C'EST LA DANSE MACABRE

Twilight Saga: New Moon Score

With an orchestral score like that, who the fuck needs plot?!

I was embarking on a mini effort to clear up my room, when I came across a rather ugly watch. I wanted to throw it away, but some part of my heart had decided to attach itself emotionally to that hideous specimen of blatantly fake leather. Like you're a parent on a grocery shopping spree with a child in the trolley, and said child keeps wanting to buy stuff you'd rather leave on the shelves. Assuming that this analogy is analagous, I shall conclude that my emotions are puerile. And in this case, I shall indulge them, as a mother would indulge a bratty, unreasonable child. Corporal punishment / refusal is just not my thing.

In any case, I can't bear to throw out the watch. I looked at the clock on my table -- ten minutes to six. I looked at the watch -- ten minutes to six. Perfect time. My heart broke at that moment. It's a cheap China watch that's trying so hard to be good. It's ticking, it's rigorously pushing its tiny body of clockwork mechanics to adhere to some unspoken level of perfection. All its features are in perfect working order. The second hand moves unfalteringly, like a heartbeat. It has a fucking claim to life.

I am so pro-life it's not even funny. Take this loving, all-inclusive attitude and expand it to include all manner of things (that normal people would've categorized as junk and thrown out long ago). See why it's so impossible for me to throw things out?!

Went to school today. I have absolutely no idea why going to school has a soothing effect on me. Is it the fengshui?

Destination library. Got most of the stuff I wanted, tho cannot find a book on literary practical criticism that I can bring myself to borrow. I think this is my subconscious rebelling. Or not-so-sub.

The librarian showed me how to renew books online. I think she recognizes me. Librarians tend to do that.

Walked out to the petrol station.

Walked back just as the seniors' alevel lit paper ended, when people were pouring into the canteen and into the walkways, going back home to mug for tomorrow's econs.

A10 bench. Jinxiang waved and me and Rachel talked! So now I know everything about what alevel papers are gonna be on what day. Also I waved goodbye to Chi Hern from a distance, and he waved tentatively and stared at me for an extended moment, and I wasn't sure he'd seen me so I waved again. And I said bye as I walked past. So I thought that was a bit of overkill friendliness. Bizarre

Now I am going through Adam Lambert's album -- for your entertainment. I have been completely enthralled ever since Dominic introduced him to me. Partly because of what I wrote about in a previous post -- songs people introduce to me are always more precious than songs I discover myself.

Today is the last day that casualpoet will be in operation. It was purely by accident that I found out -- I was bored, and blogsurfing more widely than usual, and decided to go to their website. So I have one more day with casualpoet! Robyn and I are going there in the evening. I will probably maybe have dinner there, and check out the limited selection of normal priced books, and the cool zines written in Chinese, and maybe I will get one. It will be ordinary and sweet except this will be the last day, but it doesn't mean anything to me because I haven't emotionally invested in it or anything. Just the fading away of one more semi-familiar place.

--

This is my december holiday fling.



Yep, completely obsessed.

I had the sudden thought of bringing my camera to school with me next year. This year has been curiously devoid of photographs, and I don't want to let school life go past visually undocumented! Okay this is actually how my 4 years in stnicks passed, barring the occasional happy 4truth class photo. Changes in consumer tastes and preferences -- try anticipating mine. To quote some comment I saw on facebook - 'if it's not photographed, it didn't happen'

Which technically implies that 99.2347928423% of mankind's history never actually occurred. This has serious implications for history students. History isn't just merely dead, it never existed! :p

Also the implication that you'll be able to easily forget anything that happened and wasn't photographed. Not true.

Plus I'd need a dslr. Somehow having a dslr magically de-personalizes everything... that's the impression I get, anyhow. Having a dslr makes you look as if you have a right to be taking photographs. Or as if you know what you're doing? Walking around with a tiny digital camera has a more private, personal connotation. Being photographed by one of these, without your consent, is more likely to make one feel intruded upon than if it'd been a dslr.

This is all theoretical.

Possibly I'm just trying to rationalize the purchase of a dslr.

But all of a sudden I am very bored.

Bizarre after midnight conversations on msn

In which KC kindly re-enacts the shooting star for me

With black pixels and unevenly drawn lines

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At first I thought it looked phallic. Then I realized that with KC I am always assuming the sexual.

