Things (well people, really) I hate about taking public transport:

1. Noisy people. Today (this was what prompted this post) I was stuck on a bus for ages with this group of huge teenage boys, all of whom looked like they could snap me and everyone else in half, and all of whom were so loud that they probably seriously thought they owned the bus. It wasn’t just talking loudly, they were yelling up and down the stairs to each other from the top to bottom deck, tapping on the walls, moving seats every few stops – it was a nightmare. I’ve never felt more like screaming at people on the bus.

   Subsets of this odious, offensive group include people who listen to their music at absurdly earsplitting volumes, and people who talk very loudly on the phone.

2. People who sit on the aisle seat when the window seat is empty. I will never, never, never understand this. It is a serious pet peeve. Just, well… why? Why would you do that? Especially when the bus is clearly filling up. It’s just ridiculously inconsiderate to make it difficult for people to get to a seat.
3. People who place their items on the seat beside them. I can forgive this when the item in question is clearly very large, unwieldy and impossible to place anywhere else, for example a suitcase or a massive backpack. However, people put all kinds of little items on the seat beside them, depriving others of that seat. Is it really that difficult to put your umbrella/shopping bag/handbag on your lap or the floor?
4. People who don’t move down inside the vehicle. Oh this makes me SO mad. I can’t even begin to count the number of times I’ve been jammed like a sardine against the front of the bus/Tube because someone further down the corridor needs a precious foot of space around them or something. This is not only inconsiderate, it is very selfish!
5. People who don’t get their coins/Oyster card ready before the bus comes. This is just common sense, folks. I can forgive it if you’ve just rushed up to the bus stop and hopped on, but it’s ridiculous when you’re like the second person in the queue and then hold everyone up for ages by fumbling around in your purse for loose change/your mysteriously vanished Oyster card. This is particularly aggravating here as London buses, at least the ones I’ve been on, still only have ONE card-tappy thing as you board the bus, unlike in Sydney (and Singapore? I can’t remember but I can’t imagine we would be that backward).

@letterboys no chance sadly, company is broke (as are arts organisations in general now). need money badlyyyy, or would stay on for free!

am having a very mixed cocktail of feelings as the last week of this internship kicks off… :x

I don’t know what took me such a long time to finally get round to watching The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. I think, not being a fan of supernatural elements in my plot and even less so of aliens, time-travellers or ESPers, I took one look at the summary of Haruhi and dismissed it immediately out of hand as something completely bizarre that I wouldn’t be interested in.

Lately, starved of good anime to watch and completely addicted to “God Knows…”, I decided to give Haruhi a whirl. And it is absolute genius! The meta-ness of it all, the surprising complexity of story given the slightly ridiculous-sounding subject matter, the rare likeability of practically every single character including main characters Haruhi and Kyon (I don’t usually like main characters at all so this is a big plus!), and most of all, most unexpectedly, the real emotional depth underlying the series – I honestly can’t praise it enough.

Most of the time, Haruhi doesn’t take itself very seriously. In spite of, and probably because of, its frequent frivolity, when it does get serious, it is really, really powerful. I genuinely thought this was going to be absolute crack, and The Adventures of Asahina Mikuru didn’t do anything to allay this preconception (much as I did enjoy it and nearly died laughing), but it turned out to be so much more by the end. Perhaps it’s just as well that I came to it late, as I had the benefit of having all the episodes on hand and not having to wait weeks for the chronological order to string together, as they were originally aired completely jumbled up.

Much love and obsession – and now I need something new to watch! I hate this feeling of empty “what-comes-next?” after you reach the end of a truly fantastic series and no longer have a next episode to look forward to.

Last night one of my lovely managers, who by happy virtue of being a theatre critic often gets free tickets to shows, brought me along to the press night of the RSC’s The Taming of the Shrew. I was quite looking forward to it, partly because I’ve hardly got to see any theatre in London so far and I haven’t seen or read the Shrew before, partly because I’m headed for an RSC placement in a couple weeks’ time, and partly because I really enjoyed King Lear when I saw it and I know the RSC’s work is quality.

I did have a good evening, but… there was something about the production that left a bit of a bitter taste in my mouth. I don’t know if the actors were bad, the directing was bad, or if it was the play itself that was bad, and I know it’s sacrilege to even consider one of Shakespeare’s works to be bad, but it just didn’t sit well with me. I should probably have expected this going into the theatre, as I do know the story, and I know that Kate is completely broken by the end of it. It would take a miracle for something like that to have gone down well.

