Jungle Balls, Jungle Balls, Tingle All The Way!

What the hell??? ZERO Comments for the last post???!!

Ok, I realised it might have been a little bit boring, but I found it quite difficult to try to to squeeze 19 days of indescribable excitement and happiness into a 10 minute blog entry...so forgive me if I've bored youse all!

Its that time of the year again, frantic Christmas shopping and stressing about getting that perfect gift for someone, gorging on delicious heart stopping saturated fats, protein and carbs, wishing and hoping that bitchy evil colleague of yours get drunk at the corporate Christmas party while you take wonderful pictures of her on her knees in the male toilet cubicles....ah...pure Christmas bliss.....

Since I am as religious as a hooker in Kings Cross, Christmas is just another holiday for me every year. Until I met Matt. Since I started living with Matt, I have been invited to their family Christmas gathering every year. I know how some people dread going to their "in laws" for Christmas, but I love going to Matt's for many reasons. First and foremost, I get to spend some time with Matt, without his mobile ringing every 5 seconds with offers of coffee, lunch or drinks at the pub. Even though strictly speaking I am not really alone with Matt, I feel like I'm spending a lot more personal time with him, which is hard to come by living in the city. Secondly, his relatives are a really funny lot, and I never feel out of place. Aunties asking me about my work, uncles asking me about Chinese New Year (which I told them was a Chinese version of Christmas, a time of family gatherings and excessive feasting) and cousins telling me how bad the last Robbie Williams concert was....it did help that there were mountains of food waiting to be stored in my super elastic stomach. At my last count, I have consumed 2,650,456,358 kJ on Christmas day.

Since coming back after the Europe trip, I've struggled to re-adjust to life in Sydney . While it was great that I had to stop over in Singapore for my brother's wedding, but with each passing year, I found it increasingly difficult to leave Singapore. No matter how I plan my days in Singapore, there is never enough time to catch up with friends and family, especially my immediate family ; mum, Ben, Pat and new sister in law Tricia. Many times I've had to sacrifice some of my friends' catchups so that I can get together with my family more. This year it was great that Matt had difficulties getting onto a flight to London and had to stop over in Singapore for one night. Mum met Matt 2 years ago and Mum was especially proud that she could communicate with Matt, a Caucasian, despite her limited knowledge of the English language. When I told mum Matt was coming over to stay for a night, she immediately jumped off her seat to make the bed for him, grabbing a bottle of wine along the way to place prominently on the dinner table. You see, Matt and mum go back a long way, and it was their tradition to share a bottle of wine whenever they got together. Mum loves her wine, but I suspect she loves showing off her English to Matt more. Ben has been really good as well, sacrificing a lot of his free time to go shopping with me, getting me some major discounts for clothes and paying stuff for me first using his credit card when I ran out of Singapore dollars. One thing he did touched me very much, he took one of the pants I bought in Singapore for length alterations, but my regular seamstress was away. Ben ran around with my pants looking for one, finally found one, demanded the tailor do the alterations within that hour, while Ben sat and waited for it. I hate people fussing over me because I like exerting my independence, but my family have truly shown their love and care for me each and everytime I go back home.

What made leaving Singapore more difficult this year was that Mum's foot was acting up, and she has difficulty walking once she sits down for a while. Of course, she reckons that she's got more pressing issues like her weight (I can tell you she is no where near fat, but her supermodel mind thinks otherwise), but I worry that the pain in her foot will be a hindrance to her social and work life. Mum loves going out dancing and bits of shopping here and there, and a crook foot's not gonna be much help. She also works part time twice a week, it keeps her mind and body active, and I am worried that she might not be able to work due to the pain and start having negative thoughts about growing old and useless etc etc... I tried to force her to see a doctor with me on my last day in Singapore so I could hear from the doctor what was actually going on, but she refused. The reason? She wanted to cook dinner for me before I leave for Sydney and she wouldn't be able to spare time for both, so she chose not to see the doc. So you can imagine how great I must feel having that homecooked dinner, then picking up my luggage and just leaving her to her own devices....

Matt's been great through all this difficult and moody times I've been having since coming back from Singapore. There are days when I just feel like I'm on a rollercoaster of emotions, happy and estatic one minute, down and irrititable the next. On many occasions I had to suppress a lot of my post Singapore depression as friends gathered round to celebrate our return, and it was a huge struggle. On one hand, you know your friends have good intentions in wanting to catch up. On the other hand, I needed to spend some one on one time with Matt to let out my "bad" feelings, otherwise the rollercoaster emotions are gonna to stay with me for a long time. Matt is sometimes caught in the middle, for example he would have promised friends to go out for a drink or catchup, and I didn't want to stop him because of my problems. While he is out there, my thoughts sometimes overwhelms me, resulting in me having a really foul mood, and he is often at the receiving end of my verbal diarrhea that night or the next day. For that, I am truly sorry, but his support is the only thing that's been keeping me sane the last few weeks. Don't know what I've done in my past life to deserve him, but I know I must have done something right.

I guess life's what you make out of it. This Europe trip has really opened up my eyes to what lies beyond Australia and Singapore. I know we've only seen these places from a tourist perception, but many times Matt and I imagined what it would be like to work in that part of the world for a few years. Well, dreams will always remain dreams until we make it a reality. We said last year we wanted to go for a major trip together and we did. So if we set our minds to it, I don't see why we wouldn't be able to achieve the dream of working overseas too. Matt absolutely loves New York and he reckons I would too. Who knows, we could be living and working there in a few years time. I will also be looking at working in Singapore in a few years time so that I can spend more time with Mum (she hinted at me going back to work for a while). Matt's looking into that part of the world as well. Because Matt's been so Singaporean-ised by me, I can just picture me and him with Mum meeting up on weekends for dinners at hawker centres followed by wine sessions at home....

See what Christmas does to me? Its those darn Christmas carols that bring on these melodramatics.

Have a great Christmas everyone and please cherish those around you that you love.

Merry Christmas

2006