there was a big ranty post here, in which i railed against numerous frustrating things and feelings that had cropped up recently, but i often forget that i am very blessed in many ways and it won’t do to continually dwell on sawdust while ignoring the plank in my eye. so all i will say is, i am still way too sensitive, and have a long way to go, and even with all the facility with words in the world i remain incapable of understanding the words of other people. especially when they are unaccompanied by body language. :/

1.
now it seems to me some fine things
have been laid upon your table
but you only want the ones that you can’t get
- The Eagles, “Desperado”

2.
maybe, maybe, maybe
you’ll find something that’s enough to keep you
but if the bright lights don’t receive you
you should turn yourself around and come on home
- Matchbox Twenty, “Bright Lights”

3.
but in the first moment of waking up
she knows she’s losing it, yeah she’s losing it
when the first cup of coffee tastes like washing up
she knows she’s losing it
- Belle and Sebastian, “She’s Losing It”

4.
love is the answer
at least for most of the questions in my heart, like
why are we here? and where do we go?
and how come it’s so hard?
it’s not always easy and sometimes life can be deceiving
I’ll tell you one thing, it’s always better when we’re together
- Jack Johnson, “Better Together”

5.
i’ve been thinking of the good old days
decorated in a candy glaze
each pretty ink-blot panel tells a different tale
each photo on the mantle
sweet memories that never will go stale
- Fastball, “G.O.D. (Good Old Days)”

6.
我不是你们想的如此完美
我承认有时也会辨不清真伪
并非我不愿意走出迷堆
只是这一次 这次是自己而不是谁
- Faye Wong, “执迷不悔”

7.
I originally had some elaboration after each snippet, but on reflection, the songs to which I’ve been listening and humming along sum up my meandering Sunday better than my own words possibly could. My day in a lyrical nutshell. A little strange and all over the map – it always is when I am left too long to my own devices and thoughts, alone at home. As always, though, I am eternally thankful for my friends (especially the many I had a chance to chat with today – you know who you all are!), who make me feel like I’m still a huge part of their lives, who say “love you” when I least expect it, and who surprise me with news of transcontinental visits to London out of the blue! My autumn just got way, way brighter.

there are some songs that just start your morning off with a euphoric bang. bon jovi’s “you give love a bad name” is one of them. so is, as i discovered this morning, matchbox twenty’s “real world”, which plastered a silly grin on my face as i walked to the tube station and which i am sure made me an object of ridicule to passersby, embarrassment fortunately offset by the said induced euphoria.

i ache everywhere (no, there is no explanation, i just ache despite a marked lack of physical exertion of late), i am really tired, i have an unprecedented amount of work to do, there are unforeseen snags with stuff, i have not left the office on time once in the past few weeks, monday promises to be a crazy busy day and i still can’t find anyone to take my extra proms ticket for monday night… not to mention i am perversely continuing to sleep deprive myself by wasting time online when i could be sleeping. why, why do i do this?

but! on the bright side there have been several pieces of good news from friends lately (yays all around), some good-ish news for myself, and teasingly tentative summer weather beckons this weekend. oh BBC, you and your vague, non-committal “sunny intervals”. you’ll probably change your mind in the morning too, as well as throughout the day, fickle and heartless as you are.

anyway, to all, i am very well, i know i owe multiple people emails/messages/chat time (i think the victorians had the right idea about setting aside a letter-writing time everyday for personal correspondence; it really piles up), but i haven’t forgotten and hope to catch up soon… “hope” being the operative word! the work and jobhunt and other annoying offline obligations never seem to end.

oh and the trailer for tim burton’s alice is really weird. i have decided to drop the idea altogether that it is an “alice film” and instead think of it as an entirely new fantasy world and characters which bear some vague, very distant resemblance to carroll’s – i am sure it will be a fabulous film but let it be said it has very little similarity to alice! it’s almost as egregious a departure as ella enchanted was, the latter being worse only because it made the pretense of being like the book while alice has the saving grace of being a sequel.

