so, I am Charlie Brown's baseball team.
I say this with no irony at all, unless those in the know would like to point out that it is not baseball m'dear, it is softball. Which, as we all know, is a gigantahumongous misnomer since the ball (and this I say from physical experience) is not soft at all.
In fact, I am so pre-occupied with the contradictary nature of this name so much that it is probably why I cannot play it all. That, after the fact that I was also too pre-occupied with the grossness of feeling the slick-with-sweat cushioning of the catcher's mask against my face, and that it is also too heavy and is slipping of my head and I actually have to hold it up with one hand and WHOA - ball flying into my face!
Just how does one cope!
It is the most cruel game to impose on a person with no sense of hand-eye coordination whatsoever. Somehow, when I stick my gloved hand in the air, waiting for the recently propelled un-softball to fall into said thick gloves, well, it doesn't. It's a mystery that I've been trying hard to figure out. Sometimes, it falls just besides me, before taunting me and making me run by rolling a 100m away or so. To others, I am sure, it appears that I am (moronically) standing still but I am telling you my dear sirs! According to my spacial judgement, it looked like I was standing at the right place and at the right time for it to land into my hand!
Okay, save for the few times I closed my eyes the nanosecond before it is in graspable reach.
Maybe it's because as an art student, I'm used to seeing 3-dimensional stimuli and translating it into 2-D and my brain just cannot understand the thought process required for activities such as softball. I sympathize with my brain. After all, it must be hard trying to process such unfamiliar thought patterns while being overwhelmed by the instinctual thought of: FAST BALL COMING YOUR WAY! PHYSICAL PAIN RESULTING FROM COLLISION IMMINENT - RUN! RUN!
At least I can throw the ball pretty okay, I think.
I am Charlie Brown's baseball team.
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Sunday, February 19, 2006
But you see, the problem is that the distinguishing line between love and hate is dotted.
That's why I couldn't seriously pick anybody when I mused on the topic of who I'd pick to be with if stuck on a deserted island with a couple of friends today. The first notion of logic that comes to mind is that you'd pick people who you love, or love to be with (which is not quite the same thing), but then you realize that because you love them, you also know their very flaws and at least for me, that really means I know you well enough to hate you.
That's scary, isn't it? It's true as well, that I do feel vestiges of hate for the people I love at times. It's just that I love them a lot more for 99% of the time, and the moments when I get mad, or massively annoyed/pissed/infuriated at them, I have the propensity to hate them because in any situation, I feel more for said persons.
The question I would like to pose, since I can't answer it is: Who would you rather be - the person I love and possibly could hate, or a person I am absolutely indifferent about?
That's why I couldn't seriously pick anybody when I mused on the topic of who I'd pick to be with if stuck on a deserted island with a couple of friends today. The first notion of logic that comes to mind is that you'd pick people who you love, or love to be with (which is not quite the same thing), but then you realize that because you love them, you also know their very flaws and at least for me, that really means I know you well enough to hate you.
That's scary, isn't it? It's true as well, that I do feel vestiges of hate for the people I love at times. It's just that I love them a lot more for 99% of the time, and the moments when I get mad, or massively annoyed/pissed/infuriated at them, I have the propensity to hate them because in any situation, I feel more for said persons.
The question I would like to pose, since I can't answer it is: Who would you rather be - the person I love and possibly could hate, or a person I am absolutely indifferent about?
Friday, February 17, 2006
WARNING: MASSIVE FRANZ FERDINAND RAVING.
Turn away if you're sick of this already.
O curse my short term memory!
The FF concert was shit-awesome of course, all worries about lacklustre live-audio flying out of the window since the sound was so clear and tight in tune and pitch that you'd think it was a recording, save for the fact that alex kapranos missed a couple of lyrics which in the grand scale of things, everybody who was there says - WHO CARES.
Right, back to the short term memory point. Too quickly too quickly the experience is fading for my memory like the bruises on my knee and hips. All I have in my head are quick flashes of bright lights, alex being a complete and lovable slut *FANGIRL*, nick and his guitar with the broken string swinging about, and for one of the songs zomg they had three people on the drums, and the quiet bassist who tash and i tried to wave to just to I don't know, so he'd be more cheerier somehow, so before all of this fades from my old brain:
PLEASE PEOPLE WHO ARE MY FRIENDS AND TOOK PHOTOS THEN, SEND THEM TO ME! SOON!
This means dhaniah/shila, jenn and your friend yvette (ask her to add me on msn, yes?), jaaanice and pam goh, although i suppose she doesn't even read this blog.
