The Blower's Daughter has been playing in my mind almost a month now since I heard it again in Novena Square one day during lunch. It is immensely haunting.

If it seems familiar, it is the opening and closing song in the movie Closer when Natalie Portman is walking across the road. Watch the music video (embedded in their website). I don't think I've ever heard a more beautiful song.

I painted tonight after a long time. I changed some colours of my Tuxie painting - it looks more surreal yet realistic now. Less severe, more earthy. As I look at it from a distance, I think I like it. I doubt I'd ever be a famous painter but at least I'd have made something for my wall that is personal and belongs to me.

I just noticed paws on the door, near the top next to Boy's photo. Really very near the top leading down. It looks like Buffy (larger paws) somehow climbed up to the top of the door and scurried down.

There is a time when you interact with someone else and you are either better for it or worse. When it is the latter, it is a terrible feeling to live with. I have learnt to live with it and lose myself in other things.

My hands are now full of paint. I was never meant to have pretty manicured fingers anyway.

I truly doubt I will be sleeping again tonight.

As usual, it is another sleepless night. This time it is not something incomplete, but a feeling of restlessness and dissatisfaction despite a rather productive day.

It began perhaps when I asked my Dad casually over dinner whose personality I was most like: my Dad, my Mom, or my grandmother. He signalled there with his head, which most strong silent-type fathers do, indicating my grandmother. I asked, Mama? He nodded.

My grandmother, Mama as we call her, is now 95 or at least that's what it says on her IC: born 1910. Rumours have it that she is actually older, born in 1906 or 1908. Regardless, it is a grand old age despite being slightly demented and sporadically incontinent. And she has had one heck of a life.

Personality-wise, the term dragon lady must have been originally coined for her. I told my Mom what Dad said when we went to pick her up later, and she said, yeah. I was most like my grandmother, with her quick temper and occasional irrational outbursts, particularly during my teens (poor Mom). Thankfully, she quickly added, I learned to control my temper and have hence mellowed (and may I add, am no longer prone to irrational outbursts - ahem).

Everyone feared my grandma when she was younger. Apparently by the time I was born she'd mellowed a lot. My brother told tales of how Mama was a lot worse before. Very fierce. I remember her chastising me about wearing torn jeans as a teen and me trying to explain to her that it was the fashion then. She was fiercely independent, passionate, and very loyal. Every year we visited my grandfather's grave. He died at 54 in 1975. She was 65 (according to her IC). From the story of their life together my Dad told, he adored her till the day he died.

Every decade she mellowed more. Memories of Chinese New Years spent at her house munching bak kwa, Sunday mornings drinking tea and watching English football. She lived on her own till she was 90, and this year moved in with my family. She is an insomniac like me and wanders the house at night, restless. We've hired someone to care for her and it helps to have someone keep her company during her nighttime forays. Her mind is 30 years ago, sometimes 50. But she remembers me and smiles when I sit with her. She thinks my brother and I are still petulant teenagers.

My Dad told me about her business acumen. How she made contacts and started businesses for his father. When my grandfather died, she took over the business. No one knows where she came from or who her family was. She doesn't remember, not even when I asked her 10 years ago. My Dad never knew nor asked. I guess children during that era didn't. My Dad's most distinct memory of her was when he was little, she'd tell him to sit outside the bathroom while she washed their clothes by hand and how she would let him go out and play football in the evenings with their Jewish neighbour's kids.

I wish I knew more about her, more about her life, where she came from, because that too, is where I come from. I am her, living in a different era, with different rules, and different people. And in 60 years, I wonder if I will be like her, often difficult, in a world of my own, wandering my home in silence in the dark of night. Will the life I lead share similar trials, similar joys? Will I handle them as she did, with the same fire my Mom says we share?

When I see her now, it feels like the fire is gone. She is placid and smiling. Until my Mom complains of how she suddenly stubbornly insists on doing something her way. Perhaps it isn't gone, just subdued by Alzheimer's. But not the restlessness. She, like me, is constantly restless, much worse at night.

