Journal

神雕

Too Short

Got a haircut on Saturday. I think I preferred it when it was a mess. Still, I couldn’t just let it grow and grow and grow, and this is the hairstyle I had when I was in NS. It’ll grow back. It’ll take a while, but that means I don’t have to visit Barber Bob again so soon. Looking forward to having a mess on my head again, though.

Origami

I had dinner in a Japanese restaurant on Saturday and saw a diagram they had in their menu (or something) that provided instructions for folding an origami frog. When I got home, I went to work on something. After that stuff was done, I just thought of it again and decided that there’s always a first time.

Having no origami paper of my own, I took a sheet from a notepad I have on my desk and cut off a small fraction of it to make my square. Then, with some online instructions and advice from my sister, I ventured to fold a crane.

My first piece of paper was not nearly square enough, so I set that aside. I used a ruler and a pen to mark a line out and then cut a new square with my second sheet. This was almost perfect. I followed the instructions and realised then that I didn’t really know how to read the diagrams. Thankfully, my sister then found an instructional web video. With some advice, I managed to get to the penultimate step. Not realising that I had actually got to the penultimate step and not quite being able to proceed as described in both video and diagram, I accidentally tore my paper very slightly.

So I cut a third piece. This time, it was smooth sailing, except that I missed out one step (the last step when you have a square, and you fold inwards to make the subsequent step easier), and forcibly went ahead with the next step. Thankfully, this did not vex my plans and I was well on my way to the penultimate step again. When I had got there, it took me ages to figure out what I was looking at. Besides, I had already torn one at this very point and didn’t want to ruin this one too.

After what was probably a couple of minutes of tugging around the thing, I got my bearings and it became a bird. Except that it wasn’t quite the crane I was expecting and resembled a mythical beast of some sort. To spare me some embarrassment, let’s just say that I was intending to fold a 神雕.

Here it is. Don’t laugh.

Now to practise a bit more and find someone to give them to so that these paper creatures don’t take over my room.

Editing

I think I’ve a fairly final copy of The River, so I’m going to start work on submissions once I figure that out. In the mean time, it means I can focus on writing Bukit Merah.

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© 2009 a modest odyssey.