On moving

06 July, 2009

I'm moving to here.

On YAY

04 July, 2009

Happy Independence Day, USA!

Happy Birthday, me!

Now guess which one I appreciate more. ;)

On flying the roost

02 July, 2009

The semester's over and suddenly (*poof* in a breath of air) my 'Uni' friends have flown off to far and wonderful places. France. China. The UK.

I remain land-bound in this drought-forsaken country, listening to a winter's night of rainfall that is music to the ears and I consider (in all seriousness) flying my own roost. In layman's (read: normal, self-respecting individuals') terms: moving out.

In a few days my legal clock will tick over and add another legal years to my legal age. I will throw down the raiments of adolescence and don the hat of...well. Maturity? Every year on the eve of my birthday, I sit in hope of sparkling lights and twinkling music to herald my levelling up. New stats! New improvements! Better armour! Instead, year after year, I feel much the same as I did when I was fifteen or ten or five. But this year (after incredible exam-time stress and pre- and post-exam-time head-butting) I have been seriously considering the possibility of my moving out. To avoid high tension all-round.

My main problem lies with money. As always, the problem of the world. To move out, I should get myself employment with which to pay for my living out. However, as I live so far from the CBD, many employers are uncomfortable offering me late night shifts. Daytime shifts are also a problem as my Uni hours are so anal. I am unable to get a job close to where I live as by the time I am able to leave Uni and get back to my suburb, most shops are closed. So, theoretically, to work I would need to move out. Do we see the problem here?

Actually, the mater brought it up today where she mentioned that (if I were really in the mood) I could look into trying out living out--for a month or so--and see if I am up to it at all.

Oh, freedom and shackles my friends.

On getting things that I need and rid of others that I don't

29 June, 2009

Exams over again for another semester. I dread to think how I did but the most I can wish for is that I not fail. The thought of repeating any of this semester's subjects fills me with an uncanny dread.

I figure I don't like my course at the moment is that we have yet to begin any discipline-orientated subjects--unlike you people in Medicine, Law or Commerce. So far, the past three semesters have been filled with endless year 12-esque days and subjects. The prophesy of 'change' that I had expected from tertiary education has yet to be fulfilled.

Now, on to what I had wanted to talk about.

In my parents' absence from the house (and my increased free time) I have set about cleaning up the mess I seem to have left in my wake throughout the year.

First and foremost (in fact, the moment I got home from my last exam) I cleared my desk of all papers to do with Quantum Mechanics, Special Relativity, Maths and Programming and chucked them all in the recycling bin. The next day, the recycling truck came and took them away. Great therapy--much recommended.

Secondly, I cleared out my desk drawers and cleared out receipts and random bits of paper and ticket stubs. The things I hoard. =_=

Today, oh glorious day, I took out all the drawers under my bed (so I have one of those bunk/storage beds with drawers under) and chucked all the old clothes that: I will never wear, have been worn tissue-thin, not cotton/organic materials (mainly hideous items my Grandma sends over from China--I've awfully allergic *wry face*), holey (socks) and so old that it no longer retains its original shape and purpose. No, I don't hoard clothes--Dad is just loathe to let me throw out things because he has such a bad hoarding mindset and I'm just plain lazy during the year when I'm studying.

Now I'm lying back with an itchy nose from all that dust and chaos and thinking about the things I still have to do--going to see my dentist, for one. Ugh.

Oh, and speaking of gettings things I need, suddenly everything I have has just fallen apart at the seams. I bet someone told them that the semester was over and they could let themselves go. My bag strap's unstitching itself from the bag. My wallet just went *rip* the morning I went to the LAN party (haha, yes I did) and half of it is gaping open. My coin purse is AWOL--I hope I didn't have much in it when it went. :x

On the other hand, I went and got myself an iPod (goodbye, Sansa, I couldn't deal with your screenlessness anymore ♥) and a 1TB hard drive! :D Oh, and a new jacket, but that was torturous and not at all fun. -_-

Yes, I shall go and call my dentist now.

On my Sansa, pwning your English

11 March, 2009

I have my Sansa on non-shuffle because, well, I once smashed the screen (very accidentally!) with my Linear Algebra textbook (damn you, mathematics! You stand in the way of my music! D:) and it now shows no more than blackness sprinkled with the bright pinpoints of stars.

Yeah.

