I’ve spoken to dad a couple of times in the last week and he sounds pretty excited that Nick and I are coming.  It will be good to see him again...but...I always laugh when I see the Malaysian Tourism posters and ad campaigns touting Malaysia as this fantastic holiday destination.  Because for me, it has never been a holiday.  First of all, there’s the complicated extended family element, with aunts and uncles and cousins and Mama and trying to work out who is feuding with who and trying to navigate through the wilderness of bruised egos and histrionics. 

Then there’s the lack of independence element.  I was saying to my counsellor earlier this year that when I go overseas usually, I do the research, I work out how to get around on public transport, I work out all the places I’d like to go.  But even though I’ve been going to Kuala Lumpur since I was a baby, I know absolutely nothing about its geography, how to get around, what to do or what to see.  It just doesn’t make sense to me as a place.  We normally go everywhere in a Jee family pack, from mama’s place to an uncle’s place to an eating place to a mall to a market.  But I have no idea how any of these places fit together.  Where is the centre of KL?  I have no idea.

I’ve been swinging between calmness and mild panic when I think about this trip.  Thankfully we’ll be staying at dad and Janice’s new house so we’ll have our own rooms (not like the last time we went when Nick, dad and I all shared an un air-conditioned room at my grandma’s place (actually Nick and dad had to share a bed because there were only two beds, so I should be grateful I had my own bed that time...blurgh)).  Apparently we’re going to go to Pulau Pangkor for a couple of days, which will be lovely I’m sure.  But then there’s the great unknown - two weeks of...what?  Dad’s probably going to be working most of that time...what will we be doing?  Shopping?  I don’t have any money and there’s not much I want to buy there.  Once you cancel out the counterfeit luxury goods and DVDs as an option, you can get most of it back here in Australia for a similar price these days.  Hmm.

My counsellor suggested that this time I research KL like I would any other city, and kind of take control of the trip.  It sounded like a good idea, in principle, but I know that with any Jee family holiday, you have to hold your plans loosely.  I’m kind of nervous. 

So some big things this year:

• it was the Year of Hoarding Music - started off with lots of great shows in January (Andrew Bird, the National, My Brightest Diamond, Sufjan Stevens, the Big Day Out), continued with listening to many artists, mainly ones I’d been meaning to listen to for a long time, or that my audiophile friends were shocked to learn I hadn’t heard before.  According to last.fm, Aimee Mann and Feist are two of my newer acquaintances that I listened to the most.
• Had a near-fatal car crash and totalled the car we bought off Mark and Jen.  Am still occasionally having dreams about being in car accidents.
• Went to Europe, saw many wonderful things and wonderful people.  Finished the trip with an amazing Bjork concert.
• Started counselling again.  It’s been a big year for depression, lots of hopeful positives and crashing lows.  Upped my medication recently, which seems to be helping me get onto a more even keel.
• Tried to get a bit more creative, through the fog that was my brain, recognising that lack of creative output just exacerbates the depression.  Had several writing days at Customs House with K and G, starting recording music, tried amigurumi, starting sewing things, making things out of FIMO, etc.  My novel is still unfinished, but I am trying not to despair about that; hopefully my trip to KL in a week will help fuel that particular fire (in a good way).
• Started going to Wild St @ 5 - a welcoming and supportive church, full of great people.  Struggled with getting to Bible study sometimes (mainly depression-related reasons) but always found it encouraging and edifying when I did.  It’s been such a marvellous thing to be at a healthy, mission-focused, Christ-centred church this year, to feel like I’ve been refreshed as a Christian, and to have the desire to get involved in serving again - especially with the music ministry.
• Quit my job.  After almost seven years at AFES, I resigned in September, but agreed to stay on til the end of the year to finish working on the end of year conference.  Am glad I did stay til the end, although it was really hard at times to just keep going.  Finished on good terms with everyone, and will continue to be involved with them a little bit, as I’ll still be doing the graphic design for Salt magazine.
• On my last day of work, after a really positive day full of end of year celebrations and such, my beloved cat Scout was killed by a car out the front of my house.  I cried for three days.  And I still miss her.
• last big thing of the year - dad and Janice got married yesterday.

So I’m sure 2009 will be just as big.  I’ll be going to KL with Nick in a week to visit the family, and it’s always an...interesting time (my family brings a whole new meaning to the word ‘drama’).  We’ll get a new cat when I get home.  I’ll be working freelance as a writer and graphic designer.  And I really really want to finish that novel this year.

Had a great BBQ at our place yesterday, with lots of lovely Christian friends. One thing that’s great about our house is that there’s plenty of space both inside and out, and it seems to have a really good ‘flow’ for conversations and such; it’s not like someone’s stuck out in the kitchen on their own or anything.  Though I was a little weary by the end of the night, it was a good, happy kind of tiredness.

*
Lisa: “Come to Homer’s BBBQ, the extra ‘B’ is for BYOBB”
Bart: What’s that extra B for?
Homer: That’s a typo.

