Passive-aggressive is such a dirty word

They say that people who look alike will tend to gravitate towards each other (a la the Becks-Posh complex).
Someone said that in Sec 3, your friends will start trying to appear more mature to the point where you don't really know them anymore.
I can't even tell who's genuine anymore.

Puh-lease. You don't think I'm going to burst into an emo tyrade of supposed injustice towards mankind, do you? ;)

Anyway, I have been thinking about the relevance of TKAM in our lives, and I see the recurring theme of Growing Up in everyone. I've never thought how 'stepping into other people's shoes' would make things so poignant and somewhat reassuring to me, and how odd that I've seemed to grow closer towards Scout and Jem throughout the course of my studying of the novel.

So, it pains me to see how judgmental and unforgiving some people can be. Can't I be a beacon of light that exclaims in the midst of their mad, passion-driven diatribes to stop and see things from their point of view?

Novocaine for the soul

I have just finished my literature portfolio.

I am so happy.

I am so overwhelmed.

I think I'm going to bawl. :'(

under the bearded barley

1) I want a domokun plushie!
2) Tonight will be the night when all literature students would be worrying about their literature portfolio. (Except Christine because "she had finished it in three days".)
3) I'm starting to associate Leonard with his very worn-out rubik's cube.
4) Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is really interesting to study...
5) I want to watch Goodbye Lenin.
6) I have not watched The Girl Who Leapt Through Time yet.
7) I want to go to Island Creamery!!!
8) Emo songs are interesting.
9) It has been raining for the past few days and I'm totally digging the awesome weather!
10) Xinfony is tomorrow and my sister has resorted to using post-it notes pasted around the house to remind her to pack in this and that.
11) I still can't appreciate Adam Lay Ybounden because it feels so... ugly.

Surfing On A Rocket

Isn't anyone free on Saturday?? Carpenter's Tools International is performing in Singapore but everyone's like, oh sorry I can't make it. Either that or they completely ignored my message.

Lord help me to have patience.

Choir today was sub-par: few were cooperating and a score went missing. Then I tried to fake my anger and exasperation, then I realized that I became really angry for a while, then I thought that being angry only impedes the choir's ability to express themselves freely. Ok, but that's not the point. There's this 'lost' generation that isn't as rooted to choir as us, and I'm desperate for them to put their hearts back into singing.

I love studying about the circulatory system! And the cardiac cycle and lymphatic system and systole, diastole, a and b antibodies, antigens on red blood cells and blood type imcompatibility!! It's so cool to finally figure out where the aorta and pulmonary veins were! Mr Rodrigues has this software with videos are that were slightly veering towards the side of cartoon violence, when they showed someone chopping something and accidently nipping his flesh from his fingertips. But anyway, bio lessons are so fun right now.

And Mingting told this really funny joke about the boy who liked imitating an electric fan. Seriously, it was so peng fu da xiao!

Love Your Abuser

Was Youtube-surfing after Shiyun told me about the video of their syf dance choreography.


I still prefer watching it live on stage though, since the sound of shuffling feet across wooden panelling during the silent parts lends a very organic feel to dance. My favourite part is the tableau! It can make people cry y'know.


Adam Lay Ybounden. We're doing this song. This is the Anderson Choir. (I'm having a Jennifer Tham moment.) Anyway, we have to complete this song by Wednesday now, and then revise This Marriage and Jaakobin Pojat.


Binama is a song about tidal waves, and it's really fun to do, I guess! So far, this is the best rendition I've heard (on Youtube, at least), because the choir had managed to push the dynamics to the maximum. The images of the 2004 Tsunami that recur are frightening.


And this is the trailer for The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, the movie that I so badly want to watch!!

I Run Faster Than You Can

Don't ask me what I'm doing up at 2 am. Actually—yes; ask me, and expect to become a punching bag of my grieviences and angst.

I've realized that it's not safe to force some kid's maturity into levelling up, since all he now has is a rather artificial and synthetic form of understanding that is clouded by a fog of naivety that seems to prevent the rooting of his true maturity which is, I believe, more than just saying stock phrases in some attempt to appear superior. It takes time to experience and understand things first-hand, than to listen to anecdotes and take them as The Truth And Nothing But The Truth.

