Meanwhile, I’ve spent my time doing up photos, recovering data, and streamlining my original usage experience. I figured that a new computer was a good time to remove some of the trash, that is, some of the stuff I left hanging around after initially feeling excited about. I’ve packed up my feeds, for instance, and also cut down on my applications. Stuff like that.

Photos took a long while, but it certainly was a lot faster than I thought it would be. That’s down to the new specs, I reckon. I went through 1,500 photos in about 1.5 days. I wasn’t left with too many after that, which is probably a good sign, but even better is how efficient the whole thing is now.

As for recovering data, I’ve been reasonably successful. I’ve been unable to retrieve a tiny fraction of it (admin rights, and I’m too lazy to figure out a workaround), but it’s okay. It does encourage me towards a more complete fresh start anyway.

Bidding for subjects has started, an event that heralds the beginning of school. Competition is fierce this year, so I hope I get what I’m looking for.

Oh and in equally unrelated news, I’ve finished Ishiguro’s Nocturnes.

Meanwhile, I’m going to get back to fixing up the compuer. It is good to listen to music with something other than YouTube and lousy laptop speakers.

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It reminded me of several things, not the least of which is the fact that that’ll be the rest of us in a year or so, moving on with our lives and probably saying our thank-yous and goodbyes as we should. I had to learn the hard way that things never stay the same, and even if I have, sometimes you can’t help feeling that it would be nice if they did, just for a little while.

Change can be frightening, mostly because it implies the unknown. Where will I be in a year? What will happen to us?  How will I remember these things and people around me? How will I be remembered? Will I be remembered at all? There’s a mild existentialist desperation involved in it, I suppose, kind of like literally grasping at straws and trying to hang onto the bits and pieces of your life.

And sometimes it seems to me as though it would be better if we could make these goodbyes more final. If we could really leave things behind, we would stop struggling to hang on. That is, sometimes I think I shouldn’t keep fighting, shouldn’t persist in trying to keep up with the people around me. I’ve only ever succeeded a couple of times in doing so, I think, and in those cases, only marginally. It’s just so difficult to get involved in someone else’s life the moment he or she leaves your immediate sphere of interaction. As one of those people would say, it’s just the way life is.

That I keep making such promises, therefore, only serves to highlight how futile it all is. And perhaps there is a point to be made here about the inherent futility of our faculties of memory and the powerless character of our lives, but let’s not worry about that. Let’s just say that I think we can only try to hang onto ourselves and our friendships, because if we didn’t, it just seems like throwing in the towel on something that could otherwise be brilliant.

That is, you can’t live in apathy, and neither can you live in fear.

July never seemed so strange, in the words of a certain Mr. Meloy and the irresistible Decemberists. They’re words that have never seemed more appropriate for  me, and yet I look at it and I think it’s probably just another season of change, like the ones that have come before and the ones that have yet to.

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The book club is not deceased. It came back to life the week I went missing from the internet. It’s certainly not what I would call fighting fit, but I guess there’s a shred of hope. Also, I’m lagging behind and better try to catch up.

Still Dead

My desktop, however, has not managed a similar resurrection. That accounts for most of the disruptions to my everyday life. Take, for example, the long-since dusty photo feature at the top of the main page here.

I have also taken to listening to music off of Youtube on my crappy notebook speakers. That’s the double whammy of losing your desktop and your earphones at one go.

Picky

I have to start picking my subjects. Hmm. I’m thinking about doing a minor, but I’m not too convinced about that because it involves something of a gamble since I’m not sure how well I’ll do in those, and it also involves doing a couple of extra subjects. We’ll see.

Contentious Sports

Oh I watched the World Cup finals. It was in fact the only full match of the 2010 World Cup that I watched. I thought it was a poor game and a terrible advertisement for football. Too little football and too much of histrionics.

I also disagree with what most of the press (and football legends) have been saying in that the Dutch were rough and totally anti-football. Sure, there were a number of bad tackles but I chalk that down to nerves. The anti-football claims are especially irksome because, if anything, the Dutch attacked as much as if not more than the Spanish. It was a reasonably positive performance, to be fair.

On the other hand, the Spanish team disgusted me sometimes. Well, not the team as a whole, but I wasn’t convinced about a number of the fouls they were awarded. I was also surprised to see Iniesta still on the pitch because I remember retaliation being a red-card offence. Most of all, Busquets’s constant complaining and provoking seemed to characterise the darker side of a mentally manipulative Spanish team.

But that’s the way football is. It’s so easy to have an opinion and so easy to pick a side. Perhaps the most objective thing that can be said about the match is that it was a poor one and we should all just forget about it as soon as possible.

