Friday, November 30, 2007
"She's small and naked and human, and all around her is
hard, cold, sharp, and dirty, and everything is in ruins."
i was reading an article in
Esquire about Miru Kim's work (read it
online), about her 'urban exploring' and she was talking about how she was shooting in this "former asylum that was bombed during World War II"...
"I went in there and I started shooting, but I wanted to put something else in there, other than this space, a figure, a living thing."
i've been floundering in my photography recently, knowing that something is wrong but not really understanding what i need to change in terms of what i shoot, and miru kim's work was simply inspiring. i remember seeing that photo and thinking 'this is it. this is what i want to do'. it really, really hit the nail on the head.
now i just have scrounge up enough money to buy my flippin' SLR. =\
Labels: miru kim, photography
Thursday, November 29, 2007
i think that telling others about a once-important relationship lessens it, somehow. as if in the telling and the sharing, their importance is, deliberately or otherwise, downplayed, reduced and simply
made smaller by attempts to console, to empathise or to sympathise. but it's not. it's not small and it's not meant to be small. not yet.
and as long as it's big, no, it's not okay. no, you've never had a similar experience. no,
you bloody don't know how i feel. because this
is big. this
is devastating. this
is so enormous in its significance that i can't contain it. i drown in it. i am lost in it.
i think that eventually, in my own way, in my own time, i will take these memories and downsize them, miniaturise them, make them small enough that i can hold them in one hand, see them in one glance.
until then, no one will know.
Labels: emo
Monday, November 26, 2007
considering that just about anyone that's active on
facebook these days has superpoke, i'd say that the vast majority of people that have facebook are familiar with the term 'defenestration', even if they don't know what it means.
i could just post the definition here, but while doing some searching for the meaning (it means 'to be thrown out the window'), i came across something rather interesting: the word 'defenestration' (from 'de' and 'fenestra', the latin word for window) was invented in 1620 to describe the throwing of two catholics deputies of the National Assembly out a window in Prague by protestants, an event that sparked off the
Thirty Years' War.i had initially wanted to question why on earth would they even bother to coin a word for the act of being thrown out the window (because, well, it's not quite something that happens everyday), but now i'm rather curious about who coined such a word, and how did it manage to make its way into facebook and from there into the collective consciousness when all it's been used for, in all of 400 years, is to describe an event that happened in Prague.
which brings me to the point that, in a perfect world, i'd be a linguistics major at some liberal arts college, striving towards a degree that will probably not land me any kind of job worth talking about, which doesn't matter because the last thing i want in this life is to have a brilliantly successful (read: busy) career that makes all my hair fall out by age 40.
and on a related note, someone i met over the weekend made this observation: that the singapore education system breeds engineering undergrads, who have no idea what engineering entails, or whether it would suit them.
Labels: general
Saturday, November 24, 2007
so the trip to chicago over thanksgiving could possibly have been the worst trip of my life, but my day was more than adequately saved by my going home and seeing the
world's sexiest keyboard at my door!
sexiness by association: the world's sexiest keyboard box
(admittedly not very sexy)
sexy glowing-button-things!
world's sexiest keyboard in its new home
yay i own the world's sexiest keyboard!!
Labels: dinovo edge
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
there's this thing about sleep - as an overstimulated college kid, i never want to go to sleep, until the point that i want to (okay i guess that can apply to everything).
i mean, right now i'm cooking dinner for 8 and taking a break from standing in front of my stove, and last night i had a mahjong game that lasted till 4am, so right now i kinda really need some shut-eye, but my soup's boiling and i have last monday's
Heroes to watch and
BSG: Razor to watch and.. damn. i wish i didn't need sleep.
and this thing about laundry - like sleep, i hate having to do laundry until, say, i run out of clean socks (or underwear, which reminds me that i currently have more socks than underwear and i need to buy more socks. rule #124 of studying overseas: laundry happens either because a) you run out of underwear or b) you run out of socks).
but the post-laundry feeling. the post-laundry feeling, which comprises of your entire brainspace after folding your warm clothes that smell of detergent, that feeling has got to be one of life's little wonders.
Labels: general
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
okay so i admit it's a little overdue but i went to the niagara falls over fall break (like.. a month or so ago), which was -gasp- AWESOME... (americanese 101: the -gasp- before AWESOME is required. there is a scale, and it goes: "good", "fantastic", "awesome" and "-gasp- AWESOME" in ascending order of awesome-ness.)
oh yeah, and i went to toronto as well. it's weird how so many people have actually been to toronto over here, but all everyone knows is that toronto has really good chinese food (dim-sum is awe-sum). like, as if there wasn't anything else to do in toronto - like the Royal Ontario Museum, which is supposed to be the best museum in canada.
yeah, it was pretty awesome. (but not -gasp- awesome).
let me begin with: i love the niagara falls
they have this ferry that's filled with wet people in
useless raincoats that go real close to the waterfall
and it's true that the falls look better on the canadian side
(hah! take that americans!)
they also have really weird rocks
that look like they're filled with penguins(?)
have i mentioned i love the niagara falls?
only thing: the coffee at the Falls sucked balls.
the ROM is the best museum in Canada
(also the best in-joke abbreviation i've come across in a while.)
it has cool chinese sculpture.
(this is actually a piece of a rooftop.
makes you wonder where's the rest of the roof.)
also, fierce-looking chinese figurines.
and headless, skimpily-dressed grecian sculpture.
(yup. gotta love those headless ones.)
oh wow, random ship photo.
(um. i love toronto?)
Labels: niagara falls, royal ontario museum, travel
Monday, November 19, 2007
tab·u·la ra·sa (tāb'yə-lə rä'sə, -zə)
n. pl. tab·u·lae ra·sae (tāb'yə-lē' rä'sē, -zē)
- ...
- A need or an opportunity to start from the beginning.
[Medieval Latin tabula rāsa : Latin tabula, tablet + Latin rāsa, feminine of rāsus, erased.]
it's been a long hiatus. the last time i was here, i didn't know why i was blogging anymore.
it's been a while.
Labels: general
