Saturday Photo: corridors

Thursday Photo: marks the spot

Old Is New Again

Room Transfer

I’ve been busy changing rooms. My dad has orchestrated this event and we began shifting some of the things around (desk, computers, and bed from my old room; cupboards, desk and more cupboards from the current one) during the weekend. It took a little bit of clever thinking too because it’s easy to overlook things when you’re planning these complicated manoeuvres.

The process is far from complete, but I can basically survive in this new room just fine right now, because all the important things are over. I’m still short of my wardrobe, where I hide so many things, my bookshelf, and a rack that I think I might not keep. There’s also my whiteboard, but I’m not too concerned about that. I also want to start hanging up a couple of decorations.

To say this is a new room for me is I suppose just a figure of speech, since it had been my bedroom for many, many years. Since I can remember, in fact. I only shifted out to the other room somewhere when I was maybe 16? I can’t remember.

In the meantime, I’ve still to grow used to my new room. It’s not just the feeling of being in somewhere slightly unfamiliar. There are small little practicalities too, like how I realise there’s no desk now at my bedside (it’s moved to the tail end of my bed) so I can’t check my clock in the middle of the night and have no convenient place to leave my glasses. But yes, there is the slight sense of alienation that isn’t tied to any practical explanation. I can’t help noticing, for example, that even the wall’s a different colour. I’m sure that will happen in a week or so, especially if I get more of my things over. For now, I think I’ll just continue feeling like I’m in a hotel room.

Jukebox

I’m currently listening to:

• Embryonic by The Flaming Lips
• The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars by David Bowie
• Roseland NYC Live by Portishead
• On Tour With Eric Clapton by Delaney & Bonnie
• Mingus Ah Um by Charles Mingus

A mix of the old and new and the not-so-old-not-so-new-and-just-something-I-didn’t-get-to-at-first. I can see Delaney & Bonnie getting replaced in the next couple of weeks. Though I might be wrong. I usually am.

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Tuesday Photo: what hair you have

Quietly we watch the gloaming.

TV

I was watching a bit of the Channel 5 lawyer show, The Pupil. I found it fairly interesting. Most curiously, it reminded me of Channel 8 dramas. That is, it’s like a strange blend of the very well-established local Chinese drama form and the seemingly new and teeming local English drama. The script flowed well, for the most part. At least in my view. Of course, it gets away with it mostly because it’s a bunch of lawyers. Nothing wrong with that. I use that trick too. That said, sometimes someone pops in and says something completely unnatural, and it irks you a little bit.

Extremely dramatic though. Like The Practice or something. I’m sure all my lawyer friends will tell me that it’s nothing like that. The only thing that seems remotely realistic is the fact that there’s a lot of photocopying to be done. Of course, I’m just guessing. Maybe it really is all that exciting in real life. Then, damn, I should’ve been a lawyer.

Although, I think, I should say that the realism bit isn’t actually a problem for me. I’m just pointing it out. Almost no television (except documentaries, of course) would work without throwing realism out of the window. Even reality TV, as you will no doubt tell me.

I’ll keep my eye on this. I’ve been mildly impressed by the recent English shows in some respects. Fighting Spiders, I think, caught my attention for a while (though it was really long with plot threads that I didn’t really enjoy). Red Thread too (until I realised it was really a soap marketed as a gripping drama). The water polo one was completely not to my tastes. The Pupil seems okay, if there’s something about its stock characters that disturbs me.

Trine

Trine is fun. It somehow reminds me of LittleBigPlanet. Except it’s single-player. And you get to smack things. For a 5-dollar game, it’s certainly turning out to be quite excellent.

Tekkonkinkreet

I hope to get to watch Tekkonkinkreet. I’m looking for it. In the meantime, can anyone tell me if it’s any good?

Three Percent

A review of the latest Kenzaburo Oe book to be translated by Grove Press, The Changeling. [via Three Percent]

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Saturday Photo: beauty and the…

Assortment of things.

Sorry, Shakespeare

I was going to watch The Tempest. It’s in April. I was saving up for it. I even had a small fund established and had pretty much saved the money I needed for a good ticket. I think I’ll perish the thought, though. Firstly because almost no one around me will watch Shakespeare. Also, it does have a prohibitive price considering the fact that most of my friends are poor students. Finally, it is a little strange to ask random people out for Shakespeare.

I suppose the money can be put to good use in other places. For instance, I also have an Audubon fund running; I hope to obtain Birds Of America this year. And there are camera plans too, of course.

Things We Like

I finished my first run of Mass Effect 2 yesterday. Lovely stuff. Certainly like it better than the first installment, but while the finale sets you up for the third very successfully, it also feels a little unsatisfying in terms of the stand-alone game.

