This evening, it occurred to me how absurdly overdeveloped this sense of guilt and wrongdoing has become when I found myself, stirring soup in the pot, dwelling on guilt and feeling all kinds of guilty for feeling guilty. And then feeling guilty for feeling guilty for feeling – well, you get the idea. Like one of those mirror images which never ends.

I know, I know. I’m working on it, I promise. Please don’t laugh at me. I’ll get it under control… someday. Really. You have your irrationalities too, don’t you?

In other news, we had unexpectedly good weather throughout almost all of the August bank holiday weekend, and a whole array of good food (chorizo burgers at Borough market’s Brindisa, Monmouth Coffee, GBK, lassi, cake, duck rice at Goldmine!) plus NHM plus butterflies plus South Bank sunshine plus good company made it a lovely one. And that’s it, for summer – but what a memorable sendoff.

(but my heart’s not in it)

absofrigginlutely exhausted. what a week. full of thoughts. full of conflicting emotions. bouncing from almost sinfully sugary highs to fist-clenching, gut-twisting lows, feeling like the tension knots in my back will never leave, feeling full and empty alternately (like the proverbial glass of water), soaking up the last of the summer sunshine, thinking how much i’d miss this as i walked down the south bank, futilely clinging on to the moment, loving it, hating that it had to end.

i can’t even think straight enough to string a post together coherently, i am so tired, and i feel so drained, and i feel like there is nothing of myself left over for me. i haven’t felt like this since jc. and it’s scary. i know i’ll be ok. i just really – need to let this tension go. thank goodness, thank goodness, that i will be seeing wanyun in a week’s time, and finally touch base again with an old familiar world where i know the people love me no matter how long i’ve been away and how long it’s been since we’ve spoken. i’m trying my best, here. but it’s hard.

I didn’t really want to, as I was exhausted, but decided for old times’ sake and to show support that I should make the trip down to Guildford yesterday for the closing day of my old company’s production of A Winter’s Tale. It was surreal sitting in the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre holding the programme, thinking back to November when all this madness really kicked off for me and I was bright-eyed, fresh out of university, ringing up venues to ask if they would take some leaflets for audition publicity – going through all those gruelling months with over a thousand kids – and finally witnessing the result of it all, on a stage.

I sat beside a woman from Woking who was avidly into theatre, having seen almost everything in London on and off the West End for years and years. She’d seen Judi Dench play Desiree Armfeldt in A Little Night Music, sat on the Olivier Awards’ Theatre Committee, been in about eight amateur opera and theatre groups as a teenager – chatting with her, I felt humbled, and I felt the weight of a massive tradition on my shoulders, one I was only beginning to scratch the surface of. You can work in this industry for ages and still not understand the first thing about it till you get to grips with just how much history lies behind the institution of English theatre.

The production was truly amazing. I knew the company did incredible work, but I had somehow never imagined that it would be like this, that all the paperwork and photographs and adding up audition scores would translate into this. It was especially piquant for me having just seen The Bridge Project’s version of The Winter’s Tale, and this musical interpretation, gently re-imagined as what was ultimately a celebration of youth, rebirth and hope in a Soviet State/Mediterranean setting, more than held its own. This is an even more staggeringly tremendous fact when you take into account the fact that all the young people involved were amateurs, many without formal training (as I remember all too well from aforementioned paperwork), and that they had done all this with just three weeks of rehearsal.

Sometimes the sheer slog of the grunt work gets to me. But I was genuinely a little teary-eyed by the end of yesterday’s performance, partly because the statue scene was done so well and heartbreakingly that it rivalled even that of The Bridge Project, and partly because the enormous sense of having had a hand in this, of having helped make it happen, hit me once again. As the lights came on in the house, the lady from Woking turned to me and said, “I thoroughly enjoyed that. I was very impressed indeed, there are some very promising young voices on that stage.” I told her how glad I was, that I’d make sure to convey her remarks to my colleagues, and she said to please do that. She then wished me well in my career and told me how happy she was for me that I’d managed to find a job – her daughter’s in showbiz as well, so she knows it’s tough.

I wished her a safe journey back home, we smiled as we parted, and I headed back to Guildford station to hop the next train back to Waterloo. I’ve rarely felt more glowy satisfaction from a day of doing nothing.

So the long commute is, at least partly, set off by the fact that knocking off at 5-5:30 actually does mean exactly what it says on the tin; I actually managed to get home earlier than I ever have from most of my other jobs. And happily, I’m quickly realising that a 9-5 workday fits my biological clock a lot better than the 10-6s I’ve been working since, well, ever.

