Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Thursday, August 26, 2010
woo-wooo-wooooo. woo-woo-woooooooooo.
PFFT. some people will believe anything. I mean, obviously the CIA weren't imaginative enough to make up dinosaurs. Besides that, one major flaw with that argument, how would The Doctor exist without time travel?
QED lor.
Monday, August 16, 2010
i miss my blue sister, so wide and welcoming and mad.
i miss the Andaman sea.
it's been an odd sort of year. a lot of it seems to have happened inside my mind. probably should have chronicled it better. ah well.
i've been sketching things lately. they kinda look like storyboards. or comics.
maybe that's where the words have been running off to.
i should care more, but it's a sunday night, and the mean reds are laying in wait for tomorrow.
good night, universe. keep doing that thing you do so well. especially the existing part, it's my favourite.
it's been an odd sort of year. a lot of it seems to have happened inside my mind. probably should have chronicled it better. ah well.
i've been sketching things lately. they kinda look like storyboards. or comics.
maybe that's where the words have been running off to.
i should care more, but it's a sunday night, and the mean reds are laying in wait for tomorrow.
good night, universe. keep doing that thing you do so well. especially the existing part, it's my favourite.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
my ego just level'd up!
look what i just discovered!
My favourite long jog-walk-curse route is 9.17KM! (That is super long for me, in case you're wondering how to react.)
Granted, I walk a fair bit in the middle to recover. Mapmyrun.com wins my whee because it's SO gratifying to finally realise that I shouldn't be cheesed off when I start flagging on the turn around Fort Canning. Look, it's already 2++KM in! Besides, if I pushed past that bit, I get a second wind around UE Square.
Strangely enough, I used to hit my groove at the 1.5km and 3km mark too, back when I was running up to 9 times a week. This favourite route I just mapped however, I probably only pound once a month, give or take a month. hehehe.
No, I didn't map my run so that I can procrastinate actually putting my shoes on until it gets too late to run at all, what do you think I am, a loser who flags around 2++KM?
SNORT. Now, about that yellow ribbon run...
My favourite long jog-walk-curse route is 9.17KM! (That is super long for me, in case you're wondering how to react.)
Granted, I walk a fair bit in the middle to recover. Mapmyrun.com wins my whee because it's SO gratifying to finally realise that I shouldn't be cheesed off when I start flagging on the turn around Fort Canning. Look, it's already 2++KM in! Besides, if I pushed past that bit, I get a second wind around UE Square.
Strangely enough, I used to hit my groove at the 1.5km and 3km mark too, back when I was running up to 9 times a week. This favourite route I just mapped however, I probably only pound once a month, give or take a month. hehehe.
No, I didn't map my run so that I can procrastinate actually putting my shoes on until it gets too late to run at all, what do you think I am, a loser who flags around 2++KM?
SNORT. Now, about that yellow ribbon run...
Monday, May 3, 2010
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
May I show you something personally embarrassing?
Harlan Ellison -- Speculative Fiction writer who has more Nebulas, Hugos & Edgars Awards than you can build a table of useful height with.
Right where he starts flapping his arms, I felt my ears flush red and like I should apologise. A lot. Except he looks like he might make fun of my snivelling too. And oh, it will be funny.
Make of it what you will.
To create this "Death self," the two performers devised a piece in which they connected their mouths and took in each other's exhaled breaths until they had used up all of the available oxygen. Seventeen minutes after the beginning of the performance they both fell to the floor unconscious, their lungs having filled with carbon dioxide. This personal piece explored the idea of an individual's ability to absorb the life of another person, exchanging and destroying it.- Marina Abramović & Ulay
A description of one of the projects they did together in the 70s
Monday, April 26, 2010
And the world has no need of the songs that we sang.
Essential reading for everyone.
And especially, I think, if you are in any way a creator or lover of art, although it is more specific to music. It's long, but Don't Panic. It's like Stephen King books, very painful dropped on your feet, but so compelling that it isn't hard to read it through at all.
Before you read this, go here and play this behind it. Free soundtrack to tears, and you don't even have to be American this time!
It will make sense (and be name-checked) about a third of the way in, I promise.
