Wednesday, January 26, 2005
(by Philip Larkin)
Slowly the women file to where he stands
Upright in rimless glasses, silver hair,
Dark suit, white collar. Stewards tirelessly
Persuade them onwards to his voice and hands,
Within whose warm spring rain of loving care
Each dwells some twenty seconds. Now, dear child,
What's wrong, the deep American voice demands,
And, scarcely pausing, goes into a prayer
Directing God about this eye, that knee.
Their heads are clasped abruptly; then, exiled
Like losing thoughts, they go in silence; some
Sheepishly stray, not back into their lives
Just yet; but some stay stiff, twitching and loud
With deep hoarse tears, as if a kind of dumb
And idiot child within them still survives
To re-awake at kindness, thinking a voice
At last calls them alone, that hands have come
To lift and lighten; and such joy arrives
Their thick tongues blort, their eyes squeeze grief, a crowd
Of huge unheard answers jam and rejoice -
What's wrong! Moustached in flowered frocks they shake:
By now, all's wrong. In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps
As all they might have done had they been loved.
That nothing cures. An immense slackening ache,
As when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps,
Spreads slowly through them - that, and the voice above
Saying Dear child, and all time has disproved.
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Tuesday, January 25, 2005
Someone lend me a rifle. Or a baseball bat.
...Or I could just call the hall office and tell them she's got a guy spending the night in her room again.
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Saturday, January 22, 2005
Tat Wee! On the drums! (At this point, the having a drumroll becomes quite corny. Not on purpose, I assure you...)
I'm pretty sure I freaked Shuhan out when he accidentally walked into the hall when we were practicing. He had a "WTH are you doing?!" look written all over his face... hahaha. Apologies, Shuhan! (By the way, you can come watch the full thing, with proper costume and makeup and lighting on 19th Feb, 8pm, at Victoria Concert Hall. Tickets at $15, get them from me =P)
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Friday, January 21, 2005
Thank you all for your well wishes today, I'm really touched! And special thanks to Kat Tj for organising the little surprise party in the wee hours of the morning, that was the best present ever =D And of course, my gratitude to all the members of our big Ohana who came as well - sorry for the fact that my room isn't very big so it was a bit squash-y ^^;
cHoiR r0x0RzZ! Heh.
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Wednesday, January 19, 2005
So tonight will be another 5 or 6 hours laying pages. Which I wouldn't mind so much (I can do one page in about an hour if I'm fast) but the Chron room is freaking cold. Last night I was there for 3 hours and my hands were so purple, they bore closer resemblance to something from which life had long departed.
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Tuesday, January 18, 2005
It's a web design class I took for the sake of easy credits. So now she's teaching the rest of the class how to hyperlink and I'm bored to death. Well... she did warn us that people who already knew stuff would be bored. Sigh. This is a waste of time! I could be-
...blogging in my room instead. Right.
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Saturday, January 15, 2005
"...he walked along the gravel path, holding his arms in a careful, prim posture; and something in his gait suggested that it cost him an effort to walk slowly - the effort of a man intent upon concealing the fact that he is inwardly running away."
(Thomas Mann Tristan)
Feeling completely drained. Every second semester is the semester I dread, because it just seems that there's so much to do and so little time for me to do pointless unproductive things like contemplate the meaning of life. (Which makes me wonder why contemplating the meaning of life falls under the category of "pointless unproductive things". I vaguely remember some character in Final Fantasy saying that human beings seek the meaning of life because we are mortal.)
Was contemplating taking one less module this semester, but I registered for it anyway. 2 days left to revise that decision. I doubt I'm going to drop it, because I want to complete as soon as possible, preferably with half a year to spare.
Why is everything in Singapore about speed and efficiency? I would love to have the time to savour the subjects I like, to explore and enjoy the process of acquiring knowledge just for the sake of storing away these various tidbits of information like precious gems, to admire and appreciate for another day. But all that really happens is a rapid torrent of facts I'm supposed to cram into my head and spit back out in organised categories 3 months afterwards. Words like 'productivity' and 'applicability' become exalted keywords; things that should truly matter, like 'learning' and 'enjoyment' get trampled and abandoned in the dust.
Every week I go for my one and only Lit lecture, and despite everything I am and I say, I fight to stay awake in the lulling wave of concepts like "Romanticism" and "religiousity". I fidget. I get bored. I make excuses to myself to escape from the lecture theatre every few minutes to settle choir things or school stuff. In the cacophony in my mind and the jarring interference of duties and responsibilities that the real world demands of me, I lose the capacity to appreciate the beauty of language and tranquility, of ideas and dreams.
My only solace is choir. At least I still feel that I am alive in the appreciation of music. But even that wears thin everytime we have to speed-learn a song, or other choir people mess around and do not put in enough effort (I feel) to get the feeling of the music. *sigh*
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Thursday, January 13, 2005
I was a bit intimidated by the acoustics of the hall though. It's the kind that carries your voice effortlessly - and carries all your mistakes effortlessly also. Eeks. Freakeh.
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Thursday, January 06, 2005
It wasn't just the ugliness of the whole scene, or the simple discomfort of seeing that uncivilised creature shouting hoarsely at his wife and making a public nuisance of himself; there was also the embarassment of being privy to the private lives of these two people, even if only for that fleeting moment.
The ugliness of that man's behaviour made me wonder whatever had possessed the foodstall auntie to marry him in the first place. Was it drink that had turned him into the thing he now is? Was it failure? Had there ever been love in the first place, or was it a marriage that had been built on convenience and petty things - and is love afterall a petty thing as well?
I watched the auntie's weary lined face as she bore his drunken ravings, a face weathered by the years and greased with her labour, and wondered if her passive resignation was a sign of whatever love still remained, or merely an expression of quiet despair.
Quite a few people around me getting attached, and other people getting heart-broken or still nursing festering wounds or fleeting hopes. But sometimes I wonder... what's the big deal with love anyway? It's just chemical reactions to secretions from the brain, and yet people die for it, live for it, are governed by it.
Some police who happened to be there for supper stepped in after a while when he started knocking things off the table. She didn't go forward to explain, but neither did she step forward to complain - in fact, she never once responded to him, and she never looked up from her work. As if he did not exist. I wonder if she denies his present existence to remember the man he was and the man she married.
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Saturday, January 01, 2005
and never brought to mind
May auld acquaintance be forgot,
and days of auld lang syne
For auld lang syne, my dear, For auld lang syne,
We'll take a cup o' kindness yet, For auld lang syne
Brand new year, brand new slate. Idealistic, perhaps, but selective amnesia is something to strive for sometimes.
If I had the option to turn back time and re-live and re-do everything this year, I wouldn't, and it's not just because I'm lazy and the thought of having to do everything all over again is just super sian (even though that is one major issue... hahaha).
Life can be both hell and bliss, or it can be nothing at all =)
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