Archive for December, 2008
Time And Time Again
It Flies
Oh, it’s the New Year already. Well, then, many happy wishes for you and your loved ones, dear reader.
Time Crash
Ah, about 80% of my timetable has emerged. It looks like a Lovecraft monster. I’ve got no rest days, and there appear to be three subjects with lab sessions. For the most part (like three or four out of five days) the days begin early and end late. A very unhappy timetable, to say the least.
I’m considering a sixth subject, though that could be a bad move given the relative difficulty of the five I already have. That said, I can only apply for it in a couple of weeks when school starts, so I’m probably worrying a bit early.
Slippery Things
And it’s just been slipping away, these couple of days. Maybe it’s my general moodiness, or maybe it’s this inexplicable tiredness that dogs me. Whatever it is, the days are just going rolling by. I think I’ll really have to step it up after the New Year and try to finish some work.
I have a feeling that a few days before school starts, I’m going to realise I’m out of time and step on the gas like Lewis Hamilton. They always end like this, don’t they? Holidays, I mean. Darn, I think I need my own TARDIS.
Goodbye, Delaney
Delaney Bramlett (of Delaney & Bonnie fame) has passed away. [via Yahoo! News] I’ve always loved their early work, and it’s really sad to see him go.
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Losing A Friend + Aliens
What Happened?
The Christmas week came and went with a flurry of activity. I did almost no writing, a lot of shopping, and there were a couple of other things.
Of writing, I was stuck for a long time trying to dream up some short story. I had a few half-ideas but I abandoned all of them. I settled on something on Saturday night, and wrote bits and pieces yesterday. It’s a few hundred words now and I suppose it’s going to be a few thousand eventually. It’s just nice to write something original and unrelated to all the stuff I’ve been doing.
I’m not sure what I’ll do with it. I think it’ll be clearer by the time I finish it. I’ll probably put it up here. Or I might submit it to some school publications. (The idea is that it isn’t work and so shouldn’t come affixed with things like money and stress.) We’ll see. It’s a fable. Of a fashion. My sort of fable, I suppose, isn’t an unfair description.
I also started on writing out a plot summary for Singapura, which is something I’m sure I’ve mentioned before here. It’s looking okay, but I expect to be done with it only in three or four months. I want to get the whole idea down properly first. Given the nature of the project, I think this is the only way through.
And as for The River’s query letter… It’s kind of stuck.
But other than that query letter, this is all good news.
Shopping has bought me a new shirt which is sitting on a boat captained (I imagine) by a talking rat and lost somewhere out in the choppy sea. I have faith in talking rats, so I’m sure it’ll arrive. Among other purchases, I got myself a calendar. 2009 is the year of Henri Cartier-Bresson, it seems.
I will be going down to the bookstore once more tomorrow to find something, but other than that, I’m trying to avoid spending until the next school term.
And a couple of other things, yes.
I’ve had my room painted, which involved a lot of shifting and huffing and puffing. It’s all done now, except for some of the moving, but that’ll probably be taken care of tomorrow.
And one very last thing: I lost a friend last week. Nothing bad happened, so there’s nothing to worry or feel sad about. It’s just that some recent events got me rather frustrated with things, and along the week they also made me realise that there were things that were wrong in the friendship. It disgusted me to some degree, and I thought to either sort it out or to end it.
I chose to end it.
Someone asked me along the week how I did it. (He was quite surprised that it was even possible.) I said that I just told her, I’m sorry, I don’t think I can be your friend anymore. Best of luck. Which is really what I did, albeit a condensed version of it. It’s left her bewildered but not as distressed as she could be, if she is at all. (After all, things didn’t go sour or anything, and it must have all been rather strange and sudden.) And I’ve managed to step away from it too.
Why did I choose this? I imagine I just didn’t want the potentially tortuous path out. Given the nature of the problem (which I won’t speak of; so you’ll just have to use your imagination), I didn’t think it would be possible to sort it out anyway, so to speak, because I’m sure there doesn’t seem to be a problem to her and it’s just my insanity streak acting up. I’m sure if she thought otherwise, she would have pursued some form of resolution, which hasn’t yet happened.
Or, of course, maybe I’m just a coward.
A nice thing though is that through this I found a friend to depend on. And I don’t care if your heart is made of stone–that’s a nice thing to find.
As for the one I lost, a letter she sent me sits at a corner of my bookshelf, like a reminder of what I lost and what I hope one day to repair. It stings a little. A friendship of a few years isn’t just going to go away like a dream. I suppose it’s something I’ll come back to, when I’m ready. Or maybe not. I don’t know.
