Friday, May 26, 2006

Maria for the day; jumble book sale.

Hello boys and girls!

Today will probably not be the last time you hear from me for a long, long while. Lynne Huang has less than 90 days to write 7 essays of 45,000 words, approximately 10 days to work on ONE 5000word essay, and she hasn't started. Time for the procrastinator to get down to work! And that begins by cleaning up my room - it was previously uninhabitable, but after vacuuming and 11 Tesco plastic bags of food wrappers trash, I'm very happy to report that it actually looks remotely homey. It's actually quite easy - all you have to do is to throw everything - clothes, books, papers, CDs - in one corner of the room, and voila! You can see the carpet again!

That aside, I've some books for sale, at a low of 3 quid each - price negotiable! Here's the list:

NOVELS:
Iain Banks - The Wasp Factory
Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange
J.M. Coetzee - Elizabeth Costello
Tibor Fischer - Voyage to the End of the Room
Mark Gatiss - The Vesuvius Club
Julie Gregory - Sickened
Zoe Heller - Notes on a Scandal
Natsuo Kirino - OUT
Ryu Murakami - In The Miso Soup
Susan Perabo - Explaining Death to the Dog
Elizabeth Wurtzel - Prozac Nation
Richard Yates - Eleven Kinds of Loneliness
Richard Yates - The Easter Parade
Banana Yoshimoto - Hardboiled and Hard Luck

CLASSICS:
Wilkie Collins - The Woman in White
D.H. Lawrence - Sons And Lovers

FANTASY:
Raymond E. Feist - Serpent War saga (4 books), Krondor series and Riftwar saga
Janny Wurts - Alliance of Light series and To Ride Hell's Chasm

I don't suppose anyone will want my philosophy texts on Kant and Marx and what not..? I still have about 40 more books, e.g. all of Haruki Murakami, Henry James's Turn of the Screw, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, but I know I'd cry if I sell these off, so maybe not. As it is, I'm already on the verge of tears from the auctioning of my precious books, but sometimes, you just got to do what you got to do.

So folks, help me out here - the fewer the books there are in my room, the better it is for my studies - they are terribly distracting! I can't help but read at least one of them everyday, the concept of self-control/discipline is delightfully exotic but dreadfully foreign - only enforced abstinence works for me. Besides, shipping every single one of my books home in September will be a catastrophic nightmare. Please leave comments if you're interested, I'll absorb postage if you buy 3 or more items. I only read the best of books, so rest assured - they are of top-notch quality.

By the way, I attended a concert last Wednesday with Yang'en, where the Duchess of Cornwall was present - she sat two rows in front of us. I've seen the Queen pass by in a car twice along the Strand, so that makes a grand total of two royal sightings. One more for the magic number 3 - please let it be Prince William!

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

incredulous; happy birthday!

I just wanted to say that I CAN'T BELIEVE it just hailed - woke up to the splattering of tiny ice-rocks against the window. In the month of May! At the end of May! Just when I thought I had seen all that the weather has to offer in London (I remember a day in April 2005 with snow, hail, rain and sunshine), it throws this astonishing curveball at me.

Ah, the randomness of the weather and life! And no, it's not the slightest bit interesting, but there is smug relief to be gained from the fact that I'm indoors, and safe from the furious pelting of the hailstones.

Happy belated birthday to Jo and Lalang btw - the flatmates turned 23 on the 23rd of May (and born only a few minutes apart) - how cool is that? Everyone, go wish them many happy returns!

And also, will someone please remind me to buy lightbulbs for my room? It's been five days since I've started living off the light from my laptop Karl, and somehow, I don't think it's terribly beneficial to my eyesight. What's beyond 1000 degrees?

Monday, May 22, 2006

It's very strange. When you're desperately deprived of sleep, and you have tons of work to do, everything else that is mundane and ordinary becomes terribly interesting. For example, the texture of my curtain is suddenly the most fascinating thing in my little world, and I stare at it for minutes without end with my pencil in hand, thinking about its origins from rough bark and heart-shaped leaves, wondering how it'd look like if it ever decomposes in the near future, would it still remain blue, would it still be baby soft, and would it ever miss kissing the glass panels, and looking out of my rectangular window? I don't know, but I suppose these aren't the questions I should be asking myself right now, I have 5 more A3-size manuscript papers to fill with unintelligible scribblings of black notes by 1400hr. Then again, I never seem to ask the right questions, or rather, I never seem to hear the answers that I want to hear, but if I do have it my way, the world will be topsy-turvy where we'll have 12 fingers instead of 10, the only two languages allowed would be Latin and classical music, and the consumption of raw vegetables and animals' spare parts such as monkey brains and chicken feet will be prohibited. I don't think everyone will be very happy if things are the way I would like them to be, so I suppose that's a good thing in retrospect.

Saturday, May 20, 2006

in the dark with Murphy for company.

