My UK travelmate's dog. I feel the same way he looked in this picture now.

Nowadays I find that I would suddenly speak aloud to myself if I were all alone. I would tell myself "I'm so tired", like I needed to vocalise my exhaustion to make it real. I'm my worst enemy: me and my indestructible self-discipline. I'd run myself to the ground just because I think I could take it.

I'm waiting to snap.

My best friend tells me I'm capable of greater things.
If that's true, what the hell am I doing now?

My favourite Faye Wong song is a Cantonese one which title literally means "Dark Surge". I have it on auto-repeat nowadays, and I guess my biggest regret for having only a marginal grasp of Cantonese is not being able to translate it properly.

What I rediscovered while packing.

A curved Polish blade with a bronze sword-wielding mermaid figure as the handle. I thought to use it as an enveloper-opener but it was too sharp and too long. What I ended up doing was to grip it tightly whenever I got frustrated and nowadays, that has happened more often than I cared for.

A miniature pool table which no one has played on because the surface was so flimsy, the cue sticks resembled chopsticks and the pool balls were too big in proportion. And to think when I first bought it, I was beaming at the thought of having a substitute pool table in the office. I should just chuck this but I couldn't bring myself to.

A pair of tiny green painted enamel earstuds. This puzzled me cos they weren't something I would have bought for myself. I wouldn't have chosen green at any rate, so they had to be a gift. They were well hidden, so I figured they must have been given to me back when I hadn't any ear piercings. It must have been from someone who didn't know me well enough to realise I hadn't pierced ears, or maybe they weren't even mine.

Strange.

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes - ah, that is where the art resides.
- Artur Schnabel, pianist (1882-1951)

Should have watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind earlier. I cried at the obvious tearjerker moments. I cried even when I wasn't supposed to, at the comic moments when he tried to hide memories of her in the oddest places in his mind. Most of all, I cried cos I didn't want him to wake up blank the next morning, having forgotten how much in love he once was and instead thought he hadn't loved that way before.

Bought myself a pair of dangling silver earrings shaped like long musical notes. Laughed at the thought of music oozing from my earphones and dripping off my earlobes like honey. Yes, I'm weird. Busy and weird is a lethal combination.

Over the weekend, I've visited a special restaurant run by the blind and tried to eat in pitch darkness. We were advised to close our eyes to avoid straining them, since we couldn't see anything anyway. So I kept my eyes shut and poked the cutlery around carefully. If I could dance with my eyes closed, I guess I could sleep-eat too.

The only difference is when I dance with my eyes closed, I can focus on the music and enjoy it; when I eat with my eyes closed, I was more concerned with the task of locating the food than savouring it.

Cleared up the last bit of query and it's now nearly 2am. Am supposed to be at a screening in 7 hours. omg.

Amazing. You are like some collapsed neutron star. If there's a local seven degrees you'd replace Kevin Bacon.
- sms from an incredulous friend who found a mention of me while surfing online

Well it's six degrees, not seven. lol.

There are three ingredients to the good life; learning, earning, and yearning.
- Christopher Morley

So which of those are you doing now?

Here's a original joke- all true! In a fit of corniness, I told my wife she was my soul mate. She was incensed cos she heard it as 'sole maid'.
- nullstate

Unbelievable but yes it happened during family dinner. I was there. :)

This is how it went. After our family dinner, my bro was using my laptop to hotsync emails from his Palm and we decided to filch some nuggets of wisdom (muahahaha!) from them. My bro has opted to call himself nullstate (though his wife calls him Fat Cat), and here we go:

Now, this epiphany strikes me- I believe in luck but not miracles. We are trained in maths; luck is explained by a probability distribution and over the long run, the expected result should dominate.

A miracle would be an event that is not even in the set of expected results, and would be totally irreconciliable.

I'm just one of those guys who find unexplainable situations annoying. It becomes an affront to my intellectual capacity or, at least, my ability to google the answer off the net.

So do I consciously avoid miracles so I don't have to try to explain them? Hmm, mind-boggling.

