I’m hopped up on Actifed and am seeing the world through a hazy blanket of drowsiness.
Also, the house is just a little too quiet now that my brother’s flown off. Thank goodness for my BEDB internship, starting tomorrow.
pavlov’s dog Wednesday, Aug 27 2008
musings 9:44 am
My ability to learn from the mistakes of my past has diminished with increasing and alarming rapidity over time. I am the physical embodiment of the antithesis of rationality right now. And sitting in my cousin’s flat with all the curtains firmly shut against the rays of the morning sun isn’t doing wonders at all.
Life’s full of regretful mistakes, yet somehow they always lead somewhere in the end; they inevitable inform your life in magical ways. I initially thought it was a mistake to finish my secondary education in Australia instead of in the UK somewhere, but that worked out really well in the end. And I thought it was a mistake to uproot myself from Australia to study in London, but I couldn’t imagine myself living in a different city anywhere now.
Yet what about my decision to read Law at tertiary level, my decision to study at LSE rather than UCL, my choice of Bankside Hall rather than Holborn… in fact, my entire first year as an LSE Law Undergrad?
Only time will tell.
I would rather be anywhere but here.
Pee es: On a lighter note, I found the best primer yesterday which is surprisingly an alternative to foundation! Thank you, Benefit!
singapore Friday, Aug 22 2008
Uncategorized 9:05 pm
6.30 am tomorrow will see me at the airport, ready to board my flight to Singapore. I’ll be there till the next Sunday, and depending on whether I can leech off someone’s wireless while at my cousin’s apartment, may or may not be online till then.
Aku tenang sebenarnya. Amanda has commented that over the past month, I’ve seemed more and more at peace with myself. That might be lending my situation more optimism than is necessary, but it’s quite close to the truth.
I leave tomorrow with no expectations save one — to have a good holiday which breaks the monotony of my current summer! I’ve literally done nothing productive for nearly two months now, except learning how to cook. Even my mum’s amazed at my culinary prowess: there have been no accidents in the kitchen so far (KNOCK ON WOOD) and the fare I’ve been churning out tastes the same as it usually does. That being said, my “emergency recipes” all tend to be of the Western variety — I know tons of Italian recipes (pasta, chicken, etc.) and can do a bazillion things with potatoes — but I draw a complete blank once rice is involved. I guess I’ll learn in due time though. After two years at boarding school and one year at student halls, my tummy is completely hardy already and can stomach even the worst recipes (Upul had his ups and downs, and when it was down, it was really down…) and I don’t feel compelled to have rice every single day. I’ll survive just fine, heehee. Thank goodness I actually can cook at this point in time!
So yes, my last post for a time being. Saya ingin menyusun jari sepuluh saya jika “post” saya menyinggung hati siapa sahaja yang membacanya. Sekian, terima kasih!
(Cheh!)
2.34 am Friday, Aug 22 2008
Uncategorized 2:41 am
I always find random crap to do online in the wee hours of the morning.
But this thing is actually worth the fewer hours of sleep I’ll be having tonight…
… so I’ll update you in the event that I am successful! Fingers crossed for me, please!
Love always,
Tashie
ETA: Not successful, but there is a month and a bit more to keep on trying!
poser Tuesday, Aug 19 2008
Uncategorized 6:02 pm
This is a sight you don’t see very often: Natasha Chan sitting at Coffee Zone, Gadong, with her laptop, basking in the company of other like-minded people who have sweating glasses of iced coffee in hand and glammed-up laptops on show, taking advantage of the free broadband and the instant street cred points gained just from sitting at said establishment (though that being said, one gains double the street cred from being in the vicinity of Chills alone).
In other words, Tash is being a poklen this evening.
Suan and I had our last weekly Tuesday eating-chatting-(window)shopping-moviewatching session just now, a tradition we established the week after we both arrived back in Brunei for the summer. It’s something I look forward to, because we don’t get to see each other much during term-time, her being way up north in York and my base being London. We’ve had a year’s worth of news to catch up on, and I think we’ve done that successfully in five mere weeks! This Saturday, I’m heading off to Singapore, and she’ll be leaving for Japan for a whole freaking month next week. If you were to draw a Venn diagram of our interests, the only ones which’d comprise the central overlap would be makeup and Savage Garden and squeeing over cute things (like Wall-E) and to a certain extent, shopping — but opposites do happen to attract and all, so heyy.
