I've got 2 quotes from b12 tonight. They are:
- When there's a hurricane, even turkeys can fly.
On how bad stocks can do well in a boom.

- Can you please be more realistic?
The mocking tagline used by b12's friends on people who are still seeking their one perfect love.

The hardest person to awaken is the one already awake.
- Tagalog saying

Ironic thought of the day: Despite needing to pay for my services, it has come to pass that my customers are more appreciative of my work than my own colleagues, who have taken me for granted.

Today. What can I say about today?

Today I wilfully stopped consuming my 3 daily glucosamine sulphate capsules, waiting curiously for my left knee to ache. It still hasn't.

Today I discussed about a low budget regional film I've just watched. I thought it was bad and the acting amateur. Strangely, other people liked it and the reason was that "it wasn't commercial; it was sincere". And Matrix Reloaded is bad cos it was commercial and wasn't sincere? Keanu Reeves spent hours everyday practising his fight sequences, so much so that he had to sit in a bathtub of ice at the end of the day. Would anyone want to sit in a bathtub of ice? Why isn't that sincere?

Today I tried to talk to you, to explain to you why. You said there's no need, but you also closed up like a book, and I realised we'll never really be friends again.

Today I went to the library which I haven't done in a long while. I've got too many books to read but still I crave. I saw a copy of Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys and smiled wryly to myself, thinking I've lost count of the number of times I've borrowed and not read this book. I didn't borrow it again. Instead I wandered round till I came across Dave Eggers' You Shall Know Our Velocity and clutched it gladly in my hands.

Today I watched the Latin film Before Night Falls, based on the life story of homosexual Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas. After the screening, I hit the bookstores to find a copy of the book this movie's based on, and somehow Arenas' books were stacked on the topmost shelves at both Books Kinokuniya and Borders. At Kino they have this rolling stepladder you can stand on to retrieve a book, so I gingerly tiptoed on a rung to reach the shelf. When the security guard by the door saw me, he strode over to position himself by the ladder. He didn't talk or look at me; he just stood there. Just in case. Thank you, but Kino doesn't have a copy of Before Night Falls. So I walked over to Borders where the shelves were higher, and this time there was no rolling stepladder. I clambered up 2 shelves anyway to reach the top and located a copy of the book. Luckily today's not a skirt and heels day.

Today I accidentally alighted at the busstop one stop before my place. Cos of the road construction that had been there for what seemed forever, I had to take a long detour round 5 traffic lights before I reached home. If I were younger, I would be quite pissed off by this. Now, I just think it's fate giving me a chance to listen to music longer on my ipod.

Today happened. And I survived.

Enroute to the gym, I realised that I couldn't run to any song on the CD I was listening to then, and promptly popped into HMV to buy the latest Flaming Lips' EP Fight Test. On it, the Lips did covers of Kylie Minogue's Can't Get You Out of My Head and Radiohead's Knives Out but I digress.. Anyway, reached the gym, switched CDs and started my regular run on the treadmill. Ironically as fate would decree, the remote control on my Discman konked out at that instant and I ended up listening to silence.. well, not exactly silence. I finally found out what kind of music they play in my gym. lol.

Work like you don't need the money.
Love like you've never been hurt.
Dance like nobody's watching.
- Satchel Paige

Earth calling archives. Come in archives.
Sigh, 2-year-old's and their tiny attention span.

Today's going to be beautiful and you've reached it. :)
It's literally my best friend's wedding. Congrats you two!

Why I like electronic ambient music. Sometimes the beats evolve so slowly you have to listen carefully to spot the subtle shift, like a magician performing a trick, a sleigh-of-hand right under your nose. You breathe and listen, breathe and listen, and then, your patience gets rewarded.

Song of the day: The Feature's This song could ruin our career. And they went ahead and recorded it anyway. lol.

Chilling with my US travelmate at a cafe, each buried in a book. Hit page 87 of Bret Easton Ellis' The Rules of Attraction, where an entire page was written in french. No English explanations, take it or leave it. Leaned forward and got my US travelmate to translate the passage instead.