There’s been a trend lately towards modernising Shakespeare for our generation – and somehow, inevitably, this always means amping up the sex and bawdiness, the pop culture references, the crude humour, the double-entendre. I remember seeing a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream a couple of years back which had a very graphic sex scene between Titania and Bottom, and watching Petruchio’s near-rape of Kate at the end of yesterday’s performance – which is, empathically, not in the original play! – put me in mind of that all over again. Every single line was weighted and milked for innuendo, one of the characters was bizarrely Jamaican and had this exaggerated swagger and accent which were clearly meant to be funny but were really very painful instead, and I couldn’t even begin to count the number of times some kind of sexual interaction was depicted on stage.

In the end it wasn’t just Kate’s frightening decline into docility or Petruchio’s wanton cruelty that left me feeling something wasn’t right – it was the in-your-face unsubtlety of the whole thing, how nothing was left to our imagination, nothing was implied, nothing was suggested. It was sledgehammer stuff. And I just don’t think Shakespeare would have written anything like that (I may be wrong, as it’s one of his earliest works and he was definitely a little rougher round the edges then), so I guess it has to be a problem with the production itself. Which makes me kind of sad to admit, because I like to think the RSC can do better.

On the bright side, it was technically flawless. The set, props, lighting, set changes and music were all really beautiful. At the end of the day my manager remarked to me that he always enjoyed the RSC’s stuff mainly because their production values are really high, and I’ve got to agree that that was the best of the show, on the balance. I kind of wish I’d been able to see Hamlet instead now – and I’m probably never, ever going to watch this play again, no matter who puts it on or what form it’s in, because it just left me so uncomfortable. I’m glad I had the chance to see it at least once though.

My absolute favourite part of it all? The players arriving in a truck, license plate XME K8. It took me a moment to get it, which is my favourite kind of humour. Clever, guys.

(Where did the week go?!)

Having had an absolutely manic week at work, a great deal of which was spent fielding a million phone calls, emails, stacks of paperwork, and other such exciting administrative tasks in the absence of my supervisor who is on tour, I wish I had the energy to write a longer post but I am exhausted. It was with some degree of horror that I realised this feeling was probably going to be permanent once I start proper full-time non-intern work – which I need, and soon, as my bank balance is very alarmingly low. It is kind of deflating; I wish I could genuinely say I do what I do for the love of it, but I am passing on job ads now that I would love to do but just can’t because they don’t pay (or don’t pay much – £5400 for 12 months, seriously, guys).

On the way back home today, I was on a Northern line train that didn’t budge from Old Street for the longest time. I hadn’t actually noticed because I was (predictably) drifting in and out of sleep as best as I could sandwiched between two armrest-hoggers, but then suddenly a voice came crackling over the intercom to say “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your driver speaking. There is a passenger in the first carriage playing very loud music. They may not be aware I’m speaking to them. If you will please turn it down, this train will be on its way.”

Sometimes – only sometimes, really – I love London. It’s especially charming at night, when there aren’t quite as many harried people around. It’s easy to think, walking down Regent Street from Oxford Circus to Piccadilly at 10pm, that the lights are rather beautiful after all.

Other (very geeky) exciting event of the weekend: today, in a fit of bleeding-edge madness, I nuked my entire Linux Mint system in order to try Fedora 10… for no reason really other than to have a clean, shiny new OS to play with and the enticing promise of speed, sleekness, flexibility and maturity. It’s like that oft-quoted quip “Why do people climb Mount Everest? Because it’s there” – Fedora was there and I was simply itching to try it. The jury is still out but a perverse part of me enjoys re-learning how to tweak, configure and use a new system. Fun times!

I also re-watched Pleasantville yesterday. It’s one of those movies which I really, really love but for some reason haven’t watched that many times. Since its Singapore release in 1999 (yes it has been that long!) I’ve only seen it twice, once in the cinema 10 – ten! – years ago, oh my gosh, and once in 2004 when I watched it for GP film screening along with the classes I was teaching back then. I’d forgotten how good a movie it is. Watch it if you haven’t.

Devastation: Victoria Burns

I woke up this morning to this splashed all over the BBC News front page. My heart sank, probably irrationally, even though I know Victoria is not New South Wales and all the affected areas are miles from Sydney and Australia is a flipping huge country. But there are bushfires and deaths in NSW too – just not as many.