About Singapore: eight days, two of which will be spent at SingSoc camp and the rest to spend any which way I want. It’s been practically forever since I was on a holiday where the power to do whatever I wish (well, almost!) has been handed to me. Other than being home at a respectable time, I’ve been given free reign to use my days however I wish. And that kind of rocks. (: I have a few items on my must-get shopping list, including more casual-ish footwear which aren’t the Havaianas and Birkies I seem to step out of the house in all the time — okay in Australia, but even the most casual of people will eventually tire of wearing thongs all the time. I also intend to get a patent leather belt and I have a secret dream to buy out the entire Anna Sui makeup catalouge… but one thing at a time I guess.
Okay, I’m getting antsy. Enough of this poklen gig. I am outta here!
Love love.
day twenty-eight Tuesday, Aug 19 2008
Uncategorized 2:58 am
TUESDAY, 19TH AUGUST 2008
DAY TWENTY-EIGHT
And I thought I’d never see this day. And it comes not a moment too soon.
I stopped counting days ago, the main reason why this most recent tally astonishes me.
In other news: life without Facebook is, to an ardent user, initially the most miserable existence ever. But I’ve come to love and appreciate this change of pace. Everyone has been immensely shocked by my mysterious disappearance off the surface of the cyberworld — there has been next to no contact with people via MSN, in addition to Facebook — and I have a feeling that some of my personal choices next year will cause me lose contact with a whole bunch of people that I really care about, and have shared so many good laughs with over this past year.
But do you want to know a secret?
You may think that I’m suffering right now, and starting to encounter withdrawal symptoms from this self-initiated e-communication drought. In actual fact though, I’m actually quite content. This is what summer is meant to be about: a summer spent relaxing with stacks of books and DVDs, and finally realising what matters most in life. (A mark of how bummy my holiday has been thus far is the fact that I’ve managed to finish watching all six seasons of Sex and the City in under two weeks; it’s hilarious to realise that fans of the TV show have followed Carrie’s ups-and-downs over a period of six years, and I’ve managed to squish all that into a mere fortnight!)
Fuck peer pressure, really. No, I haven’t started work, with my next CV-update about to show an enormous gap in time where I will have done nothing. And I don’t really care right now.
The irony of the fact is, I have achieved quite a bit in my eyes. So while this summer hasn’t been a learning curve of the most academic variety, it has been in other ways.
I think I’m ready to go back to university next year.
L-R: Joe-Han, Ming Hui and me atop the Mahligai outside the Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddien Mosque in BSB.
(c) Hung Ming
heartbroken Sunday, Aug 17 2008
classic 11:48 am
The final day of Swimming at the Oympics has brought too much heartache for me to bear.
Phelps, I hate you — but you are undisputedly the best swimmer to ever exist. Your 100m butterfly final put me on the edge of my seat in a way I haven’t experienced since Thorpey because I thought you wouldn’t touch the wall first. But you did, and you deserve all your fame you garner for that over the water manouevre alone.
Oh Grant Hackett, my heart bleeds for you. :c
And the Aussie women medley team’s gold medal win really made my morning.
I have two new Olympic crushes! A Malaysian archer who made the individual quarterfinals is geekily cute, and Eamon Sullivan, an Aussie sprinter (who only just broke up with Stephanie Rice!) is adorable, and did extremely well against Jason Lezak and the final Japanese swimmer in this morning’s finals relay. Mmm!
But Thorpey, even though you may be retired at the moment… You’ll always have the most special place in my heart. All your world and Olympic records have probably been broken by Phelps by now (who seems to be on some sort of performance-enhancing drug, pfft), but you were there first.
(I shall call this a post, since I think this is by far the cheesiest journal post I’ve ever written here.)
the time traveler’s wife Sunday, Aug 17 2008
literature and musings 2:32 am
It’s 1.52 am, and I’ve just finished reading The Time Traveler’s Wife.
When a book is introduced to you with glowing recommendations by more than four or five parties, one might automatically think that they represent an accurate sample of the population. Everyone I know who has read this novel has cried bucketloads after the fact, and considering that I have often been known to lapse into periods of emotional distress… well, I thought I’d be affected in the same way, if not more.
I was wrong.
The story started out beautifully. The first part of the novel — its lyrical narration, the portrayal of the characters and their subsequent development — is the stuff of a great modern classic. I lapped it up after only a few sessions of light reading, sitting in front of the television watching Olympic action unfold (mainly Archery — I recall hiding behind my copy of the book during tense moments during the men’s semi-finals and gold medal match).