Twinfold sense of humour: Ellis' audacity to write that page in french and the Almighty's crafty timing to let me read that page just when I was seated opposite one of the rare friends who read french. At any rate, thank you. :)

Richard Feynman said he often misled people to think he was irresponsible and couldn't be trusted with admin work for the students in the university he was teaching. It's not that he didn't care about the students (he did) but he thought his time was more valuably spent on physics. So he simply misled the folks who WOULD bother about admin.

Today I had a Richard Feynman moment and don't know if I was relieved or disappointed that I could be thought of as irresponsible.

My favourite song at the moment is Octopus Project's What They Found.

I have a soft spot for eccentric electronic music cos such songs aren't so straight forward, they're harder to love without warm vocals. For this song, I sort of identify the personalities of the different layers/ voices. It starts with the sober one (the 2 note wonder), and it morphs into the ditzy one (slightly out of beat, like it's wandering round in la-la land). Then the drum kicks in with the xylophone, both in competition. The drum thinks the song's stadium rock and the xylophone thinks it's a delicate musical box, while the ditzy one goes "oh, so we're not chill out music huh?". Then the song reaches a crescendo and everyone recedes leaving the sober one again. lol. Does that make sense?

One reason I don't have time to blog: quirky electronic music from the Octopus Project.
Words aren't necessary.

You chose a giant step -
caught your eye

Guaranteed sweetness
that you thought broken
and you were
not fine

and bearing in mind
other ones
that you could have wed
and hopefully dread

and I wouldn't
dare to
bring out this
awful bliss.
- Tobin Sprout, Awful Bliss

Thanks for the song.

I know I told you I know what I said I painted such a picture that golden fires burned in your head palisade of pleasure a circus sound Paris of the twenties a New York sixties art underground buried treasure a Gaudi park 57th street gallery the final resting of the ark.
- Felt, The Final Resting of the Ark

I have the password to your shell account. lol.

You are bored doing nothing, so you go for a drive. You are bored just driving, so you turn on the radio. You are bored just driving and listening to the radio, so you make a call on the cellular phone. You realize that you are now driving, listening to the radio, and talking on the phone, and you are still bored. Then you reflect that it would be nice if you had time, occasionally, just to do nothing.
- James Gleick, Faster

Perhaps you can judge the inner health of a land by the capacity of its people to do nothing - to lie abed musing, to amble about aimlessly, to sit having a coffee - because whoever can do nothing, letting his thoughts go where they may, must be at peace within himself.
- Sebastian de Grazia

Before you protest, he said this in 1962.

You may like a foreign film very much, but somehow you can't grasp the full meaning from the subtitles.

I'm ambivalent about receiving flowers, especially roses. I guess it's cos an ex persisted in giving me roses despite me preferring tulips. Why? Cos roses can be dried and hence last longer, but tulips can't. That this detracts from the pleasure in receiving them isn't the point.

I watched a fringe film from the Film Fest called "Untitled Part 1: Everything & Nothing", which is a documentary interview with a female freedom fighter detained for at least 10 years in the prime of her youth. In it, she explained that when given flowers, she wouldn't put them in water to keep them alive longer. Cos having made the decision to cut the flowers, preserving them in water would only be an artificial state to prolong one's memory of them. She had this insight when a fellow detention inmate gave her a rose... while she was bound hand and foot in a small room without any water even for herself, not to say the rose. Later on, she pasted the rose on a card to give back to the fellow inmate, but a guard saw the card and burnt it. The freedom fighter said that a rose is still beautiful even when it burns, no?

A friend told me once she saw her hand in the glass reflection and it struck her that she's got her dead mother's hand. There was this photo where her mum placed her hand on her dad's shoulder, and in the reflection my friend's hand resembled that. I guess traces of our parents appear in us unexpectedly.

[Courtesy of Chase]


You are Storm!

