More personal outpouring

I used to think that I was a very honest and direct person especially when it comes to the maneuvering of relationships, but now I realize that is not true at all. The other day I was talking to a friend about how one of my biggest frustrations is that I never got to tell my then-boyfriend all the issues I was pissed about with him when we broke up...because I didn't want to. He said that if he was in then-boyfriend's place, he would have wanted to know. Which is true, so would I. But how can you say such things to a person you love/d knowing very well that it would hurt them? In addition to that, it seems very unnecessary because it's not like much good would come of it at the stage.

Which applies to all my relationships with people now. I can barely tell my friends when I need them, or when I feel like utter crap (until days later), or that I disagree with them, or that I think they are being a jerk. I am so non-confrontational now that its ridiculous. It's just that with my time stretched so thin as it is, it seems so almost wasteful to bring in potential-conflict with friends. I would rather just keep it affable and bury issues. But seriously, this cannot be a long-term solution because I am all about suppressed frustration right now.

..as recent posts have proven.

Which is also why my ADM friends know nothing about this blog, I hope. All this anxious introspection would be alien to their impression of me and yeah honestly, I think it would make them uncomfortable. They are so convinced that I have it all figured out that they would find this ridiculous, which is ridiculous in itself. Not that I haven't tried opening up this side of me to them, but I just got strange looks from them so yeah let's just leave it at that.

Weird isn't it, the schism between who you (think you) are and other people's perception of you. To the most trivial thing, like wondering whether people think I'm pretty*. I personally like the way I look, but that is really not based on uh, standards of attractiveness. And you don't need to give me the bullcrap about how the most important thing is I like myself because excuse me, re-read the first sentence of this paragraph okay: not the point! With then-boyfriend, I never gave a flying hoot about this because I knew he thought so (belated thanks, btw). So it seems! That this really boils down to an inherent need for external validation. Which sounds a bit pathetic at first, but really people do this all the time for all causes no? I have an idea of who I am, but need external validation, the need for the Other to anchor what would otherwise be a floating and free-forming set of ideas of who you are. In this case, to think therefore you are, doesn't quite resolve the crisis.

*What, it's true! I think its a fair reaction towards having gone through consecutive half-baked romantic encounters. Its just a whole lot simpler to rationalize the outcome to thoughts of yeah probably just not pretty enough. Simplistic, but it also allows me NOT to go through even more problematic analysis of Why Things Didn't Work Out which is a complete waste of time anyway, cos heck knows what was going on on the other side right.

Oh bloody hell, what a week* of personally-not-feeling-awesomeness. THANKS WORLD, yes I get it. A quick diagram! (or two.)





Have you ever seen such angsty diagrams?

New work (when I should be sleeping, but who sleeps right.)

Live fast, die young.

Suddenly doesn't seem like a bad way to go, especially/only if you've managed to accomplish much within that span of time. Edges of nihilism biting at me.

Okay I forgot where I got this from, but its an online magazine that is downloadable in pdf.

(I used to hate pdf because I thought it was a really clunky file that made my computer lag, but of course that turned out to be the Acrobat Reader software running on Windows. PDF + Mac + Preview = Awesome Handiness.)

Also, half-baked things that are coming up from my internship stint - work that has been rudely interrupted by the client uh, lack of approval. Which I'm okay with, it helps that I assume everything will be an uphill struggle, and besides the company I'm interning at does cool jobs anyway. So even the most tedious of tedious is relatively fun.

NEW NEWS FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVEN'T SEEN ME IN AWHILE

Which means you Aini!

I have lost weight.
















No, not really. That is just some epic cheek-sucking-in and effective lighting at work. But! Remember when I said I cut my hair, and I was feeling hella awesome about it. Well I'm still feeling awesome about it and have been upkeeping what was an originally expensive hair cut with $5 trims (YEAH!) and it has been about two months now and I am totally loving it.

Fine and Normal

Pretty Awesome!

Not to get too philosophical over something as trivial as hair, but I do feel it represents who I am very aptly. Although a friend said I am a total alpha female with this hair...and I don't know how I feel about that. Has its pros and cons.

(Oh and when my mum saw it, she said she only liked one side - guess which. HAHA)

(Actually she specifically said the side she didn't like looked like something out of a drug rehab center.)

One of the few touristy pictures I took on my trip to Cambodia, courtesy of Frankie. There are a kajillion photos, so I'm just going to indiscriminately pick a few that amuse me.

Pre-album artwork for Dhaniah's band, My Writes. They play indie pop although I think their new album It's Okay, I'm With The Band, explores different styles quite nicely. The five people who read this blog! Check them out here!

Final thing:

#EDIT: On another note, how annoying is it that all the cool boys are taken?

#EDIT: Also, they need to invent a function that allows you to retract an sms from being sent out because you were only half-thinking (although the sentiments were genuine) and it was too late when you realize, oh fuck maybe that wasn't very appropriate. Resulting in an sms exchange that was awkward to the max which personally, made it ridiculous and hilarious but in all probability, I don't think the other person found it that way.