Dr. Karl Paulnack’s Welcome Address to parents of incoming students, September 2004
“One of my parents’ deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician… I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated… I still remember my mother’s remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school. She said, “You’re wasting your SAT scores!” On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they loved music: they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren’t really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the “arts and entertainment” section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it’s the opposite… Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.
One of the first cultures to articulate how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you: the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.
One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940 and imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp.
He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose, and fortunate to have musician colleagues in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist. Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.
Given what we have since learned about life in the Nazi camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture — why would anyone bother with music? And yet even from the concentration camps we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn’t just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, “I am alive, and my life has meaning.”
In September of 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. On the morning of September 12, 2001 I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn’t this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.
And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day.
At least in my neighborhood, we didn’t shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn’t play cards to pass the time, we didn’t watch TV, we didn’t shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, on the very evening of September 11th, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang “We Shall Overcome.” Lots of people sang “America the Beautiful.” The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.
From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pastime. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can’t with our minds.
Some of you may know Samuel Barber’s heart wrenchingly beautiful piece “Adagio for Strings.” If you don’t know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie “Platoon,” a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn’t know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what’s really going on inside us the way a good therapist does.
Very few of you have ever been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but with few exceptions there is some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings-people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there’s some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn’t good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can’t talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn’t happen that way. The Greeks. Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects.
I’ll give you one more example. The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in a small Mid-western town a few years ago.
I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland’s Sonata, which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland’s, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.
Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier. Even in his 70’s it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn’t the first time I’ve heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.
When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.
What he told us was this: “During World War II I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team’s planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute cords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn’t understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?”
Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. The concert in the nursing home was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.
The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this: “If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you’d take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at 2 AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you’re going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.
“You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used cars. I’m not an entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.
“Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music, I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives.”
And especially, I think, if you are in any way a creator or lover of art, although it is more specific to music. It's long, but Don't Panic. It's like Stephen King books, very painful dropped on your feet, but so compelling that it isn't hard to read it through at all.
Before you read this, go here and play this behind it. Free soundtrack to tears, and you don't even have to be American this time!
It will make sense (and be name-checked) about a third of the way in, I promise.
Why Music Matters
Karl Paulnack, Director, Music Division
The Boston Conservatory
Karl Paulnack, Director, Music Division
The Boston Conservatory
Dr. Karl Paulnack’s Welcome Address to parents of incoming students, September 2004
“One of my parents’ deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician… I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated… I still remember my mother’s remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school. She said, “You’re wasting your SAT scores!” On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they loved music: they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren’t really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the “arts and entertainment” section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it’s the opposite… Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.
One of the first cultures to articulate how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you: the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.
One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940 and imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp.
He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose, and fortunate to have musician colleagues in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist. Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.
Given what we have since learned about life in the Nazi camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture — why would anyone bother with music? And yet even from the concentration camps we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn’t just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, “I am alive, and my life has meaning.”
In September of 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. On the morning of September 12, 2001 I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn’t this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.
And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day.
At least in my neighborhood, we didn’t shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn’t play cards to pass the time, we didn’t watch TV, we didn’t shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, on the very evening of September 11th, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang “We Shall Overcome.” Lots of people sang “America the Beautiful.” The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.
From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pastime. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can’t with our minds.
Some of you may know Samuel Barber’s heart wrenchingly beautiful piece “Adagio for Strings.” If you don’t know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie “Platoon,” a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn’t know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what’s really going on inside us the way a good therapist does.
Very few of you have ever been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but with few exceptions there is some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings-people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there’s some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn’t good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can’t talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn’t happen that way. The Greeks. Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects.
I’ll give you one more example. The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in a small Mid-western town a few years ago.
I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland’s Sonata, which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland’s, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.
Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier. Even in his 70’s it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn’t the first time I’ve heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.
When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.
What he told us was this: “During World War II I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team’s planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute cords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn’t understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?”
Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. The concert in the nursing home was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.
The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this: “If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you’d take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at 2 AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you’re going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.
“You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used cars. I’m not an entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.
“Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music, I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives.”
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Buttons.
