…it would be so easy for me to lose heart and throw in the towel now. but i can’t, i can’t, i can’t, not now, not when i’m already halfway down the road, there’s no turning back – i have to keep on it, i have to keep going on. on with my rapidly draining bank account, on with my grasping straws of hope, on with my flimsy backup plans and cluelessness.

is it really so bad, not knowing what’s going to happen to you? part of me is scared out of my wits, and part of me is – well – excited. it’s the first time in my entire life i’m not following a plan that’s been set out for me. it’s the first time i’m choosing the hard, hard path. so i can’t tell you for certain where i’m going to be in a month’s, a fortnight’s time, so i haven’t anything concrete beyond getting through the next 24 hours… and is it really so bad?

i don’t know what to think. i’m just really small, right now, and the world seems very big.

19,791 words, 61 pages and about 5 months after all this started… I dropped two copies of my dissertation off at my department yesterday. And I’m done. Done and dusted. Done. Done. This is beyond surreal. Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who supported me along the way – i am right out of words at the moment, and my brain and energies are spent, but – thank you! ♥

Overwhelmed…

I am back in York with a week to go to my dissertation deadline (technically less – horrors – since I should really make sure I have it ready by Friday so that it can be bound in time for a Monday submission), a list of jobs to apply for, a messy collection of documents I need to apply for a post-study work visa, a huge flock of unpacked boxes, and absolutely no idea at all where I’m going to stay over the coming year.

Oh, sheer terrifying uncertainty… it’s been a long time since our last dalliance.

I was going to entitle this post “Yay Penguins!”, then decided that perhaps a less cryptic title would be appropriate to something that’s going to be kind of long and rambly and unattractive to read anyway. Actually I don’t really know if anyone would be interested, but I really wanted to document this somewhere for myself at least.

My pet project over the past week has been to finally attain Linux mastery, or at least the ability to use it without stumbling every step of the way; I’ve been very intrigued by the increasing usability and popularity of Ubuntu and I’d been wanting to give it a go for a while.

Having run Linux for a week now, without booting into Windows the entire time (except once when I really wanted to use Photoshop), I am convinced that now is a better time than ever before for the average computer user to make the switch. Screenshots and a VERY long post – you have been warned – after the jump.

(I apologise now, by the way, if anyone reading this via RSS sees the entire post instead of an excerpt. I have no idea how it works.)

It just dawned on me that I have precisely two weeks left to my dissertation deadline and I am still writing at a crawl instead of revising this patchworked monster – and writing badly, too! I have slightly over 16K and much of it repeats itself, and I still have a point and the conclusion to go, and I cringe at the thought of having to cull, rearrange, and rewrite large chunks of it.

Qué horror! Where did August go?

This post isn’t what it probably sounds like. I’m not going into a lengthy, thoughtful, well-considered (ha) spiel about being foreign in England/being foreign in Australia/the evils of having foreign talent invade Singapore (which I don’t really believe in anyway). No, I intend to talk about pop music.

I’ve been listening to a great deal of Japanese music lately; in fact I’ve been listening almost exclusively to it, except when I think I should take a break and put on my entire library for a while. In particular, Jpop groups Kanjani8 and NEWS have been dominating my airtime. I think I’ve actually created a playlist that consists exclusively of the songs I have from them (plus one invading Arashi song). And I don’t really have a lot – maybe 30ish – so you can imagine how many bajillion times I’ve heard each individual song by now, but I’m still not tired of them.

It dawned on me yesterday, while watching a NEWS concert DVD with English subtitles (thus being the first time I’ve actually seen what the lyrics mean in English, I have no idea what I’m singing along to in Japanese most of the time), that actually, if these songs were written in English with exactly the same tune and arrangement, I would probably hate the large majority of them – or at least be indifferent towards. This is because most of the lyrics turned out to be pretty inane, and as far as English songs go… even if everything else about it is wonderful, I have a lot of difficulty really loving songs with bad lyrics. I’m talking lines like “show me your secret paradise, baby” and “let’s dance and throw off our clothes” – which admittedly sound better in Japanese, but still!

Yet – I still love my trashy Jpop songs. It’s totally inexplicable. I know the lyrics are ridiculous, but the tunes are brilliant. They absolutely define catchy and the singing is good (surprisingly, Japanese manufactured boybands can indeed sing). Which makes me wonder what it is that makes me like a song, and whether listening to foreign songs is actually a better barometer of what your tastes are in music, pure music, sans words and meaning and inflection. Or are lyrics and music inextricable from each other? Then why is it that I like these songs in Japanese but not if they were in English? I have no idea, honestly.

‘I should like to save the Shire, if I could – though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them. But I don’t feel like that now. I feel that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again.’

- Frodo Baggins in The Fellowship of the Ring

Leave it to my comfort reading to know exactly how I feel. This, right here, is exactly what home is I think; Frodo’s not being sentimental and soppy but he isn’t being cruel either, it’s just plain and honest and absolutely utterly true.

Every time I come home is like going through an alternate reality time warp, when I’m suddenly four, five years younger and have nothing much more to worry about than getting my work done, eating and sleeping, because my parents are here to run the house, my siblings are here for company, and even though everyone’s older now and they interact with each other differently, I’m picking up where we left off long ago. It’s like nothing ever changes, except that my brother gets taller and my father gets more grey hairs.

Sometimes I want to shake my brother silly, sometimes it bugs me that my sister keeps missing her morning classes, sometimes I wish that my dad would let me drive and that my mom wouldn’t put my laundry in everyone else’s wardrobes. But ultimately, even if I occasionally think an invasion of dragons wouldn’t be unwelcome, they’re still home, and they’re always going to be here, and wherever I go or whatever I do, they aren’t going to care and they won’t stop being my firm foothold. And maybe that’s what home really is.

15700 words and dying…