After Christmas

I'm back from YF camp, Sunday School Musical rehearsals, and recovering from the long sleepless nights of writing christmas cards. I'm also blogging on my iMac, which has awakened from its coma and is now the proverbial blank slate.

I'm also feeling a strong urge to return to the nineties. But it's a very complicated manifestation of an emotion so shan't think too much about it.

Sunday School Musical was great! I was supposed to paste posters around the hall, and create the backstage, but was soon promoted to Set Extra! My line was something about ordering food in KFC. It was somewhat exciting, albeit in a relatively mediocre way, but still I'm thankful for that since this holiday season has been a rather disappointing one.

So, things I'm thankful for: the people I grew up with all my life but didn't give much thought about when we were younger, the friends around me who demand I keep the 5th of January free, and the camp that has revealed how personal God is to me.

(I'm also thankful that Persepolis will be released in cinemas next year, but I don't want to appear as shallow as a kiddy pool, right?)

Have an awesome new year ahead! :)

Briefly, the Debate Chalet

Not a good time to blog about it because I'm sleep-deprived and slowly zombifying, but here's a picture of our carb-laden dinner.

Some Taipei Photos

Shihlin Night Market. That place suffers from the perpetual crowd. If you've been to Bangkok and thought the night markets there were congested enough, wait till you enter the world's largest mosh pit. Every night is a Guinness Record attempt to compact as many people into a confined space and test the carrying capacity of the ground on which it sloshes itself on with a disconcerting array of neon lights.





Of course, how could I not visit Taipei 101? We didn't go up though, since it was a tad too overpriced in my opinion, and going up a tall building, even the world's tallest, is not exactly a life-altering experience.



The main Eslite Bookstore has got me set for another return trip. Think of Borders, Kinokuniya, HMV, Far East Plaza and Haji Lane stacked on each other and lovingly adorned with Christmas lights and with a large emphasis on nordic/scandinavian design. Most of the books were in traditional chinese, but the simplified chinese and english sections were quite modest as well, with titles that I couldn't find stocked at the literature section of borders/kino in Singapore. My sister and I bought a Holga camera and 2 chinese books. Hers was a book by François Sagan that was translated into simplified chinese. Following that, we looked around the comme des garcons boutique on the ground level, where all the clothes were sorted by their colours into racks of reds and blacks. It was so cool. Although that would have been an understatement.

More resolutions to renege

I've been busy preparing for YF camp. I have prepared encouragement gifts, perfected mystery Encourager techniques, brought cards and mahjong paper for encouragement corner and I can safely say that I won't face the same encouragement-corner disaster of 2005 when I forgot to bring my candy.

Now all I have left to do tomorrow morning before 11.30 am is to prepare worship for wednesday and do up my picture and cartoon for the encouragement corner.

And only previously, my family had a "discussion" on the music choices of my sister and I where I had to bring up the seemingly foreign concept of teenagers' discretion. That was an hour taken away from me as I wilted in my chair.

Anyway, I haven't blogged about Taipei yet. (shame) But it can be summarized into walking, eating, taking the Taipei MRT, walking, then eating, then walking some more. I'm glad I managed to get some exercise by walking. Really, really glad. I gained a few kgs in Hong Kong and was determined not to let that happen again.

So at this point in time, I'm like "my 16th birthday is in a month's time but no one cares and I kinda don't care about it too" and "I'm so freaking depressed because Apple is screwing up my computer and replacing the entire hard drive without checking software issues first and not to mention retrieving my photos and music and everything I think I'm going to cry" and "wth I still have so much work left but everyone's buzzing around me telling me to do stock taking/to help burn a cd/to design christmas cards/to bake freaking brownies/to organize the bicultural exchange exhibition booth/to plan extra practices/to lead this and lead that, so stop overloading me already".

Have I met another person facing the same problems that I have in school? Heck, no. I have not seen anyone else leading a CCA with totally apathetic members and ambitious teachers, being in a love/hate relationship with a board since sec 1, losing 4 years' worth of photographs, 11 gigs of music, hundreds of bookmarked pages, folders and folders of designs, being plagued by a fear of mediocrity in a class full of brains, living in the shadows of the generations before you, being constantly taunted unjustly, having to bounce back up because there's no choice but to put on a stupid brave manly facade, listening to the problems of other people who carry the weight of the world on their shoulders, trying to say no but sadly bound by societal obligations and trying to lead a godly life at the same time.

Yes, I am wallowing in self-pity once again, but that's all I do on this blog now, right? Let's have nature take its course, let this blog decompose into a state of unintelligent drivel, let tendrils and creepers (and lianas and rattans) engulf and suffocate my misery away, etc.

Ok this is what I have been doing this week, summarized into ridiculously nonindicative minute chunks.

1) Concert at PLMGS
2) VJC invitationals
3) Shiyun's birthday
4) Khai Soon's birthday
5) Grandpa's birthday
6) Stock-taking at bbc
7) Bag-packing

And please sms me your preferred gift from Taiwan or else I'll randomly assign gifts to you on a first-come-first serve basis.

And I'm going for a flu jab tomorrow. Not that I'm morbidly afraid of needles or anything.

And now, to tacitly justify the little time I can spend online now that the nice people at Apple will only return my computer to me on Friday;

When life gives you lemons, well, make some lemonade. Not quite for Nokia and Universal which plan to launch a digital-download service that promises to offer buyers of selected Nokia phones free and unlimited downloads of Universal recordings. However, in the face of blatant contraventions of copyright laws, Nokia and Universal, in all their ambition and expediency, have decided to make a Nigella Lawson-esque Lemon-infused meringue with all that they've got.

Although relatively young, the digital music industry has been blooming, albeit being a rather monopolistic one dominated by Apple's iTunes Music Store. Furthermore, the closure of Napster, a free digital music download service, has catalyzed a reactionary response that has sparked greater awareness of online piracy and the effect this has on the stakeholders involved; in this case, the musicians, the recording companies, and the consumer base.

Due to the pressing need to fulfill the physiological level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, ergo sleep, I have chosen to focus on the cultural shifts in the Digital Age. While not entirely bad in itself since it is reflective of a non-stagnating society which theorists say is crucial for the evolution of civilization, such shifts in mindsets offer me an oft-daunting opportunity to look at the status quo from a Christian perspective, which leaves me with the haunting question of whether it's right to steal music if (a) I face little or no criminal charges (b) Media conglomerates are bending to my level and offering me free downloads already, in any case.

According to the Bible, it is very obviously a sin to steal. Likewise, with other secular cultural constructs, it's a crime to steal. As if to complicate matters, we start to wonder about the intangible fine line that separates intellectual property from concrete and physical goods, and at this point, my viewpoint is divergent from that of a secular angle because in spite of popular consensus, I do not desensitize my moral compass.

Let's augment this basicity with a secular angle, that it's only ethical that you own the exclusive right to your own music lest you give it up in a recording contract to the company. This is where the responsibility of the media company comes in as the conscience of a society too caught up in a whirlwind of consumerism to care for the ethical dimension to their actions: are the messages that the media companies send healthy for the creative climate in the industry? Does it reflect the value system that the artists uphold? Does it exacerbate the problem of piracy, or does it implicitly decrimininalize it altogether?

Yawn. Let me stop here, please. The lack of structure clearly reflects my state of mind, yet I'm aiming to offer as much insight as I can.