This creepy man makes me puppy-dog eager to skip the bullshit experiments and just get on with being 49 and like this.
Friday, April 23, 2010
Brat bound to the coasts & swimming pools.
Some days i hate my own guts.
Hate the body I was born in, the choices I have made, the constant procrastination, the paralysing ambivalence, the dude that my mother wishes was a daughter.
There's a sweet spot of balancing sugar and spice and everything nice I can't hit because I don't fucking want to. I can dial back 9 months and decide I hate the cute colleague who always made sure I remembered I was sitting down in a skirt, not pants. It's like handing back my baby to the stock and plonking down a crocodile in the crib.
I'm pissed off I didn't inherit enough money to buy out NASA, so now I can't have the moons and the stars by stomping my foot. I resent having to commit a full hand before seeing a pay-off in 2-5 years, if I'm lucky. I resent the small freedom I have to choose what to do, when spectrums of options are closed to me. I don't want to see anyone at all, or explain how uneasy I am or have another wikipedia-trained psychoanalyst try to sort me out, and I especially just want to rot in peace alone, so stop fucking calling me all the time, nice friends! I'm sick of standing around feeling like an idiot, and I don't want witnesses, thank you very much, wankers.
Then, on enough of those some days, I can shake it off.
Whoa, wow, what the hell, M? Fuck - that's enough - obviously Erica Jong and Ben and Jerry are an unholy threesome. Fucking middle-class, feminine angst you never knew you had until you unearth it when digging for that sugary vein of fudge brownie. Wah lau, total respectable nineteenth century Viennese woman, you know?
Hate the body I was born in, the choices I have made, the constant procrastination, the paralysing ambivalence, the dude that my mother wishes was a daughter.
There's a sweet spot of balancing sugar and spice and everything nice I can't hit because I don't fucking want to. I can dial back 9 months and decide I hate the cute colleague who always made sure I remembered I was sitting down in a skirt, not pants. It's like handing back my baby to the stock and plonking down a crocodile in the crib.
I'm pissed off I didn't inherit enough money to buy out NASA, so now I can't have the moons and the stars by stomping my foot. I resent having to commit a full hand before seeing a pay-off in 2-5 years, if I'm lucky. I resent the small freedom I have to choose what to do, when spectrums of options are closed to me. I don't want to see anyone at all, or explain how uneasy I am or have another wikipedia-trained psychoanalyst try to sort me out, and I especially just want to rot in peace alone, so stop fucking calling me all the time, nice friends! I'm sick of standing around feeling like an idiot, and I don't want witnesses, thank you very much, wankers.
Then, on enough of those some days, I can shake it off.
Whoa, wow, what the hell, M? Fuck - that's enough - obviously Erica Jong and Ben and Jerry are an unholy threesome. Fucking middle-class, feminine angst you never knew you had until you unearth it when digging for that sugary vein of fudge brownie. Wah lau, total respectable nineteenth century Viennese woman, you know?
Monday, March 22, 2010
dog days are over.
Florence and the Machine "DOG DAYS ARE OVER" Music Video from LEGS MEDIA on Vimeo.
lately, i only want to listen to songs with this urgent quality in them.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Something salaah somewhere.
I went to the private home of a pastor recently, to witness the baptism of a friend.
It was an earnest, cosy affair in that middle class way, a gathering of singalongs, serene faces and tearful testimonials. There was an amp in the corner for the microphones and acoustic guitar, a costly little buffet on the dining.
I was only uncomfortable enough to make very few, very private infidel jokes to ease the outsider's itch for my fellow non-christian buddy and I. Sure, being surrounded by religion was not the favourite way we sorry free-thinkers would choose to spend a Sunday afternoon. But we are good friends, and Singaporean enough to have thick skins about trespassing religious ceremonies when invited to. What raised our eyebrows was the luxurious, large home of a man whose vocation demands modesty and sets examples.
See, the guests belonged to a small church without the facilities for the baptism, so the pastor hosted them in his home.
It begun to drizzle as we arrived, hurrying over a wide water feature to enter the bungalow. The living room had sliding glass doors for walls. They displayed the backyard, and the water feature that had followed us from the front door. Its passage surrounds much of the building; it was a modern-day, partial moot.
