Ripples and Sunshine

Last Sunday was SC's meet-up for Tracia's birthday at Dyn's house, where our dear girl is showered with lots of surprises!


I miss these girls so much.

Poor Eme and I were rushing essays well past 6, sending messages to each other over msn... so we missed the party altogether. I promised myself to finish at least half of my essay on Sat night, but didn't count in the probability of a migraine that killed off Saturday night and Sunday morning. -_- Finished the essay at 4.30am though, along with fellow online last-minute lit-mates :)

Sigh. I must never never never let an assignment keep me away from a good friend's birthday party again. I'm glad they had loadsa fun though, with all their ingenious little surprises planned for Tracia :) Oh, the endless chatter that leaves you with that warm fuzzy glow after each meeting! Like that time we sipped coffee and talked at cartel till past midnight after Clara's concert =D

I think...

I'm just glad that these precious people have a part in my life :)

Which was what I was thinking yesterday, regarding a seperate issue, how being part of a group where each and every person is indispensable makes you suddenly, acutely aware of how much the well-being of each person matters...

Odd sense of displacement at first, along with that kind of instantaneous mix of feelings I cannot quite put my finger on, but then I concluded, that if each and every one of us is gonna be doing all right, for now, and for the long term, then I'm okay :)

That said, I shall continue to snap at people who don't know how to take care of themselves. *glares*

Am jumping on the bandwagon and trying out this photo-recognition site, where they match your picture with celebrity pics...

Decidedly interested to find out who I look like, I dug up a pic that I took with my brother last year.


Oi, this is not fair, can? How come he looks like Gong Li and I look like Tony Leung? *sniffs*




Scrolled down four more male celebrities in their fifties to arrive at the first girl on my list.



and again,


*brightens* That's better :) I have no idea who Jang Nara is, but she's pretty. *grins* And wL~ my brother is still prettier than me can. Zhang Ziyi lor...




Nair mind, I also got :P






But one percent away from Zhangi Ziyi we have...


It's okay, one must not complain about looking like shuai ges :)


Proceeded to rummage through my pictures folder for a different pic. One with specs, maybe. And look what we have here!


Auntie sha shou Bae Yong-Jun! Hmm. No wonder I get along so well with a lotta aunties. =D

Was on my way to school today and met an old Indian man at the top of the overhead bridge. He was thin, white-haired, and had paused for a long while after hobbling to where he stood then. Having reached the topmost stair I walked past him, but then curiosity caught me, and I turned back to look at him. He looked back, and attempted to speak--to me, apparently, because there wasn't anyone else, so there I paused, hesitant. He looked like he wanted to say something, but seemed to be struggling to even form words. I drew the tiniest bit closer, but couldn't catch whatever it was that he seemed to want to say, his nodding and shrugging and glancing away. Then he held his right hand out, nodding at me, and in an automatic gesture I reached out mine to meet his handshake, a firm, quick shake, and then he released my hand and gave me a brilliant smile of pleasant delight, and looked almost grateful, and waved me off to continue my way. So I continued the walk across the bridge, glancing back once or twice, and when he caught my looking back he gave that same grateful smile, till I turned away and headed down and away from sight.

Odd.

But well, if it makes an old person happy to have his presence acknowledged and his hand shaken, I guess it's okay. Stay well then, uncle. I looked on with interest for a while before my bus came, where an old lady was heading across the bridge in the opposite direction, but she continued her walk, and didn't so much as glance at him, and thereafter he made his way down in a little while.

Well, like I said, odd.

That said, I'm currently in school now, on a lovely rainy Tuesday, waiting for dinner at 5 and prac at 6. Cleared my last filming bit with the recording scheduled for noon today, a voiceover of the girl's narrative in her blog as she types. I don't know whether to be amused or perturbed, but the f- word is really not part of my vocab, and to repeat it twice over and have the recording of me going "Nobody gives a f-" played back at me six or seven times, in front of the technician (and it was only me and him in the sound-room!) is quite... cringe-worthy.

More cringe-worthy stuff... look, photos!

Scary. scary scary scary. Do they even look related, you think?




Oh, the horror.

