a way we were both in the same boat, me with my busy life and she with her quiet life. We both felt alone and clung to each other for reassurance.

What’s the present without the past? As I soon found out, I truly needed these two characters back in my present, and hopefully they’ll stick around for my future too. I’m sorry to have left them out of the script so far. Maybe that’s what was missing from it.

All this while I believed that Jennyspeaks was a blog that was a little different from the others.

After all, the lack of visuals and the abundance of punishing sentences (such as this one) surely made this bit of cyberspace slightly deeper than the waters of a toilet bowl.

However, a chance peek at the Search Engine Terms at my Blog Stats page shattered my belief.

Apparently, this blog is a fan site for Billie Joe Armstrong, Kurt Cobain and John Frusciante. It is also a comprehensive site for dumb quotes, wise quotes (haha the irony), insults for fat people, hate insults and sayings that make people feel stupid.

And also it tells you about Women Shitting Toilet and Heroin Toilet Seat (yup, this one caught me off-guard).

So this is what two years of long, verbose posts have resulted in: a blog that is a lot more shallow than toilet bowl waters.

And you know what? I really don’t mind.

Search Engine Terms

These are terms people used to find your blog.

Today

Yesterday

Part 2 of the Funny Insults series is provided to you, free of charge, by Jennyspeaks. Comes packaged with a pinch of salt.

Question: Who invented the copper wire?

Answer: Two Scotsmen fighting over a penny. – English Joke

Question: How do you disperse an angry Scottish mob?

Answer: Pass around a collection box. – English Joke

German is a language developed solely to afford the speaker an opportunity to spit at strangers under the guise of polite conversation. – National Lampoon

The larger the German body, the smaller the German bathing suit, and the louder the German voice issuing German demands and German orders… to everybody who doesn’t speak German. For this and several other reasons, Germany is known as “the land where Israelites learned their manners”. – P.J Rourke, “Holidays in Hell”

An Israeli man’s life was saved when he was given a Palestinian man’s heart in a heart transplant operation. The man is doing fine, but the bad news is he can’t stop throwing rocks at himself. – Jay Leno

On a clear day you can’t see Luxembourg at all. This is because a tree is in the way. – Alan Coren

What are the first three words in a Mexican cookbook? — “Steal a chicken.”

In Russia, we only had two TV channels. Channel One was propaganda. Channel Two consisted of a KGB officer telling you: Turn back at once to Channel One. – Yakov Smirnoff

In the US you have freedom of speech. You can go up to Ronald Reagan and say, “I don’t like Ronald Reagan.” In the Soviet Union, you have the same freedom. You can also go up to Chernenko and say: “I don’t like Ronald Reagan.” – Yakov Smirnoff

America is the only country in the world where a housewife hires a cleaning woman, so she can do volunteer work at the day care centre where the cleaning woman leaves her child. – Milton Berle

The crime problem in New York is getting really serious. The other day, the Statue of Liberty had both its hands up. – Jay Leno

Feeling the stress of everyday life? At Jennyspeaks, we aim to provide you with a sanctuary where you can throw off the shit of your everyday life (at least for a while) and laugh evilly.

Here’s Part 1 of our detox program. Directions: Take before and after meals, preferably with alcohol.

Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman say their split was an amicable one. They want everyone to know that after their divorce is final, their two adopted children will be returned to the prop department at Universal Studios. – Tina Fey

Live Earth is committed to being the first carbon neutral music event. Hybrid cars will for transport, food will be served in biodegradable plastic, and the stage will be illuminated by the divine light that shines out of Bono’s arse. – Jeremy Clarkson

Mick Jagger is now at the awkward age of being a stone and passing one. – Jay Leno

(of Bee Gees’ 1988 album ESP) Few people know that the CIA is planning to cripple Iran by playing this album on loudspeakers secretly parachuted into the country.

Mary Kate Olsen admitted to being angry with Paris Hilton for sleeping with her ex boyfriend. After hearing this, Paris said, “She’s going to to have to be a lot more specific.”—Conan O Brien

Now that Martha Stewart is out of jail, she is going back to Writing a monthly column for her magzine. This month’s issue explains how to hot-glue seashells to your electronic ankle bracelet. — Conan O Brien

(of Truman Capote’s death) It was a good career move. – Gore Vidal

My mother and I hardly talk about boys, even though we’re pretty close. And so recently, it was a rare privilege for me to be able to engage in a few minutes of civil discourse with her over the subject of dating.

It has always fascinated me that my mother has extremely low libido, even through her teenage years (or so she claims). She has always insisted that she never had any problems with boys whatsoever during her school years, and that she never had crushes nor dated. How efficient. And she expects me to do the same. According to her, such complications only arose when she hit the ripe old age of 25. It makes me secretly wonder if my mother was a butch when she was younger (after all, she was a competitive netballer). Okay I’m just kidding. Of course she wasn’t a butch.

Respectfully bearing in mind my mother’s stand on boys, (“You are a Christian girl. God will keep you safe from such things”) I quietly kept all my messy hormonal adventures (or rather, misadventures) to myself. We remained as close as ever, but I just had to improve on my secret-hoarding skills. And improve they did.

I am very proud to say that as of 12 July 2009, my mother still thinks that I am “safe” from “such things”. I am also very pleased with myself for that. Just about a month ago, when I was marking the 17^th year of my existence, the both of us were taking stock of my life and it slowly evolved to the subject of dating.

“See mum, I’ve been such a good daughter. I never gave you boy trouble,” I said teasingly.

Her expression changed. Somehow she clearly felt uncomfortable but had to say something anyway: “Of course, you’re baptized in Christ. He will keep you safe.”

“What if I get a boyfriend now?”

“It just shows that you have strayed. You have become distracted. Good girls don’t do such things.”

“So I can become a nun, then?”

“No I didn’t raise you to become a nun. I will not allow that.”

“So you want me to live like a nun without becoming a nun.”

“What I’m saying is, God will provide you with a companion when you are in university. He will be intelligent and holding a good job. Or else, you will find your future husband in Church. I hope you date that altar server, the one who won the “Altar Server of the Year” award. He looks so holy and righteous.”

“Mum, that altar server wants to become a priest.”

“Then find another altar server. Oh, and put your sons in servers too…”

And so there ended the longest conversation I ever had with her on dating. And her instructions were very clear.

The thing is, my dear mother does not understand that most (but not all, I hope) males in church are no better than males out-of-church when it comes to serial dating. As one friend put it: “Don’t ever date a server. They are players.”

I think it’s in times like these that my mother and I revolve in different solar systems. While my mother’s advice is very entertaining, I don’t buy it. I don’t believe in restricting a relationship to a specific time/place. Or in my case, to a specific altar server.

What I do believe in is letting God take control of what happens or doesn’t. I’m pretty sure God isn’t going to cast me into the pits of hell for lusting over a guy, or for dating a player. I can get a guy’s number and seek him out; but what happens after that is beyond my control. I can date all I want and get my heart trampled; but I know that at the end of the day He will be there listening to my rants.

So dear mum, thank you for your advice. However I don’t think the birds and the bees are about university guys or church guys or what-have-you.

I think it’s about living and learning. The practical way.