Saturday, June 24, 2006
He wakes up with a start in the middle of the night to find his mother gone. He's alone in the dark, and suddenly every shadow in the corner is a boogeyman; every noise in the darkness is a monster under the bed.
Summoning up his courage, he calls out fearfully into the darkness, "Who's there?" He thinks he hears something in the dark, a sound he doesn't recognise, and he imagines he sees someone hiding behind the trees outside the window.
But he's a young child, and even though he is frightened, somehow he drifts off to sleep. And as he sleeps he dreams of hope and pleasant things, and the sun starts to rise, unfurling and blooming like a flower to cast light and warmth upon the child.
It is a sunrise like any other; and yet, it is also magical and miraculous, and the composer celebrates the dawning of a new day as if it was the first sunrise.
That is what "Yoru" by Matsushita Kou is supposed to sound like. Unfortunately, when NTU choir sings it, we often sound more like Ah Bengs and Ah Lians going to pia zui. Off-key Ah Bengs and Ah Lians some more. -_-;;
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Wednesday, June 07, 2006
In fact, because of the rain, I witnessed a spectacular natural phenomenon - The Great Cockroach Crossing.
There I was, sitting at the bus-stop minding my own business while the heavens emptied swimming pools of rain all around me - then I noticed something scrambling to get across the road. A lot of brown crawling somethings.
Now, being someone who's deathly afraid of cockroaches, it didn't take me long to recognise what they were. There were dozens of them coming out of the drains and the grass on the opposite side of the flooded road, struggling in a kind of cockroach crawl-swim to get across the road - towards me. Luckily for me, there was a pretty deep "moat" in front of the bus-stop because the drains were all clogged up, and it didn't seem like many of those roaches were going to make it. Happily, some also got squashed by a passing motorbike.
And then a car came, splashing water from the moat to the front of the bus-stop, and then I saw a couple of cockroaches ride the wave and surf onto the (relatively) dry safety of the ground in front of me.
I'm just lucky the bus came soon enough, so I lived to tell the tale. If I'd stayed there any longer, I might have been bludgeoned to death by people in my hall trying to catch a nice nap in the cool rainy weather because I was making such a ruckus shrieking like a girl.
Damn those cockroaches and their uncanny ability to survive. Some times I really admire their tenacity and hardiness... then I do my darnest to squish them with my shoe.
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:: Photo by National Geographic Society Copyright © 2002 ::