Thursday, April 27, 2006

My transcript has been sullied forever. Farewell, scholarship! Adieu, grad school!

It's all semiotics' fault, but I do love it so. Instead I blame simulations and intro to P&C, a plague on both their houses.

...

Well, at least there were no record-setting lows, and record-setting highs not being possible I suppose I must be contented.

Sigh.

I suppose I shouldn't have expected much, with the amount of work I did put in, and if I were to go back to January I'd stay up until 2am with the roommates every night, rather than most nights, which only goes to show where my priorities lay for the term. Ah, domesticity.

And now, back to the JAM manuals for course 6, the syntax of which is beyond human comprehension, along with its grammar... and punctation... and spelling...

Saturday, April 22, 2006

We meet someone, sometimes, with whom for obscure reasons one is thrown together for a length of time, and whose presence -- whose consciousness -- continually chafes and irritates, and all one's nerves are pulled in its direction -- the unfamiliar, the foreign, the other. One is never inured to the otherness, the shock of perception, the stimulation of difference, but must soften it with one's own memory of awareness, with impressions, with sensation; must disguise, filter, until one is accustomed to the discomfort, until the flesh accepts and the mind recalibrates, and the resulting pearl we call love.

Does an oyster live without its pearl?

Actually the oyster is doing pretty bloody well, although whether that has anything to do with nearby happy creatures of the sea the oyster is not at liberty -- and really ought to know better than -- to say. And alas the oyster is currently insomniac over the pressing business of its term marks which, although highly irritating will never in a million years lead to anything except inflamed skin, which just goes to prove what a great bunch of hogwash the first paragraph is, really, and oughtn't I to be in bed by now?

Thursday, April 13, 2006

Apparently I can no longer constrain myself to 1½ languages.

Sunday, April 9, 2006

Simulations and forecasting finals tomorrow.

Have been eating soda crackers and reading Trinity Blood.

All day.

Feel sick.

OMG MY AVERAGE

OTOH OMG TEH PRETTY

Monday, January 2, 2006

fuzzygorilla.productions presents

My solution to the age old problem of writing a bodice ripper when the (anti-)hero only has one arm, conceived of last September and subsequently abandoned for schoolwork, the SOA, co-op terms from Hell, and Other Distractions, so that it was quite foreign when I picked it up again two weeks ago.

Really quite like coming upon a mystery set in motion by someone else and abandoned when the melodrama got too sickening. And in many ways that would be the best I can do at putting what I feel about the story into words. It reads ..... too artificially, but then so do many things to me now.

Found yesterday when prepping the laptop that there really was nothing I needed to take with me out of three years' worth of anime and manga collected on the desktop. All the old novels are only so much sophistry. There's nothing I cannot do without, anymore. (Except for the Course 6 JAM manuals and 4 textbooks that by sheer indestructibility rightly belong on a construction site, of course.)

Even the music I used to listen to seem rather adolescent and baldly histrionic, and instead, after a brief aberration towards repetitive and badly enunciated cpop (for which widespread trend I blame no one other than Jay Chou), my playlists are infected by Franz Ferdinand, Muse, the Decemberists, and, em, Josh Groban.

*is smacked*

What... he has a nice voice... even if he can't enunciate to save his life in Italian (or Spanish or French) but at least his pronouciations in what is presumably his native tongue are faultless.

And the Dashboard Confessional came up in shuffle the other day. After the mortification made an exit I rather liked these lyrics.

How the mighty are fallen.

Saturday, November 19, 2005

adopt your own virtual pet!

Was tempted to call him "4-Wheel Drive" but quashed that particular Bleach-induced impulse, after a struggle.

Thursday, October 13, 2005

Had an incredibly bizarre dream early this morning involving second hand books of art prints, Italian mobsters disguised as grocers, gunfights in the grocery shop, and a small white dog with close-set features. Oh, and mild S&M starring said dog's chain leash.