We were supposed to go and visit my godmother this evening, but I fell asleep and woke to hear mum on the phone to Freda, telling her we’ll visit tomorrow.  We sat and watched Ever After (a really unsatisfying movie - Drew Barrymore is abysmal in it, but I suspect it wasn’t helped by Channel Ten’s copious number of ad breaks), ate turkey on toast followed by trifle and Christmas pudding.

Am feeling sort of teary and wistful and restless but not entirely sure why.  I suspect it’s just tiredness.  I guess it’s a time of big changes for me, and the end of a hard year.  And Christmas is a time weighted with a lot of expectation about how you’ll feel, how you’ll behave, who you’ll see, what you’ll say.  And after a long year it just all seems too hard.  Christmas is usually characterised by exhaustion for me!  And I feel like I’ll scream if I hear another newsreader say earnestly something about people discovering ‘the true meaning of Christmas’, especially because they miss the point entirely. 

But through all the tiredness and sadness and the struggle just to stay afloat sometimes, Christmas reminds me that I am grateful for Jesus, astonished that he came to our world as a mere man, humbled that he died to save us from God’s wrath, joyful that he now reigns at the Father’s side.  I pray that he will return soon.

• Had breakfast at Malabar
• Went shopping in the city
• Saw Australia at La Premiere, with a glass of red, a cheese platter and a bowl of wedges
• Watched Gilmore Girls
• Read The Little Prince again
• Read The 13 Clocks
• Had a bubble bath
• Had lunch at Malabar (yes we went to the same place twice in one weekend - we tried to go to La Perouse for fish and chips, but it was too crowded and I was in a rush to get to music rehearsal)
• Went to church and sang
• Went out for my brother’s birthday and drank champagne
• Ate mum’s homemade Christmas shortbread

Still sad.  But no longer crying.  Exhausted, and getting used to her not being here.  Grateful for peoples’ sympathy.  Thanks everyone.

It was then that the fox appeared.

“Good morning,” said the fox.

“Good morning,” the little prince responded politely, although when he turned around he saw nothing.

“I am right here,” the voice said, “under the apple tree.”

“Who are you?” asked the little prince, and added, “You are very pretty to look at.”

“I am a fox,” the fox said.

“Come and play with me,” proposed the little prince.  “I am so unhappy.”

“I cannot play with you,” the fox said.  “I am not tamed.”

“Ah! Please excuse me,” said the little prince.  But, after some thought, he added: “What does that mean - ‘tame’?”

. . . “It is an act too often neglected,” said the fox.  “It means to establish ties.”

“‘To establish ties’?”

“Just that,” said the fox.  “To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys.  And I have no need of you.  And you, on your part, have no need of me.  To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes.  But if you tame me, then we shall need each other.  To me, you will be unique in all the world.  To you, I shall be unique in all the world...”

“I am beginning to understand,” said the little prince.  “There is a flower ... I think that she has tamed me ...”

“It is possible,” said the fox.  “On the Earth one sees all sorts of things.”

“Oh, but this is not on the Earth!” said the little prince.

The fox seemed perplexed, and very curious.

“On another planet?”

“Yes.”

“Are there hunters on that planet?”

“No.”

“Ah, that is interesting!  Are there chickens?”

“No.”

“Nothing is perfect,” sighed the fox.

But he came back to his idea.

“My life is very monotonous,” he said.  “I hunt chickens; men hunt me.  All the chickens are just alike, and all men are just alike.  And, in consequence, I am a little bored.  But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life.  I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others.  Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground.  Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow.  And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder?  I do not eat bread.  Wheat is of no use to me.  The wheat fields have nothing to say to me.  And that is sad.  But you have hair that is the colour of gold.  Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me!  The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you.  And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat ...”

The fox gazed at the little prince, for a long time.

“Please - tame me!” he said.

“I want to, very much,” the little prince replied.  “But I have not much time.  I have friends to discover and a great many things to understand.”

“One only understands the things that one tames,” said the fox.  “Men have no more time to understand anything.  They buy things all ready made at the shops.  But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more.  If you want a friend, tame me...”

“What must I do, to tame you?” asked the little prince.

“You must be very patient,” replied the fox.  “First you will sit down at a little distance from me - like that - in the grass.  I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing.  Words are the source of misunderstandings.  But you will sit a little closer to me, every day...”

The next day the little prince came back.

“It would have been better to come back at the same hour,” said the fox.  “If, for example, you came at four o’clock in the afternoon, then at three o’clock I shall begin to be happy.  I shall feel happier and happier as the hour advances.  At four o’clock, I shall already be worrying and jumping about.  I shall show you how happy I am!  But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you...”

. . . So the little prince tamed the fox.  And when the hour of his departure drew near -

“Ah” said the fox.  “I shall cry.”

“It is your own fault,” said the little prince.  “I never wished you any sort of harm; but you wanted me to tame you...”

“Yes, that is so,” said the fox.