For now though, I guess all I can do, as that old song goes, is to follow the sun.
And A Few Other Things…
A very nice essay on 2666 by Francisco Goldman. [via The Elegant Variation]
Trailer for Shane Acker’s 9, produced by Tim Burton and Timur Bekmanbetov. [via Apple Quicktime Trailers] It looks amazing.
John Hodgman on close encounters of the third kind and love. [via TED]
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Harold Pinter, 1930-2008
Harold Pinter has passed away. [via The Elegant Variation]
No matter the magnitude of his contributions to theatre, Pinter has always struck me as an intensely intellectual and compassionate man who would (and did) fight for the the things he believed in. In writing, he was an unforgettable proposition and a force of nature. I will miss him, as all of us surely will.
Pinter, best known for his play The Birthday Party, was an immense figure in English theatre, and typically dealt with themes of identity in his works. His body of work was so unique that ‘Pinteresque’ has entered the modern dictionary. He also directed for theatre, television and film. He won the Nobel Prize in 2005. In that year, he also announced that he would stop writing plays, although he continued to be active in theatre as well as in politics. Aside from acting and directing, he was also involved in radio plays and television. He continued too to write poetry.
He died of cancer of the oesophagus, diagnosed in 2002.
A remarkable figure in modern literature, and–I have no doubt–a remarkable human being as well. Rest in peace, Mr. Pinter.
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Rain On Christmas
The Christ-child lay on Mary’s lap,
His hair was like a light.
(O weary, weary was the world,
But here is all aright.)The Christ-child stood at Mary’s knee,
His hair was like a crown,
And all the flowers looked up at Him
And all the stars looked down.G.K. Chesterton
It’s Christmas tomorrow. It’s raining like crazy here. I’m having a bad Christmas, but it doesn’t mean that you should too! There’s always Christmas cheer to be had, if you want it.
Our first Christmas here is a tad boring, without any fancy decorations or free things, but hey, I’m poor and poor in devising fancy things.We’ll just make do with a quote.
And three random thoughts about Christmas here: Christmas lights go up way to early, half of the people have no idea why folks celebrate Christmas anyway, and in place of snow we only ever get rain.
The first isn’t so bad this year though because I remember a year when they went up in September. But they aren’t really any pretty this year, though I have a flickr set going here.
I’m sure the second applies because people think only of shopping when they think of Christmas. Sometimes they also think of, well, a holiday.
And finally, we will never get snow here. And truth be told, I’ve never seen real snow before. I swear I will. One day. When it snows. (Duh.)
But let me not keep you.
So, whether you’re having a Merry, Manic or Moody (like me) Christmas, keep safe and don’t drink and drive. Eat lots of turkey. Unless of course you can’t eat turkey.
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Results
Results are out today and they are in fact terribly average. They also seem to tell me that I’m supposed to be in Arts, but I guess after moping around and refusing to commit to that change-in-course application, it’s too late now.
The results are:
- Organic Chemistry, B-
- Biotransport, B+ (the paper I messed up; was banking on this to pull things up)
- Biochemistry, B+
- Chinese Music, A
- Singapore History, A+
Hmm. Yes, I probably should have gone to Arts.
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Powerless Monday Blues
Nope
No electrical power today, so I guess I’ll be heading out. They’re changing the meters for the entire block, so they’re shutting down the power during office hours. I suppose this means I’ll have to do something other than staring blankly at a computer screen.
Synopses
I was right about Singapura in that that was a false start, so I’ve stopped writing. In the meantime, I’ve started to draft a plot document that I think might prove useful. The good news is that some plot details are starting to fit in, and also that there’s no hurry, since I’ve got about two-and-a-half years before my first draft, according to my self-imposed deadlines.
Meanwhile, I’ve tried my hand at the query letter so many times that I think I’ll just step back and leave it alone for a few days. I’ll probably resume after Christmas.
Lonely Days
And in these days, a canny, persistent sense of solitude dogs my senses. It seems that as Christmas draws near, I’m feeling worse and worse. I think part of it comes with being a little unsettled right now. So many things I should be doing but I don’t know how to. (My query letter screams in anguish at this point.) So many people I want to meet but probably never will ever again. (And this hurts.) So many events that I can only wait for even if I don’t want to. (Like my results.)
Just another Monday, I guess.
