I was watching Voices of a Distant Star, and it struck me how true it is that it is in the little things that we find the most comfort in, things acculturated by the environment in which we brought up. Like how i find standing in the neat aisles of a grocery store immensely calming, and how i miss the constant chatter of the crickets from my place back home. The crash and thunder of the storm outside and me comfortably under my blanket. the smell of the people i love. the sounds of people showering which i used to analyse to identify the phase they were in -- shampoo, soaping, standing in the shower. They can't be the same for everyone, but it's always in the details, and always excitement-worthy to find people who share the same ones.

bah. my tummy is malfunctioning and telling me it is hungry when i know it can't be since i've just shovelled too much food into it. and therefore i shall move on to in the mood for love after lust.caution which i quite enjoyed.

The psychology of smells is incredibly fascinating. Apparently, even smells that aren't detectible can influence the way you view things. Which reminds me of what Chris told me once about how he only likes people if he likes their smell, or something to that effect. And to a point that has worked for me, but thinking about how many people i think of with associating "fragrance auras" so to speak, I've realised that a lot of my good friends are neutral. Those with the distinguishable and memorable scents i definitely remember, but other than that, not everyone seems to have a personal scent that i detect and remember. For that matter, I seem to be the absorbent sponge of smells, and i inevitably end up smelling like whatever whoever was rustling up for lunch or dinner just before I left, or the person i was last together with. Which is alternately incredibly annoying and plain nice. I remember smelling zsing on my arms after I've reached home, and well. i love that scent (not the post exercise smell of perspiration), but the random smells of either his perfume which i love, or lingering chlorine, which i have learnt to associate with him. It's like how smelling fresh laundry somehow elevates my mood as well. Speaking of which, I managed to smash my lip against the wardrobe door trying to inhale the fragrance of my newly laundered turtleneck by recklessly half-spinning around in the small confines trying to make sure that the hanging clothes still smelled of detergent and not fried fish, which also tends to happen. Like when I was on the tube just now and wondering if the guy next to me was silently protesting the faintly fishy oily smell that my jacket which I had assumed to impervious to smells (a logical assumption, given that the material repels water and blocks the wind and should therefore reject all smell molecules) was emanating because he kept putting his hand near his nose, which is what I do when I do my silent protests. Which all made me slightly embarrassed and upset at fried stuff. bah.

Ok. the only real reason i was fascinated enough by this to want to blog this given that i generally have stayed off my blog is that I am in the midst of an essay ( i wanted to use 'throes', but i figure it isn't quite appropriate given my general reluctance and inability to immerse myself in it) which i seem to be no longer able to continue on account of a general lethargy and the fact that it's 2 in the morning and I'm somewhat crashed out from capoeira. on which topic I suppose i could occupy one of my freer nights writing about since it would probably elucidate the many complexities that now exist in my mind. I think i shall go sleep and write this essay tomorrow morning before janet's class. Sleep is probably good.

It is tough being unwillingly contrary. When a little guy seizes up inside you and makes all those chemicals in your blood system go a little haywire because you decide to start work just at the point when everyone else is beginning to relax. And their happiness jars on your efforts to concentrate and be productive because they are not. And then I'm stuck in my room without water because i don't want to pluck off my headphones and venture into happyland. sigh.

In happier news, I am a proud owner of a brightly multi-coloured drapey-ly cute beanie hat thingy which I have been assured by Crystal does not sound at all exciting.

So i know i haven't been posting on this in donkey years, but i had to exclaim somewhere about how the capoeira people are superhuman and play capoeira all the time, find it possible somehow to also go to work for 50 hours a week, and have a social life. There just is no point moaning about my 9 oclocks, and how i haven't slept enough and i'm at capoeira for the xth time this week! ugh.

my finger is falling off from playing the berimbau, my head is thudding a bit because of impending gloom and doom from flu, and it's all in a day's work for them. bah. i need a rechargeable long-life battery pack built into me. along with a gps system, so i don't have any more embarrassing interludes of semi-lostness. though i must say my skin has thickened substantially and continues to from constant exposure to awkward social situations.

tadah.

i want to play Dance Dance Immolation! because i like to be bathed in fire when i lose haha :) cleaning up the house now. or at least i'm supposed to but i'm looking at flamethrowers. and there's too much food in the fridge that i need to finish :( i love food but this is.. slightly overwhelming. people should learn to finish their food before running away!!

haha. new guilty pleasure: bingeing on strange japanese tv serials.
sigh. i miss playing the piano. who would have guessed haha. but i wish i were better at it and then it would actually be doubly fun playing it. though i guess it's an evil cycle where i don't practice because i'm not good but i'll never be any decent at it because i don't practise.

exams..... are crap. ah well.

ah i hate the feeling when my heart kind of seizes up and my chest starts to feel like it's collapsing in on itself. from annoyance. haha. damn ass.