Other cheap thrills that made my first day a pleasant surprise:
1) Having my name in my email address instead of something like marketing.intern at whatever.org
2) Having my own phone number/extension
3) Having my name on my phone display
4) Getting to record my own phone answering message (or getting round to it, soon)
5) Being informed that I will do hospital radio segments

It’s the little things that make the job!

Wow, talk about a curveball I didn’t see coming.

One of the odd things about blogging is that it is so public, so open a platform, that when big things happen you don’t really want to stand up on your virtual soapbox and shout them to the world. So, well – we’ll be okay, is all. My mom rang me an hour ago, jolting me out of an early slumber (which is just as well as I had skipped dinner to go to bed and would’ve woken up starving if I hadn’t rolled out of bed after the call to eat something), and things sound fine. It’s just the terror of the unknown that has got to me.

In other news, new job kicks off tomorrow – fingers crossed. The 3-hour daily commute is going to knock me out totally though, so expect a marked decrease in online activity. My correspondence-pwning days are over…

I can’t believe I actually did manage to redesign after all, not to mention whip up something I rather like, though the process was probably made easier by the fact that I knew for sure I wanted this layout to

1) have dark text on a light background
2) be very simple
3) contain the colour red
4) have a swirly embellishment
5) not be based on a lyric

the latter since most of my previous layouts so far have had some element of a song in them, whether inspired by one or with lyrics in the design. So my favourite line from King Lear supplied the textual decoration this time – you can never go wrong with Shakespeare – and the rest of it, given the above conditions, kind of wrote itself very quickly.

After getting this done and dusted, I was going to have a rant, triggered by a mildly traumatic night out yesterday, about the drinking culture here and how I will never ever understand it, nor the practice of clubbing, and/or making friends with strangers at pubs and bars and similar establishments, or thinking it is okay to make out with people you’ve just met just because you’re both unattached. In fairness to the friend who dragged me along on this ill-advised jaunt last night, she is an exceedingly warm-hearted and intelligent person, I know she didn’t mean any harm, and my frustration is no doubt down entirely to cultural and personal differences of opinion. But I just feel like… this is a world I will never get, and so much of England is that world. Especially the drinking. There are a lot of good things I can say about this country, but it has its really ugly sides, like all other countries. This is one of them. The hour, however, compels me to keep this brief and go to sleep, and so this has to be the extent of my rant – which is probably a good thing, as I’m sure I’ll feel better in the morning.

I keep putting off blogging because I keep wanting to redesign, and I have ideas and all and even a Photoshop mockup (done ages ago), but there is no time on weekdays and always so much to do during the weekends. Once I start full-time work, it will only go downhill. Looks like it’s tomorrow or never, but in the meantime… there’s still today, and these words of wisdom from Mr Neil Gaiman himself, which Wee Zi first drew to my attention earlier this year and which I never got round to posting…

Hello, Mr. Neil.
This is my question: You lived most of your life in the UK but now live in the United States, right? Which one do you consider to be your home? And for that matter, what do you think classifies as a ‘home’?

I find myself remembering the Richard Burton (the actor, not the Arabian Nights one) line about “Home is where the books are”. And by that token, home is the one in the US.

But truly, even now, when I go to the UK I think, I’m going home. And when I go, er, home, I think I’m going to America. Probably why I’ve never taken citizenship…

But at the end of the day, I think Home is something you make, not something you find. Something you’re always leaving, and somewhere you’re always looking for or returning to. It’s part of growing up, and not the best part.

- (from Neil’s blog)

As always, Neil totally nails it, better than I ever could even after years and years of struggling with my own words.

Recently, someone referred to the UK as my second home, in casual conversation; my immediate and instinctive response was that Sydney is my second home, and the UK just a place I’m passing through. It doesn’t really make any sense because I’ve spent most of the last five years in this country, and less than 6 months collectively in Sydney over the same period of time, and it gave me pause for thought. As for Singapore – I think I’ve spent even less time there than I have in Sydney, since 2004 at least, so why do I still think of it as my first home?

I think I’m a lot less emo and angsty about finding home now than I used to be (time will do that to you), but it doesn’t mean I don’t still think of it often, turn the question around in my mind, grapple with my lack of answers. And what Neil says here – it’s exactly how I feel about the UK, Singapore and Australia. When I fly to Singapore, I think, I’m going home. When I fly to Australia, I think, I’m going to my family. And when I fly here, to the one country where I actually have a residence (albeit rented) to call my own, and a semi-permanent correspondence address, I think… I’m going to England. Often, I think I’m going back to England, and that back is a pretty key word, but I never think I’m going home. I guess Neil is right (what am I saying? of course Neil is right. Neil is always right :P) that home is what we make, and home is what you’re looking for, what you want to return to. And I think a big part of my thinking of Singapore as home is that so much of who I am is based on my growing up there, and it represents, or is as close as a physical place can be to representing, the idea of a world I want to go back to. I know it’s not the same anymore and that it has changed, in many ways, so dramatically that it is no longer the world in my mind. But the idea of it, the memory of it -

(As for the books, let’s not even go into where mine are. I have no idea, in most cases, and this distresses me.)