Quote

“I don’t think that people accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable. It seems like religion and myth were invented against that, trying to make sense out of it.”

David Lynch.

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A few points of interest will follow:

I watched the entire Bourne trilogy on the flight back.

I lost my earphones while abroad. That was and still is rather distressing. Oh well.

I have bound my first draft of Singapura so I can begin reading it.

The desktop appears to have  finally conked out. Unlike previous occasions, it decided that it would not come back to life this time. This makes me a sad panda.

It’s not the only thing that died; I will have to pronounce the book club dead very soon too.

Plenty of souvenirs to sort out. I’ll be doing that shortly. I don’t know if I have more friends that I have souvenirs or that I have fewer friends than souvenirs. I’m sure I don’t have the exact number. I hope I’ve brought back interesting souvenirs.

I have eight tanukis in total now. (I bought a set that’s actually of the Seven Lucky Gods, except in Tanuki form.)

I realise I can’t do my photos because all of my software is on my desktop, and that has died. We’ll have to wait a bit I guess.

What’s kind of fitting, in a way, is that I was just about to get a new desktop.

Okay, better get cracking on those souvenirs. It’s good to be back.

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• Is it any good?

Probably the most obvious question anyone can ask. The trick here is that it isn’t usually accompanied by the most obvious answer. It’s certainly tends to be less good than you would want it to be, but how far is it from that standard that you hold for yourself? More importantly, perhaps, how do you measure stuff like this?

• Did I accomplish what I wanted to accomplish?

This time, I’m not very sure, primarily because this project hasn’t been as straightforward as I thought it would be. This is probably the most immediate question whenever I get done with anything, and in this case, it can only be answered when I take a second look at it.

• What exactly did I accomplish anyway?

Assuming, of course, that I accomplished anything in the first place. The icky bit about this question is that I don’t like to deal so much with the grand ambition of this or that, but rather the act of writing itself. You shouldn’t let your designs control you, in a way. So it’s not exactly phrased very well. I think a better question would be what I’ve managed to say with what I’ve written.

That applies for the previous question too. Have I said what I wanted to say?

• Is it frivolous?

This question has been popping up with increasing frequency. There is a narrow margin of difference between the absurd and the frivolous. I have not managed this line very well.

• Who would want to read this?

Often, I have no idea. I’m not sure if it actually matters to answer this.

• Why isn’t it the same as what I saw in my head?

Oh. It’s usually easy to answer this. The main reason, I think, is that ideas and images occur to you in a flash (in a manner of speaking), whereas writing takes ages in comparison. There’s also the small problem that I don’t write as well as my imagination would want me to. And so on.

• What’s the difference?

That is, did it change for an appreciably justified reason? Or did it just change because I didn’t manage to live up to the promise?

In the end, most of these questions will just remain questions. I’ll get to work and attempt to master the project eventually; whether or not I succeed is a different story. Answering the questions is probably not all that necessary, yet they get asked time and again. Funny thing, that.

A side note: On Wednesday, my mom told me she was going to dye her hair, as she always does, because the white strands had been popping up. And I just thought to myself, One day, she’s going to stop dyeing her hair. But until that day, keep fighting, mom!

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I didn’t do completely nothing, though. (To be fair, I was Pericles attempting to overwhelm the world with my awe-inspiring culture.) I drafted emails and picked out my choices for my FYP. I also tried watching some things. I also tidied up my computer a bit.

(Yeah, Civilization.)

I got the first draft printed on Monday and am looking to bind it. I’m not sure what I’m going to do–whether I’ll have people to test it, whether I’m putting myself on any kind of schedule, et cetera. I might take this week and even the next to think about it.

I’m not intending to get too much done these couple of weeks though. Not work, not admin, not even friends. I just want the week to go by like a gondola in Venice. That’s an awful simile. I will stop using similes for today.

Patti Smith is awesome, by the way. Have I ever told you that? I’m pretty sure you’ll see that sentence again in the next six months.

Meanwhile, you can donate to the David Lynch documentary project and get your choice of a poster print, a T-shirt, or a tote bag. [via LYNCHthreePROJECT]

Mean-also-while, you can disguise your Kindle as a Moleskine notebook. [via Amazon] I suppose it’s meant to protect it from the scratches, but it still seems a little… odd to me.

Mean-triple-while, scenes from G20. [via [daily dose of imagery]]

Right, off to get a few things sorted.

Things are happening so fast, though. It’s already the end of June and July is upon us.

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Yesterday at about 3p.m., I concluded work on the first draft of my current project, Singapura. I made a printable copy thereafter, though I haven’t got to printing and binding yet.