And my music is varied enough that it's like the thing's playing on shuffle anyway. Just that the names are in alphabetical order--no biggie.

So the other day I decided to spice things up a little bit and changed it to play on shuffle (don't tell me how much of a dorkus I am that I can remember the button/scroll combination to manage the settings on my mp3 player without being able to see Jack Schitt on the screen.) Here's a brief summary of what I got:

French--Chinese--French--Chinese--French--Korean--French.

Holy fuck, where did all my whitebread songs go?

Everlast--French--Korean.

Oh, well, there you go then.

Honestly, sometimes I forget how non-English my songs are. It's like when I did that shuffle meme on Facebook the other day and got:

1/ Tactikollectif!--Bella Ciao
2/ Bénabar--Triste Compagne
3/ The Red Army Choir--Katyusha
4/ The Cat Empire--Voodoo Cowboy
5/ Barry Manilow--Copacabana
6/ Marlene Dietrich--Lili Marleen
7/ Metallica--Enter Sandman
8/ Rammstein--Büch Dich
9/ The Scarlet Pimpernel--Madame Guillotine
10/ Johnny Cash--The Man Comes Around

There you go. English is overrated, seriously folks.

On going to the Osaka Twilight Festival

22 February, 2009

I'm going to go to this today with Charlie, who's just back from a mini-Gap in Brazil. :)

Shall I see anybody around?


More details and stuff here.

On V-Day and what else happened during my absence

17 February, 2009

Copied from my LJ.

Went to my first Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (free) summer concert on V-Day. It was so nice being at the Myer Music Bowl as the night softly fell to Rachmaninoff. Man, Rach. is da man. [Ungh...? Is it even appropriate to Fitty-cent grunt at classical composers?]

Had 2/3 of a LOTR marathon with kuropuu and watched Ip Man (Donnie Yen is the shit) before we heard her parents stirring and realised that it was 6 a.m. and scurried off and pretended we had been sleeping this entire time.


My neighbour's caught fire the night before last. I was on the verge of unconsciousness when I smelled smoke (more than usual, if you take into account the Maroondah-Yarra Complex (pdf) that's burning close to us) and someone was yelling blue murder and banging on the doors for everyone to wake up. The flames were something like three storeys high and it was so surreal; the entire neighbourhood standing silent in the chill night air watching the house burn. We heard the fire engines but they were lost further up the road. Moments later, five rolled up.

And then an ambulance.


Last night, I found out that a friend of mine had had a spinal tumour removed. He had it checked up here but the quack just told him it was a muscle problem. Went back to China and had an operation. He won't be back to Uni until July. :(

On learning to drive (and stressing out your supervising driver)

I've finally gotten my groove on (Fitty-cent grunt: ungh) and gotten around to driving--more than a year after getting my Ls. Read that as: needed identification for the Med. exam thing (Jesus, I can't even remember what it's called now...o_o;; M-something?) and hurried off to Camberwell to take the test without even reading the driver's manual.

I should be arrested or something.

Stressed out during the test and almost flunked it. But passed, instead.

Now I'm a road hazard. ;D

So my RACV coach is awesome and Eastern European (extra points in my book) and I make his feet scramble for the secondary brakes when I make one of my hasty turns--I have to thank Dad for that nasty habit: Slow down? Whaddyamean slow down when turning?

Poor Mum, though. When she takes me out, I bet she wished that we had passenger-side breaks. For the first and (I swear by my firstborn) last time, I ran over the curb when we were going through a roundabout. It was all because I was trying to listening to Mum, who wasn't saying anything useful (Keep left! Don't drive on to the curb! DON'T DRIVE ONTO THE CURB!!) and there was a car tail-gating me. ;__;


Anyway, I see myself being able to drive as being a first step in:

• going paintballing in Echuca (5 hour drive--woo!)
• roadtrip!
• getting myself onto the path of being a motorcycle driver

Yeah man. Wild and wonderful dreams. Ungh.

On being AFK

11 February, 2009

Currently doing a lot of stuff for my Uni club: Melbourne University Taichi and Wushu. Yeah. I’m fully cool. Like James Dean. ;D

That was totally my sekrit childhood dream.

I need to get the forum up and running and an all new website [in which I am inevitably take shortcuts by having it temporarily on Blogger] by O-week, which starts the week of the 23rd. Okay, well. Off I toddle!