As I write this, I wish she could talk to me, about her life, our afflictions, teach me to temper my fire, soothe my restlessness. But as with some things in life, we have to learn them on our own.

I make a record of all this, so that one day, should I have children, and in the distant future, should they have children of their own, they will know who they are, where they come from, and what history they carry in their genes. Perhaps then I will teach them how to harness their fire and quell their restlessness.

As usual it is Sunday night and I am unable to sleep. Not that I didn't try... I tossed and turned and my mind started organising itself, planning an upcoming event I really should have sat down to plan. Anyhow, I finally turned on the light, waking poor Z up and finished my blueprints.

I thought I'd be able to sleep now, but my mind is still churning. Perhaps it is the sound of the rain. I can't sleep when it is noisy. Or perhaps the simplest explanation is the chocolate milk I drank 10 minutes to the end of the Buffy episode I was watching to wash down my Cheese Tasters. I'd put my money on the latter.

It is also conceivable that there have been so many things in the works that have been at the back of my mind, waiting to be planned, their deadlines looming. Or most likely it is the combination of all of the above.

In other news:

- A rather quiet Father's Day. We mistakenly celebrated last week. Everyone was busy for lunch anyway.

- I collected my new pair of red glasses. Very retro I have to say.

- I slept 4 hours in the afternoon (aha! Another reason) due to MSG overdose.

- I redecorated my garden (somewhat).

Weileng sent me this pic of Maggie (Sam and Kaku's brother from the same litter) all grown up and so much like Tuxie (who shares the same mother but Tuxie was from the first litter and Maggie the second). Here is a flashback old pic taken on Jan 10, 2004 of Kaku, Mystique (her sister), and Maggie (a Tuxie lookalike).


And Maggie today. Such a handsome boy! :D

One day your descendants, if they survive a swelling Sun and other cosmic and human perils, will have at least 960 hours to work with each day. On some nights, half the world will be able to stare up at a full Moon for what seems like days and days. Imagine the loony things they'll have time to imagine, the strange lore they might conjure.

~ Robert Roy Britt, Moon Mechanics: What Really Makes Our World Go 'Round

Cool Flash movie about another war. ;)

Cat owners warned over killer flowers

A national alert has been issued to pet owners after pollen from a bunch of supermarket flowers killed a cat.

When John Hartnett bought his wife oriental stargazer lilies, he was unaware that he was passing a death sentence on the family's 13-year-old Siamese, Catalina.

The cat brushed against the flowers then licked the pollen from its fur. Within minutes she started being sick and, within hours, had died after going blind, suffering renal failure and becoming virtually paralysed.

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals singles out the Easter lily (Lilium longiflorum), tiger lily (Lilium tigrinum), rubrum lily (Lilium speciosum), Japanese show lily (Lilium lancifolium) and some species of the day lily (Hemerocallis) as liable to cause kidney failure in cats.

The Feline Advisory Bureau, a charity based in Tisbury, Wilts, said: "Symptoms of poisoning from these plants include protracted vomiting, anorexia and depression and ingestion can cause severe, possibly fatal, kidney damage."

Cats can survive if taken to a vet within six hours but the chances of survival decrease rapidly after that. After 18 hours, the kidneys stop working.

(Source: Working with the Cat Welfare Society and Telegraph)

"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us the “universe,” a part limited in time and space. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security."

~ Albert Einstein, (1879-1955), New York Post, 11/28/1972

Sometimes I wonder if Kaku is like Drew Barrymore's character in 50 First Dates. This morning she stared at me like she didn't know me, and then after I fed her and she started eating, I petted her gently. She looked up at me in wonder, continued eating, and then looked up again, and ate. It was so endearing.

Later, as I grabbed my phone from the bedside table, she saw me and darted under the bed. Perhaps so. :) But the good thing is, she seems to be coming around a little bit, day after day, seemingly curious about this pale tree-like creature who feeds and pets her daily.