Upon my Lady Death's urgings (it usually takes no more than quizzical look and her pointing to the Death part of her name), I come with a quiz. A Harry Potter quiz at that.

GRYFFINDOR:
[x] You've never done drugs
[ ] You have a lot of friends
[x] You get along with everyone
[ ] You haven't made fun of someone for at least two months (Hah!)
[ ] You love soccer football
[ ] You love baseball/softball
[x] You're into writing and art
[x] Favorite music genre is pop rock
[x] You believe in "innocent until proven guilty" theory
[ ] Abortion is wrong
[x] The war against Iraq is unneeded
[ ] One of your favorite colours is red or gold
[x] Good grades at school (please don't kill me)
[ ] One of the worst things you can do is lie (pfff. Gryffindors can't have a stick that far up their arses)
[x] You plan on going to college university

TOTAL: 8
Christ, what is with the Gryffindors and using American terms? Aren't the lot of them British?

HUFFLEPUFF:
[ ] You're content with mostly everything in your life right now.
[x] You laugh a lot.
[ ] You like to follow trends. (I like to be a unique snowflake)
[?] Politics suck. (Well. What kind of politics?)
[x] You love to swim (Since when did Hufflepuffs like to swim?)
[ ] Water polo is awesome (Or play water polo for that matter?)
[ ] Pink is one of your favorite colours (This is proof that Cedric really is gay, Cho be damned)
[ ] Black is morbid & depressing
[ ] Michael Jackson is talented as a musical artist (Ah..)
[ ] You're an optimist.
[ ] You're completely straight-edge.
[?] You're very emotional.
[ ]Rap, R&B, & hip-hop is your favorite music genre (Wad up mah Hufflepuff homies? They have got to have a gang-sign for this.)
[ ] You don't believe in going steady at a young age
[x] You've made fun of at least one person this week.

TOTAL: 3
Hufflepuffs must drop acid regularly. There is no way all of them can fit this stereotype.

RAVENCLAW:
[x] You're depressed to a certain extent. (How vague. We all are.)
[x] You love to read. (8| Lernin' be good.)
[x] You appreciate theatre & arts.
[ ] Sports suck. (Hey, whatever floats your boat. I'll stick to my books.)
[ ] You're shy.
[ ] Bush is trying his hardest to be dumb (Trying?)
[ ] You've been in love before (That word has been cheapened.)
[ Very tempted to check this. ] You're very smart (But obviously not humble eh?)
[ ] Hate is completely unneeded. (What?)
[x] Loyalty is the MOST important thing in a relationship
[ ] Emo/screamo/indie is one of your favorite genre of music.
[x] Every once in awhile you have little anger outbursts.
[x] Lying is sometimes okay
[ ] Red is one of your favorite colours.
[ ] Serious is better than funny.

TOTAL: 6

Soo.. I take it that everyone in Ravenclaw is snobbish, ego-centric, and emo. My God, imagine all the stacks of bad poetry. The winter evenings must just fly by.

Come to think of it, I'd watch an emo poetry slam> We all need a good laugh every once in a while.

SLYTHERIN:
[x] There's at least one person you hate. (Pfff. This is a silly, obvious option. I bet everybody does. Free points to Slytherin!)
[ ] Basketball is a good sport. (The only manly sport is Lacrosse. :|)
[ ] American Football is amazing. (Naughty Slytherins, turning back on your English Roots. What happened to cricket?)
[ ] Black is a cool colour. (Not really, it absorbs heat. Wearing white and other light colours would be much more comfortable in the summer.)
[ ] You've dated a slug
[x] You're a very deep person.
[x] You have considered suicide.
[x] Very loyal.
[ ] Favorite music genre is metal.
[ ]They make school seem more important than it is.
[x] You're scared to grow up.
[ ] You've done drugs in the past month.
[ ] Anger is one of your primary feelings.
[ ] You have trust issues.
[ ] Guilty until proven innocent.

Total: 5

Well. I'm in Gryffindor. Hoorah?

What a load of tripe. And I'm best friends with a Slytherin. This cannot be! It goes against any Harry Potter canon!

Now to see what Mishra was.

*dusts off blog*

I should be sleeping.

Darling, if you want to be serious about writing, you shouldn't be putting it off should you?

Yes but there are so many other things that I can do. Like, go on WoW or trawl Youtube. I love to write, and I should start, yes, I'll get round to it soon.

But why can't you start now?