We teased that the water feature was where the baptisms will happen, since, aside from the largeness of the feature, the witnesses could be seated comfortably while the girls were dipped for the ceremony right on the edge of the marbled living room floor.
At one point during the preliminary prayers, the guests, following some unseen cue, closed their eyes and tilted their faces to the ceiling. Some raised their arms, as if to embrace it. I watched as an elderly lady with a shock of bone-white hair and a surprisingly crease-less face swayed lovingly, no worrylines on her brow and slack-jawed. A pair of little ones next to her stared in their solemn child's way at the pastor's hand resting on my friend's lowered head.
A lady standing next to me turned to my curious gaze, and her mismatched eyes twinkled engagingly at mine. She didn't smile, but turned back to the ceremony and raised her arm, palm outwards to face my friend. She looked just like Yoko Ono. The rain clouds got serious about their work. The pastor used the symbolism offered so freely.
The baptism itself was uneventful. They stood chest-deep in the pastor's swimming pool, he asks my friend one last question, has her hold her nose in one hand and fold the other across her chest, and dips her backwards quickly. She emerged, with a smile and splutter for the cameras and applauding crowd.
Leaving, we found that our little remark before had been unoriginal, repeated by many other guests upon entering that vast space. The pastor himself laughed off these needling comments graciously.
"He used to be a stockbroker before finding his place with the Lord," someone said.
He stood waving us off in his foyer, dressed in shorts and a Giordano T-shirt, both in the muted, dark serviceable colours of a working class man. Only the ironed crease down the front of his shorts did not contradict his home.
It was an earnest, cosy affair in that middle class way, a gathering of singalongs, serene faces and tearful testimonials. There was an amp in the corner for the microphones and acoustic guitar, a costly little buffet on the dining.
I was only uncomfortable enough to make very few, very private infidel jokes to ease the outsider's itch for my fellow non-christian buddy and I. Sure, being surrounded by religion was not the favourite way we sorry free-thinkers would choose to spend a Sunday afternoon. But we are good friends, and Singaporean enough to have thick skins about trespassing religious ceremonies when invited to. What raised our eyebrows was the luxurious, large home of a man whose vocation demands modesty and sets examples.
See, the guests belonged to a small church without the facilities for the baptism, so the pastor hosted them in his home.
It begun to drizzle as we arrived, hurrying over a wide water feature to enter the bungalow. The living room had sliding glass doors for walls. They displayed the backyard, and the water feature that had followed us from the front door. Its passage surrounds much of the building; it was a modern-day, partial moot.
We teased that the water feature was where the baptisms will happen, since, aside from the largeness of the feature, the witnesses could be seated comfortably while the girls were dipped for the ceremony right on the edge of the marbled living room floor.
At one point during the preliminary prayers, the guests, following some unseen cue, closed their eyes and tilted their faces to the ceiling. Some raised their arms, as if to embrace it. I watched as an elderly lady with a shock of bone-white hair and a surprisingly crease-less face swayed lovingly, no worrylines on her brow and slack-jawed. A pair of little ones next to her stared in their solemn child's way at the pastor's hand resting on my friend's lowered head.
A lady standing next to me turned to my curious gaze, and her mismatched eyes twinkled engagingly at mine. She didn't smile, but turned back to the ceremony and raised her arm, palm outwards to face my friend. She looked just like Yoko Ono. The rain clouds got serious about their work. The pastor used the symbolism offered so freely.
The baptism itself was uneventful. They stood chest-deep in the pastor's swimming pool, he asks my friend one last question, has her hold her nose in one hand and fold the other across her chest, and dips her backwards quickly. She emerged, with a smile and splutter for the cameras and applauding crowd.
Leaving, we found that our little remark before had been unoriginal, repeated by many other guests upon entering that vast space. The pastor himself laughed off these needling comments graciously.
"He used to be a stockbroker before finding his place with the Lord," someone said.