Nonetheless, the gesture is much appreciated :D

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHhhhhh

WTFWTFWTFFFFFF

I'm listening to 'Time Of Our Lives' by Miley Cyrus and I just read this fucking fucking amazing post on the INTP forum that I can COMPLETELY. RELATE. TO. WHAT THE HELL. Okay give and take a little bit, and maybe upon further examination I'll start sourcing out things that don't fit me, but WTF OMFG.

To roughly quote Deyi's latest post, I feel somewhat not alone now.

<3

The right song, the right words...

and then,

in the words of Stephen Chbomsky

you can almost feel infinite

Somewhere along the line I have ceased to become self-sufficient. I have allowed myself to get dangerously drunk on people. I have forgotten the blissful ignorance of the loner who has never had company -- I have been ejected from the silent womb, the world of people who are okay with being by themselves. I have been initiated to DRUGS -- didn't you heed all those warnings, those you dismissed as cliché, those that insisted you learn to say 'NO' -- and I am now an addict. I have become needy, and hence weak. I have let parts of myself be renovated; from something whole and complete, into something incomplete, something that requires, that needs something else to become whole. We develop attachments, needs. All our lives we let ourselves be transformed into yearning creatures, drunk on whatever it is we feed on, and always needing more. We accumulate weaknesses, we trade our perfection (assuming we started out perfect) for fleeting mortal delights. My soul is littered with Achilles spots. They are sore, and hungry, and if they do not feed on what they are meant to feed on, they feed on me.

This is a complete exaggeration but it springs from a grain of truth. A tiny unassuming seed that, bewildered, finds itself ten years later grown into a gigantic tree or flower. And it whispers to itself, 'I never intended this'~ If we knew the consequences of what we were doing, maybe we'd stop and think first. Or maybe, under the all-excusing canopy of artistic license, we wouldn't.

I think I am a Buddhist, at least on some level, in philosophy if not in practice. I.e. undecided and unwilling to commit.

--

Listening to soundtrack of 'where the wild things are', even though I haven't yet watched the movie. The songs are awesome.

Watched Everything But The Brain at RJ. Twice. I liked it a lot, mostly because of the bears, certain emotionally charged scenes between father and daughter [that made me tear], and the Theory of Relativity. I don't know if this is a deliberate act on the playwright's part, but at the start of the play, the bears/narrators talk about how this is about the story of Elaine and her father which will take place over a span of approx 10 years. 'So,' they say, 'this play will end in exactly 10 years, __ months and __ days. However, in your time, this translates to just 1 hour, __ minutes and __seconds'.

IDK if I'm reading too much into it, but I thought this sentence was wonderfully in fitting with the theory of relativity. That is, it illustrates how time runs faster in some places [for the audience watching the play] and slower in other places [for Elaine and her father].

I don't even really get said theory of relativity. As in, I sort of get it, but...

[edit/ You are the one constant in my entire life -- to which everything else -- is relative. ♥ ]

Margaret Atwood is a brilliant writer and I love her utterly

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Robyn and I went over relativity-related physics concepts [what we know of them, at least, being the feckless artz students that we are] on the way to the mrt. She asked to see the book I was reading -- cat's eye by margaret atwood. Bizarrely the very first line of the first chapter was a musing on the inconstant nature of time.

during the intermission

me: It lasts for fifteen minutes.
robyn: well... who knows.

K shall spare you our amateur attempts at genius. ^^

I have been compulsively downloading songs faster than I can listen to them. I don't know what I'm going to do with all these albums of bands I've never even heard of. I'm not actually very adventurous with sourcing out new songs -- it takes a conscious effort to remind myself to 'try more new things'.

My sister is preparing for her p6 graduation night, i.e. she and her friends are crammed into the room, with the door locked, and tons of squealing is coming from inside. All of a sudden the door burst open and a half-dressed adolescent girl I've never seen in my life peers out, the side of her bra showing. She catches sight of me, squeals, and dashes back inside. Hysterical laughter ensues from inside the room.

I have no idea what I'm going to do for the rest of the year. Reading up on MBTI and haunting the MBTI forums is taking up tons of internet time, contrary to what I told AJ about me deciding 'not to take it too seriously'. In any case, I'm just going to curl up into a ball and dive back into the waters and disappear off the face of the earth... nais

Robyn has an interesting post on how the Singaporean government exploits the concept of multiracialism... which inspired me to set off on a tangent exploring multiracialism and cultural assimilation. All you wall-of-text enthusiasts, enjoy.

