Hey!

so, I'm a new writer on this site, though i've been reading the stories here for the longest time. i think that many of the writers on this site are really out-of-this-world fantastic. I really hope I'll be able to write like that one of these days.

anyway, I've really decided to post some of my writing on this site because I'd honestly like to write better, and I figure this is a great platform to put forth my writing and get some feedback on how I might improve. eh, I'm obviously not too good at writing yet though, haha.

okay, so about me. um, i'm actually female, despite my penname, which i think is hokkien(?) for joseph's big brother. anyhow, i cut my hair really short a while back, and this awful cute little boy called me gor gor. he really was adorable though, so I coudn't help but forgive him. anyway, I'm really your typical bimbotic air-headed teenage, obsessed about clothes, though not so much about shopping. I'd prefer if all the wonderfully fantastic clothes made their waay into my closet on their own, instead of me burrowing through hours and mounds of not quite so fantastic (read: hideous), itchy-materialed confections. I'm also a die-hard romantic, both in the sense that I'm in love with the idea of love, and that i'm infatuated with ideals of peace and chivalry and joy and faith and hope and all other romanticism-ish notions, perhaps because I'm Christian. which is why i despise realism. i detested Hedda Gabler. it's a really good play and Ibsen is a really good playwright, but it denied, defied, all that i believe in. pft. I'm also a huge sweet tooth, but as i'm a disaster in the kitchen, i generally rely on my rather more culinarily-blessed friends to feed me. i also hate coffee (love the smell though, great stuff), love tea, rain(again the smell! and grass and earth!), clouds and other fluffy things.

I'm from Singapore, where Hokkien mixed into English is an unofficial national language. we call it Singlish (urh, Singaporean English), but it's really a hodge-podge or rojak of pidgin English, mandarin, Hokkien(and other dialects), Malay, etcetera. generally, it seems that we can't seem to speak any language particularly well, so we tend to disguise it by speaking in several languages all at once. it's quite fun really, but i'm not too good at it. i'm ethnically chinese, but i tend to believe English to be my mother tongue. i speak terrible mandarin (my ang moh accent tends to screw with the intonations), and can barely count in Cantonese (my mother's mother tongue of sorts). i do however, sing my national anthem in Malay, describe people with nothing better to do as bo liao, and question if a friend jiak bak bo dai ji zou ah!,in limited Hokkien. i also take french as a third language. i love languages, even mandarin (i'm particularly besotted with cheng yus, where entire stories are compacted into 4 characters) though I'm absolutely atrocious at it. so much culture and nuances of meaning are communicated by them, and i really wish i had a good enough mastery over them to make fullest use of them. hence my starting an account on this site.

currently, i'm really stuck on most frente songssuch as Girl and Accidently Kelly Street, Jason Mraz, Sir Elton John, the Beatles, KT Tunstall, Edith Piaf, Charles Aznavour, Jean Ferrat and Ginette Reno. also Nick Pitera's gorgeous voice.

and all my favourite moviesare kind of...eh, bimbo(: i love chick flicks like she's the man and step up and 10 things i hate about you and a walk to remember and the like. i hate horror movies. embarrassing for me, and most unpleasant for those watching them with me. same thing with action flicks (offensive to my bimbo sensibilities), though i did enjoy iron-man and dark knight(i screamed four times during the movie), v for vendetta, the prestige (does this count? whatever, i screamed during this movie), lalalala. i scream at animated monsters and cry during cartoons. surprisingly, i enjoyed the lord of the rings when my friends finally forced me to watch the movies (it'd always seemed to me that the movies consisted only of long battle scenes; apparently i'd slept through all the good parts before), and promptly proceeded to read the books(much better after i finally progressed beyond the first chapter). my favourite movies of all time are Juno and the Mirrormask.

i haven't been keeping up with my reading for a long time. which is bad. no wonder my english standards are deteriorating so impressively. anyhow, my favourite booksare: Lord of the Flies by William Golding, the Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux, the Hunchback of Notredame by Victor Hugo, the Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, Nicholas Nickelby by Charles Dickens, the Twits by Roald Dahl, Stardust, by Neil Gaiman, the Abhorsen trilogy by Garth Nix and Love Story by Erich Segal, among a mulititude of rather more bimbotic and nameless books:)
currently reading: the Kite Runner
just finished: the Alchemist by Paul Coelho (it was amazing!)

favourite plays! the Hypochondriac by Moliere(i've only ever watched the W!ld Rice production though), Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw, and a number of horribly convoluted, overtly dramatic, formulaic but intensely romantic Shakespearean plays.

favourite poems: I love Shel Silverstein's poems, especially "The Meehoo with an Exactlywatt". Also, "First Day at School" by Roger McGough, "Rising Five" by Norman Nicholson, "Telephone Conversation" by Wole Soyinka , "At the Theatre: To the Lady behind me" by AP Herbert, "Mushrooms" and "You're", by Sylivia Plath and Seamus Heaney's, Robert Frost's and Ben Johnson's poems, in particular, "My First Sonne".

okay! so that was my very long exposition to me. if you've made it thus far, do read my writing! thanks!

My works thus far:

stories

I remember the very old man with enormous wings- a short story in tribute to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. complete, but author's commentary on the story will be posted later on. i actually like this story! do read it(:

poems

A Whole New World - a poem on modernisation

a forgotten flower- a poem i wrote a couple of years back. i personally find it rather awkward now.