That luck/ miracle/ math bit really sounds like me. lol. No wonder we're related.

he has left us alone but shafts of light
sometimes grace the corner of our rooms
- one of my favourite album titles by silver mt. zion

I woke up this morning to find a note under my door. It's from the Beach Boys. Time to open right up.

For nearly 10 years, I've worn the same ring on the middle finger of my right hand. Everyone who knows me has seen it (except for my personal trainer, cos I don't wear rings during gym). Barring metal fatigue and accidents, I hope to wear this ring till our end (either it or mine).

This ring is the most constant thing on me, and I aspire to be the same.

When I'm so tired I've shut the door in the world's face, music is a note that's slipped under the door to make its way in. And sometimes the note is intriguing enough for me to open up a crack, just to see who's out there.

An acquaintance constantly changes his away message online to reflect the song he's listening to currently. I don't message him, but everyday I note his music preference and wonder how he feels so compelled (and is so idle) to do this. But it is quite amusing to check out the songs, and I'm grateful for this little distraction.

Work has reduced lunch to a curry puff, an apple, a biscuit and a mug of milo. It's really not as pathetic as it sounds.

It is surprising what a man can do when he has to, and how little most men
will do when they don't have to.
- Walter Linn

I wonder if someone would invent a Discman with a counter which automatically increments everytime a song is replayed on auto-repeat. And then I wonder how many digits would be allocated for this counter, and would they be enough for someone like me?

Numbers I remember.
Birthdates. Death anniversary. Wedding dates.
Number of times I failed driving.
Weight. Height. IQ. Degree of short-sightedness.
Car license plates. Bus routes.
Plane models. Flight numbers.
A handful of phone numbers.
Pin numbers. Identity card number. Bank account number.
Pi.
Runtime of some movies.
Length of some songs.
Distance run. Speed. Time taken.
Years of service in job.
Number of blog entries up to now.

I'm anal-retentive to the point that I keep a log of dates of when I've finished reading books. It doesn't help that I take a long time, since I'm always reading a couple simultaneously besides my stash of magazines. Perhaps the trick is to keep a log of dates of when I've started reading a book, so to coax myself to finish the earlier ones first. You know, adopt a FIFO approach. However, I think my oldest backlog is Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, which I've started about 4-5 years ago. It'll be quite challenging to find that book to continue reading, not to say remember where I've stopped after all these years.

Dropped by the 20% Kinokuniya sale today and bought female magazine fodder and Richard Nisbett's Geography of Thought. The latter attracted my attention cos it's trying to explain how and why asians and westerners think differently. There is an example where a picture of a cow is displayed. Then there are 2 other pictures alongside, one of a hen and the other of grass. The reader's asked to associate either of these 2 pictures with that of the cow. Research has shown that asians were more likely to associate the cow with the grass, while westerners normally picked the hen. I thought I'd have picked the grass too, so maybe there's some weird truth in this?

Saw a waitress whose name tag read "Retch". My jc girlfriend and I looked incredulously at each other, and the first thought that popped in our heads was probably "How wretched". And that tickled us all over again.

Doug had once heard an executive say that every project is like a ham-and-egg breakfast in which participants play different roles. The Pig is critical to the breakfast because he has the most at stake, whereas the Chicken contributes but can always walk away. To this confusing barnyard metaphor (were pigs that became ham successful?) Doug added Cows, who were consulted but uninfluential, because they had no stake in the outcome.
- Steve Kemper, Code Name Ginger

So we're all Pigs that feel like Cows then? lol

Realisation #900: I hate underwire bras.

Well yes, but what I really want to say is

Realisation #901: I wish my team can take a more efficient approach to problem solving.

Let's say there's a muffin-baker and a brownie-baker. Each follows his own recipe and understands generally what the other's job entails.

The muffin-baker encounters a problem in step n of his recipe, but he knows that steps 1 to (n-1) are correct. He asks the brownie-baker for help. The brownie-baker will then ask the muffin-baker everything from steps 1 to n, to find out what went wrong.

The muffin-baker will explain all as requested, but will get frustrated cos nothing is done for step n yet. The brownie-baker will listen and also get frustrated cos there's too much to absorb.