On a bad heatwave

07 February, 2009

I'm being hemmed in by bushfires to my north and east. One of the train lines near me have been cancelled. People are being encouraged to keep power consumption low.

Things are worse to the west.


Walked outside today and was buffeted by a scorching hot wind that dried my eyes and burned my skin.

On strange sounding sounds in the night and trying to get to sleep

03 February, 2009

1. I'm brushing my teeth. Outside, all is dark--even the sliver of moon is not in view.

Kr. Krah. K-k-k-kr-raaaah.

I tense. A cold sweat breaks out. There's something primordial about hearing sounds you cannot identify (this is a noise that sounds like it's made by something crossed between a bird and a reptile) in the pitch dark.

I get out of there double time.

2. I'm in bed with the Godfather (read that how you will ;D)

Don-don-don.

Someone's walking up the stairs to our front porch!!

Don-don-don-don-don.

What. The. Hell.

3. A strong believer in the if-my-eyes-are-shut-it's-not-there philosophy, I turn my light off and try to go to sleep.

Roll roll roll roll. (sorry, I don't know how to make rolling sounds, whut)

Roll roll roll roll. (in the other direction now)

Roll roll roll roll. (past my window again)

Roll roll thump rahr! --scrambling noises-- (hah, rolled off the porch and onto the cactus, huh?)

Don-don-don. (up the stairs again for another go)

4. At least, unlike when I lived in the inner suburbs, it's not my neighbours having sex.

Fucking animals. (take that how you will)

On friggin' awesomeness

01 February, 2009

This is, indeed, friggin' awesomesauce.

Innovation in advertising is beautiful.

On the silly Life on Mars (US) review

Original piece from M - The Sunday Age

Remakes are always a tricky proposition especially when all you do with the remake is set it in America. Especially when the original is so peculiar: a detective thrown back in time, where his 21st century policing skills clash head-on with their 1970s counterparts; underpinned by his struggle to return to his own time; further underpinned by the question--is he really in the 1970s, or just completely bonkers yeah, sure, but still definitely better than the drivel that passes for quality programming these days--especially seeing as it works? Surprisingly, this US version is terrific funnily enough because the original was just that. There's a cracking cast, including Harvey Keitel and Michael Imperiolo oh blah--Simm! <3. The New York setting works brilliantly, every bit as dirty and claustrophobic as the Manchester of the original tcheh, but with a slightly different soundtrack and milieu you'd hope so. Unfortunately for existing fans, the series depends too heavily on mystery and surprise to really work the second time round so watching an exact (albeit American) replica is a bit tough on the intellect, but if you haven't seen the original, you'll love V2 why don't we just stop here and say: watch the original.

Thanks, lunatoic, you've got me riled up about this, too. And really, I'm never an advocator for watch the original!! better than the remake FTW and all that. I mean, I liked the US remake of the Office! Admittedly moreso when they moved themselves away from the UK script. There's great script and then there's the lazy version where you just take the aforementioned great script and transplant it in a new and foreign country and wow just watch the little bugger go! go! go!

Look, I'm willing to give it a go--just don't let me hear you harp on about how great the plot is or I'll give you something new to harp about.

On stargazing and the sad state of my eyes

30 January, 2009

I wandered outside last night--something I'm not wont to do, being a civilised human and all we apparently don't come into contact with real nature and 'true dark.' Ja. It's true. It's sad. I'd rather stay inside with my lappy and watch DVDs than take a walk outside and come in contact with the seedier elements of Australian fauna. You can't blame me, something makes these gods-awful noises in the night--a kind of indescribable animal call that chills me somewhere primordial.

Anyway. I wandered outside last night. It was inky dark pitted and marred by the lights of humanity. I manoeuvred myself so that the Chilean willows blocked out the neighbour's porch light, the fir tree the street light and turned my eyes upwards to that great patch of vacuum and dust that has inspired us to great feats of the imagination.

Gods it was beautiful.

The Milky Way was splashed from one side of the horizon to the other. Orion was at one end and the Southern Cross the other. I stood like that for an age and imagined that the patch of sky and stars directly above me were all I could see and that I was not standing in my backyard but out in the black surrounded on all sides by pinpricks of history. Not blinking, but cold and hard light.