I’m moving onto Empire: Total War, but I’ve also tried my hand at some Trine, and I really enjoyed my time with it. That is, the first twenty minutes or so. I really dig the presentation, although for some curious reason my movie files don’t manage to complete. They just stop halfway as if they’d finished. No biggie, but still a small irritation.

Books

I ordered five books online. A stand-alone copy of The Tempest, the Everyman’s edition of Orwell’s Essays, a new copy of Flowers For Algernon, a China Mieville’s The City and The City, and the forthcoming paperback edition of Ishiguro’s Nocturnes (preordered, that is). I suppose that will be all for my book expenditure for a while.

Work

Not exactly fantastic, but at least I’ve got stuff done here and there. Having been writing so much, I’d forgotten just how short a thousand words actually is, so when I tried to draft one of my essays yesterday, I had to sort of crimp it down to make it fit. It’s also been a long time since I did any such writing, so I’m sure that first draft is fraught with awkward expressions and ugly sentences.

But I have two others to deal with and a project, and a test. Or two. So that’ll have to wait.

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Thursday Photo: a prince

Catching Up

As you will know, the past few days have been a little rough. It’s also been far busier than I anticipated. This implies that I’ve had less time than I would’ve thought I’d have. It also means that I’ve kind of had to readjust, to get back into some kind of working rhythm.

Well, that’s really the wrong tense. Because I’ve yet to do it. So, I have to get back into some kind of rhythm.

That starts today, I think. I hope. I have my fingers crossed very tightly. It’s not easy simply because there’s so much to do, and the sheer ahem variety just makes you lose your balance. I don’t know where to start, and I don’t know what I’ll have a realistic chance of completing.

I suppose I shouldn’t find it curious how completely unrelated things can get in the way of one another, but I do.

I’ll do what I can. Today I hope to sort out some administrative things, start work (planning, at least) on two essays, and invent some kind of contingency plan. The contingency plan is most worrying for me, mostly because it means that I’m running on faith and it could very well spell disaster. It’s for my project. Apparently, our current solution may not step up to the mark. I need a new one, and I need it fast. The fact that the preceding sentence is an action movie staple will hopefully mean that this will have an action movie happy ending.

Oh yes, I also need to write. But the uh volume flow rate will probably have to go down a bit in these more trying times. This is exactly what I’m always afraid of. Life has a habit of getting in the way. And some people say that as long as you’re disciplined enough, you will always make time for writing. While I think that’s true in a way, it also seems to suggest that you write in the same way no matter the circumstance, which can’t be true.

Of course, it’s not to say that I would’ve fared any better if things hadn’t turned out the way that they did, so let’s not worry about that and make the best of the remains of the… week.

(Ouch.)

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Goodbye, Old Friend

Over the Chinese New Year weekend, I bade goodbye to a friend, an old friend, a beautiful friend. It’s the reason things have been a bit out of order over here. It’s the reason this year has begun on a very strange note.

It’s been difficult, more so for some others than myself, surely, but difficult nonetheless.

I remember when the news hit on Saturday morning, and though we’d all in a way seen it coming, I can’t say that it wasn’t unexpected. I’d woken up that morning and I had done a whole bunch of things before my dad came by with his phone and asked if he was right about his interpretation of a message. He wasn’t, I told him, and just to be sure, he made a call to check; but by that time, it had all descended upon us like dust.

We did our best. In fact, I was fine until this afternoon. It was all extremely unreal, though. Friends, relatives, strangers, all under one banner. And I watched these half-familiar faces, faces from all those years ago. It humbles you to think that so much has happened to you in the time since then, and so much more must have happened to them all. And yet, in spite of this grand divergence, there they all were, there we all were, sitting together in a curious unity, talking about the things that didn’t really matter, and helping each other to move on. And he was there throughout it all, lying there, imbuing the occasion if not with blessings then simply with a purpose.

These are human things. You gather, you huddle, you hold each other because it’s the only thing you know how to do. This is how we live.

Today, I finally wept again. Before it, I made up my mind that I would do whatever I could not to, but of course it didn’t work. There were others who cried too, and some who didn’t, but in all of them you could see an exceptional and yet not uncommon courage. These things overtake us. They challenge us and humble us. They remind us of the little we can do. Yet, these people, they don’t give in. They hang in there. They remember and mourn, but refuse to be broken. It was a message that this shared friend of ours knew well. He didn’t always have the words for it, but if you had just met him, you’d know. You’d know.

Of course he wouldn’t want us to cry, but in a way, I was glad that I did, because through the tears, I saw his smile again.

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