Turn of the year

I just got a birthday card in the mail-- from my insurance agent. And though I'm a person who love birthday cards immensely, this templated, printed paper with a company sticker from a person that I do not know makes me squirm... it takes all the personal touch out of it. Plus the date is wrong too-- I wonder if the company sends stacks of birthday cards out at the beginning of each month, as a perfunctory kinda gesture.

That said, goodness, it's that time of the year again, and no, I don't have a wishlist, still. All I want now at this moment, very much, is time. Time out from school work, and time for my folks, and my friends, for everyone whom I've said "let's meet, ok?" but never got round to doing so. And time for everyone else who is so very busy, whom I have yet to ask-- "hey, are you doing okay so far?"

Alternatively, I love birthday cards with long personal messages. No, no toys, no ornaments, no anything. Handwritten messages will do. Cards and autograph books and diaries give me the sense of borrowed time, time that can be re-lived in the future-- you read and you remember, little fragments of memories from people who've been part of your life, and who make up part of who you are.

So yeah, that's my only item on the wishlist so far-- in your own time, please, I know how bogged with work everyone is, now-- and writing additional stuff is probably the last thing you want to do, haha. Otherwise a birthday hug will do.

3 weeks...!

Mid-Autumn Festival

I celebrate mid-autumn festival the usual way-- mooncakes, lanterns... but perhaps it is just out of habit that I do so. This year we commemorated it a little earlier, on Sunday night, but perhaps only because my brother badgered me to come out into the garden to light the lanterns with him.



It wasn't hard to understand his enthusiasm... I had spent every mid-autumn festival in my childhood looking forward to the same familiar routine, come rain or moonshine: once we've retrieved that big red candle from the drawer beneath the praying altar, our game commences: lighting fire sparklers, lighting candles, lighting lanterns.


In a couple of previous years we would stick candles to styrofoam boxes, and float it across the pond, watching the flickering candle flames light up sections of the water... in the night there would be utter silence, save for the running patter of the water, and watching the styrofoam boat, alone, carrying the lighted candles, rocking gently above the ripples, offers a moment of absolute serenity that till now I do occasionally yearn for.

It's a lot of nostalgia, the season. When both my brother and I were much younger, I'd play with my youngest aunt (strictly speaking, but then she was only a year older than I was), or my cousins... later on it would be my grandpa--who's no longer around, now, then occasionally my dad, and then of course my mum, who'd do all the lantern-lighting in the most systematic way possible. Parents were occupied this time, so this year was just the two of us.



Okay that was quite poser. My brother kept irritating me ("Eh! Can already or not? Aiyah I take already hor." "Can already? Wei faster leh I want to go and light the other candles!") and I couldn't take my ideal in-action shot. Nor even look vaguely contemplative. Hrmph.

Anyhow. I think we didn't do too badly, though:



Pretty. Flickering flames are quite fascinating to watch on their own, but sheltered within a pretty traditional translucent paper cover and strung properly in a row, and they become endearingly pretty. =)


中秋节快乐, everyone!

Completed third essay of the week at 12 noon.

And Nicole is a Godsend lar, popping up on MSN at 2am in the morning ("taught you so much still don't know how to write ah?") and trouble-shooting with only my 200-word thesis, throwing out terms and possible theories to use from the top of her head. Which really did wonders for lifting that incredibly writers' block that I've been struggling so hard with the entire day.

So, so, so, so relieved and grateful. Last night was such a nightmare--in desperate tears over a word count that cannot increase. Thank God for divine intervention. Really.

*big sigh* Liberation for now, at long last. What a week it'd been.

Dying, but not quite

Dr R extended the deadline to Friday!

That means maybe around 8 hours more for Asia Mods essay =)

That means maybe tonight I can sleep at 3am instead of 6am.

That means I won't be officially liberated until Friday.

But. To quote Jia Yan, "It just means you gotta sleep more so you can write a much better paper in the same amount of time! :)"

Heh... much needed optimism... Thanks dear! :)


So yeah, taking time off to blog now, just for a couple of minutes. (My mum just came in to pop a quarter of a custard mooncake in my mouth. It's so good!).

Okay out of point. I'm beginning to feel a tad more human now, although my butt's still aching from sitting for hours and hours before the computer, doing one essay after another. Was totally zombified on Tuesday. Slept from 7 plus to almost noon, then dragged myself off to school (slipping and bruising my knee on the floor on my way out, pui. And that was in front of my mum and my grandma, can. So from henceforth I'm gonna get new variations of reproaches for staying up late, eg "WHY are you not sleeping yet? You don't sleep enough later tomorrow you'll fall down all over the place again!" Which is not entirely true. I hope.)