So that concludes about six or seven months’ worth of writing.

Now I just want to take a good long break and enjoy what’s left of the holidays. I have some movies to watch, some games to play, some people to meet, and some books to read.

Of course it won’t be all play, because there are a few things I have to take care of. I need to follow up on this and that, start making preparations for the school term, complete some chores, and so on.

And of course there’ll come the time when I ask what I’ve actually managed to accomplished, having written all of this. I don’t actually know and I don’t want to think about that right now. But we’ll get to it.

And of course, I’ll print. And edit. And print. And edit again. And so on.

But for now, it’s time for a break.

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Today begins a series of meet-ups over the course of the next two or three days. I’m looking forward just to not working. I’m in the final stretch and I really need to take my mind off of it. In a sense, I don’t want to mess up the last bits and have to do them from scratch a second time.

It’s mostly eating and walking around, though I think I may have to keep my eye open and do a bit of shopping. I’m not very sure how it’s all going to work out, but I’m sure that’s not actually a big problem. It’ll work out!

Meanwhile, as I stitch up this first draft, I’ve got to get to emailing to see where my first project is.

FYP

I also have to start picking my final-year project. I’ve printed the list out and narrowed it down slightly, but only very slightly, and greater narrowing-down must take place shortly.

Music

Recent things on my jukebox: Radiohead’s Hail To The Thief., Bowie’s Hunky Dory, Arcadi Volodos playing Liszt, Sonic Youth’s The Destroyed Room, Buddy Guy’s Skin Deep, and Coltrane’s Blue Train.

Book Club

Book club appears to be on its last legs.

World Cup

No, I don’t usually talk about sports here, but this World Cup appears to be turning into a farce of some sort. The refereeing appears to be horrible; the playacting is in its full glory; BZZZZZZZZ; the goal count is pretty low; many teams appear to be playing some kind of anti-football; and then there’s this French mess as well as discontent in the English camp. The surprise results are sort of nice, but that’s about it.

Admittedly, the sport is too big to suffer too heavily from this, but you have to wonder if any of this is going to be on FIFA’s meeting agendas. And even then, there’s no guarantee that anything is going to be happen. The sport has had the opportunity to improve refereeing and has flatly declined the use of more referees and new technologies. Governing bodies also don’t seem too interested in dealing with playacting. And the inflated egos of players in the past ten years will only worsen with the power shift towards them.

It’s a sport that I love watching, but certainly an embarrassing one at times.

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It’s going to be a busy week. I have quite a few people to meet in the next ten days or so and I’m afraid I’m going to have to procrastinate with a couple of them, unfortunately. That doesn’t happen very often. I’m not usually this much of a, uh, people person, in that sense. Still, after all the work last week, it’s nice to actually meet people again.

Speaking of work, today I intend to finish up with the second part of the current project. I look at the manuscript in three parts, and I’ve done about 70% of the third part and 90% of the second, so I’m hoping to complete the second in order to turn my attentions fully to the last. I have a sort of self-imposed deadline with regards to all of this, and I’m not sure if I’m on schedule, but I’m taking it one step at a time, really. It’s hard to tell, these things, and my predictions would be little more than wild guesses.

I have to balance all of this, of course, with (as I said) meeting up with people, and also with a number of chores. And meanwhile, I hope to ensure a certain degree of entertainment and enjoyment during these supposed holiday weeks, so I’m trying to make space for that too. It’s not a balancing act I’m confident of pulling off, but it’s not as if I’ve got much of a choice.

So it’s a brand new week! Sure, the world looks pretty sombre these days (well, it kind of always does, doesn’t it?) but that’s no excuse not to make the best of it. So, in the old and famous words, go out and get her.

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Hear Joyce read a bit of Finnegans Wake to you. [via UbuWeb Sound, go to "Anna Livia Plurabelle"]

Bloomsday in Brooklyn. [via The Book Bench]

The heirs of Ulysses. [The Daily Beast, via The Millions]

Brian Donnelly on Declan Kiberd’s Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living. [via dublin review of books]

Sylvia Beach and Margaret Anderson: the two women behind Ulysses. [via The Barnes & Noble Review]

Biography of James Joyce. [via themodernworld, pdf]

And as they say, last but not least, stock footage of Joyce. [via YouTube]

The commentary is hilarious: “The author of Ulysses was a small, thin, unathletic man with very bad eyes. When in the course of their drinking he ran into any sort of belligerence, he would jump behind his powerful friend and shout, Deal with him, Hemingway! Deal with him!”

Hope you had a great Bloomsday!

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