But what I thought will be more efficient was just to ascertain that steps 1 to (n-1) are correct, and then ignore them. Instead, they should just concentrate on the inputs for step n and trace that. It is not necessary for the brownie-baker to learn the whole process on how to bake muffins in order to solve the problem, but time after time, this is what took place.

People can't seem to isolate the problem before solving it.

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.
- Virginia Woolf

Ok, so I succumbed and went in search of Radio 4.

Today music has overrun my world. Auto-repeat song of the day is Linkin Park's Faint, and it is anything but. Enough sniper music posts which won't interest anyone 'cept that handful of you, but I feel better already.

People like me are suckers for album titles like The Difference Between Me and You is that I'm Not On Fire. And the album cover is as intriguing as it sounds too. It bugs me that I don't know what this picture is about.

Forever compared to DJ Shadow, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
RJD2. Since We Last Spoke

Morrissey's latest album: You are the Quarry.

Milk and cereal, boy band style. lol.

To kill time is not murder, it's suicide.
- William James

I don't have to invent anything... It's out there somewhere if I can just find it and integrate it.. Inventing is frustrating, it's dangerous, it's expensive, and inventors should avoid it whenever possible. Be a systems integrator. Innovation was the art of concealing your sources.
- Dean Kamen, creator of the Segway Human Transporter

... if J.P. Morgan had said to them, "I want to build a railroad to the West Coast," they would have advised against it as too capital intensive, with an uncertain return, because the railroad would be going nowhere. Morgan's reply to such sensible MBA advice.. would have been, "Morons! I know there's nothing out there. That's why I want to build the railroad!"
- Steve Kemper, Code Name Ginger

I failed to wake up at 6am to hit the gym like what B12 has been doing. I chose to have another 1+ hour of sleep cos I was so deadbeat. I doubt there's a chance to sneak off to gym tonight due to work, but let's see. Just realised that running for an hour listening to music could be my equivalent to my friend's hour of sitting down and listening to music.

There's a cantonese Hong Kong animation film entitled My Life as McDull, about an average little pig named McDull. I watched it with my mum and bro last weekend, and there's this quirky song in it that the little pig sang. The lyrics (literally translated) go something like: "Big bun, give us 2 more! Big bun, give us 2 more! We're not afraid of indigestion!" The song's so catchy that my bro and I kept singing the song after the film.

Anyway, my bro just did the cutest thing. He phoned me to tell me he couldn't get the song out of his head, but couldn't get me. So he hummed the song into my voice mail instead. Zero greetings or explanation, just that funny tune. Oh, and he hums offkey too. lol.

The datetime stamp on my post seems screwed up too. Hmm.

I think my best friend is right. I've hit the exact opposite. You know those movies where some busy corporate person is walking from place to place and there are people trailing him to ask him questions along the way? And he's never given time to pause, not even during a meal or in the lift? I've always thought it pretty lame and unbelievable. And then it happens to me.

Reality check: 9pm in the office on a Monday after working through the weekend, and trying desperately not to turn into da mouse.

Today while commuting to work, I sent my best friend an sms which read: "Is there anything more dangerous than getting up and having nothing to worry about, no problem to solve, no friction to heat you up?"

He replied: "The exact opposite."

Pareidolia is the erroneous or fanciful perception of a pattern or meaning in something that is actually ambiguous or random.

Beautiful word about a condition I suspect I have.

Just the other day, a friend was telling me he spends about an hour a day sitting and listening to music. He doesn't multi-task or do anything else. He just rests and listens. For someone who claims to love music, I cannot remember devoting myself as much as this. I'm envious somehow.

Today I tried to make up for it by buying more CDs.
Ryan Adams' "Love is Hell".
The Observatory's "Time of Rebirth".
Keane's "Hopes and Fears".
Linkin Park's "Live in Texas".

That should do for now.

Slept 6 hrs and woke to work. Actually I didn't realise the time till I saw Dave online and told him, and he msg'd "9am on a sunday?". Hmm, yeah.

