Valerie

This is from V for Vendetta. Evey gets it while she's in prison being tortured.

I don't know who you are. Please believe. There is no way I can convince you that this is not one of their tricks. But I don't care. I am me, and I don't know who you are, but I love you.
I have a pencil. A little one they did not find. I am a woman. I hid it inside me. Perhaps I won't be able to write again, so this is a long letter about my life. It is the only autobiography I have ever written and oh God I'm writing it on toilet paper.

I was born in Nottingham in 1957, and it rained a lot. I passed my eleven plus and went to girl's Grammar. I wanted to be an actress.

I met my first girlfriend at school. Her name was Sara. She was fourteen and I was fifteen but we were both in Miss. Watson's class. Her wrists. Her wrists were beautiful. I sat in biology class, staring at the picket rabbit foetus in its jar, listening while Mr. Hird said it was an adolescent phase that people outgrew. Sara did. I didn't.

In 1976 I stopped pretending and took a girl called Christine home to meet my parents. A week later I enrolled at drama college. My mother said I broke her heart.

But it was my integrity that was important. Is that so selfish? It sells for so little, but it's all we have left in this place. It is the very last inch of us. But within that inch we are free.

London. I was happy in London. In 1981 I played Dandini in Cinderella. My first rep work. The world was strange and rustling and busy, with invisible crowds behind the hot lights and all that breathless glamour. It was exciting and it was lonely. At nights I'd go to the Crew-Ins or one of the other clubs. But I was stand-offish and didn't mix easily. I saw a lot of the scene, but I never felt comfortable there. So many of them just wanted to be gay. It was their life, their ambition. And I wanted more than that.

Work improved. I got small film roles, then bigger ones. In 1986 I starred in "The Salt Flats." It pulled in the awards but not the crowds. I met Ruth while working on that. We loved each other. We lived together and on Valentine's Day she sent me roses and oh God, we had so much. Those were the best three years of my life.

In 1988 there was the war, and after that there were no more roses. Not for anybody.
In 1992 they started rounding up the gays. They took Ruth while she was out looking for food. Why are they so frightened of us? They burned her with cigarette ends and made her give them my name. She signed a statement saying I'd seduced her. I didn't blame her. God, I loved her. I didn't blame her.

But she did. She killed herself in her cell. She couldn't live with betraying me, with giving up that last inch. Oh Ruth. . . .

They came for me. They told me that all of my films would be burned. They shaved off my hair and held my head down a toilet bowl and told jokes about lesbians. They brought me here and gave me drugs. I can't feel my tongue anymore. I can't speak.

The other gay women here, Rita, died two weeks ago. I imagine I'll die quite soon. It's strange that my life should end in such a terrible place, but for three years I had roses and I apologized to nobody.

I shall die here. Every last inch of me shall perish. Except one.

An inch. It's small and it's fragile and it's the only thing in the world worth having. We must never lose it, or sell it, or give it away. We must never let them take it from us.

I don't know who you are. Or whether you're a man or a woman. I may never see you or cry with you or get drunk with you. But I love you. I hope that you escape this place. I hope that the world turns and that things get better, and that one day people have roses again. I wish I could kiss you.

Valerie
X

my life so far

hey today i met cassandra... this primary school classmate i never saw for ages... think the last time i saw her it was sec2 i think... so yea it was really cool cos i walked into this classroom and my class was there then she was there mugging with them wearing the vj tee so i was like... eh... is that...? so i don't wanna ask cos usually these kind of situations it's just someone who looks really like the actual person but is not the actual person and u go "eh r u cassandra?" and she goes "who?" but this time it was the real person and she knew junkiat so she decided to mug with my class in the classroom... and guess what? despite my initial inhibitions, i still succeeded in looking like an idiot cos the first question i asked was "eh... what u doing here?" so it was like i was so defensive and looked like someone whose husband just came back from a night full of drinking... (btw this metaphor implies i'm an angry old wife, not myself, cos i don't see myself having husbands anytime in the near future thank u very much) so yea i upheld the jumpoverthewall legacy of never failing to look stupid... haha but that's really ok...

yes i know i've devoted an entire paragraph to a boring event like meeting an old friend but u know, sadly, now that we're all in mugging mode, that's really one of the more exctiting events in my life these days... oh i helped paint a banner for mr beetsma yesterday... it was really all sheeyin and clara's work, i just helped put in a few colours. and i realised shiling is really skilled at toning with multicolours, and sherli too. (yes i know this phrasing implies shiling uses sherli to tone but i don't care) so ya that was the highlight of yesterday... but it was really kind of fun watching sheeyin and clara get every single finger of them a different colour and not care abt the toxic stuff and all... actually i think its not toxic.... ok i know some of u pple will be thinking i'm some kind of special breed of gentleman who lets girls get their hands dirty but keep mine clean... yea well... haha... tough... ok i have an excuse:

ok i don't have an excuse. i just didn't want to get my hands dirty yesterday. and besides i'll have two whole years to get my hands dirty while theirs' are clean.