Red Velvet Cake is one of life’s great mysteries (to me). It has an unpinpointable taste that makes it impossible to describe what kind of cake it is. I don’t think it’s chocolatey enough to be chocolate, and it’s not a butter cake, nor a sponge cake, nor a pound cake. Also, it owes its renown pretty much entirely to red food colouring, which is ridiculous considering that you could red-food-colour almost any other cake you want. You could even have a red cheesecake if that floats your scarlet-loving boat. And as Deb of Smitten Kitchen (where I got this recipe) points out, red velvet cake could be any other colour you want, so this red thing is really kind of mindboggling.

But, as is also observed by Deb, people loooove red velvet cake. I freely admit to feeling an inexplicable attraction towards it, even when I know that this is an attraction borne entirely of artificial colouring. People especially love it when it is baked in cupcake form. Here in the UK, I suspect this is due to the famed Hummingbird Bakery’s version of it (they do do a cake form but I far more often hear people talk about their red velvet cupcakes). And as I was after an impressive dessert recipe for my colleagues to commemorate my last days of work at my current theatre, I decided I should finally give red velvet cake a go. I shan’t reproduce the recipe here because I pretty much used the one from Smitten Kitchen word for word (except for some quanitity adjustments for a smaller cake), but I shall have a good long rant about the painstaking process that is cake-baking…

Which segues nicely to how not to bake a cake, point 1: when a recipe tells you to lump some butter in the bottom of your pan and place pan in oven “for a few minutes until butter melts”, don’t let your butter burn, as I rather stupidly did! If you, like me, associate the smell of burnt butter with popcorn and movies, this will make your cake smell of popcorn and movies. And taste a little like it too (the bits of it that came into contact with the burnt butter bottom, anyway). Point 2: when the recipe says to line your pan with parchment paper, there’s probably a reason for it… it would’ve made my cake NOT taste like popcorn, at the very least >__>

I also struggled almightily with the components of the recipe itself. Who has 3 cake tins lying around? Seriously? Well I don’t… and on top of that, the UK doesn’t contain cake flour, canola oil or white vinegar. Cake flour I can understand because I’ve never heard of it in my life, but canola oil and white vinegar definitely exist in Singapore (the oil at least I’m sure of!), so what gives, London? I wound up reducing the recipe by one-third and making it one fat layer instead of a few, then slapping all the frosting on top of my one fat layer, and using vegetable oil in place of canola, the latter of which turned out to be an icky mistake :/ it’s not as disastrous as it could’ve been. But there’s definitely a strange, lingering, oily aftertaste to the cake. Argh! Next time I shall try it with rapeseed oil instead, which is apparently the closest thing the UK has to canola (and I didn’t bother doing this research before going out grocery shopping, because I had no idea canola oil didn’t exist here… annoying country differences).

In the absence of a standing electric mixer with a bowl that the recipe called for, I had to make do with a handheld mixer instead. I don’t think it really made a difference in the end, but I did find myself having to juggle a lot more things at one go. Oh and I had no white vinegar. Did I mention that already? I highly doubted that malt vinegar would be quite the same, so I substituted lemon juice, which… I suspect wasn’t strong enough because the expected tangy taste is barely there at all. I suppose it is quite possible that my lemon juice, being Tesco house brand, is of substandard quality.

And then! After all was done and the cake was in the oven, and I had washed up and wiped the table and was feeling good about it all, I realised to my horror that I had forgotten to add vanilla to the cake. Cue panic removal of the cake pan from oven, throwing in vanilla, and mixing it up in the pan itself, totally ignoring the fact that it had started to bake and bits of crusty top were forming. Alas. I don’t know if this really affected the cake much, but I would rather advise that you not do it if possible to avoid…!

Happily, it didn’t turn out all disastrously – the middle of the cake (i.e. everywhere that didn’t touch the popcorny burnt-butter sides and bottom) actually tastes pretty good. If you, erm, try to ignore the faint oily aftertaste. And the cream cheese frosting is golden. This is hands down the best frosting I have ever made in my life. Not that I’m very experienced at frosting, but this is really, really good, and so easy; I’m definitely nicking the same frosting for other cakes!