He stood waving us off in his foyer, dressed in shorts and a Giordano T-shirt, both in the muted, dark serviceable colours of a working class man. Only the ironed crease down the front of his shorts did not contradict his home.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
sunnah somewhere.
in some cultures it must be considered polite to inform people when you have fantasised about them. probably anonymously. won't you want to know? hello, thank you for the version of you that you have left dancing in my head, it's been good times. will you take cash or kind?
chinese new year isn't part of any such culture. it is also way too intense. i have subwoofs for relatives, from ages 5 to 73.
"when will you treat me to drinks?!", screeched 2nd grandaunt (er jiu mu, if i'm not wrong), meaning, "when are you getting married?!"
"tell me again, tell me again, TELL ME AGAAAAAIN", screeched one of twins, having gotten twice as loud with each of his 5 birthdays. okay okay, i say. you are too cute. the monster won't eat cute.
"DON'T TOUCH THAT REMOTE! AND DON'T EAT IT!!", screeched 'uncle' at his kid. fatherhood doesn't seem to be equally kind, sometimes it taps some of the dudes into their motherly sides instead.
In those enlightened cultures, i bet there'd less anorexia and impotency and tummy control underwear and red lights on and fat asses and fights, because i bet knowing you're attractive would soothe most women problems and appease all manly egos.
chinese new year isn't part of any such culture. it is also way too intense. i have subwoofs for relatives, from ages 5 to 73.
"when will you treat me to drinks?!", screeched 2nd grandaunt (er jiu mu, if i'm not wrong), meaning, "when are you getting married?!"
"tell me again, tell me again, TELL ME AGAAAAAIN", screeched one of twins, having gotten twice as loud with each of his 5 birthdays. okay okay, i say. you are too cute. the monster won't eat cute.
"DON'T TOUCH THAT REMOTE! AND DON'T EAT IT!!", screeched 'uncle' at his kid. fatherhood doesn't seem to be equally kind, sometimes it taps some of the dudes into their motherly sides instead.
In those enlightened cultures, i bet there'd less anorexia and impotency and tummy control underwear and red lights on and fat asses and fights, because i bet knowing you're attractive would soothe most women problems and appease all manly egos.
Friday, February 12, 2010
like brothers on a hotel bed.
I baked Apple Galette for a picnick! It was burnt, looked like a pizza, laughed at buuuuut yummy enough. NEXT: Pear Galette. (Galette/: french for "pie dish? we no so fancy, here, save yourself the trouble like so", "ooooh sodesneh.")
Say hi to my black coral bracelet too. it's that wild-looking cutie up there - my mom squirmed and called it a black slug. My dreadlocks? "Worms on your head!" The next time i come home from somewhere you just know i have a quest, to complete the trio.
I'm going to try to make this (minus sleeves) out of black satin! also, plus zipper and proper waistband.
multi-pitch, ao nang tower.& these will be my feet in a likewise photo taken with a kickass camera i will own one day! (I'm looking at you, Ricoh GR2. or Lumix LX3, insists timmatits.) (goal: within the next 3-5 years) (if this photo did not make you shudder violently you have no soul) (or fear. power to you, but you're still a bloody tragedy.)
I just like this Frida painting a whole bunch.Caught up with some people recently. I'd lost track of how much i genuinely like my friends. I'm looking at you, Cat and Kamiliah, Fay and Pam. Conversations go on for hours and i'm exhausted from laughing. I have friends with blazing smarts and electric hearts, you should be so jealous, of them and my asskicking galettes.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
railay is a rejection of their reality.