oh and the piece de resistance (please do not read this as it is, its french; i just dunno how to put in the strokes on top of the words... *_*) so as i was saying, the piece de resistance of my week was my visit to the library book sale. u know, the newspaper said come 1.5 hours early. so i thought: yea, eat ur shit la straits times... s'poreans are not that book loving.... i hate it when the s'pore media blow stuff out of proprotion to try and make s'poreans look like what they're not...

but this time, omg the starits times was right, man! s'poreans impressed me with their enthusiasm for literature and the great works of Mankind. the line was extemely long. it took me 1/2 an hour to get in. pple camped there i think. and i was lining up next to some delightful pple. in front of me was this really weird ang mo guy discussing with an indian guy abt america, when he's clearly not american. and behind me was these 2 guys discussing how to plot a graph of how many pple come aginst dunno what. and then they discussed the probability of a person leaving the line... and how that is inversely related to the opportunity cost of leaving the line... haha u know what the worst part is? i can actually remember what they said... and i'll probably end up like that in the near future if i don't fight gravity. so ok, i finally manage to get in the booksale and find that all the books are going for 2 dollars each. sweet! so i rush to the crowd.... there was practically no spae to walk or breathe... pple were constantly moving and pushing and u had to keep moving. pple were just chucking like 50 books into their plastic bags, baskets and trolleys. (yes, trolleys, so strategically brought from home, relieved of their menial duties of carrying busloads of groceries to and from the market, and ennobled with the sacred task of being graced by the pages upon pages of literature for the great duty of enriching singaporeans' minds) so yeah they just whack and pile their modes of transportation with books galore (like abt 50 per person) and take them to one corner and sift thru them one by one to decide on what they wanna buy. so i tries to take the moral high ground and tell myself i'm better than them. that i have more finesse, more class, but guess what? lemme give u a quote from alice in wonderland.

"but i don't want to be mad." said alice.
"we're all mad here, i'm mad, he's mad, you're mad." said the mad hatter.
"but how do u know i'm mad?"said alice to the mad hatter.
"of course you're mad,"replied the mad hatter, "otherwise, you wouldn't be here."

ya so first i want to say one thing. looking at this, i think lewis carroll is really twisted. he's probably a psycho or close to being a psycho. i mean if he were not mad, he wouldn't write abt this right? so ya i guess i'm as singaporean as all the rest of my beloved countrymen. so if u can't beat them, join them. i thus began my frantic hunt for good literature admist the widerness of outdated programing books and teen books like "boywatching" and "sweet valley university". by the way, i'm thinking of applying to sweet valley university. it'll be killer on my resume (ladies and gentlemen, this is french, too). and i joined the hunters in their ingenious hunting methods. after all, if i weren't mad, i wouldn't have ended up in a place that sells reject books that nobody wants to borrow any more. so after an hour or two i returned to the checkout counter, my prize (8 books) brandished proudly in my hands, a young hunter back with with his first kill. i joined the greats, the true shopping veterans, the hardcore lovers of good literature, the heroes our country needs. i join them, humbled as my 8 measley books trembled beneath the shadow of their hundreds of books, laden in half-bursting plastic bags, spilling from bright red trolleys that were once the lowly transporters in sheng siong supermarket, the spoils of glorious war, the ruins of an exhibition room raped and ravaged. i stood humbled at the piles upon piles of literature that was going to enrich the minds of the hunters, bcos i'm sure that the moment they get home, every single one of these heros are going to read every single page of what they bought so cleverly with so little money. btw, i haven't started on any of those 8 books i've bought yet. i feel so ashamed.

yup so that's my life so far. sounds exciting right?

i'm back.

hey i haven't blogged for ages... been real busy but tonight, i'm back! u know, i really don't have much to write about since my life this past few days have been all about mugging la basically. let's see... i bought this really cool book, the Books Of Magic, by Neil Gaiman. It's about this guy called Timothy Hunter, and it's kind of like Harry Potter but only a million times better cos it's darker and more mature.

ok National Day celebrations were really bad. i know i shouldn't be criticising the poor hardworking pple in vj who made everything come together, but it was seriously bad. i tell u, if i see another singapore idol spoof i'll literally shit myself. making spoofs of american idol was really a thing we do like 2 years ago, and to do it now is really old and lame and a hopeless excuse for humor.

ooh but u know what's funny? check out this video on you tube called "borat", check out the one that lasts 24 minutes. really hilarious.

ok haha i'm now chatting with this guy online and he asks me if i'm chinese, cos my name is ortega. so i say no i'm filipino. and guess what he says? he says "my maid is also filipino." ok there are so many things wrong with that,cos he said it like "wow! that's such a big coincidence!" like a filipino maid in singapore is so rare, that i'd be shocked to find one. some pple are just so funny.

ok that's it. really nothing much now la.