“But now you are going to cry!” said the little prince.

“Yes, that is so,” said the fox.

“Then it has done you no good at all!”

“It has done me good,” said the fox, “because of the colour of the wheat fields.” And then he added: “Go and look again at the roses.  You will understand now that yours is unique in all the world.  Then come back to say goodbye to me, and I will make you a present of a secret.”

The little prince went away, to look again at the roses.

“You are not at all like my rose,” he said.  “As yet you are nothing.  No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one.  You are like my fox when I first knew him.  He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes.  But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world.”

And the roses were very much embarrassed.

“You are beautiful, but you are empty,” he went on.  “One could not die for you.  To be sure, an ordinary passer-by would think that my rose looked just like you - the rose that belongs to me.  But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing.  Because she is my rose.”

And he went back to meet the fox.

“Goodbye,” he said.

“Goodbye,” said the fox.  “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

“What is essential is invisible to the eye,” the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.

“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”

“It is the time I have wasted for my rose - “ said the little prince, so that he would be sure to remember.

“Men have forgotten this truth,” said the fox. “But you must not forget it.  You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.  You are responsible for your rose...”

“I am responsible for my rose,” the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (London: Piccolo Books, 1974) pp 64-72

Scout, thankfully, wasn’t squashed by the car.  Her white bib was red with blood, and her eyes black and fully dilated, and it seems that she died very quickly.  We cried a lot and wrapped her up.  The thing that saddened me most was stroking her, and the tail that normally curled around my hand just flopped back down.

This morning we took her to the vet’s so they could take care of her body, and we went out to have a breakfast in her honour.

It’s hard to know how to grieve for a lost pet.  It’s not the same as mourning the loss of a human, but it is a very real grief, the loss of a creature that depended on you and trusted you fully, the loss of that companionship and affection.  She was a dear little thing, and I’m grateful to God for the year and nine days that we had her.

Here’s the puppet version (thanks Karen!).  Almost as good as the movie itself!  (which I shamelessly enjoyed as a pulpy diversion).

Perfectly fits a Moleskine, phone and a coin purse.  Hooray for creativity!

Mum was sick on the day that her church was doing gingerbread house making, so the kit got dropped off to our house and mum said I could make it.  So I did!  The best part about making a gingerbread house on your own?  You don’t have to share the lollies.

This house has many bears.  Goldilocks would have a hard time getting in.

I made a little pouchy thing out of my favourite purple corduroy that fits my phone and ipod (and will stop them getting bashed about by keys in my bag).  I used my favourite button - the other one of these buttons I sewed onto my dark purple velvet coat that I got when I was at uni.

I just asked her what she thought of the writing, and while she thought about it I flipped the book open at random and found a classic example of how-not-to-write dialogue.

“Didn’t you ever go with a boyfriend or something?” Jess asked dubiously as we walked through the front doors of the store.
“Really,” I tried to convince her, not wanting to confess my dancing problems.  “I’ve never had a boyfriend or anything close.  I didn’t go out much.”
“Why not?” Jessica demanded.
“No one asked me,” I answered honestly.
She looked skeptical.  “People ask you out here,” she reminded me, “and you tell them no.” We were in the juniors’ section now, scanning the racks for dress-up clothes.
“Well, except for Tyler,” Angela amended quietly.
“Excuse me?” I gasped.  “What did you say?”
“Tyler told everyone he’s taking you to prom,” Jessica informed me with suspicious eyes.
“He said what?” I sounded like I was choking.
“I told you it wasn’t true,” Angela murmured to Jessica.

Twilight, Stephenie Meyer, Atom, 2008, p133

Notice how every snippet of dialogue is followed by an attribution, adjective or adverb, making it pretty arduous to read (thrilling content aside).  “Jessica informed me with suspicious eyes” is a dreadful sentence!  Perhaps the rest of the book is more engaging, but if that excerpt is indicative, the writing is unimaginative, lazy and, sadly, appealing to people who don’t want to be challenged in their reading. In terms of literary style, it’s not much more advanced than the trashy Sweet Valley High books I used to read when I was 11 or 12...but then I guess that’s Meyer’s target market, romantically-inclined early teens who aspire to be stalked by an emo-looking undead dude who glitters in the sunlight (the movie poster bugs me so much...Edward is just so...bleccch.  Robert Pattinson played Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and wasn’t nearly so offputting then).

Having said that, I know that if this had gotten to me at the right time, I would have totally been into it.  And I think we’re going to see the movie this Friday after my farewell lunch.  :D

We had an office lunch today at the nearby Malaysian restaurant and I did so enjoy the noodles and satay.  It made me feel a bit excited about going to Malaysia in January because I’ll get to eat all this stuff all the time (and for much cheaper).  Then I’ll come back and be doing the design for Salt (so yeah, I’m leaving AFES but still getting contracted back to do the bit of my job I really enjoyed).  And then...who knows?  If you need a designer or a writer, let me know!