An Orchard Invisible: A Natural Nistory of Seeds by Jonathan Silvertown is fantastically interesting. It's science written in the style of really good science fiction, without the long-winded and occasionally overwrought (though eloquent, and often delightful) language with which I've come to associate Simon Winchester. Of course I'm only still in the second chapter, so my opinion may change later on, but Silvertown writes concisely and he explains the biology in a way that is remarkably easy to understand. For a science n00b who likes to pick up random stuff in the library, this book was like unearthing an emerald in a minefield.

Other news:

• school starts next week! Looking forward to it. Considering that I'd been working throughout 2/3 of my holidays.
• speaking of work, it's ended. Though long-anticipated, it came almost as a surprise. That day, very few people were in the office, and it turned out to be because the staff had been doing OverTime all week (and the week before that) rushing out a project and were thus granted a day off, meaning that they got this glorious four-day weekend. Isn't this nice?
• Pixar's UP is here!! IT'S HERE AT LAST!!! Now, I need someone to watch it with so I can squee about the movie afterwards.
• I used to get very upset when my parents quarrelled, or when one of them (it's always this one of the pair) started shouting at the other, but now I'm completely blasé about it. I know both of them well enough that the shouter has problems dealing with shocks, and that the shoutee... usually deserves some shouting at, though perhaps not the way the shouter does it. Shaking a finger in someone else's face is just so extremely rude. It's almost like watching children sometimes...
• I've shrunk. It's actually visible. Wow. I need to shrink some more to reach the national standard of ideal weight, though it's not weight I'm really trying to lose -- just my underchin fats, because I loathe the way it hinders the movement of the neck. (Plus, it looks ugly.) It's a pity that one of the only really effective ways to lose them, that I know off, is to shave off total body fat. Shave, shave.
• I have wednesdays free until 7pm!!! I GET TO EAT IN QUIET RESTAURANTS AND TAKE ADVANTAGE OF STUDENT DISCOUNTS!

My second tuition student's mum SMSed me early this morning saying that tuition has to be moved to Sunday. I didn't get the message until an hour before the lesson, which may or may not have been my fault, but I am NOT free on Sunday. I need one day's notice to plan ahead so that other people aren't affected; I'm going to have to tell them that the moment I manage to get into two-way contact with the pair (who are at the moment incommunicado.) Said tuition student's grammar is horrible enough that she needs lessons regularly, so I'm not going to cancel for the week if she doesn't, but both of them need to take this thing seriously.

Unless they have SUCH an excellent reason that I wince in sympathy and believe that I would have had to do the same thing in their situation. Whatever it is, it's fine if they don't make a habit of it.

I now have the day to rest and clean my room. Hence this nice, long post.

Of Mice and Men: I'm glad it wasn't very long. Reading it was like being repeatedly kicked in the chest. A quiet tragedy in about a hundred pages or so, to be meditated upon over on a long train ride home and the decades beyond.

Verdict: hearts and shinies.

And then I got home and -- there was this awful hammy local show on the telly. The contrast was like being STABBED in the chest.

Unfit for minors. Yet -- get this -- acted by local minors, and AIMED at local minors. Said minors might as well be indoctrinated underage criminals for all they're worth in the eyes of any organism in the industry who really believe that youths can swallow this crap, unless of course the target audience really exists en masse. (A thought too disgusting to contemplate.) If only censorship were aimed at quality and not content. But, no, this is LOCAL. 

Now that 'homegrown' has pretty much become a swear word, where the fuck do we go from here?

http://ethium.deviantart.com/

Right now it's all old stuff, because I haven't any new stuff to show. I'll upload updates every so often (of old stuff) until I have new stuff.

Very tired.

Today for the first time since that second-last post all my time is my own.

There are two weeks left on my internship. School starts directly after that. I've missed the Module Pre-Allocation Exercise simply by not knowing when it started (I was waiting expectantly for an email that never came) so monday's bidding will be very stressful, but I did get both the creative writing modules I'd applied for. On top of MAP2009, although they haven't sent me the confirmation email yet.

I've learned enough on my internship to know that I never want to work in an animation studio for a living. I love drawing and art but I like to do self-directed stuff. Working in someone else's style is sometimes instructive but never satisfying. I knew from before that most of the large-scale projects that I admire was created by the collaborative efforts of a whole studio (and their partners/sponsors/etc), and it's fun too, and yet most of it as always is mind-breaking tedium of about the same level as when I was being blinded through a microscope while working in that jewellery company. Thing is, if you're ever to look closely enough at a diamond, you'll realise it really RESEMBLES ACRYLIC. No matter what the diamond might be a metaphorical stand-in for. And after eight or nine years of doing this thing...

...Not that I'm already underqualified to begin with. Yes, still underqualified.