At one point, alex was standing on the drums and I thought woah, is he going to jump off then he uh, kind of nimbly hopped off and i was like, eh?
But the white light that made them look like angels and then turning blood red when they played This Fire, the way they sauntered out knowing, like tash said, that they didn't need a opening act or even massive dramatic shindig to work the crowd. When they played the first few bars of crowd-pleaser songs (which is almost everthing, basically) and the crowd just surges and the atmosphere was just there and zomg, alex really knew how to work the crowd with his sneaky, flirty furtive looks and uh, tight pants. or when the atmosphere is just SO up there and nick just kills you with the slick guitar and he plays with this pale and feverish gleam, or paul i think is standing hitting the bass drums pounding out a steady beat for us to cheer the band back out from their short breather and breaking out into Your Diary.
(paragraph break!)
how alex spoke with a funny elvis-accent, which is supremely odd for a scottish man and by general consensus, nobody understood but it was funny and they were having fun so again, nobpdy cares. oh oh and when they did those guitar jumps, or when people were jumping in the mosh pit and you jump along and it's like you're being carried by a giant organism IT IS SO WEIRD. oh oh and they played all the songs I wanted to hear by the first half and could die happy already because you could tell they were all really into it, and not just playing for a bunch of fans from a tiny speck of an island. hand punching and pointing in unision, screaming the words to the songs but you can't hear yourself anyway and then falling into captive silence when the song falls into a slow and soft catch and you can just see everybody watching the single notes and syllables flowing from the band like spheres of sound. Oh the bridge for Walk Away and That Was Easy were like that.
(oh come on, I must remember more than this!)
Hm, at some point in between songs, alex mentioned something about 'stirrings in his nether-regions'. I'm pretty sure I didn't imagine that, really! And for the love of everything in a flowery shirt and striped pants, I can't remember what led him to say that, or what he said afterwards.
I love that they made theatrical stage bows that were dignified in their own way, and did not smash one guitar at all throughout the whole thing because I honestly don't understand how musicians can bear to do that. Even though this entire entry quite shows that I have massive leanings towards Alex Kapranos fangirlhood, you know, we really were all there for the music.
Which was brilliant, and I don't think anything in 2006 can top that sweaty and cramped hour and half being hardly a meter away from FF although I would very much like to beg the Powers That Be to try, because man! If the peak of this year is in February, what does that say about the next 10 months?
So many times, I just wanted to close my eyes and enjoy the music the way I do with my earphones plugged into my ears in a closed and empty room but could only bear to close my eyes for 3 seconds each time because the nanasecond-thought of missing anything would immediately send my eyelids flying up.
Oh and when alex stand-curls around the mike stand and his light blue eyes glint under the spotlights singing slowly:
"You can feel my lips undress your eyes
Undress your eyes, undress your eyes
Words of love, words so leisured
Words are poisoned darts of pleasure"
Things that you can only see from a live performance, things that made the $90 so very very worth it. Somehow, I must convince you readers that I am not that massive a rabid fangirl, and even though I have vestiges of that, it's not the main point of this entry or why it was so brilliant.
It was the performance in itself, and these musicians with such a fresh sound, with an audience, a convention of like-minded souls you know? I suppose you have to admit that it is a form of idol worship although that makes me think of *shudder* Taiwanese boybands because for a long while, you've only known the band and their music and brilliance through indirect contact like cds and what, blog posts on their official site. and suddenly, their RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU. Slight underexaggeration to say that things like that don't happen all the time and yes, again I suppose you could blame the celebrity culture that we have right now. But above all, it's just you want to know and meet the people that you think are incredibly talented because gosh, I'm sure they're pretty interesting people aren't they?
AND EVERYBODY WHO GOT TO
A) SHAKE HANDS
B) GET AN AUTOGRAPH
C) MANAGED TO PROCURE SUBSTANTIAL PIECE OF STAGE DEBRIS LIKE DRUMSTICKS AND GUITAR PICKS
D)STALKED THEM BACK TO THE HOTEL AND HAD MAD WILD ORGIES INVOLVING SINGAPOREAN FOOD
DON'T TELL ME OKAY. I WILL KILL YOU WITH MY UH, SMELLY CLOTHES THAT ARE STILL WAITING IN THE LAUNDRY BASKET. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED.
My phone is so battered from the mosh pit it wants to cry.
Oh oh I don't want to forget so soon - come back neurones, come back!
Turn away if you're sick of this already.
O curse my short term memory!
The FF concert was shit-awesome of course, all worries about lacklustre live-audio flying out of the window since the sound was so clear and tight in tune and pitch that you'd think it was a recording, save for the fact that alex kapranos missed a couple of lyrics which in the grand scale of things, everybody who was there says - WHO CARES.