Literally, because all the lamps in my room have been mysteriously snuffed out by Murphy. I mean, what are the chances of all 4 of them dying simultaneously, one after another on the same night? I don't think it's a fuse or anything, because everything else in the room is still working - laptop, CD player, heater, phone charger, that kinda thing. Makes you realize once again, how mindlessly dependent you can be on these unobtrusive objects, which you tend to take for granted all too often.

And this is the perfect excuse for not doing any work tonight!

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

helpless.

I just went through a thousand and one deaths - I had FIVE simultaneous Blue Screens Of Death, and I thought that was the pitiful end of BOB (the christened name of my ancient dinosaur).

But it's up and running for now! Oh, I promise not to be an unreasonable tyrant, and I will let BOB sleep at least once a week in future.

It's terrifying to be that dependent on an object, or the internet for that matter. Deprived of access to them both for an hour, I was going ballistic and delirious with fear in my little room, and chowing down on kitkat at 547 in the morning in a bid to prevent myself from wearing my teeth down in anguish.

I should go to bed, it's 0639, but I'm procrastinating because I don't really want to turn off my laptop. (Poor BOB!) I'm actually getting a bit agitated from the mere thought of it.

You know, I think I have a problem here. (No shit, Sherlock!)

I wonder if there's a rehab centre for internet junkies? Not that I want to put myself through all that exquisite torment, but it'd be nice to know. Just in case.

Monday, May 15, 2006

midori/morbid ducks.

I was sitting on the bench next to the tiniest of lakes, or the largest of ponds, and on it were the glossiest and fattest ducks I had ever seen. Gliding up and down the murky green waters, I wondered if they really had nothing else better to do? And with that, do I really have nothing else better to do than to sit down on my arse, and watch a flock of mindless ducks indulge in such fascinating and repetitive behaviour?

But there was the oddest of ducks, the queerest of the queer who caught my attention, and let me tell you why. But first, let's give it a name, shall we? How about Tom? Beautifully random and obscurely common. So, Tom was different. How different was he? He chose to be apart from the swimming collective. There he was, standing as proud as he could be, on the same mahogany bricks as I was on, ponderously waddling up and down around this horse-shoe bend - down the 'U' and up again, down the 'U' and up again, as if he was thinking, thinking and thinking. As if he was the most philosophical of ducks, contemplating life in existential terms only known to him, ah, he is chosen and he punctuates each step with a dismissive flounce of his tail-feathers, which unfortunately, made him look far too comical.

I'm not sure what conclusion he came to, but he must have come to one. He halted at the edge of his little mountain, and looked down at his world, which was a good 3 metres below him. And there he stood alone, unflinching and unmoved. For some reason, I think he wanted to commit suicide. In fact, I was quite sure that Tom wanted to die. Then I asked myself - do birds even think about the possibility of dying, or even realize that they are making a choice everyday to live? I've seen a pigeon commit suicide along Charing Cross Road, he was standing in line of a truck and remained there. I don't think I've ever seen a deader pigeon in my life - I've seen my fair share of feathered corpses, and one which I saw at a castle in Wales comes to mind. But then again, we all know that pigeons have no brains, so that must have had been a genuine accident.

Anyway, the more I thought about it, the more I felt as if I cannot discount the possibility, that Tom was waiting for the right moment to plunge headlong into the depths - and fail. For which duck is ever, ever, going to die by falling into the pond from a height of 3 metres? Maybe a duckling, but Tom was no child.

So I waited, and waited, and waited, for a good half an hour, for Tom to fall over the edge and try to die. Or rather, I waited for Tom to prove me right, that survival instinct will somehow kick in, where his wings will spread and take flight, or he'd just 'plop' onto the water and kick his life away. And may I add that all this time, he just stood still there, proudly desolate in his predictament? But I really wanted to be proven wrong, for some reason. It's no fun being right all the time. And if Tom somehow dies, would he just sink to the bottom of the stagnant waters, or would he turn upside down like a dead fish, would the other ducks actually be affected by his death, would they even know, would they even care, would they even miss dear old Tom?

But alas, I had to be on my way, so I started packing up. Tom was still standing there when I left, so I never got to find out if he successfully committed harakiri ala kamikaze, but it's one of the many questions that strangely lingers on my mind.

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

climbing down.

You know, it took me nearly 3.5 years in London to make me realize that I actually love performing. I know, I know, such a belated awakening.

Thing is, I'd never been terribly confident of my pianistic abilities. Whatever little skills I may possess right now are painfully earned from accumulated years of hard work, and nights after nights of relentless practice. And despite all this effort, I'm still not as technically competent as I hope to be, neither am I very musical by nature (horrendous practical marks aren't exactly the most ego-boosting either). And if I were to say "I love performing", when I'm so shit at it, it's mighty, mighty embarrassing. Ah, the ego speaks.

