Counting Blessings

Just because, here are 5 highlights of my 2005:

  • Alec moving to Singapore, after one and a half years of us living on different continents.
  • Having an awesome birthday. For once, lots of people actually remembered, and I attended one of the best gigs of my life.
  • My best friend Russ visiting me in Singapore. Every moment of our time together was great but one thing that made me especially happy was dancing to the Scratch Perverts at Zouk together – they were the DJs we saw the first time we went clubbing together, on our first visit to a very newly-opened Fabric, having just met each other in the first week of our first year of university. Six years later, so much had changed for us but the important things hadn’t.
  • Not having cancer really rocked, and the outpouring of concern I received from strangers and friends alike touched me deeply.
  • An amazing holiday to London, Norway and Germany, which had the perfect balance between time with dear friends in beloved places and adventures alone in the new and fascinating. The travel journal entries are still a work in progress but rereading them fills me with joy.

Other cool things happened to me too, but these stand out. I hope all of you had a good year too, and wish you health, happiness, joy and love in the next. :)

All Clear

4 lumps, 4 “no evidence of malignancy” conclusions. In other words, I’m okay. :)

But please, don’t forget the reason I went public with this in the first place.

It is now nearly a year since my first visit to the doctor, and I had known a lump was there for more than a year before that. I have been blessed with a happy ending (as are 99.5% of women under 40), but if I had heard bad news today I would have had to deal with the disease knowing that **I** could have done so much more to protect myself from it but didn’t – and ultimately, that’s what I’ve hoped my story could help to prevent for other young women. Lots more information, for anyone who’s interested, can be found here.

Thanks to everyone, strangers and friends alike, who expressed their concern and support in comments, emails, text messages, conversations, and prayers. I am neither wealthy nor wise, but at the moment it just feels amazing to know I am healthy.

Incongruous Hair Day

Yesterday I was finally called to the Bar as an Advocate and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Singapore. I celebrated this momentous occasion by heading almost immediately to the hair salon, to get my hair cut and coloured such that any self-respecting judge would throw me out of his courtroom. (This is possible because I’m only starting work at my scholarship company in September, and it’s not a law firm.)

It was quite amusing when I left the hair salon, walking through Raffles Place in the evening with my ultra-conservative black and white court attire and my new hairdo, which is basically like the chick in Sinfest, plus bright purple streaks.

Please Take This Personally

Even as I type this I’m not sure how comfortable I am being so public about it, but a sentiment stronger than my privacy scruples is motivating me to continue.

I had day surgery today, to remove four lumps from one of my breasts. Although one was biopsied last year (needle, boob, OW OW OW) and found to be benign, they said it was best to take them all out for testing, just to be safe.

I don’t know the test results yet, and will only find out on 20 July.

I am only twenty-five years old.

None of this is written to get your pity, although for those of you who pray, I’d be grateful for your prayers. I’m writing this because I’m pretty sure that many of the females who read this blog are around my age, and I want to say to you: please don’t think you are impervious to these problems just because you’re still young. Please learn how to check yourself, and do so regularly. Lumps aren’t at all uncommon in young breasts, and are more than likely to be benign, but you owe it to yourself and everyone who loves you to make sure anyway. I know it’s damn uncomfortable to do, but don’t do it half-heartedly either – I only found one lump on my own, but a thorough scan revealed four.

I’m still quite uncomfortable in writing all this, but this is where I’m coming from: despite anti-breast-cancer messages more than amply publicized both in women’s media and mainstream media, despite all sorts of celebrity campaigns, despite the background awareness most of us have that breast cancer happens to a lot of women and kills some of them, I was still pretty cavalier about it. Irrationally, it took a distant relative’s death from a totally different cancer to get me worried enough to check myself, and then to consult a doctor.

I don’t mean to overestimate the influence my Z-list blog could have on any of you, but it seems from your emails and comments over the years that I have at least influenced some of you in terms of music and reading. And even if I didn’t influence you there, please listen to me here.

Girls: you already know what you should do. Do it.
Guys: do all you can to make sure the women you love take the time and trouble to protect themselves.

[Edit: By the way, I have no objections if any of you link to this post in order to promote its message.]

[Edit: I have received the test results, and thankfully, all is well.]

Countdown

The countdown to London starts on Friday.

On Friday, my best friend Russ arrives in Singapore on a 3 week vacation.¹ As if that level of Michelle bliss isn’t enough, the Scratch Perverts play at Zouk the night he arrives! So in one fell swoop, I’m getting two of the things I’ve longed for most since returning to Singapore – the company of my best friend, and the chance to see some of my long-running favourite DJs again.

The same week that Russ leaves here in May, Nav arrives on her visit.

A few weeks after Nav leaves, my pupillage ends.

A few weeks after my pupillage ends, I make what I hope will become an annual trip to England, and see these two people, other people I love, and the city I love, again.

¹ Obviously he’s also exploring other bits of South East Asia during his holiday, would I be so cruel as to force the poor guy to stay in Singapore for 3 weeks, just for me? (Don’t answer that.)