Lately, I've also been thinking about how I'm so limited/narrow in my interest. Which is design, obviously. Its just that I've been meeting new people and they're into this, and also this and this and what would I say? I'm really into graphic design.

What, that's it? Although I do love EVERYTHING about design. I love the sensitive treatment of typography, especially in recent issues of Vanity Fair.
And also in letterpress typography.

This one I found at Oh So Beautiful, a design blog I found today with a great focus on all things paper and beautiful.

And packaging design, motion graphics and the crafting of intent that comes with advertising and branding. I wish I was really good at what I do though. There are amazing people out there and I think more than just to have a brilliant and clever idea, the other thing to scour for is recognition. Which is more than talent and skill, sometimes its just plain luck and connections.

Wow funny mousse birthday cake I had earlier is doing things to my digestive system now at 4:41 A.M. Selective and sporadic lactose intolerance, YOU SUCK.

Its funny how reading astrology books do help in creating some sense and explanation for the things that I would otherwise, only have half-vague answers for. Which is really why I have always been pulled towards astrology, for the simple fact that it offers me a brace or scaffolding to lean on to, a foundation to build up my own understanding of the relationships I have with people.

Anyway, I was hanging out with Dhaniah yesterday which was great as always, but a bit more awesome this time because we had an episode of hysterically cussing out the world to expel our frustration (WHICH FELT GREAT AND REALLY WORKED BTW) and then were witnesses to a pretty damn cool lead singer-mosh pit dynamic which made for good analysis and discussion on male aggression (lol), and then discussion on things that are bright, shiny and new, and then actually genuine cross-affirmation of things along the line of 'yeah, you totally deserve better!'

Good weekend.

Feel the need to do something reckless and drastic. Might have something to do with turning 21 recently, and there's just a lot of tension and unfulfilled-ness in there that I am keeping under wraps.

But I already got my hair cut (looks super cool btw) and bought new shoes. What else, what else.

Have been painting a lot (self-portrait assignments) and you'd think that would help, but not really. All that close observation and introspection is just making me more tense.

more from the holga

Kulai, Malaysia. (not that its recognizable anyway ha)




near Tash's




Tanjong Pagar Railway Station, early morning Singapore

THIS IS WHY GMAIL ROCKS

Because I am very careless when I email sometimes and tend to forget to attach files. Tell me I'm not the only one here.

Source: http://www.popgadget.net/
(Which is techno-gadget site aimed at women, full of quirky goodness. Not that I'm re-inforcing negative gender stereotypes. Women can be very serious about technology. But where's the fun in that! BRING ON THE SUSHI THUMBDRIVES)


Or other such weirdness:

(NOT THAT I AM EMO-ING OKAY)

But a recent conversation with a friend has gotten me thinking about love. And I figured, that love is tenderness. Its tenderness towards the other person, and its also the tenderness that comes from putting yourself at that point of vulnerability, and also the irrational way how your reaction to the person's actions are disproportionately amplified.

I am glad to have loved, anyhow.

Also, I don't quite understand uh, people who feel the need to keep their relationship a secret from other people. I get not-flaunting-it-about, but the secrecy? I find it strange, and slightly shady.

Also, I am STILL very disturbed by this couple I know who I had once thought to be pretty cool and chill, but then witnessed him being super-rude/dismissive to her. At least, intolerably rude according to my standards. Excuse me, I don't take that kind of attitude from anybody and I always thought she was kind of like me in that regard, AND in light of the whole chris brown/rihanna debacle, it just leaves me D:

LOL at me for living via other people's relationships since I am oh so alone/single now. How nosy.

In any case, so despite my rather rosy thoughts about love as mentioned earlier, I am starting to think that relationships (or at least the ones that surround me) are all pretty screwed up. Anisha was joking with me earlier tonight: pointing to the Fullerton Hotel, she said, "That's where I'm getting married in 6 years time."

"6 years?? But that would make us..."

"27."

"Yeah, 27 would be a good time to get married -

"That's the plan. Either that or you're going to find me at the bottom of the river."

"I'll join you."

Such fatalism! Which does not so much come from the cynicism/pessimism of not being able to find a person who you will love a lot-lot, but for me at least, the apprehension that I will be able to sustain (forever) the relationship through everything else that I'm passing through for the next few years. If the aim is Ultimate Long-Term relationship, I'm pretty sure I'm going to fail that one.

You would think that the fear is not being able to find somebody you want to live with forever (in the mortal sense) in the next few years, but its really that I don't think I will be ready in the next few years.

Then what?

 Desaturated

Old holga photos from when I was in India that were originally in colour. I realized that desaturating them brought out some details that I had not seen before, hurray for surprises!

My Very First Oil Painting

How exciting right! I'm taking an oil painting class this semester because I thought it would be good to beef up my (non-existing) painting skills. I'm primarily a drawing person, and I have painted in watercolours and acrylic before, but never with formal skills etc. Also, I'm making it a point to take one therapeutic class every semester, so this is it! It would be a good skill set to obtain too, illustration-wise.

My composition skills are a bit shite (note: this was already cropped in photoshop), and I don't have so much the loose option to alter or add on to adjust things as I would when I draw, since I'm not too comfortable with it yet.