My last day of work at the current place isn’t till next week. I had deliberately made an early trial run of this cake with the idea in mind that I would definitely screw up and need a second run to perfect it for my colleagues T____T I can’t decide whether I’m happy or not to have been proven right. But at least it doesn’t taste so terrible that I can’t eat it. And now that you all know what not to do when making red velvet cake, you can all have a good laugh at me and hopefully go off and make lots of lovely red velvet cake yourselves with Smitten Kitchen’s fantastic recipe, which I can sample in future ♥

So much has happened that I feel it hasn’t all properly sunk in yet. I don’t even really know where to start. I have been staring at this empty text box, listening to Aikawa Nanase and the pattering rain on my window, blanking out for at least 10 minutes. I suppose the most important thing to share is the exciting news (though most people know already) that, as of one magic phone call on Monday, I am no longer unemployed, at least for the next 6 months :) I won’t exactly be well-paid (understatement of the year) but it is something I really want to do, and am really excited about. It is such a strange feeling, alternating between bouncing-off-the-walls joy and a sort of surreal “is this really happening? have i genuinely landed something that pays, smack in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression?”

And I’m kinda, stupidly, a little bit choked up about it all, because I feel that I have worked so hard and fought tooth and nail to get to where I am now, and it’s like… finally, payoff. I don’t even know if I am particularly justified in feeling this way because it’s not that I’ve had to suffer materially or anything :/ but it’s just been such an emotional rollercoaster, an exhausting, draining ride down a long dark tunnel with no end in sight. Then suddenly: boom, light. What an indescribable feeling.

Earthshaking news aside, the rest of the week has been: The Bridge Project’s The Winter’s Tale at The Old Vic, the regular fortnightly dinner with fellow foodies from Japanese class, a whirlwind tour of the beautiful Kew Gardens today with Kevin followed by coffee at Monmouth, the best in the world ♥, a flurry of chat, conversation and correspondence online with many old friends, touching base with the family, and finding out my brother might have H1N1 (which… amuses me more than it alarms me. is this wrong?). It has been lovely, with today’s day out in gorgeous weather and the promise of rest tomorrow being the icing on the cake; it has also been much-needed relief from the horrors of last week, when it looked like the production I was working on was not going to sell at all (only for me to find out on Monday that Friday’s closing night sold out. joy!), and all kinds of other disasters piled themselves up in a it-never-rains-but-it-pours fashion.

The Winter’s Tale was fantastic :) I enjoyed it much much more than The Cherry Orchard, though that might be down to the play itself, as Shakespeare is much more my cup of tea than Chekhov. The undeniably very, very talented cast and crew did an amazing job of making Shakespeare accessible, which was all the more remarkable considering The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s perennial problem plays, not to mention isn’t well-known at all. But there is magic in hearing Shakespeare’s words spoken; I really do think they come to life, and it is always such a pleasure to be reminded of it in a top-notch production. I am really excited about the future of The Bridge Project, and I really hope to be able to watch more of them as they continue their stellar work over the next couple of years. Watching good theatre reminds me why I love the work I do… we’re the ones who make it happen!

“Exit, pursued by a bear” was, by the way, amazingly well done. I haven’t seen any other performances of this play so I’ve nothing to compare it to, but it was incredibly smooth and realistically executed. Props to the stage manager.

To me, Sunday is and probably always will be Oldies Day. As a child, and all through my teenage years as well, Sunday was waking up to an old CD that my dad had put on the stereo downstairs. The music would waft through the house as I went about my morning, softly upstairs through the bathroom door, louder as I headed downstairs, accompanying me through breakfast and the Sunday colour comics at the big marble dining table. I hummed along to Donna Summer, The Osmonds, the Bee Gees and Billy Joel never knowing the first thing about any of them. It was all just Sunday music, the music of lazy days in and slow, languid, easy mornings.

I haven’t listened to oldies on a Sunday for many years now. Perhaps since I came here and my family moved. We no longer have an ancient JVC stereo in the living room. Sunday mornings at home in Sydney are now the sound of my brother’s cartoons on TV, or perhaps his breakdance music blaring from computer speakers, and sometimes both. And while I’d diligently ripped almost all my CDs before coming here, I hadn’t thought to rip any of my dad’s, so I’ve now got a hard disk full of modern music, instrumental soundtracks, the odd classical piece and a very limited selection of oldies.

This morning, in search of suitable background music to keep me company while I did chores, I plowed through the Shoutcast internet radio directory and put on an oldies station. Suddenly it was like I was a child again – boppy, syncopated ’80s beats filling the house. I couldn’t help a little hop, skip and twirl round the room to Tina Turner’s glorious, belting vocals. Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken? Ah Sunday, Sunday – with the right soundtrack, what a revelation you have been to me all over again.