Was passing from building to building in arts fac feeling like I was walking through water. It's one of those glorious days when you suddenly understand what scientists mean by air resistance, in your valiant attempt to force your way through resisting air particles all around you. The entire world felt surreal lar can, like my ears are blocked and I'm in this glass bubble. Was hoping so hard I won't be asked to talk about my proposed film essay topic during tutorial... I was so not in the right brain configuration to discuss another essay. Even O Holy Night at prac that night felt like it was strangely flat... energy consuming just to sing louder, and it's supposed to be one of my absolute favourite carols =( Grah.

Lousy 4 hour sleep cycles.

Okay back to the last essay before term break!

Random early-morning ramble

6:36AM

3 down, and one more to go! Not re-reading already, uber sian. Even if I conk out till 11am tomorrow I'll only have 4 hours of sleep. 4 hours! =(

Was in the shower when a random thought occurred to me. You remember all those personality tests on emode and facebook and livejournal?

I haven't done one for ages, but since I've so little time to spare, I decided I could just write my own, just to fill up my blog space a little. (It's a tradition, I have to treat myself to a blog post after slogging for an essay.)

Which Disney Princess Are You?

Charmaine,

You are Sleeping Beauty! You'll like nothing better than to conk out for the next century or so, and awake to meet Prince Charming in a darn good mood because you're so well-rested. Plus by then your essay deadlines will all have expired anyway.

Awake

The word count is at
500/1500, 1000/1500

Not bad lar hor. If you add the two essays together I'll actually hit the full word limit! Hurhurhur.

I got the extension to Tuesday for SEA lit also. I think Angeline and Dr H are uber nice folks lar. Dr H is like the only lecturer who told us we could email to request for extensions "because I know this is the period where you're all dying."

Ding! Exactly so.

I miss my level 3000s, my time, my sleep and my sanity =(

Oh and thank God I finished my film title selection and rationale to hand in tonight also. If I have to conceptualise another topic-of-discussion kinda stuff I'll go screaming mad.

Okay, back to the 4 hour sleep cycle. And I really really should finish SEA Lit by Monday too. For sanity's sake.

And we are enlightened...

(abridged)

.:Charm:.
ello je~!
did you get my msg?
JE
yo yo
what msg?

(long pause)

.:Charm:.
die
what's your number?
JE
my number from last yr is not valid anymore
i didnt update with u ar
.:Charm:.
!
so i've been sending msges to a non existing number
...
for all the times i never got back to you on stuff in the past weeks... you know why now =X
JE
yah... i was like... how come charm never replied me
lolx

(long process of settling admin details)

Several minutes later:

.:Charm:.
come to think of it
i nv got a msg from you
JE
96520662?
.:Charm:.
*cringe*
that's my old number. not in use anymore
JE
hahahahaha
we're even :D

Hurhur. The wonders of communication devices.

When Phrasing Confuses...

During a lecture on a particular film director:

Japanese Studies lecturer: If you look at his ears you'll see how old he was.
*general gasps all round lecture theatre*

Charm: *stares hard at the ears of said film director on the powerpoint slide*
(thinks to self) Huh, his ears look normal what.

Japanese Studies lecturer: As you can see, Ibuse lived through both the world wars, which came to influence his later works...

Charm: *eyes travel up to slide title-- "Ibuse Masuji: 1898-1993"*

Oh. Look at his years.

char says:
wad u doing in sch?
char says:
in honours room mugging?
.:Charm:. in school says:
panicking
.:Charm:. in school says:
that's just about how productive i am now
char says:
panicking in sch?
char says:
shldn't u panic at home?
.:Charm:. in school says:
no, school provides the illusion that help is not too far away
.:Charm:. in school says:
if i freak out i can sprint for the library.

School is turning me neurotic. Help.

How to Radiate Level Fourness

1. Use at least two 5-syllable words in a sentence. Possible words include te-leo-lo-gi-cal, sub-al-ter-ni-ty, o-ri-en-ta-list al-ler-go-ry, es-sen-tia-li-sm and mul-ti-na-tio-nal ca-pi-ta-li-sm

2. Sprinkle a couple of foreign words for colour. Try incognito, ad nauseam, deus ex machina. Whether it makes sense or not.

3. Throw in big names for good measure. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's subalternity, Anderson's imagined communities, Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, Althusser's Ideology, Gramsci's Hegemony, Harold Bloom's Literature of Anxiety, Freud's Unconscious, Deleuze and Guattari's Flows of Desire...

4. Ask questions that no one understands. Then you either a) look extremely pleased when someone (somehow!) gives a fantastic reply, and nod wisely, or b) disagree, and say resignedly "oh, I don't think you are getting my point, but it's okay, that's fine too."