I haven't looked into the NUS blogfest thingie, but when they first advertised for entries last month, I was thinking Are they serious? People do actually submit their blog addresses? Woah, no way am I gonna try, lor... The publicity! Eek! What if my lecturers see, huh, all these nonsense rants at wee hours in the morning at a period which I'm supposed to be reading, and researching, and writing essays? Like now.

You incorrigible girl, go and finish your writeup, or start going through your Romanticism notes, or something. I'm blogging way too much, but it's one of these random little things I do, to jump start my ideas and get words and expressions out, so there is some semblance of flow.

Isn't very exciting though, when no one else blogs and no one else leaves notes (my dear Charm, they are all rushing assignments too) Sigh. Go back and do your research and writeup and essay, k...

I like anthropology. Tutorial is really fun! And the people are really really nice and chatty without being unnecessaily cheem, and it's not difficult to have a discussion where everyone can throw ideas out freely.... as compared to the 9am tut right before that when my eyes will glaze over and my mind struggle with an overdose of information and my thoughts in a wild fumble wondering how come everyone else is so freaking cheem and sound like they really do know what is going on even when things get so convulated...!

The problem about fornightly anthro (and SS) tutorials, though, is that you don't get round to knowing people well enough for it to last more than a semester. Which is sad lar.

Just a random thought. Which is probably why Reso means a lot, the friendships that last, the getting-to-know-you-and-grow-along-with-one-another :) Transience and uncertainty and shifting changes are all very well and pretty, but I like things that last. Hence the potted, rooted flowers, rather that the daintily beautiful but rapidly fading bouquet.

CHARM! I'm majorly peeved with you! Why do you have to tense up and panic and therefore majorly mess up your solo line by your sharp panicked gasp of breath and unstable placement that results in your insecure trembly long notes and your shrill squeak-of-a-high-note and... ugh, even your mid-range crackles! When you know very well that you can pull it off decently when you're practising with your group-mates, and are even comfortable enough to set aside your scores and play with dynamics, and when you know that you have strong enough a background to support you, when you know that you can, upon first try for tonight's prac, hit your B with ease and glide down properly, because you were so relaxed and so unperturbed then? You need to snap out of this psychological barrier, you silly girl, and stop your solo from falling apart the moment you have extra pairs of eyes watching you, else concert how? how? *agitated* You've been singing onstage since secondary school, can, and here you are still freaking out... Oi, zhen qi yi dian, ke yi mah?

Aahhhhhh!!!! *exasperation* What do I do with you, Charm?

Quick follow-up.

I am insanely glad to be out of my makeup, although I still smell of pungent nail polish remover (silver toenails look nice in the first two hours or so, and then I get mildly startled each time I look down and spot them glinting up at me and wonder briefly whose toes those are before it dawned that they belong to me.) No, lar, it's not a fancy dress party I went for, it's just a role I'm playing in our Singapore film project, where we've got to make a mini-Singapore-film of our own, and I was suppose to act the part of this deviant and terribly lonely girl.

Which is really very odd, because not only am I an amateur in acting, I am an amateur in being--or dressing--deviant, too. (I can't work that darned eyeliner properly, lar... and purple lip-gloss! *wails at Maria again* I look like I just downed poison, wu-xia-ju style, and should, more aptly, lie in a faint in some handsome hero's arms gasping "I--will--die--without--the--antidote...The--spider--spirit--has--poisoned--me---You--must--run...Don't--bother--to--save--me...") But of course, this is an English programme, and therefore with complementary blackened eyes I just look malevolent and vamp-ish, more gothic villianess than dying heroine. (Sigh. No handsome hero. *grins*)

Okay. I'm exaggerating. Aftermath of the intoxicating nail-polish-remover.

It's just kinda difficult to get into character, because I am tempted to smack the young protagonist and tell her to wake up her idea because I think of the girl in the mirror with her makeup and her black mini-skirt and black top and her growling frustration at her mother and her friends and the depressing entries she writes in her blog and... It's not who she is, but the silly little thing cannot untangle herself from her own misery.

She isn't what I want to be, at any point in my life. This is not an outlet for vicarious rebelliousness and untapped potential to unleash the darker side of the self, or something. All I see in this girl is a gaping hole, and an aching desire to fill it up. But she can't, because she's looking in all the wrong places, and her family doesn't give her the emotional fulfilment she needs. *shudder* And you wonder what you can do with her, when things are so warped.