Given that I left the cinema practically slack-jawed in awe, and almost the whole of the film in some kind of rapture, this may not be tremendously objective… but I’ll try my best.

On the whole, I really, really liked HBP. I thought it was the best of the movies so far, and in order to assess this opinion I went home and re-watched PoA, my previous favourite, to see how they stacked up against each other. I definitely need to see HBP again before giving a definitive conclusion, but at this point I have to say that, given PoA had such a strong book as its base and HBP doesn’t, it is remarkable how good the latter movie is. And I think it is as good as, if not better, than the PoA movie.

I should preface this with a caveat that I’ve only read HBP once, when it first came out. I can’t remember a lot of things about the book, so missing things and niggly details didn’t bug me so much. And I did not go in expecting it to be anything like the book. If you do, you WILL be disappointed! If you’re prepared for something that departs significantly but still manages to capture the essence of the book and stands in its own right as a cracking good movie, you’ll enjoy it a lot more. Detailed review of things I liked and didn’t like below!

WARNING: HERE BE SPOILERS.

DO NOT READ!

…if you haven’t seen the film and don’t want to be spoiled. It’s safely cut for everyone reading this here directly, but if you’re reading this in Google Reader, beware.

Working life is apparently having to do all (or most) of your timewasting internet stuff in the morning before work because after, you’re too tired… granted maybe this only applies if you’re a morning person (we’re a dying breed!) and your office doesn’t start work till 10am (decadence!).

saturday was
The Bridge Project’s The Cherry Orchard at the Old Vic with Wenqi and her sister, who happens to be a good friend of my sister’s, which was very pleasant as I have a tendency to ramble about my siblings and it’s nice having someone who knows who I’m talking about :) Play-wise… I’m not the hugest fan of Chekhov, but parts of it, especially the premise of having to move out of a house you’ve lived in your whole life, really resonated. And the acting and production itself – superb. Though, and I say this as an Ethan Hawke fan, the British actors outperformed the American ones by a mile! Rebecca Hall especially really impressed, I hadn’t heard of her before, and now feel like I need to see all her movies.

sunday was
Dinner with Charmain at a sublime Randall & Aubin (thanks to Wey Ren for the introduction to this place) and a good long chat over walks round Soho and dessert in Chinatown. We had some very thought-provoking conversation – amidst conversation over fluffier topics like how all the Harry Potter kids grew up looking weird – about elitism in Singapore schools, and anti-elitism. Neither of us feel we’re particularly elitist, but we can sense a hostility from people who think we are… and does our consciousness of this other group of people make us elitist already? In a “us and them” mentality sort of way?

monday was
Post-work dinner with Jane from Japanese class, who is from Taiwan and as much of an Asian foodie as I am, which makes for very enjoyable food-related conversation over a dazzling array of dishes. We went to Kiasu at Bayswater which is newly re-opened after a period of apparent closure (heard from many sources it was closed for good so very surprised it was still there) – sadly the standard of food has plummeted so dramatically since I was last there that I can’t really recommend it anymore. Unless you’re going for carrot cake. Their carrot cake is absolutely tops ♥

akan datang
A trip to York tomorrow to watch another generation of kids graduate, La Cage Aux Folles, and the First Night of the Proms on Friday!

Many bajillion interviews later, I feel that I am far less nervous than I used to be, but the whole process still confounds me. I still leave interviews with the feeling that I could have done better, that I ought to have seized the opportunity to say things that I forgot to say, that I am an incorrigible rambler and completely fail at giving nice concise answers.

Thankfully, these past few days have been a reminder that I have the best friends in the world – FACT! Seriously… love you guys. ♥

Roll on July, bring on summer. I can’t wait to see where I’m going next.

I try not to get too geeky here (and have often contemplated forking geek posts to a new blog altogether because I often feel like I have a lot of geeky things to say regarding Linux and software that will alienate 99.9999% of my current audience – to fork or not to fork?), but that said, I feel like I have to be all anarchic and go against the tide of Google Chrome OS posts out in the blogosphere today, and say that I… am really not all that excited about it. Yet.