It might be about time for someone to tag me with a sticker saying 'Not a team player'. Which is the truth. But it was a wonderful experience all the same.

Maybe the next two weeks will change my mind.

Looking forward to being free on weekdays again. I like quiet restaurants.

I'm burning out. I think.

But I'm young, I can deal with it.

Yay for youth.

I have this thing for folk-like pop.

You know:

色づく　西空に
差し込む一筋の陽
夕立の雨上がりに
気付く夏の匂い

ひしめく光が照らす
想いに耳を澄ませば
聴こえし友の面影

夏夕空　薫り立つ
鮮やかな過ぎ去りし日々
心のまま笑いあった
あの夏の思い出よ

色づく鬼灯(ほおずき)に
賑わいし夏祭り
鳴り響く風鈴(すず)の音に
胸の奥が揺れる

さざめく蜩(ひぐらし)が鳴く
木立を一人歩けば
蘇(よみがえ)し日の面影

そっと僕の
耳元でささやいた
懐かしい日々
あの頃のまま変わらず
今も心の中で

人として守るもの
人として学ぶこと
亡き祖父が紡ぐ
大切な言葉はこの胸に

夏夕空　薫り立つ
鮮やかな過ぎ去りし日々
あの頃のまま変わらぬ
染み渡る温もりよ

あの夏の思い出よ



In blushing western skies
the sun purposefully sets;
Within the evening rains
I noticed the breath of summer.

Beneath this intense mass of light
My thoughts become clear in my ears --
I remember the faces of my friends.

The scent of that summer evening sky
Brings back the days of my past afresh.
My heart rejoices
In the memories of that summer.

The ripening ground cherries*
Enliven the summer festivities
The reveberating knell of the wind-bells
Shakes the inner core of my heart.

Amidst the cicadas' raucous singing
I wander through the woodland
Remembering the visage of the past...

And close to my ears
Are the whispers of nostalgia.
Those seasons have not changed,
For I have lodged them inside my heart.

All people protect their loved ones;
All people may learn from experience.
So said my late grandfather,
whose words reside within my heart.

The scent of that summer evening sky
Brings back the days of my past afresh.
Nothing of those seasons have changed,
Warmth is spreading its roots deep and wide --

Like the memories of that summer.


I've had to be less than literal in some places due to non-translatability, but there you go. *Ground cherries => can literally translate into 'goblin lights', which has specific meaning in the context of Natsume Yuujin-chou. They look like this:




A shortened version of the song is accompanied by pretty visuals HERE:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_FF1n54iHg

what are you waiting for? Click it!

More stuff from the person who has become my source of godawesome music.

Ril says:

GOULD

Ril says:

Rilarien: You do realise I'm creating a character based on Glenn Gould's interpretation of the third movement of Beethoven's 31st piano sonata.

going places says:

that would be potent.

going places says:

this guy plays as if he were in an electric chair (or engaging in a very lewd sex act with the piano.)

Ril says:

Yes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJG8VqU8XNE&feature=related

Phone conversation:

Me: Hello 弟!
弟: Yes?
Me: I've run away.
弟: WHAT??

I did run away. But I'd run away in my parents' car. They'd just invited me to Kinokuniya and when they agreed to my condition of FREE BOOKS (i.e. they pay), I'd simply hopped in. Before that I was just going downstairs to hand over my membership card after been interrupted in the middle of vaccuming underneath the sofa...

I re-bought To Kill A Mockingbird because the old copy had been crapped up beyond recognition even before it disappeared, maybe two years ago. (Three bored secondary school students had been using it for classwork in succession. And the last one, knowing that he would be the last one to use it, had been very liberal with his highlighting.) It's still a tremendously fine read. Anyone who hasn't looked inside it yet should go and at least TOUCH it now.

Otherwise -- how many ways do you have of saying 'drink' without actually saying the word 'drink'?

chug
lap
swill
down
guzzle
lick
suck
sip
glug
gulp
swig
quaff
slurp
drain
draw
taste
partake
imbibe
ingest
consume
absorb
inhale
swallow
wash down

The thesaurus also recommends 'dissipate', 'sponge', 'swig', 'sup' and 'toss off' among other more informal usages I have no business knowing. Synonyms are very exciting.

I've been meeting all kinds of new people lately. For someone whose natural desire is to hermit, the experience is tempting me to buy a plane ticket to tibet from india (if there is such a thing, because of chinese airspace restrictions) and plan a forced ejection by parachute over the himalayas. Then I can be among goats and snow leopards who might eat me, yes, but won't disrupt my limited social-existential horizons.

Well, it was fun while it lasted.

Disappearing.