Meanwhile in our parallel line universes, "benevolent" is the strange word used on you and I separately on the same day. I think you've been abducted by aliens, but evidently they grant you internet access. Interception seems impossible but I guess it doesn't matter anymore.

Today I just hope to wrap up work, read newspapers, buy a CD or 2, pick up concert tickets, and watch a film in that order. Better start soon shouldn't I?

Downloading Beatallica now, an album of metal covers of Beatles songs. It's been a while since I've downloaded music and when I do, strangely it's one banned album after another.

Music seems to be the only thing within my control now; everything else I'm falling behind.

Had a meeting with my new co-workers which went into overtime on a Fri night. I'm getting a taste of how things are going to be in the future. Anyway, I missed the screening I was supposed to be watching and still I've got work to do over the weekend. In the meantime, three friends have told me today that they're on the brink of getting attached. THREE! omg. Seems like it's typhoon season for everyone else. lol. Me, I'm going to wake up early tomorrow for a preview, bring my home laptop out to do some work where I can tap into a continuous supply of electricity, and round up with 2 more films. I wish I can find some time to read though.

Self-realisation #10051: I may have the smallest pair of hands in my office.
It's been a few times that people have locked their cubicle drawers accidentally, or needed to open the cubicle drawers of other co-workers who couldn't make it back to the office but had important items locked up. In these cases I've been called upon to slip my hand into the tiny opening in the cubicle drawer, to unlock it or fish out items. So far I've never failed. This reminds me of children being forced to be chimney sweeps in old English days cos they were the only ones small enough to climb up and clean the chimneys. Maybe I've missed my calling somewhere.

Still on ovens. Once my boss' oven crashed and there were lots of new ones sitting in the next building, but he wasn't allowed to get any of them until he's gotten the right approvals. Which meant 32 signatures. Which took at least a month. Do I need to elaborate on why I hate bureaucracy?

Baking analogy at work today. The bakery I'm working in is about to change owners and all purchases have been frozen till the changeover is complete. In the meantime, my oven crashed. Well not completely. It can bake, but only if I climb into the oven with the cake mixture while it is baking. Of course this meant that I got burnt too (which I hate), and my work is slowed down cos I can't move around to other tasks while I'm sitting in the oven babysitting the cake. Now I've been told that the purchase of a new oven will take 1-2 months, which is quite ridiculous considering the new bakery owner is an oven manufacturer. I've got my own home oven, but I'm reluctant to bring that to the bakery in case the bakery inherits it "accidentally". Anyway, there's also the principle of the matter. So now I'm pissed off and wondering for the upteenth time why I'm still baking.

My blog is less evil than da mouse's! Muahahaha! I need any cheap thrill I can get while working through lunch.

This precise moment is the quietest respite I've had all day. I'm downloading music while listening to the latest pared down live theater recordings Sit Down and Listen to Hooverphonic, where Hooverphonic covers their own songs in the simplest fashion. One of my favourite Hooverphonic songs is a strange one entitled 2 Wicky. It goes:

Prophet 60091
This is the flight number of our galactic sun
Prophet 60091
Before we start you should know that you're not the only one
Who can hurt me
SH10151
This is the serial number of our orbital gun
SH10151
You better be sure before you leave me for another one

Doesn't make sense? But this woman sounds so sexy just singing serial numbers. lol.

We built a nation over sms, icq, yahoo messenger, early weekend morning breakfasts at Coffee Bean, phone calls and email. Thanks Dave. Couldn't have done it without you. :) Keeping fingers crossed now.

Quiz which told me I'm not romancing a single person but I'm romancing the world.

Inspired by lainey's, cos I feel like answering some questions this morning.

If I were a planet, I would be Pluto. Pluto is the one far from the madding crowd.

If I were a direction, I would be an arrow pointing in a circle back to itself.

If I were a song, I would be a wrap-around one, vocals optional. Too many to pin one down.

If I were a number, I would be 11. Prime number more than 10, clean straight lines. Plus 11 is pronounced 'elf' in German.

Ok, time to go earn my living.