Gosh. I sound like some prissy kid who thinks herself too well-brought-up to be able to empathise properly. My apologies. I am so freaking conservative, I sometimes suspect that I'm supposed to be born in 18th century England or ancient China. Char was telling me the other day that I exist on a seperate plane on my own, of a seperate time and space, haha. Although indeed there's more truth to that expression than one can imagine.

Okay now. Must snap out of musings like that, and direct my textual analysis to where it's needed... ie, the three essays lined up for the coming weeks. For all my inability to act obviously deviant, I'm quite beyond completing enough readings within the stipulated time in order to qualify as a proper guai kia. Sigh.

I'll never get used to seeing myself in purple lip gloss (wah say Maria where did you ever get that from?!) and intense black eyeliner and eyeshadow smudged down the side of my face, I think. Very gothic, Charm. Just recalled that I didn't take a picture to remember it by, haha, but there is still one more scene of that to go. Oh well.

I'm exhausted. *flops over and sublimates into a puddle* Filming is not quite as easy as it sounds. Four and a half scenes done, three and a half to go.

Off to the shower. Must scrub the remnants of black eyeliner off my face so that I won't scare myself =)

Howl's Moving Castle is absolutely beautiful.

*blissful sigh*

It probably wouldn't make as much sense without having read Diana Wynne Jones's book first, so that you get a proper feel of the original and stretch your imagination and delve into character a bit... the movie just helps to expand, grandly, the visuals... But it's beautiful all the same =)

It's been so so long since I've watched a movie, or read a proper light fantasy book like Diana Wynne Jones, that this one movie totally swept me off my feet. It's probably something to do with watching a VCD in the quiet night alone, another with recalling all the times I'll gleefully submerge myself in Jones's book, revelling in a world totally apart from ours, beautiful, enchanting, imaginative, one that doesn't put on flairs and pretences of inaccessibility, but is delightfully complex in its simplicity, so that the light shades of romantic subplot echoes with irresistable sweetness.

*blissful sigh*

Nostalgia and all sorts of feel-good-ness. I've forgotten what it's like to sit and enjoy a movie without worrying about time.

I want a Diana Wynne Jones book for my birthday! Archer's Goon, maybe, or Howl's Moving Castle, or Witch Week, or something from the Chrestomanci series... And it doesn't matter that it's written for children, because that's exactly the point. I'm getting tired of the self-conscious text written for adults, that struggles to explain so much, yet consciously casts a veil over what it wants to say so that the stuff lurks under the surface, and you need to probe deeply for it to yield you its textual richness. Quite unlike a proper children's fantasy book that doesn't attempt to cheemify itself--what matters is the story, not the moral-behind-the-story... A proper children's book warms quickly to the story, and sweeps you right into their world with little self-conscious distractions or allusions or explanations. Yet it takes a child to grasp, with keen understanding, the complexities of a child's fantasy book, without forfeiting any of the enjoyment and genuine submersion within the story. It's a skill that gets lost in the hands of a growing adult. So we'll need to learn it all over again, the ability to appreciate, the instinctive impulse to feel without intellectual rationalisation, to get a better understanding of the story as a whole, like it's part of you, a world that is an extension of your desires.

If I had my way, I'll demand that all things should be understood only in this manner. :)

I shall return to reality in a little while. It was good while it lasted, though. Oh, if only...

Weary-kinda-tired.

Finished essay at 6 in the morning.

Dinner at the temple till 11pm just now. Reminded me of my grandpa. so much.

Almost expected to find him walk up to me to give me that customary pat on the head, before melting back into the crowd, like he always used to do...

Am reminded of a lot of things that I still have not lived up to. Not the tiniest bit.

I'm tired and panicky and conflicted. Which probably means I shan't continue in a long strain of narrative berating myself and make everyone miserable reading the entry.

Readings. Must do readings. And sleep. And presentation notes...

*hums* hearing voices telling me that I should get some sleep, because tomorrow might be good or something...

Finished my second essay of the week. Yay!

In less than an hour the earlier households will stir, and the morning-session children awaken, while I... I shall go have my two-hour nap for the night :)