The close-up shows the brush strokes, and close tonal scheme that I seem to incline towards. I'm on my third painting so far, and its becoming very apparent that I'm into subtle tonal differences and a kind of blockish brush stroke. I actually took this class hoping to learn how to do the hyper-realistic style of oil painting but urgh, blending! Maybe I don't have the patience for it, or rather the fact that amateurish realism looks so lame that I would rather leapfrog across the whole thing and not learn it at all!



Also, Euan Uglow is a present favourite:


More sketch-doodles. I'm stuck in the sense that I haven't a clue how to process them to make them look more polished - I have tons of these.





*Who's Hans Bacher? He used to be a production designer for Disney, working on major things like Mulan, Beauty and the Beast, Roger Rabbit etc. He came to our school today to present a lecture and it was really entertaining - apart from hearing the inside (positive and negative) scoop of what happens behind the storyboards at Disney, he presented a really cool analysis on colour and composition principles based on some classical paintings. Very nice.

I have massive gap time between posting up completed work. This was part of a book project for my 2D class at the end of my foundation year. It was crazy stressful, but you know, I do miss working with the print press, and being more crafty. Lament, lament!

Speaking of crazy stressful, that is one thing i REALLY should be right now but I'm not lol. I'm completely in a state of denial and negligence, and I've never cut my deadlines/progress this close before. Its a puzzling lack of urgency.

I hope you will be pleased with the cleaned-up blog layout, I spent the night pushing around html code without even fully understanding it ha, but I think it looks much more orderly now AND MOST IMPORTANTLY: huge space for pictures.

Like this one -



One of the nicer shots I got from the train ride back from malaysia. I took the railway with anisha and tash, and it was a series of almost-misadventures which made for interesting times ha. More on that later, am supposed to be studying astronomy. Among many other things that need to get done.

Early morning at Red Hill

Its a Typography Post.

Was working on a project for school where I had to design a masthead for a fictional magazine. So playing around with fonts and such, I discovered this!

How amazingly cool is it that Baskerville's brackets are so gorgeously thin and light, that it looks like it belongs with a san serif typeface? And yet, it still matches the serif letters so well, since Baskerville I feel, has a relatively light stroke as it is. So nice.

(Not that there's anything wrong with Caslon, of course.)

How about a closer look please! And you know I love italics, even more than how much I love san serifs in their thin/ultrathin versions.

Check out the even stroke of the ampersand (&) on Baskerville Regular compared to the Caslon. And the contrast on its comma is gorgeous. While I'm not to sure on the sharpness of its question mark, I really love the flourish on Baskerville Italic's ampersand and just look at the sharp tapered ends of the brackets!

Its quite an innovative solution too, I think, with regards to designing what the italicized form of the brackets should be. Ultrathin strokes on regular, and a slight belly in italics, to denote a really graceful shift in weight and angle.

Sigh.

Today, while covering lecture notes from my astronomy class that I have only attended once this entire half-semester, I learnt that the light from the sun takes 8 minutes to reach us!

I see my day by something that happened 8 minutes ago. Its a strange, strange tension between past and present.

And you know, since everything is formed and/or defined from light, colours (which are, I think, the reflection of different wavelengths of light) and light helps us define forms, I think its pretty crazy-ridiculous that our present is shaped by something that is past.

No? Anyone else see the craziness?

In any case, it'll help me feel less guilty if and when I start delving back into old sad stories, because hey, that seems to be the actual, physical condition of our lives on this planet! Hoho, nifty excuse.

This is why I wanted to take the astronomy class, I guess I see something romantic about the universe and all its systems and how they were formed. Its so massive, gorgeous but also distant.

Something humbling too, to know that Earth is part of our Solar System, which is part of a branch of one of the many lesser arms of the Milky Way Galaxy, which is part of the Local Group, smaller than another Local Group galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy, which in itself, is minute against the unimaginable number of galaxies that probably exist in the universe.

To which I say: HOW CAN THERE NOT BE ALIENS.

I also like how my lecturer wrote in his slide:
Most of the atoms in our bodies were created in the core of a star! We are made of star stuff.

Seriously, Helter Skelter is an amazing song - both the original Beatles song and the version for Across the Universe. The rawness, the violence! GRAWR!

Do you, don't you want me to love you
I'm coming down fast but I'm miles above you
Tell me tell me tell me come on tell me the answer
Well you may be a lover but you ain't no dancer

Now helter skelter helter skelter
Helter skelter yeah
Ooh!

Will you, won't you want me to make you
I'm coming down fast but don't let me break you
Tell me tell me tell me the answer
You may be a lover but you ain't no dancer

Damn killer. I suppose my taste for music late in the night when churning out work is loud and ear-killing. The Vines!

Old project based on Symone's translation of Baudelaire's Epilogue:

With heart at rest I climbed the citadel's/ Steep height

and see the city as from a tower, /Hospital, brothel, prison, and such hells,

I love thee, infamous city!

Harlots and /Hunted have pleasures of their own to give,

The vulgar herd can never understand.

(click to enlarge to get mofo-huge image)