*boggle*

Well, as long as it takes my mind off the Dream of Anxiety I had before it, I don't mind.

Off to stare uncomprehendingly at the chapter on cubic splines.

Sunday, September 25, 2005

've been reading Fruits Basket. Kyo in black and white looks surprisingly like Sano Izumi, except for the cat expressions, and tonight quite by chance I realised why I have always been partial to looking at the skinny black-haired good-cheekbones type.

They remind me of how someone I know used to look.

*sigh*

And all who come after will be but pale shadows indeed.

Sunday, September 11, 2005

And finally, for Joanna (even though both my taste and music collection are hopelessly old fashioned, mostly because I haven't the faintest where to find new stuff, cue embarrassed laughter) --

Some of the Chinese songs I've been listening to, in order of... well, I tell you there is insidious and very sekrit method in my madness.

A mandarin sensibility

Tuesday, September 6, 2005

To continue from yesterday's entry --

By some minor miracle I scrambled onto the plane for Paris with everything I needed for the trip, though through no agency of mine, I must confess -- I have vague recollections of my mother bodily stuffing me into my seat, although considering the usual airport procedure that might be somewhat metaphorical. And if Jean hadn't been there with me in Europe I'd quite probably have been sold back to China by now and at this moment be afflicting some benighted farmer who thought he was getting a bargain on slave labour, the poor sod. But I digress.

Europe -- especially Paris -- was everything I imagined it to be, only better, as a direct result of which I wrote pages upon pages in my diary every night and got no sleep. Once I sort out the photographs -- hundreds and hundreds of them -- I shall let the captions tell the tale, because God knows I can't constrain myself to a thousand words only.

...

On second thought I forego the multi-lingual impressions. The things I want to say, after all, are best classified as old-fashioned schoolgirlism -- zi zuo duo qing.

Monday, September 5, 2005

[ Scene: a silent wilderness ]

And the disconcerting thing is -- after more than a month's silence I still have nothing to say. I don't know whether this is the slow death of the soul or a faltering of what Sayers called, I think, the singing voice. At this point I don't much care which it is.

There are, however, many things to tell, not least of which is Jean and Ling's Excellent European Adventure. But to proceed in an orderly fashion --

First, a bitter and jaundiced review of the latest schoolterm: Suffice to say that it went wretchedly. Classes were dull (except Linguistics), co-op was an extended exercise in frustration, and Accounting 101 managed to singlehandedly wreck havoc on my average. Well no, Loss Models (both of them) and Life Contingencies also helped. But the fact remains that the Accounting prof was absolutely the most unoriginal, condescending, and irresponsible lecturer I have ever had the misfortune to encounter. And he looked like a constipated rabbit. I hope to have one day the singular pleasure of performing the wind-up-due-to-insolvency valuation of his pension plan.

...

« You know someone will be an actuary when... » Coming soon to a bookstore near you!

When I think back to the previous school term and how contented I was -- it's not that I don't know what was wrong. I know exactly what was wrong. Efforts to remedy the situation, however, proved fruitless. Let me tell you, girls, that if you come across, in the library, that infamous work of Margaret Mitchell's one bright and sunny Saturday morning -- take it as a portent.

Well... alcohol flowed freely on several occasions, so it was not a term of uniform misery, at least (except for my much abused liver). But the general impression upon review is that of la petite Ling a des ennuis.

Truly, past happiness does not bear thinking of. So I make like Murong Fu and say, Happiness is in the future. And if I come to half as good an end as he does I suppose I should count myself supremely fortunate.

Now that's over with.

Came home from school and, true to form, devoted myself solely to the doll maker program with magnificent disregard for all the packing I still needed to do for Europe. And because I have more webspace than I know what to do with --

Candybar's rendition of what yours truly looks like

Candybar's rendition of what yours truly wishes she looked like

[ cf. what yours truly actually looks like ]

And Co-op Term No. 5 starts in under 12 hours, so I must needs away to bed. More anon.