The thing that strikes me about Google Chrome OS – and what I’m sure a lot of other regular Linux users have also realised – is that it offers nothing radically new enough to warrant all the hype around it. If you want an OS for your netbook that boots up really quick and does nothing except go online, there’s already Jolicloud, and the upcoming gOS Cloud that boots directly into a browser, which is what I imagine Google’s OS will do. There are literally countless Linux distros optimised for netbooks. And if you don’t mind getting your hands a little dirty (it isn’t as hard as it sounds, I’ve tried it!), you can always roll your own Linux OS with something like Arch Linux, which basically starts you off from a command line and lets you install whatever you want on top of the veryVERY basic framework.

In fairness, I’m not techie enough to know how to wrangle the Linux kernel such that my OS boots directly into a browser, but I’m sure other people are. And if I had a netbook, nothing would be stopping me from using one of the already available distros that do something similar. I think I just don’t see right now what Google could do, other than add their brand name to the project, that could truly revolutionise netbook computing. On the bright side, I’m guessing a LOT more users will be converted to Linux netbooks if Google throws their weight behind it – and as it will be open source, I’m sure it won’t take long for intrepid developers to fork it into all sorts of yummy variations.

I don’t really subscribe to the “Google is evil” theory, and I still feel that they have the potential and know-how to really pull out something brilliant, so… more of the waiting game for now, I guess. Right now, for the life of me, I can’t imagine what it could possibly be. This is probably why I don’t work for Google (creativity fail)!

This hilarious photo near Blenheim Palace, from the Daily Telegraph, cracked me up when I first saw it but the more I look at it the more strangely evocative it seems. I think I have been feeling a lot like this over the past few days – like no matter how hard I try to fence myself off, to close the gate, there is a wide open expanse of chinks in my armour, whole gaping areas which can’t be blocked off. Where things just creep through anyway. At 23-going-on-24 there are so many things I feel I ought to be, to have learned by now, but haven’t; I am still so worried about how I am viewed, about being vulnerable, about doing what pleases others. I haven’t learned anything all that much, other than that I still have a long way to go – but maybe that in itself is a worthwhile lesson.

Weekends when good friends come to visit are always the best :) and Saturday mornings have taken on a new shade of happy altogether since picking up Japanese again. I love the language, I love my sensei, and my classmates are made of win. Never have I met a more diverse group of people with differing interests who clicked better. A fortnight ago I was saying to Pak how I feel that sometimes, you know instinctively you can get along with someone even if you haven’t all that much in common – there’s just this click, and you know, even if you’re a floaty-artsy-type and they’re into science or banking or architecture. I had a lot of trouble describing this clicky-feeling and what it was based on, and I don’t think I really succeeded, but I’m sure it’s there. I have felt it so often with the unlikeliest of people. And interestingly enough, hardly hardly ever with people who share my interests – my colleagues in theatre, my lit coursemates from uni.

A while ago, the realisation that by the end of this year, much of my London company will have left – either for greener pastures overseas, or to other parts of England – hit me pretty hard. And I guess maybe the time is long overdue to open the gate, to let others in, to be what i want, and stop being so afraid.

Reason #1249028 why I love living in London:
Getting to watch a live broadcast of the Royal Opera House’s La Traviata, starring only the most legendary soprano alive, Renee Fleming, as Violetta – all for free (with subtitles!) on a big screen in Trafalgar Square with an audience of 10,000 people

Reason #2937917982730813 why i hate living in London:
The fact that there were 9,999 other people there

Honestly, there are just waaay too many people in London. Summer heat has never felt so suffocating. One shouldn’t be made to feel like cattle when watching opera, even if it is free and outdoors…

Pleasant surprise of the night, overheard from two scruffy, stocky chavvy-type guys walking past me with cans of beer in hand:
“He missed a high C on the big aria in Act II, but other than that I thought he was really good. Have you heard him before?”

Ah, nothing like the occasional timely reminder that one should never, ever judge others on first impressions. I don’t even know what a high C sounds like!