the inbetweens, the lazy dream state and the dipping, weaving through the air ripe with musky couples. hopping from one slippy, damned scary barnacle to the next, only vaguely knowing where next to go, besides not down. t-shirts warm with the sun and worn down with salt. at sunset, red tracks open to the beach on the other side of the world, Fiji. exploring a cave because Tik had no idea where it ends. storms at sea that whips inland and kills the mosquitoes' buzz for once. climbing up anything. trusty directions: walk straight up the path, past the walls lovingly adorned in broken glass on your right, past the lecherous man at the officious-looking cave who'd snatch a kiss you're that naive, past another low wall lovingly adorned in barbed wires and mocking monkeys, and find the beach you swear upsidedown exists uphill, go on then. watch thai boys watching the lady bottoms go by and eat breakfast with them. sand fine enough to snort. sharing a mat with the king of the railay climbing circle. tapping the anchor ring and then gaping at the horizon ending in mists both eastward and westward. evening gossip over masala tea, suddenly the pretty ladies make venomous, pragmatic sense. working my butt off happily for 20 bahts. the shaving comedy. don't piss now, there's a naked lady canoeing over! 2am from tonsai to railay west, the engine of the long tail being cut, drifting silently into the shore past the silhouettes of anchored long tails, wading towards the lights, turning to wave good night to the boatman and the always-lit limestone walls. errands taking longer with every passing day... and every new acquaintance. porch philosophy & waxing windowseat lyrical, is just what we do. taking coffee with chaow's wisdoms, his 'why not' & 'hot and cool' theories. chasing Orion with our eyes. chasing bangtet all over town. chatting easily while walking uphill. showering in the dark. the requisite break to cool down for anyone walking in from anywhere being the best source of information on the isl - wait, no - peninsula, sometimes.
i can't offer you full sentences for how much Railay welcomed me with this time, just selfish snippets. (Yeeeess, Ma,) i know i don't quite belong there, not by a long shot. but having been there i'm wiggling to see the rest of the world in spurts now & end each travel with a Chang in hand, watching the sun set behind the boys playing soccer on Railay West.
just as soon as i work up the cash.
i can't offer you full sentences for how much Railay welcomed me with this time, just selfish snippets. (Yeeeess, Ma,) i know i don't quite belong there, not by a long shot. but having been there i'm wiggling to see the rest of the world in spurts now & end each travel with a Chang in hand, watching the sun set behind the boys playing soccer on Railay West.
just as soon as i work up the cash.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
I haven't unpacked.
In Suk11, a Backpackers Hostel along Sukhumvit Rd. Maneuvering around Sex Tourists and their willing prey was eye-opening and more humourous than you'd expect.
In the meantime, money. Forget a career for now, it's not like I honestly ever cared. I've been irresponsible to my friends too, I'm going to fix that.
Friday, January 1, 2010
too intense.
eh what the hell miho, get excited already.
hello, you'd think you aren't leaving your jailhouse, or that you haven't got an exciting trip wandering (or just climbing) thailand planned. scary siah you, so listless. jellyfishes have more form than you.
it's not quite listless exactly, because i'm humming on nerves. stress. fight or flight instincts are freaking out all the time, even now when i'm just sitting at home and telling my mom, sorry, no lunch, i'm going to see my lauban on new year's day to discuss the release of my salary.
never mind that work has not ended with the last day, never mind mummy's nervous breakdowns going back to work (woman, pull yourself together, it's only been 3 weeks. at a bank. with regular hours. with lunch hours. my sympathy starting to become a bit bedeh le. i mean you whine about colleagues stealing your highlighter, hello?), never mind that my pay is on hold and i'm hyperventilating because i'm living paycheque to paycheque, and going on a month long trip was a rather financially painful / fully-rationalised but actually desperation-driven thing to do.
fuck, kammi's right, i'm a tomboy with insane rollercoaster girl emotions. nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo PMS all year round. okay, don't misqoute, kammi actually said i'm very in touch with my emotions, even if in many other aspects i'm tomboyish. same same but different, right?
new expenses keep coming up. fuuuuuck, my climbing shoes has holes. ok, spend phone bill money on it, i'm not using my mobile in thailand anyway. fuuuuuuck, christmas presents for the whole office?! okay, try to keep it under $150 total, even though that's almost a quarter of my salary, and about 10 days living expenses in railay. fuuuuuck, mom wants money again. ok, this week only eat packed lunches. fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck, travel insurance is gonna cost 92 bucks?! okay, be sane, miho, this one DIE DIE must get. if i die in railay, at least my mom (& one other companion), can fly over to collect my remains for free. then with my dying breath, i'd fulfil my promise to mommy that i'd bring her to see the world one day.
right, anyway, i'm stressed out trying to escape to a simpler life. o the irony.