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Children’s Books
A couple of days ago, we moved out these two extremely old bookshelves of ours (we’re painting the house) to find a terrible roach infestation stuck somewhere in between them. Putting that fairly repulsive matter aside, I did (re)discover a few treasures from the old bookshelves.
It started with a four-volume edition of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales. There’s a bit of history in this in that it’s from my aunt (dated 1991), and two (I think) of the same set of books were given to my other cousins (two sets: one for a brother-sister pair like in my case, and I suppose there was probably another set to my aunt’s son). It’s a fairly nice edition, and in reasonably good condition, though the box didn’t exactly fare as well. (It still holds its shape, though.) The pages have turned a bit yellow and the books smelled of mothballs when I first removed them from the shelf. They’re otherwise in great shape, though.
They now occupy a nice spot on my personal shelf.
This spurred me to look for some of my favourites when I was younger. And by younger, I mean much younger. I came across books I had long grown out of, like the random bestsellers and thrillers that I used to read. Although I had no clear idea of what I was looking for, I had a sense of it, and those were obviously not the things I wanted to see. And after much searching, I came across Ffangs the Vampire Bat and the Kiss of Truth, which is a children’s book by Ted Hughes published in 1986. The illustrations are by Chris Riddell, whose name I had recently seen on the cover of a different edition of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book (where he did the illustrations instead of Dave McKean). I had won this book in 1994 for coming in third in class, and as I remember, this is the one book that I actually enjoyed out of all the books I had got from school.
For the most part, it’s written in (my memory might fail me here so I might be wrong about this) free verse, and has characters ranging from a talking rooster to a tiny woman. It has plenty of ghosts too, a ratty rat, and a giant whale. I remember this book fondly because the illustrations were and still are very lovely, and the text went down very easily even though sometimes I got lost and wasn’t quite sure why something was happening. (I was eight when I first read it.) There’s also a girl at the end (who delivers the kiss of truth in the title) with an asp in her mouth, which was a remarkably striking image for me, even if I didn’t know it back then.
I clutched the book to my chest and realised that I was looking for books like these.
Eventually, my search also turned up Asimov’s Little Library of Dinosaurs. It comes in a little box and has five tiny volumes each detailing a different class of dinosaur. I think it was this that began my love affair with dinosaurs because thereafter I bought plenty of dinosaur books for no particular reason. All of them were more complex than this set, but I still loved this the most. I suppose it’s true, what they say, that there’s always something special about that first one, huh?
The box is kind of coming apart, and the colours are all faded, but now it sits safely on my shelf and will hopefully not face further deterioration. The copyright says 1989, so this set is pretty old too. I was three years old when it was published, and Asimov was still alive back then.
The last of the books that I moved up to my shelf was Little Woolly Lamb by Tony Hutchings. This is the simplest of the books, marked for ages 1-4. It has 10 pages worth of content, with each page being a gigantic illustration (relative to the page size) accompanied by a sentence or two. In it, the little woolly lamb has no idea what sort of animal it is, so it goes around looking and trying to match its baa-baa with the sounds that the other animals make. I don’t know why I treasure this book so dearly. It’s just rather adorable, I suppose. The illustrations, in particular, have a charm to them that up to this day still makes me smile whenever I open up the book.
And those were the books I moved up, the ones I remembered with remarkable fondness. I didn’t have many children’s books. I stepped up quite quickly into the 10-13 year old books, and then into stuff that was probably too difficult for me even though I didn’t care. (So much so that I think by the time I hit 18 I found myself in some ways burnt out.) I think maybe that’s why I’ve always had an ambition to have a children’s section in my library. Part of it probably comes down to how I think children here don’t end up reading very good material because a reasonable amount of competence in language is considered acceptable (for administration and work). I never, for instance, read Alice until I was much older, which is all fine and dandy, except that I think maybe I could’ve have had that as part of my childhood.
That children’s section of my library is still very tiny now. I’m trying to be as selective as I can, to pick out the ones that I find really special. Apart from the two I’ve just rediscovered (I’ve placed the fairy tales in my literature section), I’ve got the classic Where The Wild Things Are, Gaiman’s The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish, and Raymond Briggs’s The Snowman.
(A note on The Snowman: It too was one of my favourites when I was very young, except that my edition was I think a Ladybird pocket book that used a few of the illustrations and basically summarised the entire story in a few sentences. A year or two ago, my sister bought me the original version from Randomhouse.)
It’ll grow, as children grow. Give it some time. In the meantime, I’m just happy to have found these little gems from my childhood.
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