I took off my glasses and all dimmed. The sky was still the sky but the stars were no longer defined and sharp and beautiful. The Milky Way was just a soft, white blur. Orion was just a thin strip made of Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka. The Southern Cross could have been any vague quadrangle.

Everytime I'm confronted by such awesome scenes I feel distinctly how my genes have let me down. What I wouldn't give to see such things with my bare eyes and not through the help of bent glass.

Fortresses of clouds on a clear sky. The slanting of rain on the distant mount. The choppy sea and, in the horizon, the faint outline of the city buildings.

You lose all perception of depth and detail and the world becomes a life seen through an Impressionist brush.

And it's fucking sad.

On the hottest week in a century

29 January, 2009

Melbourne braces for record heatwave. Victoria readies for week of scorchers.

I cannot describe the discomfort of living through consecutive days of above 40 degree temperature. Without air-conditioning. All our neighbours are whirring away while we sweat away in our dark rooms without the aid of modern technology. Yesterday, I was bubbly about doing my part for good ole Earth. Today, I'm a little cranky (who am I kidding? I'm soaked in bloody sweat!!) but my resolve is holding the fort. It's no longer a wonder, though, why people choose personal comfort over, say, the environment. Immediate gratification over long-term gain. I guess that we devolve to our animalistic natures when it gets to be a little too much.

I had a brief moment of pure Schadenfreude this afternoon when we had a power cut. Sure, I was left without internet, but to hear the indignant cries of my neighbours upon the failing of their air-conditioners was blissful. Pity it only lasted for about 15 minutes.

I'm retaining my fluids and drinking green tea by the gallons. Peeing comes in a far second from sweating. I've given up wearing pants and am just chilaxing in my underwear. Sorry, furniture.

My mum--being a TCM practitioner--has knocked a good amount of life tips into me before I started on the path of being a modern medicine believer. Now, I'm a healthy(?) mixture of the two. Something that both gets to me and for which I am glad is the fact that she abhors the 'Western habit' of eating cold things in hot weather and has drummed it into me that it is not a worthy habit to uptake. Sweating is good for you and cleans the toxins from the body...and all that. So we drink hot/warm boiled water--rarely straight from the tap for me and never for my parents--and hot/warm tea, take hot soup for lunch and dinner--all the more opportunity to work those sweat glands. Sure, it sounds gross but hot darn does it feel good afterwards, when we're chilaxing with our hand fans. Between feeling really hot and dry or hot and sweating, I'd take the latter any day.

This also means the smallest amount of ice cream, chilled fruits, chilled fruit juices, ice cubes, etc. I don't mind that much since I've never had much of a sweet tooth. Sure, I don't mind the occasional smoothie or juice but if the world were to go without Rocky Road or Death by Chocolate, I wouldn't shed a tear.

I guess that makes it all the easier to bear.

Anyway, cold things just aren't that dinkum for the stomach so I'll stick to taking them in moderation no matter how unbearably hot it gets.

One thing I can't stand is this: EVERYTHING NOW IS WARMER THAN ROOM TEMPERATURE:

• I had an apple for lunch and it tasted like it had been boiled.
• I went to the toilet and let me just say, the Japanese aren't the only ones with warm toilet seats
• The back doors that open on to the deck are both sticking because the metal door jams have warped due to the heat
• The cold water's hot--I don't meant warm, I mean it's around 40 degrees
• You don't have to wait for the hot water to heat up anymore
• My laptop heats up really fast and can get uncomfortable to use :(
• Every bit of furniture feels like the unfortunate victims of some warm behind (not mine) and anything metal/glass feels like it is part of an oven

I dread to open my violin case and pluck the strings. I wonder how badly out of tune they have loosened.

And on a more sinister note, I wonder how hard and how fast the bushfires will burn this year. I worry about my friends in the MFB and CFA and hope, for their sake, that some bastard isn't getting his rocks off throwing lighters, cigarette butts and other incendiaries around. Not surprisingly the state in a state (hah) of total fire ban. I remember one year it was so bad that the CBD was shrouded in an eerie smog and on the other side of the Dandenongs was burning so badly that we could smell the smoke that had drifted over the mountain. Natural and controlled are one thing, but what I wouldn't give to eat the souls of incendiaries.

I'm also glad that I'm still on holidays this month, with Connex cancelling half the peak hour services--I'm still getting the SMS alerts. The poor commuters. We really need high heat resistant infrastructure.