This is why I normally choose to accompany friends or the choir, rather than to take centrestage as a soloist. Don't get me wrong, I love playing chamber music, always have, always will. It's actually far more stressful to be an accompanist than to be a soloist, even though it's great fun making music with someone else. (Yibin's Grovlez and Yang'en's Faure come to mind.) It's just that I've always felt that I'm not good enough to be heard on my own, not good enough to warrant attention to my amateur music-making.

So it's quite ironic that I only discover this anew, during my Masters year where I have no performing modules, where I'm not taking any piano lessons from the Royal College of Music (I do have an allocated professor, but I never got round to calling him somehow). Despite that, the piano and my soul are in holy communion every single day of the week, and all I want to do is to practise practise practise my life away. And it's the worst time ever! Not when I have gazillions of books to read and millions of essays to write before the BBC Prom Concerts start in July.

This confession only came about when I finally accepted that I will never be the performer that I wish to be. Let's face it - I'm never going to make it. Not at this age, not at this time, and certainly not with my limited capacity as a musician. I'm not being a pessimist perfectionist (or maybe I am), but it's never going to happen - or at least, I know I will never regain the minute 'peak' I reached during my final recital last year. But I shouldn't let that stop me from making music in my own boorish way, you know?

I suppose I will always find solace in listening to gorgeous renditions of pieces by the hatefully obscenely talented elite, and tearing at each beautifully nuanced suspension, but it will always be bitterly tainted green by my feelings of inadequacy. How I wish I can play like Mitsuko Uchida, or Martha Argerich! And I will always remain envious of the gifts that others have, and never be thankful enough for my own. Do you know how devastating it is, to love music so much, and yet be so terribly incompetent at it? Especially when you know that your best, is at most, second-best - trust me - I know exactly where I stand.

I'm not giving up though. Even though I'm awed and humbled daily by the great maestros, I'll continue testing my own limits, and hopefully transcend the physical barrier of my technical abilities, and the psychological ones which I have inadvertently set upon myself. My impertinent arrogance knows no bounds, and perhaps, I should be grateful for that. The other alternative would be to happily indulge in narcissistic self-pity for the rest of my life.

And of course, if I can't perform, there's always teaching, and there is such great joy and reward to be derived in the impartation of musical knowledge. To illuminate, to enlighten, to relish, and the consequent revelation in the eyes! Harmonious bliss and ecstasy in a very different sort of way. Somehow, I suspect my strengths lie in teaching, and not performing. You know how it is, pompous and snooty people conserve all their energy for the heavy criticism of other people, but never themselves. Ah well.

This has been a very windy post, but I suppose it more than makes up for the past lack of updates (Jess, I've finally blogged!). A shout-out to the blessed few who are having exams (like Jing and Vincent), here's wishing you all the very best!

p.s. It was great hearing from you Steffy, call me whenever!

blueprint

I will like to spend my days, as though they are my own, which I mostly end up doing in halves, for duty beckons, and I am answering its clarion call. Soon enough! I am also a veteran procrastinator.

fresh monodies

Old wounds hurt most, I learned this today, becaus...
She speaks, repeating the old litanies, of worn ac...
time skips
and it all comes together!
beethoven's symphony no.7 2nd mvt
again,
towards that something
In the alley of shadows and death
Masking Tape
another end of the world

previous rants

August 2004
September 2004
October 2004
November 2004
December 2004
January 2005
February 2005
March 2005
April 2005
May 2005
June 2005
July 2005
August 2005
September 2005
October 2005
November 2005
December 2005
January 2006
February 2006
March 2006
April 2006
May 2006
June 2006
July 2006
August 2006
September 2006
October 2006
November 2006
December 2006
January 2007
February 2007
April 2007
May 2007
June 2007
July 2007
August 2007
September 2007
October 2007
November 2007
December 2007
January 2008
February 2008
March 2008
April 2008
May 2008
June 2008
July 2008
August 2008
September 2008
October 2008
November 2008
December 2008
January 2009
February 2009
March 2009
April 2009
May 2009
June 2009
July 2009
August 2009
September 2009
October 2009
November 2009
December 2009
November 2010
January 2011
February 2011
August 2011
October 2011
May 2013

treatises on life

arty jen
betty boop
carmentica
charming-linn
chasing snowy cars
cheeky lynn
cheryliciously glam
clean and cute
cyclist-mad bass
darling dominic
feisty jing
fellow ditz-sista/porkSTAR
hail mary!
hell's kitchen
hero on the beach
h-Euge heart
hunky lenny
lipgloss queen
little cheryl
live n learn, baby
lolita lou
loony loon
mr popular
musically dan
m y s t j
phringe
princess tania
roger smurf
runaway pigeon
sabotage king jeremiah
sibling angst1
sibling angst2
spector dan
spunky tian
steffy bunny
sun-sunzzz
teeny wee-nee
weeeee, leonard!
yangtze yang'en

frivolous pursuits

for shallow ppl
for very geeky ppl
for the truly bored
spun prose
binary thoughts
past imprints
some stamps
montage of images
other memories

mulling over

And there were phlegmatic souls.