My place in several camp committees has rendered my more controlled sleeping schedules of yore irrelevant.
My tea's gone cold.
UNSW's international subject competitions are getting less challenging to the point of frustration due to immense boredom. I no longer feel that I have achieved much even with a high distinction.
There is a strange sound coming from my window.
I want to sing Binama, Kasar, Daemon, Shima e, Ave Maria by Javier Busto, Sleep and This Marriage by Eric Whitacre, Aglepta and Shinjiru!! I think the only part of Adam Lay Ybounden that the audience prefers listening to is the ending (which is seriously quite nice) but the melodic line is quite difficult to appreciate, I guess.
I want to go to Island Creamery! Though the wait is long, the anticipation brings out the flavour of things, somehow.
I'm reading My Latest Grievience (which is written in a clever, witty way through the eyes of an intellectual who has lived her entire childhood out in a college), and Moon Tiger (written in an original way that borders slightly on experimental but still manages to engage instead of distancing the reader, which I find is so prevailant in modernist literature, that I decided to read The Waves in fits to prevent its poetic style of prose from influencing the oh-so-standard English essays that seem to prefer the conformist manner of writing that cramps whatever speck of creativity, which has to be then carefully weaved in with the rest of the words.)
Response to H.E.L.P. has been disappointing, to say the least. There are teachers who hastily tick the 'fail' box and then comment 'Enough said!', as if we have psychic abilities to understand reasons and then miraculously handle critique. If we need to make the survey form more specific, i.e. needing to remind them that we would appreciate constructive comments in the comments column, then I don't see any degree of professionalism at all, and all I see is pompousness and conceit. But to be fair, most survey forms had constructive comments, be it failing or passing the proposal, which has certainly helped alot. We'll see next year, I guess.

Here's Your Future

I miss Hong Kong...

(cue sad music)

Nayways I was reading about the whole Wu Xiao Kang photography hoax and I thought that public perception varies as much as the ebb and flow of the tide. Without trying sound too modernist, (or rather, postmodernist), I thought the pieces were a rather clever take on conceptual art, since the ideas presented took precedence over the aesthetic quality of the photographs. In other words, we are not shown a bunch of pretty pictures, but instead, a story and a message to bring home.

There's an online walkthrough here.

There's an intrisic poignancy about the piece (since we need to view the photographs collectively as there is a sense of continuation throughout the series) which causes the viewer to reflect about plight and illness. His method of catharsis causes us to pause and think of Xiao Kang as an ever more 'real' person, with the photographs progressing from slide to slide, invoking some interest in his messages through the inferences of his rather disturbed captions. Yet, Xiao Kang is only fictatious in the end, and there is a sudden longing to understand and interpret his photographs.

On a deeper level, I feel that labelling it as a hoax may have been the societal manifestations of backlash due to a sense of selfishness in upholding the pride that we're perceived to be upholding the pride of other people. The accusations of it exploiting schizophrenia could have been uncalled for, since who are we to be judging what should be a 'good' perception and what's a 'bad' depiction? What is their absolute, definite yardstick for something that is 'good', if not, 'accurate'?

At the end of the day, the group's attempt on conceptual art could just well be said to be something of a success, since the controversy it has provoked is on the lines of conceptual art. After all, René Magritte's The Treachery of Images and Damien Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death In The Mind Of Someone Living has been something of an icon in conceptual arts' hall of fame, and most have not existed without the company of societal backlash.

Laurence Weiner, conceptual artist, once remarked that "Once you know about a work of mine you own it. There's no way I can climb inside somebody's head and remove it." Which is something that I find to be so true. And I guess this is why I love art so much.