Yay, got my internship. I'm starting next monday. 1/4 of me is going 'WHEEEE' and the other 3/4 is all 'MEIN GOTT, WHAT HAVE I SIGNED UP FOR??!' but it's settled, and I'm excited and nervous, and wondering if they won't want to throw me out on my ear after the first week because of my blinding ignorance. There seem to be a lot of other people my age at the office. But the place doesn't have a dress code, so that's one of the perks. And it has a canteen next to it which appears to sell chicken rice for $3. Hrm.

The meeting/interview thingy was yesterday. When they asked me why I didn't go to poly and get properly trained in drawingstuff, I had to explain that I actually really liked Lit.

'Can't have your cake and eat it too, huh?' said one of the people there.

I don't know. I think I'm doing a pretty good job of trying to do just that. After all, it's easy when you have two cakes.

I spent all of today writing short stories and narratives. It's great fun that I'd forgotten that I could have since CAP ended last year.

Whoever owes me money, or whom I owe money to, should contact me NOW before I disappear forever.

Ganked off somewhere I can't remember.

Siegfried is a Brat.

They got a good singer to do his part though.

Life's pretty fun with nothing to do, but after a week of lying at home (not being able to go out and properly have fun because I was sick) I feel the need to start learning of my own volition. So I've started ploughing through the Bible again, attacking Western philosophy and properly learning about Photoshop CS2 functions like I should have when I first got it four years ago. If I am rejected for that internship I'll take the extra time to learn about web programming, and then finally set up that comics webpage like I'd been meaning to for... a year and a half now.

That said, I still haven't started/completed character commissions that are dated back from last year. T__T I'll do those first. (While doing the others on the side.) 

I still spout opague phlegm and burst into coughing fits, but other than that, I'm fine.

Life begins again.

The first moment I get after the exams, I fall sick. Perhaps without knowing it I have only been waiting for the end of the exams to fall sick. It might be only natural when one starts binge-mugging: the body doesn't understand such excesses.

The NUS matriculation card has its privileges. I'm planning a museum pilgrimage while I still have free access to such places.

But right now I'm sniffly and a little annoyed. Sigh. At least I'm not busy on top of that. It's nice to have free time.

Exams over, but not without its casualties. Four-line long answer to a Lit essay question, anyone?


Anyway, this is what I found on TVtropes, under the tag 'Better Than It Sounds':

'Life: A state of being in which those who experience it go through years of slow deterioration of bodily parts and have nothing better to do than talk about random things in places like this, release excess fecal matter, and participate in the world's slowest and least impressive MMO.

• I don't know, the graphics are really good, the dialogue (usually) better than others and the full immersion something else. The quests are bit vague, though.
• Also, it's far too expensive.'

w1n.

Not quite back to life yet. The furthest I'll go is un-dead. Undead.

I'm back to writing poetry. Some of it is very angry stuff.

But I'm actually quite happy. My feet are happy, my ego is happy, my mugging progress charts are happy. Only my wallet is not happy. (Sandwiches are SO expensive.) It is very perverse to be happy in what for most would be a period of unmediated stress, but my life is very peaceful right now and my head is filling satisfyingly with bits of fluff that may or may not be useful in the actual papers. No need to contend with existential problems, lying bastards or company audits... Just sitting in my little study cocoon until it's all over and I can rejoin real life. Possibly with some regret.

The heat, though, is something I should make a case against, but the humidity makes up for it somewhat. Although I can't complain because I study in the bountiful air-conditioning of public libraries, currently the sole reason for which I will very willingly pay my taxes when I am of age. (there are other reasons, like covered walkways and subsidised primary education, but they're not the subject of my intense gratitude at the moment.) 

Be back after the exams.

The flies were out and about by Friday evening. Diffuse swarms of them probably awakened by the rain, all doing whatever it is that flies do. These are not houseflies or horseflies we're talking about -- they're the sweet little ones with long flat wings. But they too can be annoying in large numbers.

And no more than today as I was at the swimming complex. It was evening and the stadium lights were reflecting off the water's surface like anything. And the flies, whole hordes of them, were wheeling down from above like raintree leaves and nosediving in with little plops-- literally drowning themselves in the pool!!!

Evolution had definitely taken a wrong step somewhere.

They've changed the drums a bit, but it's still fantastic. In fact, it's even more fantastic seeing it performed live. I wish I had been there.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJsEYwguuj8

The lyrics are scary.

If you have time tonight, get out there and look at the moon. It's worth it.

And two 1800-word essays after that.

I should not drink coffee. I don't really like the taste, and after the initial high the experience is unpleasant for up to and beyond 8 hours after the act. Although it does provide me with the bodily malaise which I have found necessary in order to work nowdays... if I'm too comfortable, I tend to want to put it off.

I can see that when I become economically productive, I am going to have an extremely miserable life.

Okay, back to work.