I’m Shorty, It’s My Birthday

As I mentioned before, I’ll be out and about this weekend following 50 Cent’s command, which will be great after two spent in confinement. (To anyone who’s just surfed over from Mr Miyagi, I’m not Zoe Tay, I just had chicken pox).

So if you happen to be at the Tortoise gig tonight, or watching Chicks On Speed tomorrow night at Zouk, or at Mox on Saturday for RNDM, or Zouk for Grandmaster Flash after that, come wish me happy birthday!

Perhaps you wonder how you’ll recognise me, given that I don’t have a picture of myself on this blog. Easy – just look out for a hot girl, funkily dressed and surrounded by adoring men. That’s not me. But it might well be my friend Ida or my friend Kelly, so then you can ask them to point me out.

Youngest Fag Hag In The World

My two oldest guy friends are Ken and Roy. (Well, I had a good friend called Cavan Wee in kindergarten, but we lost touch once we entered primary school. Email me if you ever read this, Cavan!) We all lived in the same condo. I spent countless hours of my childhood with them.

Last night, the following exchange of text messages took place:
Ken (Think I deleted this message, so I’m paraphrasing): Am at Mox now and you’ll never guess who I’ve just run into. Roy! He’s gay and out!
Me: My childhood just got a lot weirder.
Ken: He says you’ve been a fag hag since five.
Me: When we were kids I was totally more manly than you guys.
Ken: We agree.
Me: Our repeated viewings of Ms Universe are easily understood now. Less easy are our SMALL METAL PLANE MODEL BEAUTY PAGEANTS…ask him to explain.

(You can read Ken’s account here.)

It is somewhat ironic, in hindsight, that at our condo playground neither of them dared to slide down the pole.

Not Quite An After-Party

As predicted a while ago, the advocacy competition which finished yesterday kept me fiendishly busy.

The short account of things is that we got to the finals, where we lost, but won prizes for best team in the general rounds, best memorial, and I won for best speaker in the finals.

A long account of things, however, will be difficult, since writing about the final here in any amount of detail might be risking defamation suits. It would also make me look like a sore loser, which I am not. I congratulated the winning team with all sincerity. They were a good team, and nice people. I would have been fine with losing to them on an equal playing field, but (through no fault of theirs) that was not the case.

It isn’t really worth writing much more about the final, because it will sound unbelievable to anyone who wasn’t actually there to see it for themselves. All I’ll say is that if it had been a real arbitration proceeding, our team would have had grounds to appeal against the award. I have lost considerable respect for two prominent professionals involved in the final, and if I ever meet them again, I will be hard-pressed to be civil.

At times like this I suppose one is meant to focus on the good things:

  • My wonderful teammates, who did everything I hated (practical stuff like photocopying bundles of authorities) so I could concentrate on everything I loved (the actual advocacy), and kept me supplied with Coke.
  • My co-speaker, who never thought he’d deserved to be chosen to speak, but was so excellent in the finals that I hoped against hope that he’d kept our chance of winning alive.
  • Our amazing coach, who, unlike previous coaches I have had, helped me develop and refine my abilities instead of stifling me with overdirection. I became a much better advocate because of her than I had been before. (And in my not-so-humble opinion, I was pretty damn good before.)
  • Over the course of the competition, certain compliments I received from people (who had no reason to exaggerate or be anything but honest) staggered even egotistical me so much that I’m not actually going to repeat them here.

At any time over the past 5 months, if you had asked me if this damn competition was actually worth it, I would have given a resounding no. Sitting here today, despite what happened in the finals, for the first time ever I’m considering a yes.

There’ll Be A Load Of Compromisin’

Karaoke today was a riot of cheese. The boys were in fine falsetto form with several BeeGees songs – Tragedy was especially successful, they even managed the harmonies – and I went on a one-hit-wonder rampage with Superwoman (Karyn White), If Love Is Blind (Tiffany) and Don’t Cry Out Loud (Melissa Manchester) before caving in to my long-repressed yearning for Rhinestone Cowboy.

Chinese songs were, of course, attempted, but my largely stagnant Chinese music horizons rendered me incapable of singing more than the songs I always sing. K Ge Zhi Wang and Qi Zi were mostly ungarbled, but I didn’t fare quite so well on Ti Or Or. I am now trying to decide whether to embark on the almighty challenge of adding Faye Wong’s An Yong to my repertoire. Right now I think it’s one of the most gorgeous ballads I’ve ever heard (in any language) but it also sounds fiendishly difficult.

Halfway through karaoke, I found out that the moot coaches have chosen the speakers for an upcoming advocacy competition NUS is taking part in. I will have to pass the shipping law arguments I’ve spent the last four months perfecting to my teammate, take on a whole new set of issues, and be lead counsel. By Monday. Apparently this is because I am the strongest speaker. I hope the coaches realize their strongest speaker is now strongly tempted to spend the next three weeks curled up under a table in a fetal position.

Jokes aside, I’m honoured by the choice, because I certainly wouldn’t give such a shit-hard job to anyone I didn’t think had the balls and brains to take it on. But it’s possible updates here in the next couple of weeks might be a little thin on the ground, or at least overly link-based.