it's a crisis of faith. i've realised that other people have not lost sight of doing something with their lives and i am completely ashamed of what i have been doing with mine. i've been so caught up in the useless obsession about the minutiae of my life that i've just been stuck in a tiny closed-in world of my own construct. what am i in school for if i do not excel nor take joy in what i do? sure it's tolerable but it's not what i thought my amazing wondrous life at university would be. what happened to the education? this is not fucking education. this is cramming for the sake of grades. which don't mean anything except that you're good at sitting down for hours on end reading stuff and then writing it all out again. i hate my life. i hate what i'm doing now or rather what i am not doing which is making something worthwhile out of it and (at the risk of sounding like a self-help book) taking charge of my life instead of just floating along with wherever circumstances bring me. seriously. and then now all i can do, or all i will do, is go back to reading. so that i can write it all out again. how useless.

i wish i could dance better then i could express what i'm feeling right now so much more eloquently. and all i'm doing is just listening to mumuki while reading about bureaucracies of all things.

and... finally getting the cupcakes i've been thinking about for a couple of weeks.

it's 4am. and i'm not sleepy. and it's not like i'm studying. so wtf am i doing?? ugh. i just spent about 2 hours looking for passport sized photos. and so now my floor is clear once again. and my books and note stacked on one side of the table rather than sprawled all over. and meanwhile i also only just found out that iphoto allows me to adjust the saturation and exposure levels on my photos. so haha. i am happy and shall post pretty photos. i discovered that i love underexposed shots.


this being fes and the old medina which is windy and filled with people and animals and life basically. ruined walls and baths alongside houses and schools and little schoolchildren. i love how the buildings are all weathered and slightly dingy. well. i really quite liked fes. which, in contrast with marrakesh, reminded me of how i felt about naples and rome.

on a side note. i realise i quite like writing these things down. just randomly putting things down as they pop into my head. which in turn reminds me that i really like writing in journals but somehow i need to be able to imagine an audience or it doesn't quite work out. haha. said imagined audience do not even have to be real (since they're imagined) because i don't believe people actually do read through these long-drawn out things which i ramble on about since i don't :p

i love the night and how quiet it is. (except that in a city like london there're always random vehicles zooming past at odd hours) i've even gotten used to how i no longer hear the crickets calling. i should really get down to work though :) pushing on with microecon which has fair murdered me with welfare economics. which i really do not like.

the best part about my room is my wall. or so i like to believe. (i especially like the one of kate moss.)

and of the random things i laugh to myself about when i'm studying. because you know. i have to appreciate my own humour. otherwise no one will.




aie. well. thinking about whether i should bother getting my passport extended here or just you know, waiting till i go home and doing it. either way will be annoyingly annoying. bah.

i love the impossibly rich colours that photoshopped pictures all have. the vividness that doesn't translate properly onto film but photoshops in easily. i wonder what they had to do before photoshop?

i wonder how they chose the number 21 to be an arbitrary sign of maturity. hm.

i am going slightly crazy. i was looking at the wiki featured article of the day at 12.22am and it was the same as the previous day's! and then i caught myself checking if my clock was right because how could wiki not have had a new article of the day already? hm.

whee~

my horoscope for day makes me feel like taking weed. but also warns me that if i take weed i will get mugged and robbed.

A mysterious mist creeps over your mind, yet if you are willing to loosen your grip on reality, this can be an enchanting journey. If, however, you try to hold on to what you have in the material world, this can be a disorienting time. There is nothing dangerous about entertaining fantasy, as long as you come back to ground level when you are called.

i am glad for friends who don't giggle incessantly :) i love you guys.

quickquickquick i have to write these down before i forget them just because today is a rare happy day. or at least it turned into a rare happy day :) after going for macro and falling asleep and blahblahblah.
so. for one. today's capoeira session kicked ass and it made me happy happy happy. hm. wait the happy things are quickly fading.
1. talked to random man at busstop who was telling me of his days studying statistics in lse. random friendliness making me chirpier.
2. saw couple making out inside the train station. all over each other, very nearly pornographic but the pure sexual energy and the fact that they were totally going for it made me grin.
3. as the bus went past st paul's there was all that manmade rain and filming crew. but i couldn't see if there was any one i ought to see running in the rain or sthg.
4. and then as i was walking home my shuffle shuffled to i like to move it. and i was so insanely amused i think if anyone had seen me they would have thought i was crazy.

so basically today is a good day :) and i should shower and get to work! harness good energy and banish bad chi :)

it's really painful and embarrassing to relive snatches of most-cringeworthy moments that has ever happened to you. and it's not like telling it stop actually makes it stop because it's like some sadistic torture machine that makes every detail even more vivid the more you want it to stop. so here i am trying to study micro and for some reason, tortured by these -moments-. ughh. even travis isn't soothing my frazzled nerves. why??

