one for joy, two for sorrow

I feel like there's a war over my head. And I want to stand tall in the middle of the war grounds, hoping that a grenade would come my way. Not so much for the pride in dying of a sacrfice, but dying to admit defeat. So that hopefully....finally....I can fall asleep. Soundly.

There you go. Possibly my most bleak and subdued entry of the year.

lie down here with me, watch the clouds with me

Have you ever played this game, where you look up the sky, and look at the clouds and try to make sense of what you see? Make out shapes, or things, or people you know, or even stories out of them - and then you ask the person next to you if they see what you see?

Well, I do that a lot. I love it! And I miss it. We don't get that much clouds here. Plus, it's getting really cold these days to be lying on the grass, staring at what seems like a big blanket of cotton candy.

There's a myriad of things up there - a lop-sided KL twin tower, MJ's nose, a vacuum cleaner sucking Amy Wino's beehive, Krusty the clown, the dead Mufasa, Abraham Lincoln, a cello, Humpty Dumpty, the gorilla from that Cadbury ad, the Chinese character for wealth, Darwin's theory of evolution, and many, many more.

It really is whatever you make those clouds to be.

I often get into great lengths of arguments with the person next to me about what we see/what we don't see. It normally takes a lot of head-tilting and eye-squinting, before we finally reach a consensus. But in aggravated moments such as, "How the hell do you make that a gorilla?", my response would be, "I'm sorry. You just don't see things the way I do."

That moment in itself, when you're lying on the grass, watching the clouds is magical. But what is more magical is moments like...

A: I see Marge Simpson.

B: Me too. And if you look about 5 feet that way, that's Bart about to ram into her with his skateboard.

A: Uh-huh. Me too.

...when someone else just sees things the way you do. Instantly. A moment when two minds just click. When two thoughts just converge into one. Not just with cloud-watching. But with everything else. And moments like those are hard to come by.