Reminded by Yoyo's blog entry to download the Grey Album by DJ Danger Mouse at Bannedmusic.org. Lovely to hear the Beatles' White Album superimposed by Jay-Z's Black Album. Like wearing a pair of headphones where you hear a different album from each earpiece, and somehow your brain wraps the songs together into a coherent whole.

Courtesy of Yoyo: a fantastic link to the music of Dokaka, Japanese beatbox accapella extraordinaire. The Smells Like Teen Spirit cover IS brilliant. lol.

I can't stand the new blogger editor. Urgh.

Today, in typewritten shorthand.
Hot (and not just "macham hot").
Ex-classmates, coconuts, brother, lockers, first and last visit backstage, but no teacher.
Flea market, overpriced old model phone, underpriced flower-embroidered bag.
Memento if it had been a romantic comedy.
2 CDs. Hall & Oates compilation; Hooverphonic doing jazz covers of their own songs.
Enough.

Dance music documentary Maestro will descend upon Zouk. Woohoo.

Today I will visit the mountain before it shifts to be with Mohamed.

There is not a cloud in my sky. Or perhaps that's cos I've been too busy to lift my head up to see.

I don't watch TV. I read blogs of people who watch TV. One such blog belongs to a teenage boy who loves films, whom I've noticed before at screenings. I've observed his habit to lean forward unconsciously, entranced during screenings. I don't remember liking films so intensely when I was his age. Films hit me later in life. I don't talk to him ever. I just read his blog and muse about life seen through his eyes.

Today I read a blog entry of his which quoted from the TV series Everwood. I thought that pretty much summed up what I feel nowadays too, and I really wish the best for this boy.

Friends have been dreaming lately. M dreamt of running against another pregnant woman to rush for a tiny elevator. Another girlfriend dreamt that Tom Cruise wrote a conciliatory letter to Nicole Kidman (why?). I'm dreamless. Or maybe I've not slept enough to hit REM (Rapid Eye Movement) state.

I've been thinking though about a reverse state of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. If you can erase a loved one's memories from your mind, surely you can insert them artificially? So what if the two of you have never gotten together though you've secretly fantasized about it? You can implant fake memories! The only problem is this will interfere with your real life and give you false expectations, cos only you will have these memories.

And if you've never gone through them, are the memories really worthwhile?

Oh yeah, today I did something new. I bought myself a huge flower. Bizarre.

The lamest thing is using your mobile phone's calendar function not to record appointments, but to record mealtimes and what you've eaten. Urgh. I'm going off the protein energy bars recommended by my personal trainer. So far, I've only tried eating 2 but somehow they feel odd. They look like chocolate but taste slightly off, like vegetarian food which is supposed to look like meat. You get the idea. Maybe I should try muesli bars. They're less pretentious.

Otherwise I'm busy busy busy: phone calls, sms, emails, meetings, project datelines, films, friends, gym.
And sleep is the sacrificial lamb, the last on my list, the second-class citizen. Sorry.

Leslie asks: is there a point in applying power factor correction in an automobile? In the form of a device connected in parallel across the battery?

Step right up and answer him! lol.

Love is like war; easy to begin but very hard to stop.
- H.L. Mencken

Just one tiny thing. B12 and I were discussing names and I mentioned that it's possible to reasonably gauge when someone was born by whether they have both dialect and hanyu pinyin names, or if they only have hanyu pinyin names without dialect names. Then he said that inbetween these 2 stages is a short phase where people have names joined by a hyphen. And of course we thought of my US travelmate. lol.

Woke at 4am to email and sneak in a blog entry. Ran 10km yesterday, from 10.2km/h to 11km/h, listening to Scissor Sisters' It can't come quickly enough on auto-repeat. Didn't blog yesterday cos sleep > blog. And even now, I can't blog quickly enough and I won't bother. Will go sleep.