things are in such a strange place right now. when things go in a cycle, sort of like a sine graph with the regular peaks and troughs, despite perfect information of all that has gone before, with the regular cycling of the pattern, how does one know that the trough will eventually climb into a peak and things will all be good again? what if the line has levelled out and you're going to stay in the trough forever more except that it isn't really a trough but more of a neverending abyss more like.

in any case. was reading about marine snow today. and despite the most enchanting images the phrase "marine snow" conjures up the reality is so much more blase (not disappointing simply because marine snow is actually a fair miracle of nature) --- dead bits and flotsam and sand and soot falling through the water rather than pretty delicate snowflakes. and congealed in some sort of mucus no less. haha. visions of sugar plums dissipate fairly alarmingly.

my single friends are dropping like flies! which i guess is good. except it induces jealousy :P which is none too flattering and endearing. but awwwww. everyone so sweet.

now that i finally own a hammock i can string it up between the two coconut trees that have sprouted overnight in my tiny room and study in it and swing around and be happy. there should be increasing marginal returns to studying from that i guess. all that happy pinkness and stuff should be very exciting :)

another quiet night at home. except it isn't really quiet because i like the way music reverberates in a quiet room. and i don't actually know if the housemates are home or not. but i shall assume they aren't until they present themselves and prove me wrong :)

things just seem so different now. i don't know if i'm happy with the way i turned out but it's times like this that i wonder again. so ok fine we live happily (hypothetically) and we do everything the way we want to and all that. but then what? then even if we went back and erased our existences does it really make a difference anyhow? to any one or to anything. gaaaah. things are not coming out right. ah well. need to find something to study about.

i've got a splitting headache and i feel like i'm going to puke but i can't stop reading this! haha. geekologie.com. which has the most random amazing things ever like a maserati entirely covered in glassshards for the moscow biennale. or scrabble sofas where the seats are the racks and the cushions are the letters. waaaay coolass! i wish some of them concepts were for retail haha. i would buy them in a heartbeat.

wow. so i used to be a lot more garrulous on blogger i think. and i had a lot more stuff to say. does that mean that i've grown up (to be blander and more blah and boring than ever before?) ah well. i love my desktop.

how completely surreal... i've never had my ceiling leak on me before -- the water coming from random spots and dripdropping all over every and anything. and so completely helpless too. at least it wasn't too bad. and it didn't shortcircuit our house either. so all's well :) sigh. everything else seems so much more interesting during study time. i was even secretly happy when the ceiling leaked cos i meant i could preoccupy myself mopping up the gross wetnesss on the floor. haha.

now that it's warmish it's really really nice to just go out and walk around and soak in foreign air :) and maybe buy a cupcake or two. depending on if i get my bum out of my house into the fray (all these tourists. tut tut.). so gold bars are really made of solid gold. like up to 99.9% pure gold. and here i was thinking gold is really soft right so isn't it malleable and wouldn't hold as a inscribed bar very well? but well. apparently not. and seriously i'm getting inured to the wonders of the human body from all the naked bodies i see on tv. which of course are great bodies just that there are just too many of them for it to arouse any sort of emotion at all :p except of course the french (? crystal knows her name) woman with watermelon breasts. that was a sight to behold.

because this is where i much rather be right now. camel-riding bedamned.

This studying thing is seriously getting on my nerves. i don't feel right doing anything. studying and i feel like doing anything else really. and then i do anything else and i get overcome by an overwhelming sense of guilt. add to that the fact that about the only thing that gives me a legit excuse not to study is to eat and you have a killer combination. don't mind the bad pun. i want to go home and eat food that hasn't been randomly thrown together by my practically out-of-commission sense of cookery.

Two rainbows side by side. The other so faint it is barely discernible but you know it's there and it's all that really matters. It wasn't me who saw it but it feels as if i was almost there. After the crazy storm which caused 7 blackouts and which i really cannot imagine. I like days like that :) Even through a champagne induced miasma. But the days ahead, well.

They are just the result of a chemical imbalance and are entirely not my fault except for the bit where I let them be freely expressed and then only because we know that repression isn't good for the soul and being the person that I am of course I don't want to injure my already battered soul in any other way. I'm so sorry for always hitting the self-destruct button like that and causing all that collateral damage that I swear I don't mean. I can't help it. Except that that's the lamest excuse ever.

A red moon without any forewarning would probably have seemed like blood and darkness was washing across the sky, ever so slowly. It's so difficult to need to rev up and do work when all i want to do is lie in bed and sulk. And the thing is talking to people doesn't even really help because all i do is snap at them, and besides, I have yet to learn that annoyance during mood swings does not equal actual dislike.

Well. I don't mean harm, but the things i can't be bothered to do seem to bother people. it's just me and me not giving a hoot about what i ought or ought not do which could be good, or bad. As of now, bad.