However, once I got to the middle… my opinion drastically changed.
The Time Traveler’s Wife is what a great romance novel should be. That being said though, I’m not a fan of the genre; give me a crime fiction novel instead, some Kay Scarpetta or Patterson, and I’ll be content. The novel, if not taken seriously as an elucidation of morality or a strain of philosophy I can’t put my finger on, is a fantastic bedtime read.
But the reviews I’ve recently read, as well as garnered from my friends, really seem too good to be true for a novel of this calibre (or lack of, perhaps).
The story struck me as being just a deux ex machina, personified, in grand proportions. Nothing about the narration struck me as being particularly ingenious as well: I expected more random orderings of the chapters and subchapters, to underscore the disorientating nature of time travel, for one. Character development was haphazard at best post-Part 1 of the novel:
- Clare became such a twat that I can’t find words to describe how much I wanted to knock some sense into her about her pregnancies, about what she wanted for Alba;
- Some of Henry’s actions are mystifying (like how, it being his last few weeks/days/hours on earth, he decides not to tell his nearest and dearest); and
- Charisse’s and Gomez’s troubled marriage is only brought up when it is useful to the protagonists’ storyline (which is, not a lot — so when Clare needs comfort, Gomez is there and we get a sense that his marriage is tenuous, yet when Clare is self-absorbed, Gomez and Charisse are the epitome of a super American family).
And for all the time that Niffenegger has spent building up to Henry’s eventual “departure”, we never really get a sense of how Clare deals with his death. A mere three or four tiny chapters focus on her life after Henry’s death — but surely, it being a novel on time travel and how we readers know from the outset that his death will be eventual, it is only imperative that the story should also focus on how Clare deals with her emotional torment sans Henry? The art show that Clare has in 2010 or thereabouts, mentioned halfway through the novel, seems to be introduced almost as it will play an important role in the later section… but no. The inspirations for Clare’s birds, her sculptures, her artwork… we can infer that Henry is her muse of sorts perhaps, but this scene — which has so much potential in allowing us to see how Clare deals with her husband’s death — is discarded, not fully utilised.
It’s been a while since I’ve read a book (and Law textbooks don’t count), and since I’ve been inspired to write about it in this way. I seem to find only one book to either rant or rave about every year. Last year was the final instalment in the Harry Potter series (you can find my review on it in one of my older posts on this journal); I guess this year is Niffenegger’s year.
And with Rachel McAdams starring in the movie version of this novel, I expect that this will turn into a cult classic among teenagers and young adults in no time, a la The Notebook, which I absolutely love to hate (just like I do Michael Phelps). Maybe it’s part of me which dislikes fads and refuses to get swept along by society’s norms and pigeon-holed into being someone I’m not. I don’t know what it is exactly, but it’s there, it’s a part of me and I can’t help myself.
Not to say though, that I wasn’t moved by the book. I was, to a small extent. I did tear somewhat at the end, but Henry’s death was a tad too anti-climatic to draw a huge well of tears from me… Sometimes I wonder if, over the course of the past few weeks, I’ve really hardened myself and steeled my heart to prevent myself from continuing to feel hurt. A sort of defence mechanism if you like, which has inadvertently produced such a reaction to this novel. Only goodness knows how many days I’ve spent moping and attempting to sleep with a heavy heart over the beginning of the summer that I grew tired of my daily emotional routine. My “liver” (it once being known as the seat of passion) is probably undergoing some form of metaphorical calcification if The Time Traveler’s Wife can’t move me like it did everyone else. But perhaps this is good for the time being; I don’t really know.
Ah well. It’s 2.31 am. Bedtime for me.
(And if anything, my copy of the Time Traveler’s Wife will make an effective shield for my eyes while watching the women’s and men’s 4 x 100 medley relay final tomorrow. Aussie Aussie Aussie oy oy oy!)
eta: I think I’m going to start on some Euripedes, just for the heck of it.
888 Sunday, Aug 10 2008
Uncategorized 1:03 am
Translation 1:
“Heyy, it was a pity that you didn’t go [to the LufBru Games prize presentation
ceremony] just now. The Crazy Pandas won ‘Most Potential Team’ since they
noticed our growth since last year =) Will scan/photocopy the certificate for
all of you soon =p”
Translation 2:
Even though life may throw you curveballs
there remain little things which make you realise that
not all has been lost.
Family and friends-
well,
these just happen to be two of the most important reasons of all.
