Ripples and Sunshine

I am quite incorrigible sometimes when deadlines come in chunks and I begin to panic. It gets really bad when a headache is thrown into the scene, and even worse when I realise the headache isn't really a headache, but a migraine in the making.

And for those in-between moments I would write or type furiously, about any random thing that comes to mind, just to get things out of my system. And should words fail me utterly I would be quite quite distraught, because it would mean I've lost, for the moment, the ability to decipher what it is I need to deal with... although sometimes I suspect that my mind just refuses to drag things out to sort, preferring instead to settle for frustrated ignorance.

Whatever works, so long as tomorrow is a better day. And it often is =)

*taps finger on table*

Darn, the scribbled entry on the bus doesn't make practical reading sense. I gaze at it and wonder at the vague vague words that I do understand in an odd kind of way, but they don't say anything much to anyone else, I think, other than indicating that I'm an awfully spaced-out creature sometimes.

What do you think when you're alone with your thoughts sometimes? When no one is around, when you draw into your own inner world, and the outside world lapses into a misty silence that ceases to matter?

I remember those hour long lunches I had by myself on my previous temp job, when my lunch hour often had to be seperate from the rest because I was the only person covering my scope of duties. Heading out alone, eating alone, walking alone, and watching the world go by, this independent being whose existence had no relation whatsoever to the many people that pass you by.

(With what enthusiasm and cheer I had picked up every phonecall "Hello, good morning!" during my working hours there then, for 10 seconds of human communication that breaks the monotony of non-stop work, and how every message to the handphone had me smiling so, and how I looked forward to Thursdays, where Peggy the accountant comes to occupy the seat behind mine, and we can talk for ages and ages...)

But I digress. Anyhow, it was one of those long lunch hours that I started to wonder if every person had an inner world that he or she could draw him or herself into, this world that exists as a construct of thoughts and feelings, this world, this sanctuary that you withdraw into when you need to be by yourself, when you reflect, when you want a timeout from this world of bustling activities.

It's almost like a Quizilla question. "WHAT IS YOUR INNER WORLD? (PICTURES INCLUDED!)"

What would this world of yours look like, if you were to draw a picture of it? Would it be a place, perhaps? An imaginary lakeside and a tall tree with drooping branches of leaves that brush against the water? A bare room, with white walls and ceiling and floor? A large cavern, that reaches deep deep within, shadowy and grey, with rocky edges that glint with reflected moonlight? A sunlit meadow, an endless stretch of long grass that sway in the breeze?

That kinda place you would imagine that you retreat to think, a place inaccessible from the world.

I imagined my place (and I had a darn lot of time to imagine then, trust me) to be a shady forest clearing, with a waterfall by the side, rushing water tumbling into a pool making a constant, lulling whish-whoosh, where the trees will rustle in the breeze, where the sunlight will peek through the foilage and leave dapples of sun rays on the ground, where the streaming water glints in random places the reflected rays. When it rains I draw into a cavern, a dim glittering cave with a high high ceiling, that echoes away when you hum a tune. Moonlight comes in at an angle, and a trickle of steam runs from a corner into a quiet underground pool.

An inner world of thought visualised, a little imagined sanctuary part of myself (though, when you think back again, there usually isn't much luxury of time to construct background images to house your thoughts -_-) Otherwise it is just a misty haze of the outer world as you slip into the liminal realm between reality and imagination.

Well. Just a very random (albeit rather elaborate) thought =) (which does not occur too frequently, don't worry) What would your inner world be like?


(Pardon the density... it is difficult to edit abstract thoughts into digestable text that serves a purpose, and even I wonder at the randomness of this pattern of thoughts sometimes)

Do me a favour.

Pause for the slightest ever moment, and wonder, for a little while, whether you might or might not have perhaps hurt the feelings of someone in your life at any moment in time. Whether you might have been insensitive, gone overboard, and been absolutely blind to your own actions. Shrugged, laughed it off, dismissed it with ease... For what do words matter, when they are carelessly thrown out in fun and good-nature?