You are very strong and very protective of those
you love. You are in tune with nature and are
very concerned with justice and humanity.
Unfortunately, certain apprehensions and fears
are very hard for you to overcome, and can
often inhibit you when most need to be strong.


Which X-Men character are you most like?
brought to you by Quizilla

Song titles downloaded tonight include:
Beulah's If We can Land a Man on the Moon, Surely I can Win Your Heart.
Brokeback's Name's Winston, Friends call me James.
Doldrums' Godspeed You Young Actress.
Kid606's Defective Boy.
The Books' Enjoy your worries, you may never have them again.

I guess I have a soft spot for whimsical titles.

Just sampled mp3s for the past 4 hours and downloaded a whopping 59. I'm not done yet but I think I need sleep. Obviously I have a problem but everyone needs a vice. :)

leslie_: do u guys rotate ppl who r burning out?
vaya: no. no extra person to rotate. do u?
leslie_: yeah
vaya: r u the replacement or the burn out?
leslie_: first the former, then the later ... always :)

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast.

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold.
- William Carlos Williams, This is Just to Say

Post-it note as poem. lol.

Work sucks. Worked for more than 11 hours continuously with only a 5 minute lunch and loo breaks. Toxic politics at my customer's. After more than 100 days on my current project, nearly all the users in the project have resigned. As a result, I've had to help out with users' tasks as well. Can't wait for this to be over but I may not be able to clear leave after cos of future schedules. Nothing is on my mind except I can't afford to be sick now cos of time delay.

Pathetic.

Weird song titles in my ipod now include:
Decemberists' I Dreamt I was an Architect.
Handsome Boy Modeling School's Modeling Sucks.
Hefner's When the Angels Play their Drum Machines.
John Vanderslice's Bill Gates must Die.
Laurent Garnier's The Man with the Red Face.
Machine Gun Fellatio's My Ex-Girlfriend's Boyfriend.

Goodness knows how those songs got there.

Supposed to meet 3TapRiff to attend an alumni gathering tonight but I was delayed by work, so we had a late dinner instead. It's so nice to have an old friend for company, especially when I woke so tired this morning I felt like my hair's taken root in my pillow. Wish I could have more energy to blog but it's already an effort to not wallow.

Now I have 724 songs on my ipod. And I still want more.

Bro spent 3 hours troubleshooting my laptop and it seems like everything is going to be ok! :) Not only that, he also showed me how to extract my blog entries for download to my Palm V! Isn't he the bestest?! Muahahaha! I'm glad I'm not an only child!

I'm currently typing this on my home laptop which has a virus which can't be quarantined or cleaned; can't be scanned properly and can't be defragmented. Short of a major reformat, there doesn't seem much hope for full recovery. Yet I still pretend to myself things are fine during the odd random moments when bootup is not accompanied by shrill warning beeps. Strangely enough, I wonder if I'm projecting myself onto my laptop.

More and more often I find myself asking friends "what are we doing?" out of the blue. And everytime the answer is always "I don't know".

I've written before about 6 degrees of separation, ie. 2 supposedly unrelated persons can be found to be related by tracing the people they know up to 6 degrees. In the same way, I think this can apply to folks sitting next to a film fanatic friend of mine at film screenings. Just now prior to a Film Fest screening, an acquaintance told me he happened to sit next to the film fanatic at a screening though they didn't plan to. Then I exclaimed that it was a coincidence cos I found myself sitting next to the same film fanatic last week too. This got me to thinking that strangers sitting next to this guy could probably be traced to within 6 degrees of separation too.

I've just found the Kevin Bacon of film screening seating.

My 2 yr old home laptop is on the verge of a breakdown and I desperately need sleep.

It's been a while since I've last been sent a poem. Somehow I'm glad it's this.

I know my colleagues miss me in the office cos everytime I go back, the soft toys in my cubicle would be rearranged. The croc would hold the duck captive in its gaping jaws, while the other toys would be having a mass orgy humping one another. lol. Thanks. It's things like this that comfort me when I slave away at the customer's.