Ah. A cool wind is starting up outside. I think I'll go and check it out.

With pants on.

On the reasons for sticky hands

28 January, 2009

• eating an apple
• going at a mango (the unsophisticated method--bare hands vs. spoon)
• typing on keyboard
• hot laptop
• reading a book in hot weather--wrinkles the paper, too
• chocolate-coated biscuits
• eating Ferrero Rochers layer by layer

In general, due to the damn heat, I am going to wash my hands every 10 minutes or so.

On inactivity in the summer season

Curtains drawn to keep out every electromagnetic wave I can and windows closed to the smallest gap so that the warm breaths of air stays as far away from the cool of of darkened rooms. Without air-conditioning, a comfortable living temperature can only be achieved by great effort. I take solace in knowing that I am doing my part in keeping it cool. And by 'it' I mean the Earth. Yeah. Rock on.

In reality, though, our AC is an historic remnant of the previous owners of our house and smells distinctly of Urine of Possum when turned on. Not something we would hazard--the heat being uncomfortable enough as it is. [I would like to take this moment to note that everything that smells funny around these parts is usually due to some sort of dubious possum activity--I shall postulate on this in greater detail when I am not feeling so slothlike.]

Fans, on the other hand, do little but stir the warm air up a bit and spreads it around. The last thing I would probably want is for all that heat to be moving. Best to stay where it is, languishing with the rest of us.

I have my laptop on and am soothed and caressed by the dulcet voices of Samuel West, Ian McKellen, Bryan Dick, Linus Roache and Michael Sheen. I languish prettily to Keats and Shakespeare and thank all gods for Michael Tavener; my heart ached for the Angel of Covent Garden and poor, vengeful Wayland; and I lay back and let the Pity of War sweep over me in its sad grandeur and lost nostalgia.

Oh, audio plays. Oh, radio.

I can forget--for an hour or more--that the sun is beating down hard on the garden outside; drying the bark of the eucalyptus so that it curls and crinkles and hangs off the trees in strips like hair, drying the ground so that when it rains it floods for the clay has been baked hard, bleaching the wood so that everything not living becomes as brittle and dry as the land. The cicadas call and the magpies have laid off their warbling for the shadier, cooler time of evening.

On the perceived literary pecking order

24 January, 2009

Most people I know reread a favourite book every year. For my old English teacher, Paul Upperton, it was the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Incidentally, this turned out to be the case for a large portion of my class--not surprising, really, since we were all in awe of his literary prowess, fascinated by his well-travelled, well-read, well-written life and saw in him a bastion of Who's Who (or: What's What) in Literature.

At the time I did not think that I had such a habit (short interest span to be under consideration) and could barely think up a title that I held in particular reverence (commitment problems.) I felt my position in the literary world (as it were) drop a few notches to rest amongst those who read maybe one decent novel a year and bought all their quick fixes from the nearest Kmart. Oh, it was indecent! Suddenly I felt so unread amidst my well-educated peers and our pretentious, pre-examination discources over the latest in classic Russian literature lacked its usual Chekhovian ...oomph.

I have now long graduated into the wonderful world of tertiary education where most of my course comrades belong to the one-to-none-novel-a-year category. The Lord of the Rings people are reading humanities--history, linguistics, law. I have, though, managed to climb a few rungs of that secret social ladder. In a way, I am back to where I was before this darned dilemma but I am certainly not up with the real socialites and important personages of the well-read.

Every year now, I lay my hands on a precious book. I hold closed its broken spine, open the cover and mentally feel as if I am sinking into the most comfortable armchair ever to be upholstered. It was the book that saved me when I was fifteen, carried me through University entry examinations when I was eighteen and is now seeing me through this current literary desert on my path in life. It is certainly not something as prestigious as reading Tolkien or even good old Fyodor (Dostoevsky) and perhaps the very sight of its shoddy grammar and dodgy publishing typos would send the linguistics Nazis into a frenzy but it is what can be considered my annual habit. Which book?

Mario Puzo's The Godfather.

Yeah, I am as shallow as a pond.

On the end of the cyber-trail

I've left rabbit holes all over the interwebs. An account here, a profile there, a brief flash of interest; I wonder what has become of them, left behind, blowing in the binary winds.

And, currently, it all ends here.