I don't know. Out of ideas I guess.

Bollocks. You're full of them.

Well, yes but, they're not very good.

...

Look, alright? I'm sorry, but- they aren't up to the standards I impose on myself.

You are merely insecure.

I suppose.

What about the future? Are you going to keep on doing this?

I don't know. Maybe not? It's too far away to tell, I'm living from day to day.

Forty years from now you'll be thinking the exact same thing. What are you going to do when you grow up?

I dunno. Not a doctor, not a lawyer, not a teacher I guess.

University? HarvardCambridgeOxfordNUS?

*shrug*

What do you want to do?

I don't know-
I want to write.

Then start.

---
I wonder how long late-night conclusions last. Let's hope for my sake this will continue on.

Sometimes, I think I'm more of a pompous dickwad than anything else.

Ah, teenage insecurity.

My, such a cynic.

Zilong says I must blog here, and so I shall.

But what shall I blog about? Shall I talk about my day?

I woke up today. I lived, I breathed, I ate and shat and went on World of Warcraft. Perhaps I could bore you with details, every incident recorded in excruciating detail.

----
The last thing I heard before I drifted off was the television, to be precise, a re-run of "Mad Labs" on National Geographic. With snarky British commentary echoing in my ears, I sunk down, down, down, into the sweet embrace of a dreamless sleep.

No more than two hours later, my mother woke me up. She pulled aside the curtains with reckless aplomb and grey daylight pierced my retinas, blinding me for a second. While my irises adjusted to the sudden change in light intensity, my mother talked about how we were going out to lunch. My stomach rumbled in assent, reminding me that I had not eaten in the past eleven hours. So encouraged by this organ of mine, I put on my glasses, swung out of my comfortable bed, tottered over the carpet and parquet floor into the bathroom. Its stone floor was cold against my bare feet, and I quickly stepped on one of the two mats in the room. Blinking at myself in the mirror, I picked up the toothbrush, squirted some Colgate toothpaste onto the bristles and started brushing my teeth in circular motions like the scary dentists in primary school told me to do.
----

Agh. So purple. Painful. Agh.

The thing about blogging is that, if you don't have anything to say, it becomes banal and, well, flat. If it's all about how your day was and what X said to Z about Q and OHMIGOD she is such a BIATCH then to be honest, you're better off not posting it at all. Not to mention it's really rather stupid to air your dirty linen in a public domain.

All those quizzes, and copy+pasted song lyrics by a random band? The easy way out. You're relying on another person's (sometimes sub-par) creations to express your thoughts and feelings instead of trying to put it in your own words. There's certainly nothing inherently wrong about it, it's just that you're not building your own identity with your own constructs, your own rules. That is what is important.

Finding out who you are beneath the bag of flesh, bone and chemical reactions is gaining more and more significance in our time, especially for our and any subsequent generations. With the advent of the internet and mass media, boundaries are fluid. In areas that have access to this technology, one will notice many similarities between them. Jeans have replaced the sarong and 50cent has superseded folklore. Culture has not evolved, it has been destroyed, mashed into an amorphous lump. Only remnants survive on the runways, draped on models as the new flavour of the month or to make an ironic statement.

And somewhere, within this whirlwind of superficiality is you, your identity, the essence of your being. Find it, or be trampled by the relentless march of change.

Where would a writer be without words?

Probably somewhere off the deep end.

Imagine, 26 different letters that are arranged according to rules that nobody but English majors know about give rise to works of art; poetry that sears the soul and literature that opens your eyes to the dark, secret world frothing below our consciousness. Without them we would not be able to distinguish melancholy from despair, love from lust and all the other human passions that lurk within.

How can someone know loneliness if they can't even identify and put a name to it? Out of the chaos, words make meaning for us, and they shape the world and the way we see it.

It's Over!

If You're Feeling Sinister, by Belle & Sebastian

It's pretty good really, if you look past the campy guitar and the unfortunate lisp.

I mean. Come on. "succethful"?

He tends to go flat at times as well.

Ah well. It's a very good break from Radiohead 24/7 (courtesy of my brother.) It reminds me of Simon and Garfunkel (whom I adore), although the latter arguably have better voices. Something to tide me over till I track down albums by the Postal Service, Sigur Ros or Dogs.

...

"She was into S and M and bible study's not everyone's cup of tea she would admit to me, a cup of tea she would admit to no one."

A line from the title track, "If you're feeling Sinister". He is definitely forgiven for the lithp.