Monday, August 1, 2005

Have 5 hours of exams tomorrow.

Came home to study away from the temptation of X/1999.

Read Good Omens fic all weekend.

*makes like the Lady of Shalott*

Sunday, July 17, 2005

There is a song popular from the days of my youth (back in the veritable mists of time, by now) which has always afflicted me.

Last year today I was convinced the end of the world was upon me. But time passed serenely on, like the ship in that poem by Auden, and in the intervening year it has been brought home to me, a little painfully, that what I thought of, in characteristically egocentric fashion, as some minor apocalyptic event was really only the lingering end of my dreams.

A sort of death from exposure to reality. The world is not as I had conceived of it, people do not behave as they ought to, and -- this the most unconscionable of all -- I am not who I had always, always expected to be.

To one who at the age of twenty-one is without dreams -- what remains? Beauty, blue skies and sunsets, blood-ties and friendship. The sea. Music and poetry. Learning and work to busy my hands. And if all love stories are false to me now I might find my faith again, someday.

And it is not strictly true that I am entirely without dreams. I still have one, of the golden millet variety.

Saturday, July 9, 2005

It's one of those days. The clouds stream fraying endlessly across the sky, and in the distance past entire changing seas are obscure mountains and vast unknown shores, drawn by wind and water. If one were on the edge of the lake there would be, I think, no horizon.

On days like these I want more than anything to travel down unfamiliar roads towards some place I have never been, to the ends of the earth, across the waters of the lake and then seas and mountains in the sky, to break, at last, past the horizon. I suppose it's wanderlust, and of course the earth is round and the end of the earth already known. But to travel with sunlight falling on my shoulders, the ribbon of road always behind me and the aching blue overhead -- even if the journey must end in the commonplace, the sensation of travelling, I think, would be unbearable and very like happiness. There are times at which even the milkman's door is new.

And by the expression the ends of the earth of course we mean home.

Monday, July 4, 2005

Am planning a trip to France in August.

Feel like Julia Larwood, of Thus was Adonis Murdered.

Thursday, June 30, 2005

1 apple martini, 4 shots, a linear regression assignment and 4 hours of sleep later, I went to linguistics class, where I misread denotation for detonation and wondered what intensions and extensions applied to fireworks and/or widespread destruction of property.

I'm getting too old for this, saith she who will soon be -- God help us -- 21.

Thursday, June 23, 2005

Never, never did I think to be on the Reggie Pomfret side of the equation.

Well, it's not so bad as all that. But after getting my Linear Regression midterm back today my marks are well and truly into freefall, I can neither sleep nor work for thinking of him, and subsist almost entirely on pistachios, and my face is coming out all acne (possibly because of the pistachios), and the parental units are daily bracing themselves for a nervous breakdown, and all I seem inclined to do is sit around and quote Song-dynasty lyrics.

That it should come to this!

Well, I certainly can't go on in this fashion. It shall not permitted. If I have learned nothing else from my grandmother, she did teach me this -- three-legged toads may be hard to come by, but bipedal men are not so difficult to find.

It is a saying I hold very dear to my heart, and I know laolao would have liked to see me find my own three-legged toad someday. And to then make fun of him, possibly.

Henceforth I appreciate Song-dynasty lyrics, and all other forms of poetry, on purely literary grounds.

And with that resolution I depart to make inroads into those accursed loss models assignments, which must be finished tonight.

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Theme no.17.

Inspired by the breaking down of my watch. In fact, a man's watch makes much better imagery than any piece of women's jewelry, but that's a thought for another day and now I really have got to go to bed.

*stumbles away*

Saturday, June 18, 2005

Have painted my toenails. ("Sand-bank" from the Body Shop.) Under the light they're a very glossy gold, but otherwise I appear to be afflicted with some strange subcutaneous disease.

Si amusant.