5. Combine and deliver!

"I can't say I agree--Jame;son's notion that all third-world texts are necessarily national allegories is presumptuous! It falls back to the notions of Western superiority that Chatter;jee extrapolates in his article-- and this inclination to politicize even texts with no such original intention is hardly an objective thesis. I mean, yes, of course, although one of its chief presuppositions is the critique of the sovereign subject... *ramble* the persistent dichotomising of these polemic differences allows for a pseudo sacrilization of a teleological history..."



Ah well.

But then we shouldn't expect any less, should we, when we have readings that go like this:

"Maoism here simply creates an aura of narrative specificity, which would be a harmless rhetorical banality were it not that the innocent appropriation of the proper name 'Maoism' for the eccentric phenomenon of French intellectual 'Maoism' and subsequent 'New Philosophy' symptomatically renders 'Asia' transparent...... Why should such occlusions be sanctioned in precisely those intellectuals who are our best prophets of heterogeneity and the Other?"
- from Can the Subaltern Speak? by Spivak

I think perhaps the subaltern could have spoken if they hadn't already drowned in this sea of words.

Week 4

Went for my first Japanese studies tutorial today, and stepped into classroom 0213 at 4pm promptly... and instantly felt something was wrong. Half the class was already on their feet right in front of the classroom, writing on the whiteboard.

"Er... Japanese class tutorial?" I asked the tutor.
"Yeah, this is Japanese class," he confirms cheerfully.

I took two more steps in, half doubtful, and turned around to stare quizzically at the whiteboard--which looked genuinely foreign. The stuff that the class was scribbling were Japanese words, much to my chagrin.

A two-second pause, and I turned to the tutor again.

"Japanese studies class?"
"Eh? Oh, no," he replies with the same serenity, and a pleasant smile. "Japanese class."
"...!"

Needless to say, I retreated with a string of flustered apologies, to which he replied, "it's okay :)" with that same calm pleasant demeanor.

Argh, freshie moment.

Flew to AS7 to double check my tutorial room on IVLE (correct what!) and was pacing the corridor one end to another, peeking into seminar room windows... before realising, suddenly, that what I sincerely believed to be AS3 was actually AS1, and ran for life two blocks down to the right classroom.

*cringe* Malu-ation. I have no idea why I was so confident that the AS1 corridor was AS3. Reminds me of the nineteenth-century geopolitical schizophrenia (ie a time-space dislocation and general disorientation). In my fourth NUS year. Hur.

Anyway tutorial today was fun =) General introductions all round, and film discussion. I feel like I'm around normal people again -- I can understand what's going on, and people don't speak in 5-syllable words (refer next entry)-- they talk like normal people! So I could actually offer my own opinions without feeling intimidated. Plus fresh faces are always interesting =D

Last week's level 3000 lit mod was fine too, I think. SEA lit is interesting, with its share of short stories to kick start the term, but you kinda realise that after semesters of conditioning, we start to get sensitive, and whenever we get a lyrical, descriptive passage, we'll have half the class jumping up and roaring (figuratively, not literally) EXOTICISATION! ROMANTICISATION! IT'S THE COLONIAL MASTERS ERRONEOUSLY DEPICTING THE NATIVES AS IDEALISED BEINGS! etc.

So that's that-- the remaining modules shall remain politely unmentioned because I'm scared of them.

Welcome tea on Monday night was a blast. Like I said, it's always interesting to have fresh faces, and the new batch of 22 has lots of interesting people =) I'm kinda looking forward to getting to know them all, and see what happens to them by chlamp--they are such a humongous bunch. It took ages just to get the introductions done, after which the games had to be shortened, and the food went cold-- but I gather that cold food was not an issue with the half-starved Reso folks =P Mini presentation was fun because of zi-hai seniors doing our usual fanclub actions at the back of the room, haha, and the rest of them were practically dancing to Techno liao. Which was really heartwarming-- it puts all the fun back into performing again, and is a timely reminder of how delightful it is to perform with crazy Reso people as part of your audience =)

So yeah, even though I hadn't slept proper for some 40 hours prior to welcome tea, and even though I really felt totally -ugh- at prac the night before (I'm sorry OOPsians!)-- I did enjoy welcome tea =)

And I've been feeling apprehensive about this, but I still do believe it's gonna be super, so--

Reso's having a mini concert at YIH, details as follows:
A Walk To September: a Reso mini-concert,
at NUS YIH Function Room, 14th Sept, 7pm
Tickets at 5 bucks only =)

Come, okay!

Huh 250 words also need one night to finish. Jia lat lar. 7.30am already, sure late for school one liao. Today is a long day =(

I'm really very sorry if I'm cranky or slow or unresponsive-- I know there's no reason for my own stress to spill over to affect others, and I'll consciously try not to let it get to me, okay?

Thanks to all the brave sweet souls who came by to offer words of encouragement =) Love ya all!