Irrelevantly speaking...

This is what collating industry news does to you after some time.

----------

Typo of the week, which had my poor vetter KK in fits of laughter:

US Raw Meat Prices Rise
"... Output of beef, pork and chicken is expected to decline by one billion bounds..."

*image of billions of processed cow, pig and chicken bounding gleefully over dandelion fields*

----------

Re: Why did the cattle cross the border?

Canadian Cattle Cross US Border
"... US complained that Canadian cattle over the age of 30 months are crossing the borders, infringing food export bans...."

*frowns, pencil hovering over text*
"Cattle? That means they're alive? Like, not yet beef?"
"Dunno leh, should be bah, the source used the word cattle."

*image of old Canadian cows ambling over the US-Canada border*

"Well, if their herd of live cattle decides to trot across the border, it isn't really their fault what. Plus the grass is supposed to be greener on the other side."
"..."

----------

KK said I have too much imagination -_-

Omg I've got no time to blog! No time for reflective entries again today, darnit. I miss writing in that intuitive, random, spontaneous way, luxuriating in a swirl of words, colour palettes of thoughts, the freedom in the random splashes of images and quirky little events that are of little significance to anyone else but you.

Like on Friday after work when I was semi-lost but feeling uber happy in my dressed-down t-shirt and jeans and flat shoes, mp3 player plugged in and humming Yesterday Once More to myself, strolling along the pavement without strict navigation, just a general sense of direction.

How good to feel like yourself again, even if it had to be a haphazard, dressed-down, take-unnecessary-detours-by-accident self, who still cannot sing relatively well enough, who is flustered by her own inadequacies, who is still slow, and oh, so many things... but how good it is to be yourself again, on a Friday evening with no plans for the weekend, no need to be anyone or anything else.

Such a luxury.

SN MegaReunion: Brief Excerpt

Representatives from the lovable orange tags =P (And the oldest in the whole reunion lar, can)
Charm and Cynthia in full attire! (Oh man we still look like sec 4s...)


The Rosythian-and-SN-Sop-one pic, featuring beloved red tags Fel and Sheena


With Michelle, newly reunited in Reso, but always ever SN choir girls at heart =)





Nostalgic already?

Young oldies: lovely combination of white and orange =) (I like this picture!)



And I really really cannot resist doing a comparison =P



The standing position was really a coincidence, I promise!



We really didn't change that much, you know =P (Sheena is still taller than me! =( *laughs*)

One more, for old times sake... (if any of the orange-tag-sops girls catch themselves in this old photo they'll scream at me lar, haha)




Generations of SN girls, with our ever constant dear Mrs Ong =)

My heartfelt thank-yous to the special bunch of people who made this possible:



You girls rawk!

Foreword

On Friday I find Brave New World lying on my work table, along with The Tempest (which I hadn't had time to read yet). It's almost, in the craziest kind of way, a response to my despondency blogged just a day before.

Not the book itself, or its rather depressing contents, of course, but the author's foreword, which I had begun to read Friday evening.

Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better the next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

Art also has its morality, and many of the rules of this morality are the same as, or at least analogous to, the rules of ordinary ethics. Remorse, for example, is as undesirable in relation to our bad art as it is in relation to our bad behaviour. The badness should be hunted out, acknowledged and, if possible, avoided in the future. To pore over the literary shortcomings of twenty years ago, to attempt to patch a faulty work into the perfection it missed at its first execution, to spend one's middle age in trying to mend the artistic sins committed and bequeathed by that different person who was oneself in youth -- all this is surely vain and futile. And that is why this new Brave New World is the same as the old one. Its defects as a work of art are considerable; but in order to correct them I should have to rewrite the book -- and in the process of rewriting, as an older, other person, I should probably get rid not only of some of the faults of the story, but also of such merits as it originally possessed. And so, resisting the temptation to wallow in artistic remorse, I prefer to leave both well and ill alone and to think about something else.

- Aldous Huxley, "Foreword", Brave New World

If you do believe in coincidences, then this is a happy coincidence. If there is no such thing as coincidences, I am still deeply grateful for this little reminder to learn and move on with understanding and grace =)

Funny how it takes a book on insanity to remind me where sanity lies. And how funny, too, that it takes complicated literary twists and philosophical forewords to remind me the simplicity of how things oughta be dealt with, after all.

=)

Update

Am uber tired after work and am not gonna reach home till almost 10 everyday, 'cos I need to accompany my parents to pick Sin Kang up from night tuition in the west. After which I conk out after I wash up.

I do enjoy the couple of hours at my maternal uncle's place, though. It's a nice homey feeling, and the whole family gets to sit down and talk.

I can't write long entries now, was bummed a couple of days ago when I found that the stuff I turned in was really not good enough. Am not in disgrace anymore, I think, but I really do need to write with c-r-y-s-t-a-l clarity henceforth.

So, stuff to learn, stuff to pick up, and I really do want to do better, if only to give my supt much much less editing to do. Mustn't think too much and complicate my own writing... the easier the better, yah.

Till the next time =)

So exciting! Friendster-ed a whole lot of seniors with regards to the MegaReunion, and who should reply by Evan, who asked if I remembered her. Of course I did =) She's probably the only senior red tag I know, and a super zai one, at that... But what a cycle-- red tags to red tags... too bad she couldn't make it down from overseas =(

The SN girls are really all over the world, I realised, covering whole continents by themselves, haha. In my batch alone we have Gill and Yeesh in Europe (Switz and Austria!), Shu Qiu's in South Asia on her China exchange, Amanda's heading Down Under to Australia, and Su Yin's in America... We're only left with Antarctica uncovered, I think =P Oh, and Africa.