Like little kids that engage in playful fights and hit out at another without knowing. If the other kid does not retailiate, do you assume that you've never hurt your playmate?

Perhaps we've done it too often to even realise that other people might have feelings like we do too. And that their feelings do frigging matter as well.

Thanks for all the well-wishes, the presents, the cards, the hugs, the smses, the food... and every little bit of effort that means a whole whole lot to me =)

and... and the song, and the book, and the saturday night surprise visit...

I don't know what to say, except that I really don't know where I'll be without you all.

Thank you for being part of my life.
Every single one of you.

=)

I realised, with some horror, that we didn't take a group photo at the OOPs-sizzlers-dinner-celebration-for-Wai-Lun's-birthday.

... Wei, how can forget?

I think we were all too caught up with watching Derek eat vegetables to remember anything else.

The above-mentioned party very bravely dared Cheryl to get him a plate of salad of her choice, and promised to finish it all, in a valiant attempt to silence the rude remarks the OOPs gang regularly makes with regards to his picky eating.

I think Derek was probably expecting something small and friendly, like this:



Now, this is probably what Charmaine would have taken.

But then of course, because he dared Cheryl the Salad Queen, the unchallenged veggie-lover who had calmly demolished several servings of salads of every variety in one sitting, such leniency is not to be expected.

Of course, we must not discount the contributions of two extremely gleeful male advisors, (who shall not be named since we all know who they are anyway) "Wah lao, take more take more! Eh! Add onions leh! Oh oh, put some more celery!"

(I mean it when I say gleeful. They were almost bouncing to the salad bar to watch Cheryl pick out the ingredients, can.)

Er-hmm.

So our protagonist was presented with a forest of dense vegetation to demolish.



Our valiant protagonist fought long and hard, overcoming vegetable after vegetable to emerge triumphant to the applause of 5 impressed OOPsians. So the next time you meet Derek along the arts fac corridor, be sure to congratulate him in completing his mission =D

That aside, I suspect that Mr Chong enjoyed himself tremendously throughout his good friend's traumatising experience. His only regret, the author believes, was that he did not add more onions to the dish.

And of course, there is the matter of the strawberry lip gloss, but that is another story for another day, and I'm withholding pictures for er... well, if there is need for blackmail in future. Just remember to wish Wai Lun a happy belated birthday when you next see him along the corridors too =)

Talk is cheap, you say, so I shall not embellish the moment with words.

As it is I owe all three of you a big big hug.

=)

So good to see you girls again =)

I just found this in Sharon's flickr collection *beams* I like! It's something to do with good friends and sunflowers and sunlight and smiles that makes it pretty pretty pretty =) And her birthday party was nice and warm and cosy, so even though I kinda barely knew anyone, besides Sharon and Zhen, it still left a nice cosy feeling =) (Yah I know, this is kinda belated a comment, eeps, but the picture kinda reminded me to write, mah...)

I have two assignments to rush! But because there's no school tmr I get this false sense of security... and I figured I can let myself breathe a tiny bit, maybe. I get so boggled thinking about feminism and insanity and language, rawr. And the profile. And the test. Sigh.

The texts are getting overtly disturbing nowadays, methinks. Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper and the narrator's descent into insanity, Kafka's In the Penal Colony and the torture machine that spends twelve hours piercing words of your crime onto your body before running your head through with a spike, Scarry's thesis on "The Structure of Torture" and how pain functions to control the human body, and Under the Skin and multilating alien bodies and processing and consuming human flesh as irresistable delicacy... Very visual stuff.

One needs a good stomach to do lit, I think.

Da has an interesting question about "who is your muse?" that I thought was really interesting. I shall go ponder over a shower and see if I can come up with an answer. But-- must one person only have one muse, one source of inspiration? And must a muse even be a person? Not the breeze in the trees, or the laughter of children, or a piece of prose that touches you, or a song that speaks to you, or rain against your window, or a long bus ride, or... people, people in general, who are so transient themselves, so different, who makes you feel different each and every point in time? Will that deviate entirely then from the point of having a muse?