Friday, June 17, 2005

Had a dream last night that a bird flew into my room, and I caught it (it looked like a very young and very dirty vulture) and duly proceeded to feed it daikon radishes, which it didn't like, so I took it out onto the porch and let it go.

And this morning, when the parental units called me up at some ungodly hour to ask after my co-op employment situation, about the first thing my dad said was, 'you know that expression, a bird in the hand?'

Saturday, June 11, 2005

Today, while cooking asparagus, came to the realisation that happiness comes in small pieces from many sources, and you take what you can get.

Sort of like bittorrent.

Thursday, June 9, 2005

Am in throes of co-op interviews at the moment. The Esprit skirt hangs in my closet and in the back of my mind like Banquo's ghost.

Augh.

Sunday, June 5, 2005

Went shopping yesterday! Bought a shirt (black, with red cufflinks, and second only to the black & silver shirt for effect), a sweater (asymmetric and probably entirely out of fashion by the time I get around to wearing it), a pair of pants (although I have discovered that my Marcelle cream to powder make-up, beige lin, purchased last Sunday -- the first purchase of powder is without exception an important landmark in a woman's life, even a woman like me -- is surprisingly effective, and not just on my face, so take that, postinflammatory hyperpigmentation!), and a Gap bag, which I conscript into service as my new school bag, and never again shall I submit to the yoke of a backpack!

*is smacked for being melodramatic*

What... 'm allowed to protest a symbol of institutionalised learning, amn't I?

And I found a pair of sandals, of the unfortunate brand fly, complete with iconic representation. This purchase I mark by paraphrasing Donne.

Call him one, me another fly,
We're tapers too, and at our own cost die

And upon that subject let us speak no further.

Thursday, June 2, 2005

Last night, realised, in the course of a conversation, that for the past four months or so I have been a bloody fool.

I don't know what brought on this sudden revelation, but there is an intense feeling of veils falling from my eyes, or something, as the culmination of... something. Nothing looks the same to me. No one looks the same. Books smell different and my own handwriting feels alien.

How does one remedy this? But I think it is beyond remedy. So far as I can see it's incurable, so the question becomes, How does one live with it?

Or does one not live with it, but conduct frantic Bernoulli trials looking for the Other with whom one does not fall back into this...

impatience. dislocation. ennui. whatever it is.

I blame loss models, I'll have you know.

Tuesday, April 26, 2005

Am terribly, insanely bored.

Bored with staring at my work report, bored with the quaking fear the thought of Course 3 inspires in me, bored with food and sleep and wine and song.

Truly, there is nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon, and Cleopatra at least had the excuse of being in love.

Je chante pour passer le temps.

Wednesday, April 20, 2005

*looks at watch* It's now 8:43pm.

Three guesses as to where I am.

The first two don't count.

Lord but I have no life.

Monday, April 18, 2005

So I got none of those things done this weekend.

*has a minor crying fit*

What's the use of anything? What are words and music and poetry for, except to tell someone how entirely futile he makes you feel?

Ah, my traitorous mouth.

Thursday, April 14, 2005

Ling's To-Do list for tonight --

1. finish theme no.29 (Gawd it's tragic)

Ling's To-Do list for the weekend --

1. write work report (what on?!)
2. write resumes English & Chinese
3. le lettre
6. test-bake

And now back to work.

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

Until I find another pairing to ship like mad I revert to the Hakkai + poem layouts.

In fact, there was another poem on my Criticism exam on Saturday, at which I was first given the wrong exam, and then the right exam turned out to be bloody hard, and God but I think I might have just dragged my average into the gutter.

Anyway, the exam paper had the author of the poem as Edna St.Vincent Millay, but I've found it online as written by Gwendolyn Brooks -- 'the mother'.

Bloody depressing poem, but it inspires me to stay up till all hours of the morning writing theme no.29.

And speaking of poems, was going to post a Song-dynasty lyric but have been told in no uncertain terms to buzz off, so fine then.

'Scuse me while I flounce off to ba jiu zhu dong feng.