In the book The Da Vinci Code, the protagonist talked in depth about PHI (pronounced fee), or the Divine Proportion. PHI is special because of its ubiquity in nature:
- the ratio of female to male bees in a bee colony
- the proportions of the human skeleton in Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, e.g. the ratio of your height from head-to-floor to the height from your navel-to-floor.
- how the quotients of adjacent numbers in Fibonacci sequence converge to 1.618
- how the lines in a pentagram will intersect to make one part 1.618 times the other

We knew all the answers
and we shouted them like anthems
Anxious and suspicious
that God knew how much we cheated
- Scissor Sisters, It can't come quickly enough

At my bro's recommendations to get noise-reduction earphones, I've succumbed and bought a pair of Panasonic RP-HC50 Noise Canceling Stereo Insidephones (or what they call stereo ear-buds). He has a pair of Sony ones, and the noise reduction is amazing.. I practically had to lip-read people when I switched it on. Now my isolation from the world is complete.

Watched Kill Bill Vol. 2 with my bro and mum today. Prior to this, my personal trainer has told me to wait till all the credits have finished, to see a candid outtake of the movie. The problem is the credits took about 10 minutes. Within this period, everyone has exited the cinema hall (including my exasperated mum), and the cleaners were clearing up the place. Well, all except my bro. He just sat and waited with me till the final end. Not because it mattered much to him if there was a candid footage. He believed I wanted to stay to find out so he stayed too.

Thank you. I couldn't have asked for a nicer brother.

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd;
Labour and rest, that equal periods keep;
"Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep;"
- Alexander Pope, extract from Eloisa to Abelard

A question I get all the time is, "What is the difference between doing a music video and a film?". I don't know what to say, except to ask, "Can't you see for yourself?"
- Michel Gondry

This is also a point brought up by Tsai Ming-Liang during the director's Q&A after the screening of his film. He mentioned that he was asked about a particular scene in the film where the actor was getting his fortune slip from one of those fortune telling machines, but it wasn't disclosed what the fortune slip read. Tsai replied that if he had intended for this to be known, he would have done a closeup shot of the fortune slip. He felt the audience was getting too reliant on being spoonfed and getting ready answers. People have lost the ability to interpret a film for what it really means to themselves.

Just watched Tsai Ming-Liang's Goodbye Dragon Inn, which is about screening an old martial arts film Dragon Inn at a cinema on its last opening day. There's hardly any dialogue in this film; the lines are mostly from the old movie being screened. There's a lot of Tsai's characteristic long stationary shots too, so I guess as long as you can stand still, move in slow motion and look pensive, you stand a chance to act in his film. lol. Not to say that I dislike this film cos I love it. He captures a mood and freezes it lovingly, suspending time till you've examined everything in the frame carefully. I like this attention to detail.

Another aspect of being logical. Rather than give an opinion like "People should die" or "People must die", I am more inclined to present a fact, like "People die" or "People will die".

A woman who isn't sexy must be sensual. If she isn't sensual, she must be sensible. If she isn't sensible, she must know her own limitations.
- Taiwanese cartoonist Chu Te-yung

Today's auto-repeat song is Scissor Sisters' Tits on the Radio. The falsetto rendition a la the Bee Gees crooning "there ain't no tits on the radio" is somehow strangely catchy. R(A) song title without gangsta rapping, imagine that. lol.

Sat alone in an empty row at the screening of Since Otar Left just now and loved it so much I cried my eyes out more than was necessary. The story revolved round a household of women (grandmother, mother and daughter) in Georgia. The grandmother was always pining for her son who had left for Paris, but one day the mother and daughter heard news of his death and couldn't bring themselves to tell her. Thus began the lies to deceive her (without the comic element in Goodbye, Lenin!).

An analogy can be like this. An old woman is always seated at the window in her room, looking out through a telescope at the road far beyond the hills. She is waiting for a traveller to appear on the road but no one ever shows. Meanwhile, she ignores the life taking place around her because what she wants is not in the room. Finally, one day she decides to travel to the road to see for herself what is there, and takes her daughter and granddaughter along. When they get there, they find no one on the road, but the granddaughter decides to travel on it to find out for herself what it'll be like. So the grandmother and mother go home, knowing that they have a valid reason to look through the telescope now.