Hmm. Do you know who is your muse?

"The atoms that had been herself would mingle with the oxygen and nitrogen in the air. Instead of ending up buried in the ground, she would become part of the sky: that was the way to look at it. Her invisible remains would combine, over time, with all the wonders under the sun. When it snowed, she would be part of it, falling softly to earth, rising up again with the snow's evaporation. When it rained, she would be there in the spectral arch that spanned from firth to ground. She would help to wreathe the fields in mists, and yet would always be transparent to the stars. She would live forever."

-Under the Skin, Michel Faber

The Body module has the absolute nicest set of texts ever, second only to the sci-fi and fantasy module so far. But the rest of the modules this sem are not bad, really. I need to get down to reading Rebecca once there is a pause in deadlines. Oh, and whiny Dracula too (stupid whiny crew of men...)

But Dracula is quite funny sometimes, actually. And like all long-winded A Level texts you tend to remember the crazy bits. Like this silly instance of extreme understatement, where Jonathan Harker realises, for the first time, that there is something very wrong with his host. Happened when he realised Count Dracula standing right behind him, but couldn't see him in his shaving mirror:

"But there was no reflection of him in the mirror! The whole room behind me was displayed; but there was no sign of a man in it, except myself. This was startling, and...... was beginning to increase that vague feeling of uneasiness...
(etc, etc...)
When the Count saw my face, his eyes blazed with a sort of demoniac fury, and he suddenly made a grab at my throat. I drew away, and his hand touched the string of beads which held the crucifix. It made an instant change in him, for the fury passed so quickly that I could hardly believe that it was ever there...
(etc... he takes a while to get to the point)
Then seizing the shaving glass... and opening the heavy window... he flung out the glass, which was shattered into a thousand pieces on the stones of the courtyard far below. Then he withdrew without a word."

And how did our incredibly mild Jonathan react? Scream bloody murder and fling his shaver aside and run for life?

Not quite.

What follows immediately after the dramatic confrontation was,

"It is very annoying, for I do not see how I am to shave, unless in my watch-case or the bottom of the shaving pot, which is fortunately of metal."

......

One of the reasons why Dracula isn't as scary as one might think.

I think one of the main reasons why I remember this out-of-point bit so much was because Dylan used to find great pleasure in quoting "It is very annoying, for I do not see how I am to shave" to Shell and I, with lots to smug approval, much to Shell's exasperation and my amusement. Hehe. Seriously, I think that's the only line he remembers from Dracula -_-

Sheesh.

Random other-stuff...
My mum got me a very very pretty watch today =) Oh and Dr Y. accepted my Body proposal! I didn't have to redo! =)) And I finished exercise 5 =))) And the haze is gone and the air smells good! =))))

Looking forward to the end of the week where the next three deadlines'll be cleared up =)

Spent a whole day packing the family hall, old large storage containers and part of my shelf.

Look what I found!



Looks familiar, anyone? Let's take a closer peek!



Lower primary textbooks! When was the last time you saw your PETS coursebook, or your hao gong ming text? Rare antiques, okay... You don't even have them in the market anymore, with the syllables (oops! my mistake... and ding ding ding! Derek spotted it!) syllabus and textbooks changes...





Gosh, I miss the illustrators...



Feeling nostalgic, anyone?


That said, we cleared out some 6 garbage bags of stuff today, and one big box of toys and stuff to be recycled. It's a bit hard for me to clear out stuff sometimes, especially if I am in a sentimental mood, and feel that I oughta keep every other thing because it tingles with fond memories of the past. I've gotten better over the years, lar, and don't hesitate at every scrap of paper or flower or ornament or worksheet (but the old yellow parchment-ish worksheets with careful little handwriting is so sweet...!) so I do actually get a little more room =) Still have a weakness with written stuff, though. Found myself salvaging notes and postcards and letters and essays and even scribbled ramblings during lectures (I never knew I wrote so much...!)