Right, back to the short term memory point. Too quickly too quickly the experience is fading for my memory like the bruises on my knee and hips. All I have in my head are quick flashes of bright lights, alex being a complete and lovable slut *FANGIRL*, nick and his guitar with the broken string swinging about, and for one of the songs zomg they had three people on the drums, and the quiet bassist who tash and i tried to wave to just to I don't know, so he'd be more cheerier somehow, so before all of this fades from my old brain:
PLEASE PEOPLE WHO ARE MY FRIENDS AND TOOK PHOTOS THEN, SEND THEM TO ME! SOON!
This means dhaniah/shila, jenn and your friend yvette (ask her to add me on msn, yes?), jaaanice and pam goh, although i suppose she doesn't even read this blog.
At one point, alex was standing on the drums and I thought woah, is he going to jump off then he uh, kind of nimbly hopped off and i was like, eh?
But the white light that made them look like angels and then turning blood red when they played This Fire, the way they sauntered out knowing, like tash said, that they didn't need a opening act or even massive dramatic shindig to work the crowd. When they played the first few bars of crowd-pleaser songs (which is almost everthing, basically) and the crowd just surges and the atmosphere was just there and zomg, alex really knew how to work the crowd with his sneaky, flirty furtive looks and uh, tight pants. or when the atmosphere is just SO up there and nick just kills you with the slick guitar and he plays with this pale and feverish gleam, or paul i think is standing hitting the bass drums pounding out a steady beat for us to cheer the band back out from their short breather and breaking out into Your Diary.
(paragraph break!)
how alex spoke with a funny elvis-accent, which is supremely odd for a scottish man and by general consensus, nobody understood but it was funny and they were having fun so again, nobpdy cares. oh oh and when they did those guitar jumps, or when people were jumping in the mosh pit and you jump along and it's like you're being carried by a giant organism IT IS SO WEIRD. oh oh and they played all the songs I wanted to hear by the first half and could die happy already because you could tell they were all really into it, and not just playing for a bunch of fans from a tiny speck of an island. hand punching and pointing in unision, screaming the words to the songs but you can't hear yourself anyway and then falling into captive silence when the song falls into a slow and soft catch and you can just see everybody watching the single notes and syllables flowing from the band like spheres of sound. Oh the bridge for Walk Away and That Was Easy were like that.
(oh come on, I must remember more than this!)
Hm, at some point in between songs, alex mentioned something about 'stirrings in his nether-regions'. I'm pretty sure I didn't imagine that, really! And for the love of everything in a flowery shirt and striped pants, I can't remember what led him to say that, or what he said afterwards.
I love that they made theatrical stage bows that were dignified in their own way, and did not smash one guitar at all throughout the whole thing because I honestly don't understand how musicians can bear to do that. Even though this entire entry quite shows that I have massive leanings towards Alex Kapranos fangirlhood, you know, we really were all there for the music.
Which was brilliant, and I don't think anything in 2006 can top that sweaty and cramped hour and half being hardly a meter away from FF although I would very much like to beg the Powers That Be to try, because man! If the peak of this year is in February, what does that say about the next 10 months?
So many times, I just wanted to close my eyes and enjoy the music the way I do with my earphones plugged into my ears in a closed and empty room but could only bear to close my eyes for 3 seconds each time because the nanasecond-thought of missing anything would immediately send my eyelids flying up.
Oh and when alex stand-curls around the mike stand and his light blue eyes glint under the spotlights singing slowly:
"You can feel my lips undress your eyes
Undress your eyes, undress your eyes
Words of love, words so leisured
Words are poisoned darts of pleasure"
Things that you can only see from a live performance, things that made the $90 so very very worth it. Somehow, I must convince you readers that I am not that massive a rabid fangirl, and even though I have vestiges of that, it's not the main point of this entry or why it was so brilliant.
It was the performance in itself, and these musicians with such a fresh sound, with an audience, a convention of like-minded souls you know? I suppose you have to admit that it is a form of idol worship although that makes me think of *shudder* Taiwanese boybands because for a long while, you've only known the band and their music and brilliance through indirect contact like cds and what, blog posts on their official site. and suddenly, their RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU. Slight underexaggeration to say that things like that don't happen all the time and yes, again I suppose you could blame the celebrity culture that we have right now. But above all, it's just you want to know and meet the people that you think are incredibly talented because gosh, I'm sure they're pretty interesting people aren't they?
