the best days don't appear here.

the busy days get journalled. i did this, then that, and saw this, and then that.

the relaxed days gives you time to reflect, and write about random things that come to mind. your mother and the chicken. the book you read yesterday. what you saw from your window. what you did when you were little.

the sad days get some airing here. i'm lonely, depressed, frightened, confused, frustrated. and then we go on.

the happiest days don't appear here. i had one of them on wednesday, the most fun i've had since i came back, lunch with 8 others, typical gep-humanz outing. but i can't reproduce it here, short of a transcript of the day, and even then, no one will get it. it's the humanzy jokes and the bad chinese and the well-timed use of dialects and the general shared past and personal digs. how can you beat curfew jokes about turning into a kimkway, or choonping's mom's "facial morphology" theory of southern and northern chinese features. von asking for the bill with "suan4 zhang", star wars in hokkien, generally loitering at orchard as we've always done? arguing about what a sea bass in teochew is (kim muk loh,) or describing mutant catfish in the york lake. (cp says catfish is torh suk in teochew is that right? mud sucker?) fay and her hairclips (choonping: nobody can wear hairclips like fay), mbti insults, (why am i sitting between two js? get them away from me!) choonping asking louise "are you from gep" and earning the verbal equivalent of a slap, and making fun of the things su-lin doesn't eat, and louise commenting on cheryl chan's cg being useful in skiing. von's dad's secretary called rose chen meigui and who likes taka shopping bags because of the roses. minzhi trying to soothe away julian's exasperation at outram mrt by saying, don't worry darling you won't always be surrounded by frivolous women like us, whereupon su-lin exclaims, i'm not frivolous!

oh i do love them but those days never get here. the fun is not in what i can put here. so the happiest days do not get recorded, only the happy enough ones.