Something that kinda struck me, though... Can I request to please please not have stuff-toy or ornament presents? Unless of course it comes with a decently sized glass cabinet to be placed in, so I wouldn't have to worry about collecting dust on the shelves (swepted one level of my shelf today and there was enough dust to roll into a grey ball *shudder*). But Charmaine doesn't have a glass cabinet and is definitely not asking for one, so let not another poor stuff toy or ornament suffer the fate of a dusty dwelling =)

Oh and I sorted six small albums of JC photos into one big one. More space! Yay!

The temporal neatness will last until my next deadline, when notes will be spewed all over with a vengeance, and my parents will start to enquire, with some exasperation, why I work in a rubbish dump. Ah, well -_-

Spent a day away on packing, but oddly enough it felt decently weekend-ish, and that I was actually getting stuff done, with satisfyingly visible results. Must get back to the homework, though. Aiyeee.

I handed in a term paper and finished a presentation this week. Just one more proposal to go before weekend beckons! =)

It is very odd that I cannot remember what I said at all during the presentation, because my mind was in an incomprehensible flustered blank, but I think writing a presentation transcript helped a lot. My groupmates said I sounded nice and friendly, which I suppose is a good thing, because I was only reading straight off my notes in blind auto-pilot.

Which means that the extra effort that goes into preparing a separate informal script written in second-person "do you see the link now?" "if you would hold that thought for a minute... lemme show you the next bit..." "now, so how do we do this?" actually works for the flustered mind that was quite spaced out in anxiety =) spent the hour-long bus trip to school with the notes before me talking away under my breath, occassionally pausing and quirking an eyebrow and tilting my head to stare quizzically at the paper, but amazingly no one gave me weird looks. Ah well.

That aside, there is this guy in my class that looks uncannily like another friend of mine. I get a jolt of surprise every time I look at him, especially when he's got this exact same expression that my other friend always wears. And no, they don't have the same surnames, and are immensely different in how they talk, but... *shudder* It's freaky lar, can, and he's in three of my modules, so on days when my mind is in a decidedly dramatic mode I'll be reminded of gothic Doubles and Uncanny reflections and mirrored Selfs.

Very weird.

Okay, must not get carried away. Had a field day analysing female insanity and madness, logic, il-logic and a-logic, and irreducible Otherness and the Elsewhere outside patriarchal discourse during seminar today. It is very scary to have extremely vocal, eloquent and cheemified people in your class, a good percentage of whom you see on Dean's List.

I concluded that I am no dramatic passionate fighter against existing systems, nor aspiring abolisher of the established status-quo, so literary discourse is a... kinda enjoyable vicarious dramatisation of what I would not get to do in reality =) I am honestly quite a content creature of systems and habits (sad as it sounds... wah lao, then be arts student and question so much for what, right?) probably because I have never really had stuff imposed upon me (read: I usually get what I want, without even having to ask for them ^_^)--so I very seldom demand for radical changes in anything. While I can't find the heart to condemn alternative preferences and am generally sympathetic towards the marginalised, I am, I regret to say, no activist either... not quite in me to conduct riots for liberation of the repressed soul and rally for change. Yes, darn, I'm such a passive creature. How unexciting.

Okay, random rant over, back to formulating a new set of cheem arguments for my Body module.

Just read Maria's outing-suggestion email, and realised that I miss you girls a tremendous lot. Oh man, when was the last time we sat down to talk? That crazy, excited buzz of chatter when a whole bunch of girls are talking and listening to one another's stories, and laughing and laughing and laughing...

And I haven't touched the phone for how long?

Well, at least I managed to meet Shell for a couple of hours after a year(!), catch Char for the briefest of minutes on the phone, and Gill on MSN for a mutual whine in what may be defined as recently.

I wished that of all months, October wasn't the one so heavy with deadlines, that days don't pack together so quickly, and disappear in such a flash. And before you know it semester's over. *shudder*

Somehow the time to sit and linger and stone and talk aimlessly with your friends is becoming a rare, rare luxury.