i haven't paid my phone bill in 5 months and since deciding that i won't buy anything i won't use travelling in thailand, i haven't touched the sales but once yesterday for an awesome tanktop that i will kick rock ass in. i stopped my cab habit too, cold turkey, and it's pretty amazing how little food (or conversely, how much food you can eat for free if you planned packed lunches and timed for snack raids on the pantry when certain colleagues usually buy communal snacks. freeloaderss, ftw!), that was a long segway, again, it's pretty amazing how little food you need to buy. the supermarket is definitely your friend. it's definitely possible to cramp your intern salary real tight, give drinking and a bunch of movies a miss, and still climb and travel. if you don't mind having your phone line cut off, and if your boss pays on schedule. other tips, only eat out / drink coffee out when you absolutely have been peer pressured into it! haahahahhahahahhaaaaaaaahhhi'mstressedout.
honestly, i'm worn really thin right now. i'm getting wrinkles from new facial expressions. apparently, it's somewhere between prune-face and cramps. i smile with cramps, i frown with cramps, i look like a grumpy toad all the time. i can't laugh easily anymore, even though i laugh like gunshots at a riot at the smallest things jane does because it's such a relief to laugh. i climb in frustration, and so my techniques go to shit and raf scolds me for forgetting the silliest things, like letting the bone take my weight, not chicken-winging; trying to climb cleanly so i don't spoil my climbing shoes; flipping the sloper when i manage to murk around pass it.
i'm worried about money, about surviving the trip, about my family getting dinners and arguements and chores settled without me around, about finding work in february, about my favourite colleagues surviving without me in the trenches with them. i'm not cursed with false modesty, it does sound arrogant and i must shrug that off uncomfortably, but i know i have been "vital to the creative process" when people say, okay, let's wait to work on this when miho is in and we can discuss with her.
i worry that i will regress professionally while i'm gone, even though i know to my bones that i would have failed a copy test this past 3 months because so much of creativity relies on emotional health and finding the flow, not churning along blindly. in the last 5 mins, i've been laughing, tearing, arguing with my mom, cursing out my cat, chasing it down to sayang it because he may hate me for one whole january and get too used to life without me, reassuring my mom about her work, trying to outthink a headache, jittering nervously, trying to throw stuff blindly into my backpack for the trip, analysing my default expression. i think it's a middle-aged pout.
okay okay enough venting, miho, buck up, ban zai, jia you.
this will pass.
you'd come back from the trip vibrating with happy vibes, totally un-amoeba'ed out. you'd have enough savings left to tide you over while you find a new job. if not, no sweat, you can part-time data-entry for a quick spell while you wait for replies. you'd have a kickass portfolio. you'd take up a job for a good high pay and decent management, and forget about creative-driven agencies for another year while you polish the skills and tools you were crafting this last 5 months. at this job, you'd negotiate more harshly this time, after which you will settle down for 6 months of good solid working. keep saving and build up a bit of a nest. we'd talk plans again when you have done all that, when you have the bulk of 6 months of full salary built up and you're a neat clean rainbow. let's see how your dreadlocks look by then!
you chose this path ok. so you can manage this. you wanted a career to fight for, so fight brave. you decided, you can live large on very little, so live wisely. you decided to take your internal storm elsewhere, so set sail. you've managed pretty great, this is something you can win if you see it through. this can be done!
hello, you'd think you aren't leaving your jailhouse, or that you haven't got an exciting trip wandering (or just climbing) thailand planned. scary siah you, so listless. jellyfishes have more form than you.
it's not quite listless exactly, because i'm humming on nerves. stress. fight or flight instincts are freaking out all the time, even now when i'm just sitting at home and telling my mom, sorry, no lunch, i'm going to see my lauban on new year's day to discuss the release of my salary.
never mind that work has not ended with the last day, never mind mummy's nervous breakdowns going back to work (woman, pull yourself together, it's only been 3 weeks. at a bank. with regular hours. with lunch hours. my sympathy starting to become a bit bedeh le. i mean you whine about colleagues stealing your highlighter, hello?), never mind that my pay is on hold and i'm hyperventilating because i'm living paycheque to paycheque, and going on a month long trip was a rather financially painful / fully-rationalised but actually desperation-driven thing to do.
fuck, kammi's right, i'm a tomboy with insane rollercoaster girl emotions. nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo PMS all year round. okay, don't misqoute, kammi actually said i'm very in touch with my emotions, even if in many other aspects i'm tomboyish. same same but different, right?