I rang my home number and no one picked up the phone. I rang my father, my mother, and my sister in turn with no response, and was beginning to really panic by the time I rang my brother. I’ve honestly never been so happy to hear his voice… seriously. Or to hear that my entire family was in a car on the way home from dinner in a distinctly un-burnt neighbourhood.

Entire towns in Victoria have been wiped out like they never existed. I don’t even live there, but somehow, I feel really, really shaken. I don’t know why. The fires are still raging, people are dying by the score, and here I am, freezing in the cold, cold Northern hemisphere with my heart a million miles away.

One of my New Year’s resolutions for 2009 (let’s ignore the fact that said resolutions were made in a fit of inspiration on the bus to work on 3 February) is to blog more, partly to keep in better touch with my nearest and dearest who are scattered all round the globe, and partly because… I feel like I haven’t been seriously writing in eons. I miss it.

I am ambitiously aiming to update once a week, even if it’s really short one-liner posts which consist of a link to something I found interesting. Now that I have publicly declared this, you have the right to prod me whenever I go MIA for a while.

-receives 500 facebook pokes next week-

This picture was taken from my window on the day that London ground to a halt, Monday 2 February. It’s not the prettiest view, I know, but I don’t live in the prettiest neighbourhood (that’s a council estate being refurbished across the road). The snow made it prettier than it’s ever been before though.

I woke up that morning with the typical Monday reluctance, thought gosh it’s cold as I brushed my teeth and washed my face, made my coffee as usual while watching the snow fall from a little crack between my curtains where the window shows. Wondering just how much it had snowed overnight, I peeked out quickly and noticed there was at least an inch of the white stuff on the ground with more falling at a rapid rate. The centre lanes of the road were clear, but the left-hand lanes were good and buried under a layer of fresh snow, the kind of snow that looked like it’d be fun to step in because it makes that crunch crunch sound beneath your boots.

I didn’t even realise the buses weren’t running and couldn’t run, in my morning bleariness; I simply wondered how on earth they were going to, assumed (overoptimistically) that TfL would find a way, and went back to breakfast. Then half an hour before I usually leave for work, I got a text from my supervisor which went hey babes. the office is closed today. get yourself back to bed. day off! woo!

Being, well, Singaporean – and tropical – it didn’t even occur to me that work could be brought to an abrupt stop due to weather conditions, and it wasn’t until I texted back to ask why and got a reply that transport was totally buggered today so no one can come in and she was mega glad of the day off (having worked all weekend) that I even realised something was wrong. London, as the rest of the world probably well realises by now, is terribly equipped to deal with snow. The UK is having to import gritting salt now because they’ve run through nearly all of the year’s supplies. It’s a little bit ridiculous, a little bit sad, and really very English (I say that in the fondest way possible, truly).

It was a strange day off. With the Tube moving at a crawl, and the buses off the roads, there was little I could do besides stay in and watch the snow fall. The same happened for all my colleagues, as I found out the next day when we returned to work. I kept glancing out the window throughout the day, watching the snowstorm get even more torrential, wondering if the bus lanes would ever, ever be cleared, wondering if people were deluging the office with phone calls in our absence.

But much has been written about how, perhaps, London needed this day. I called my family first thing in the morning. I hadn’t spoken to them at all over the Chinese New Year period (except for one text from my mom), and I’d been aching to ring them forever but never had the chance because the timezones just don’t work in our favour and I’m always at work when it’s the optimum phone calling time to Australia. We spoke for nearly 40 minutes. I hung up knowing that my phone bill for the month had probably just tripled, but I felt so much happier, and warmer.

Even in York I’ve rarely seen this much snow. It was like waking up in a totally new land. My room faces the main road and is right behind a bus stop so I’ve grown used to the constant noise and the labouring engines of buses stopping and going, the recorded female voice announcing “2 to Marylebone” or “345 to South Kensington”. On that day, it was dead quiet. Along with the snow seemed to have fallen an almost reverent hush. There was silence, there was peace, there was whimsy in the air. The harsh reality of it was that it was bitterly cold and dead, no amount of huddling by my heater and steaming cups of tea were warding off the lurking chill in my room, and I kept wishing I had a garden to build a snowman in. But as London found itself brought to its knees by a flurry of white, I can’t help but think that part of it was secretly going “YES!!!”.

Dear lady on the bus, why oh why does your precious umbrella need a seat??

I’m on a train being driven by a madman and this close to throwing up in my coffee cup!