--

My stance against cultural assimilation: isn't racial harmony about appreciating each other -- in spite -- of our differences, and embracing said differences instead of seeking to eradicate them? If cultural assimilation really were to take place, maybe we'd all be one harmonious family treating each other all the same, but you can't say there's 'racial' harmony since you would've effectively stamped out all the differences that help distinguish one group from another, that give rise to the concept of 'race'.

Okay ignoring the semantics, multiracialism makes us acknowledge that our races distinguish us from each other, but that despite our differences, we are all equal. It's a fine line between the two – a 'balancing act', to quote Robyn. I think the problem with this is that while it's a noble ideal, many people nevertheless tend to place a value judgment on the differences between the various cultures/races, thinking that 'different' necessarily means 'unequal'. So some people end up creating like, mental hierachies of races, with e.g. Caucasian at the top and whatever else at the bottom. The ideal is noble, just that in practice it often falls short -- it is human nature to compare and judge.

Cultural assimilation pushes for completely refusing 'race' as part of our identity, insisting that we ignore the differences in culture, colour, etc., and recognize each other as completely the same. In a sense it's like Communism in a more abstract way -- it seeks to forcibly equalize all of us. Perhaps race shouldn't feature in our identities -- indeed it is tempting to dismiss the idea of 'race' as a social construct. Again, cultural assimilation is yet another ideal that honestly wants to remove racial boundaries for the better, that seeks to make people look at each other in non-racial terms. Hence ideally it would bypass the problem of people judging each other based on differences in race.

Yet there are also problems with putting full assimilation into practice. To roughly quote a cool phrase from the Ethics notes I photocopied from AJ, 'there are differences between various groups of people that occur at the level of culture and cannot be explained away as mere surface phenomena'. Whether you agree with this or not, we can't ignore the fact that at this very moment, race/culture play very important roles in the lives of many people, to the point where it dictates a core part of their identity.

I cite the example of France, where the wearing of Muslim head veils was banned in schools in an attempt at racial 'integration'. [I remember doing a really long post on this in sec3, which led to my tagboard being flamed by some anonymous people, whom I responded to, leading to a long, drawn out war in which I was accused of being pro-segregation. Fourteen year old me had to check the dictionary for the definition of 'segregation'. O_O] It was not pretty, obvs. There was serious backlash from the Muslim community -- and who can blame them? Westerners see the headveil as both a symbol of racial segregation and a symbol of female oppression. Muslim women see the headveil as something that defines and protects their identity as female Muslims. Both sides, instead of trying to understand each others' different motivations that could've opened the door to a higher level of understanding and tolerance, simply talked past each other. Inevitably the dominant culture -- 'dominant' only because they formed the majority -- had their say. This is where attempts at cultural assimilation backfire, because it fails to take into account the importance race plays in forming identity, the personal value people assign to their races. In this case, it simply exacerbated the problem of intolerance -- one side perceived the other as using majority pressure to corner them into giving up their identities, while the other was simply insensitive.

One might argue that race really is nothing more than 'mere surface phenomena' and shouldn't be taken so seriously. I agree with this on some reductionistic philosophical level, and maybe in the distant future, people will be able to leave behind the idea of race as a defining factor. But to try to impose this on the world at large is, for now, unfeasible and will probably incite more hostility. The ideal is, as usual, awesome but difficult to achieve

Plus on a sidenote, I wonder if 'cultural assimilation' opens the door to cultural imperialism. Maybe minority races simply get assimilated into the majority race, as was attempted in the France example. Big fish eat small fish. It would be more like conformism rather than tolerance. Though I guess if everyone's the same, it's easier to tolerate each other... but THAT'S NOT THE POINT is it?

I think my personal bias towards multiracialism is pretty obvious. The ideal, at least. I'm an idealist envisioning a utopia in which different races can safely do their own thing side by side, where we don't feel compelled to judge people for their differences. Plus it would be so much more diverse and colorful... pun unintended. Whatever, shut off the real world -- I'll be safe in my head amongst my concepts my dreams and my hopes.

edit/

I realize that I use 'race' and 'culture' interchangeably. I'm too lazy/tired to see how this impacts the overall argument, and I fear tomorrow morning I will wake up and realize that I was wrong all along... or something like that. Whatever.