FROM THE NORM TO THE MARGIN

Loose thoughts.

My imagination is always active. I'd like to think of nothing from time to time, to have eight-hour nights and focus on what's going on around me during the day.

Today my daughter and I went to a mall, another name for shopping centre. She wanted to dress up for Halloween. Usually she organizes something with her sisters or her family because she has no other plans. But this year, miraculously, she was invited. The problem was that she was invited to two places at the same time. What to choose? Of course she asks me what she should do. What is complicated with children, besides the fact that nothing ever goes according to plan with them, is that we have to find solutions to problems that we have never solved for ourselves. I tell her to go to the one that starts first and then go to the second. She tells me that this is not done. Then she should go where she is more sure to have fun. Yes, but she was invited to the other one at the beginning. Well, let her go to this one. Yes but she is friends with the seconds. She should go with her friends then. Yes, but then she might not be invited by the boy who's having the party at his place... Argh! Why ask my opinion if you're going to refuse everything I suggest. Besides, she can do whatever she wants. Teenagers are great!When we get home after she's found her happiness, I grab my stuff and go to work at Starbuck's. Yes, I make myself go to work. Yes, I force myself to go to a place where I have to do something other than hang out or watch Kdramas. What do you expect when you have an iron will.

I find myself on my taxi-scooter. The discussion is not very fluid between my driver and me because we are "pros" in English. It always makes me feel strange to go from small lanes made for a moped to a field with cows, from an industrial area to a temple, from a waste area to the Sunset road. And then we take off. I bought myself a full face helmet because Gojek helmets are worn by so many people who must sweat as much as I do. Yummy! My visor is up so I don't suffocate and my helmet tilts backwards with the speed. It makes me want to laugh. I feel free on these bikes like when I'm walking on the beach, for lack of the possibility to walk in the streets like in Europe. It's striking to see the difference with our French cities where the streets are either rich or poor. Here, from one building to another, there is luxury or misery. Yesterday evening we were coming back from a phone repair shop because I wallowed with mine because of a hole on a piece of pavement with no light at night (after half past six).

The journey from the shop to the house takes fifteen, twenty minutes. I want to absorb everything I see so I can tell my daughters back in France. How can you imagine something you've never seen. There are Pizza Huts, tents in the fields with racks of clothes as far as the eye can see, shelters that serve as local shops: for water, bags of noodles, drinks, one-litre bottles of fuel, small gas bottles, warungs, garages, laundries, SIM card shops. In the not always lit streets there are offerings on the ground, stray dogs, grandmothers with wrinkled skin like parchment, broken backs pushing a bicycle in the middle of the road, scooters swarming and slaloming between the cars. Scooters swarm and weave in and out of cars. Traffic lights are not often in operation, pavements are not necessarily for walking. The colours of the sunset in pastel shades take my breath away. The thin quarter moon completes the picture. Poverty and beauty are the charm of this country.

Even if I feel more "at home" in Singapore because I find some of my landmarks, I like being in the middle of this hive of life. I feel like I am living in the moment. I want to learn, soak up, remember all the sensations.