For All The Tanning Salons in Texas

While I'm not intending to be fractious (ha! today's Word of The Day), I need to find the answers to end a period of uncertainty which is strange, bitter and too inconspicuous and covered-up for my own liking. You probably don't get what I mean. But sometimes I feel deprived of information from what's going on around me, and yet I'm expected to understand and empathize with their own little problems as if I was gifted with the supreme power to infer and assume things one-dimensionally from only cryptic remarks and tableaus that frame the scenes. As if I might, perhaps, be telepathic enough to know. As if I wouldn't become a too over-assuming and presumptious gossip after being conditioned to lead a social life of playing guessing while being withheld from the truth.

So I sit in the audience, while yet still having some sort of emotional involvement with the characters and their passion, desires, worries, doubts, etc. and being a sort of catalyst in the process. From the velour of the cushioned seats, I'm tied up with their existence, and at times, happy to be dragged along with the curtains that close, disporting myself at the splintered edges that run across the stage, becoming part of the tableau, finally understanding the plot when things come round full-circle, feeling the melange of adreneline, tears and clamminess from nervous palms swirl around, circumventing around the intangible, even though the secretions are not mine.

Then I find myself trapped in the chasm bordering on despotism wondering why one would wish so much to become one of them. Wide-eyed, I stare back at the audience; eyelids clamped tightly shut, I decide to fade back into the dusty maroon of the velvet curtains. The spotlights become the judgemental eyes of societal circles, and I turn to my right to see raw emotions left undisturbed, caked with rouge, foundation and mascara to form a mask that becomes hard and protective—a sort of inner sanctum in the midst of faked, forced feelings. Lights shine on but they can't hide in the curtains. I become the onlooker, progressing to become the mimes in the background in faded light, to become fearful of more; how funny it becomes now. The scriptwriter decides to be his own character, the hand that hovers over these puppets becomes weary of his own creations.

(Damn it. Go figure!)

Jaakobin Pojat

St. Nick's choir. Ms Lim's conducting style is so distinctive. I think the hand actions at the ending is cool!

I Hear You Drowning But I'm Tied

Choir camp has ended, and I'm feeling so depressed because there's nothing else to look forward to now. But on the other hand, I'm very glad that it's finally over and I can get some sleep now thank you very much.

I think choir teachers are one of the best in the school because they are so concerned with our welfare, even out of choir. Sometimes, the judgemental teens that we are, we tend to focus more on shortcomings than what help and effort they have put in so far, and after the incidents today, I must say I'm very touched by all the help we've received. And no, I wasn't brainwashed to say this.

So anyway I'm really ever-grateful for the help that Mrs Yeap, Ms Quek and Mrs Khor gave us. Also, I'm thankful for all the effort and energy put in by the committee, even though we were so new and inexperienced; Royson for the hours spent worrying about the meals for everyone, Mingting for helping me make announcements because apparently no one can detect low-frequency speech and for being so Mingting-like, Gavin for his sense and advice, Angeline for being the long-suffering treasurer, Xinyi for uplifting everyone's spirits (and forking out nearly 50 bucks for the sashes!), Marcus for his funky songs and quirky humour, Abigail for being so enthusiastic and eager to help, Nicholas for being the efficient scorekeeper that he was, Leonard for being the most stable one and bringing his Rubik's cube to curb our insanity induced by the lack of sleep, Gwen for her cool camera and the really cool I-can't-stand-your-nonsense attitude with annoying people which made planning smoother, Elizabeth for her amazing efficiency and discipline and her provision of pens, Vivian for keeping Royson under control (!) and ensuring that all the meals go on smoothly, Wendy for her really contagious enthusiasm and energy, Stuart for being, well, Stuart-ish and effervescent, Tengyong for his extreme coolness, and last but definitely not the least, Colin who is probably the most involved sec 1 I've ever seen!

And very very very importantly, the sec 4s turned up!! Minghui, Olivia, Jialin, Germaine, Weihui, Denise, Phoebe, Wanling, Yapning, Danson, Qinghao, Brandon, Sherman, Peiyu, Yuying, Jamie, Fangfang and Shijie! Without them, the committee would have had mental and emotional breakdowns by the second day. Or at least, I would have. (At this point I'm like, Oh man I'm so going to miss them.)

Oh yes and I'm so happy that I don't have to attend the model ASEAN summit now :D My throat's still sore anyway.