Always dare to hold a red balloon. Always reach for the stars. Always look ahead with clear eye and open heart. Always sing the songs you love. You're so heartbreakingly beautiful. C'est tout.

This life is too good not to be lived.

C'est tout.

Happiness, being a newly acquired state of mind, appears to be a pair of shoes that need to be broken into. I have not worn it long enough for it to become me.

But I will try.

C'est tout.

Children will break your heart, though you will gladly let them. You did it and so did I - when we left our mothers' grief behind.

C'est tout.

I look to the future, as uncertain and unreal as it is, because the past is just as fictitious and deceptive. It is a different country whose name I can no longer remember but whose people, places and things hold a strange resonance like the stray figment of a long ago dream.

Then there are the memories we store in things, those delicious attempts, that we take out to look at in the dark when the present moment does not appear to suffice. Frozen, neither in time nor space. Sometimes I wander through those old halls again, just to get a sense of what we were thinking or where I was.

Nostalgia is a dangerous thing. It is also rather self-congratulatory.

C'est tout.

Travelling to Chester County, PA for Thanksgiving, I am reminded of Alistair Cooke's Letters From America series. For all that has been written about the sameness of America's "monumental and mundane", there is a multiplicity of nuances when one traverses the unpeopled distances between states.

Yes, we stopped in at a Home Depot very much like the one in upstate New York. There was a DSW and a Staples and a TJ Maxx. And yet, in this little gem of the country, there is the mushroom capital of the United States, if not the world. The land is given over to pasture - the area is generally affluent and the terrain of gentlemen farmers. There is a Fresh Market - I have not seen that in New York so far - and in Kennett Square, there is a real thriving community with its own idiosyncracies.

Driving to Chester County takes you through New Jersey and brings you quite near to Elizabeth whose towering cranes and cargo ships can be seen from a distance. Elizabeth also happens to be the largest port on the Eastern seaboard and was to the east coast what Pearl Harbour was to the west. The drive through it is not the most pleasant but it was most surreal to see the machinery ablaze with night lights against a cool, black sky.

There is the America of strip malls and large box stores. It is the cultural desert (that is also a cultural monolith) which we grew up to fear, deride and scorn. Growing up in a different country, I sometimes wonder if our Anglophilic teachers had an unspoken prejudice against American culture and American norms. The traditions of a dead empire are always a lot more quaint when viewed through the lens of nostalgia. They did not prepare me for the astounding diversity of people, terrain, ideas and manners found in this country - and for me to say this, when all I have explored is but a sliver of this great country! - and against their words, their snide comments about American pedagogy, American literature, American food, American politics and American society, I find increasingly that they have given this country short shrift.

God bless this sainted country for it is indeed, the New World.

C'est tout.

"Everyone knows I'm the pretty one."

No, you're the funny one.


C'est tout.

I apologise for I will never be as competent nor as level-headed as you would like me to be. I try and I try and it is not enough. There will always be something else I could do better. 

I apologise but at the end of the day, I find myself exhausted of the capacity to care what you might think of me.

C'est tout.