AND EVERYBODY WHO GOT TO
A) SHAKE HANDS
B) GET AN AUTOGRAPH
C) MANAGED TO PROCURE SUBSTANTIAL PIECE OF STAGE DEBRIS LIKE DRUMSTICKS AND GUITAR PICKS
D)STALKED THEM BACK TO THE HOTEL AND HAD MAD WILD ORGIES INVOLVING SINGAPOREAN FOOD
DON'T TELL ME OKAY. I WILL KILL YOU WITH MY UH, SMELLY CLOTHES THAT ARE STILL WAITING IN THE LAUNDRY BASKET. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED.
My phone is so battered from the mosh pit it wants to cry.
Oh oh I don't want to forget so soon - come back neurones, come back!
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
One of the nice things about having an mp3 player and receiving too many songs to keep track is that sometimes, you are suddenly pleasantly surprised when you find an awesome song in your player that you didn't know even was in there. Today, that song is:
Kite
I hid myself from failure and fear
O my dear you're a threat to the bad in us all
They tell themselves that each word from your lips
Or the grace in your eyes overcomes any fall
Over the twilight you're listening for me
Darling, go to sleep
Cradled by moonlight, I'm dreaming we'll be
Loved so deep
Floating and fighting, like a kite on a string
Till you cut through my tether and changed everything
From the sky you looked small, but I loved you the same
So I darted back quickly to spell out your name
And when they say that I'm just a terrible kite
You'll tell them you're proud of my marvelous flight
Don't hide yourself inside till I'm old
O my dear you're a threat to the bad we all see
I'm beside myself for the touch of your lips
Or the grace of your eyes that can see good in me
Over the twilight you're listening for me
Darling, go to sleep
Cradled by moonlight, I'm dreaming we'll be
Loved so deep
Floating and fighting, like a kite on a string
Till you cut through my tether and changed everything
From the sky you looked small, but I loved you the same
So I darted back quickly to spell out your name
And when they say that I'm just a terrible kite
You'll tell them you're proud of my marvelous flight
- Copeland.
It sounds like a beautiful and sad lullaby, and lovely lyrics.
Thanks (insert name here) for sending it to me!
Kite
I hid myself from failure and fear
O my dear you're a threat to the bad in us all
They tell themselves that each word from your lips
Or the grace in your eyes overcomes any fall
Over the twilight you're listening for me
Darling, go to sleep
Cradled by moonlight, I'm dreaming we'll be
Loved so deep
Floating and fighting, like a kite on a string
Till you cut through my tether and changed everything
From the sky you looked small, but I loved you the same
So I darted back quickly to spell out your name
And when they say that I'm just a terrible kite
You'll tell them you're proud of my marvelous flight
Don't hide yourself inside till I'm old
O my dear you're a threat to the bad we all see
I'm beside myself for the touch of your lips
Or the grace of your eyes that can see good in me
Over the twilight you're listening for me
Darling, go to sleep
Cradled by moonlight, I'm dreaming we'll be
Loved so deep
Floating and fighting, like a kite on a string
Till you cut through my tether and changed everything
From the sky you looked small, but I loved you the same
So I darted back quickly to spell out your name
And when they say that I'm just a terrible kite
You'll tell them you're proud of my marvelous flight
- Copeland.
It sounds like a beautiful and sad lullaby, and lovely lyrics.
Thanks (insert name here) for sending it to me!
Monday, February 06, 2006
i have a sudden craving for blueberry waffles. and not the fancy-schmancy gelare kind mind you, i miss the good old heartland bakery kind so it is with much sadness and longing that i announce that the Nagoya Bakery at Teck Whye Lane has closed down.
i suppose it means nothing to you, but oh that was a place for cheap birthday cakes that always looked better than they tasted as i would find out every time when i was able to convince my parents to buy me a small mini-cake slice, the kind that has a tasteless wafer biscuit shaped as a disturbingly distorted dwarf. i won't be able to trace my name (the narcissism! the narcissism!) anymore in the condensation of the chiller while waiting for my waffles, or choose candles that eventually end up dusty at the bottom of the kitchen drawer.
NO MORE WAFFLES FOR BREAKFAST.
i suppose it means nothing to you, but oh that was a place for cheap birthday cakes that always looked better than they tasted as i would find out every time when i was able to convince my parents to buy me a small mini-cake slice, the kind that has a tasteless wafer biscuit shaped as a disturbingly distorted dwarf. i won't be able to trace my name (the narcissism! the narcissism!) anymore in the condensation of the chiller while waiting for my waffles, or choose candles that eventually end up dusty at the bottom of the kitchen drawer.
NO MORE WAFFLES FOR BREAKFAST.
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