In and out the cherry blossoms or 'stream of consciousness'

HAVE you ever wondered why certain things just get stuck in your mind and refuse to go? Certain snatches of memory, rather inconsequential, would play in your mind for no rhyme of reason -- and then exit only to return again later.

Maybe if I share some with you, I'd be able to make them go into my archives, to be retrieved only at will, and not flash around at random, which can be quite irritating. Here goes:

• The coloured twirls you see in glass marbles. They are among the most beautiful things in the world. The mustard yellow twirls in a glass marble about the diameter of a Singapore 50 cent coin. Or the red one in a 10 cent size.

• Close-up of a Flame of the Forest bark growing in the compound of Zion Church along Tavistock Avenue -- I was on a bus to work and I zoomed into a portion of the trunk and obtained a good mental image of the tree bark.

• Close-up of the top of a bus shelter as I passed by on a double decker -- strewn with dried leaves and twigs and rubbish like drink cartons -- along with an old rusty nail.

• A girl carrying some grocery and walking along a narrow trail along the side of grass slope along Pasir Panjang Road, slightly after Haw Par Villa (towards Clementi Road) on a sunny afternoon. (That grass slope is no longer around. A new condo is being built there.)

• I was bothered by my cold sore and thinking how ugly I must have looked (I was on the bus again, of course). Then I told myself to remember this girl standing in front of me, in her beige dress, holding on to the iron pole in the crowded bus -- because, I told myself, a few days later I would recall this mental image -- but my cold sore would be gone by then. This thought was comforting.

• Once, when I was in primary school, I told my friend.that one can never escape anything by committing suicide because one would just enter the consciousness of someone else and start feeling all over again.

• Again in primary school (primary 5, I think), Mr Gomez posed us this question: "What do plants do in the day?" When no one answered, he pressed his thumb on the blackboard, leaving wet marks... "Transpiration, transpiration, class..." he said. 

• And my Pre-U teacher (Science teacher if I remember rightly) once told us how a woman always thought she had swallowed a snake. The doctor made her vomit into a pail and somehow managed to throw in a snake. The woman was cured of her obsession. (I think the teacher was trying to make a point about psychology.)

• Strangely, after A-Levels, I wrote in to an architecture firm  for the position of a clerk. The boss replied that he thinks I would do better if I further my studies and perhaps do psychology. I have sent out numerous applications but he was the only one who replied. I am still wondering why he suggested psychology. Based on what I have written? My letter was a simple standard letter that started with "With reference to your advertisement..." Was it my photograph that I sent with the letter -- rather chubby faced then. But it was very kind of him to have bothered replying me, and with advice even.

• Two mynahs talking to each other at the bus terminal of Serangoon Gardens and me thinking about what I have written to my English Lit lecturer in Australia -- that the question "So what?" takes the joy out of every (if not most) thing. Sometimes we should just... "Just do it!"

• And one more for the road... there were seven orange stripes on my cat's head.