I pop by the SN choir blog every once in a while or so now, just to catch up on the on-goings. And it's delightful to see Mariel and Jacq and Charlene and Shirleen (senior green tags! I miss them so much!) So I am really quite grateful towards Friendster, and people who conscientiously pass the message on, and are enthusiastic about this whole thing =)

*sigh* St Nicks is a whole volume by itself, with many many chapters of its own. And there were so many entries before, still intact in the diary since Sec 2, of competitions and singing and swinging and friends and politics and committees and orientation and Jubilate and recordings--oh my goodness, icky! recordings! and such crazy moments...

But now's not the appropriate time to get drunk all over again on nostalgia. We leave that all for 17 June, yes? =) And another one, perhaps, when more people return?

But thank you so very much anyhow, my dear red tags, for making this happen =)

Music the way it is

I miss NY choir, not for all the reasons everyone else had missed theirs. Not for the perfection of music and music only-- that happened only a few times, always ever in a combined choir, the most recent one (already a few years ago) being the combined concert with Amadeus, where the music just rings in your head, the voices, the sound, the way it blends and mingles and settles, the way the notes walked, danced, twirled, took on a life of their own, formed tangible shapes in the concert hall.

Would I have been happy being part of a choir like that? It had ever always been temporal, the experience. An exhilarating burst of colour, a memory to remember. But one that lasts...?

Was talking to Sheena the other day about SN choir last time, and something that she said struck a chord.

"There's a distinct difference between striving for the best.. and trying to maintain your top position... the former being more fulfilling."

How true =)

Which is why SN and NY choir had held so very much meaning even after all these years. All the talk of gold choirs at the recent SYF this May, and about techniques and vocal excellence. "But how does your conductor conduct your choir?" Wai Lun had asked. I said I didn't remember =S

It wasn't the technicalities and stylistics that stuck. I remembered practices, certainly. I remembered horrific chord clashes, I remember pracs repeating the same material over and over again. I remembered my depressed soloists during Cadenza, struggling to sound better, the humongous efforts they put in just to get certain things correct. I remember the alto-drama that had all my altos in tears, I remembered my dear sop SL and secretary sobbing in the pavilion the same day because only so few of us could get the song right and she didn't know what to do with us anymore. I remembered, oh, a very memorable moment when my dear bass SL threw a tantrum and refused to teach, and I lugged him back to the piano and stood glaring at the guys in despair for quarter an hour. I remember days when my dear SC and VP were so stressed up that they glowered with stony silence, and the choir, picking up on the vibes, remained subdued for the day.

Bad memories? Not quite-- for how very dear they are still, every tense episode, every struggling moment. My dear altos were closer-knit than any other group I know, and the antics my Sops come up with to tickle their SL to delight still leaves the linger of a smile. The girls had built up a support system in time, that they would reach out automatically to one another to help, that for every tear shed together they would laugh as hard barely minutes later over some silly nonsense joke. And our guys've gotta be the most hilarious and outspoken lot altogether, and very nice individuals on top of that, as well. If there is one thing I could say about these guys that the best choirs would need extra effort to match up to, it is, very simply, that NY choir guys are naturally spontaneous, very sporting people, with an instinct for having fun on stage in a way that's very infectious =)

And so I had cried for the silver then for a number of reasons, one of which was that I felt the choir deserved something more for all the work put in... if they'd heard us from the beginning, listen to how we'd to start from scratch, again and again, commit songs to memory note by note, in careful patterns. The patience of my SLs and SC, the genuine effort put in by the choir, the energy of my conductor in getting it all together, and the efforts of my ever beloved committee, of whom I'm deeply proud of. Who never for once generated that kind of politics I've known of in other places. Skills and techniques? I remembered Miss Ong most acutely for the way she makes us feel better about ourselves, the way she could talk to the guys in their most troubled moments where I hadn't the ability to help, the way she goes "Rubbish, Charmaine, of course you can sing that", and I do.

On random rare days I pick up my autograph book and it floods back in a rush, these memories. The Cadenza CD, which I haven't touched for ages, holds the best ever musical I've ever watched, despite cringe-worthy zao sia moments. I still feel like laughing when I recall our sole four basses, arms over shoulders, singing "we got sun-light-on-the-sand, we got moon-light-on-the-sea, we got man-goes-and-ba-na-nas we can pick-right-off-a-tree" in the most miserable ah beng moans, hahahaha. And the time the guys were supposed to pretend-stumble on stage, and they all really happily tumbled into a huge heap with a loud WOOOO-OH!!! Priceless.

My brother and even my mum (who's been to so many of my performances!) had the deepest impression of this one. As have I. And how we have all grown, indeed. Till now when the girls meet up (and it's hardly frequent, what with everyone in different schools, pending graduation into the working world...) we still connect as we did before, and talk non stop for ages, haha.

Somehow, this is, above everything else, what truly matters. The people, the people, the people.

I wondered, with a start, without all our imperfections, whether all these would have mattered as much, meant as much. Strangely enough, upon hindsight, pitchiness, tone-deafness, short-term memories, all the countless obstacles to overcome, the efforts put in to make it work, the eventual feeling of everything coming together, little by little, but ever so much ultimately... It taught me to be humble first, and then it taught me love, and respect, for a choir remarkable in so many ways... More than pitch perfection, flawless rhythm, stunning individual talents.

It's all in the heart, after all. A bigness of heart that made music the way it is to be felt, through people... more deeply fulfilling than any other song in the world.