new expenses keep coming up. fuuuuuck, my climbing shoes has holes. ok, spend phone bill money on it, i'm not using my mobile in thailand anyway. fuuuuuuck, christmas presents for the whole office?! okay, try to keep it under $150 total, even though that's almost a quarter of my salary, and about 10 days living expenses in railay. fuuuuuck, mom wants money again. ok, this week only eat packed lunches. fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck, travel insurance is gonna cost 92 bucks?! okay, be sane, miho, this one DIE DIE must get. if i die in railay, at least my mom (& one other companion), can fly over to collect my remains for free. then with my dying breath, i'd fulfil my promise to mommy that i'd bring her to see the world one day.
right, anyway, i'm stressed out trying to escape to a simpler life. o the irony.
i haven't paid my phone bill in 5 months and since deciding that i won't buy anything i won't use travelling in thailand, i haven't touched the sales but once yesterday for an awesome tanktop that i will kick rock ass in. i stopped my cab habit too, cold turkey, and it's pretty amazing how little food (or conversely, how much food you can eat for free if you planned packed lunches and timed for snack raids on the pantry when certain colleagues usually buy communal snacks. freeloaderss, ftw!), that was a long segway, again, it's pretty amazing how little food you need to buy. the supermarket is definitely your friend. it's definitely possible to cramp your intern salary real tight, give drinking and a bunch of movies a miss, and still climb and travel. if you don't mind having your phone line cut off, and if your boss pays on schedule. other tips, only eat out / drink coffee out when you absolutely have been peer pressured into it! haahahahhahahahhaaaaaaaahhhi'mstressedout.
honestly, i'm worn really thin right now. i'm getting wrinkles from new facial expressions. apparently, it's somewhere between prune-face and cramps. i smile with cramps, i frown with cramps, i look like a grumpy toad all the time. i can't laugh easily anymore, even though i laugh like gunshots at a riot at the smallest things jane does because it's such a relief to laugh. i climb in frustration, and so my techniques go to shit and raf scolds me for forgetting the silliest things, like letting the bone take my weight, not chicken-winging; trying to climb cleanly so i don't spoil my climbing shoes; flipping the sloper when i manage to murk around pass it.
i'm worried about money, about surviving the trip, about my family getting dinners and arguements and chores settled without me around, about finding work in february, about my favourite colleagues surviving without me in the trenches with them. i'm not cursed with false modesty, it does sound arrogant and i must shrug that off uncomfortably, but i know i have been "vital to the creative process" when people say, okay, let's wait to work on this when miho is in and we can discuss with her.
i worry that i will regress professionally while i'm gone, even though i know to my bones that i would have failed a copy test this past 3 months because so much of creativity relies on emotional health and finding the flow, not churning along blindly. in the last 5 mins, i've been laughing, tearing, arguing with my mom, cursing out my cat, chasing it down to sayang it because he may hate me for one whole january and get too used to life without me, reassuring my mom about her work, trying to outthink a headache, jittering nervously, trying to throw stuff blindly into my backpack for the trip, analysing my default expression. i think it's a middle-aged pout.
okay okay enough venting, miho, buck up, ban zai, jia you.
this will pass.
you'd come back from the trip vibrating with happy vibes, totally un-amoeba'ed out. you'd have enough savings left to tide you over while you find a new job. if not, no sweat, you can part-time data-entry for a quick spell while you wait for replies. you'd have a kickass portfolio. you'd take up a job for a good high pay and decent management, and forget about creative-driven agencies for another year while you polish the skills and tools you were crafting this last 5 months. at this job, you'd negotiate more harshly this time, after which you will settle down for 6 months of good solid working. keep saving and build up a bit of a nest. we'd talk plans again when you have done all that, when you have the bulk of 6 months of full salary built up and you're a neat clean rainbow. let's see how your dreadlocks look by then!
you chose this path ok. so you can manage this. you wanted a career to fight for, so fight brave. you decided, you can live large on very little, so live wisely. you decided to take your internal storm elsewhere, so set sail. you've managed pretty great, this is something you can win if you see it through. this can be done!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)