Here's a part of Yoko Kanno's concert 'Souvenir from Tokyo'. Its a piano medley of various songs redone in her own style. The titles of the songs in the order they are played are as follows: the singing sea piano black ELM green bird and piano bar (modified)
I think it's awesome, but you're free to disagree. Just listen to it and see what you think.
For more of the concert go here. This guy has the whole thing.
Btw, spring term is starting, it looks like it's gonna be a ton of fun...
Its a cold morning. The wind howls sharply. The window is frosty, the landscape white. I sit up groggily, a blank mind still asleep within a rising body. I step into the bathroom. The white tiles are cold to my feet, who shudder at their chilling touch. I make for the rug and welcome to buffer against the morning cold. I reach for my toothbrush, a weathered and pitiful thing. The motions of the morning bathroom ritual come to me. Forms and flows practiced day after day without fail, they are a routine, a predictable... a comfort.
After a morning session of gameplay and the customary web surfing, I proceed downstairs for breakfast. The term is misleading, its 11.30 and I'm the only one at the table. I drench my home-made 'belgian waffle' in maple syrup, and then throw on some ice cream for good measure. The whole mess looks like a something the stereotypical sweet-crazy fat kid dragged in, I take a large and big bite anyway. The sweetness is acute, sharp and shocking. My taste buds suddenly are swamped, my mind reels with the sheer strength of it. The carton of Eddy's Ice Cream reads, "Double-Vanilla: Intense and sweet", I groan silently while the overwhelming taste in my mouth plays 'pinata' with my reeling head. Thats why I don't eat breakfast...
We drive off to the winter carnival, because Dad decided it was a good idea. I grumble a little, but my mind is elsewhere, semi-present and unstable. The ice sculptures look depressed, lonely amidst to flat and bleak white landscape. Despite the thronging crowds, the horridly mass-produced smell of pop-corn and corn-dog, the place feels like a wretched, empty dump of artificial wasteland. The hole in my mind where the rain gets in isn't fixed, and it wanders, where it will go...
I read my friends blogs. The words on the screen are funny, somber, exciting yet mundane, but I am still hundreds of thousands of miles away, in a cold little room at a cold little desk with an old toshiba laptop that runs hot even in Minnesotan weather. What do you say when the friends you once knew pass you by, growing and gaining, living life and loving life, experiencing the joys and thrills that you should have shared with them, while you stare from behind an icy wall? The chill seeps through the window, frosting it's edges, but that is nothing, a passing cold that will be gone come spring. Another chill remains though, the one that creeps into my soul, freezing slowly the passions in my heart, leaving a deadened husk.
A chill that comes in the night and lingers in the frosts of a foreign land till a familiar dawn drives it away...
So, my final lecture ended an hour ago. Tomorrow, all we're doing is a final review session before the last exam and a trip to some speech on economics by some economic big-wig. Then it'll be finals on thursday and the lighning paced J-term will be over. Whew.
I met some friends to jam yesterday. It was fun.
I also seem to have exhausted interest in youtube anime and have taken to downloading the GW client on library computers so I can play on campus without bringing my laptop. Its actually surprisingly easy and quick to do. Cheers to free high speed internet.
I don't have pictures of the inside of the house yet, but I will soon. They're installing carpets on the stairs today so its better if I wait anyway.
Thanks for listening to (or reading rather) this mundane post.
Hope everyone back home is safe, sound and having fun!
Ignorance is bliss, don't worry about tomorrow, for it shall worry about itself, a child's carefree smile is the brightest in the world; what wonderful sentiments these are. Yet the dark clouds of worry still furrow my brow and darken my sight. Worries about grades, worries about life, worries about the future.
Not too long ago, I was a secondary school student. A rather carefree and irresponsible one, despite being captain of a debate team. I was horrendous at chinese, barely passable at math & physics, and almost failing chemistry. The only subjects I had going for me were english and literature, odd subjects to be good at by Singaporean standards. I was a bit of a loner, I had a bunch of friends here and there and truckloads of acquaintances, but I had no proverbial "best friend". No confidant or best bud.
In retrospect, that wasn't really true, I had more friends than I cared to count (or at least I think I do) I just never really counted them properly. I was perenially under the impression that I was the unpopular geeky kid who was friends with Wei Zhang and Matthew and Shawn Sim (Hey just because they're on the debate team doesn't mean I like them right? Stupid shallow Fairsians!).
Anyhow, mayhap because of a minority view that was expressed to me, I ended up thinking that the vast majority of Fairsians thought I was a nerd/geek/dork (pick your poison). Like I said, in hindsight, this wasn't really true (at least I hope so :P); but it got me thinking.
If my social skills in secondary school are this shitty, what am I gonna do when I get into the real world, office politics, power struggles, the Great Big Rat Race of Life!
What a bother.
Well, everything took a backseat when sec 4 came and I found myself whisked off to America in a cloud of GEDs, SATs and TOEFLs. I found myself in the middle of University 2 years early, bombarded with "what's your major?" and "Why Hamline?" and "what're you gonna do once you bust this joint?". I didn't really know. I still don't, and its currently a rather large worry in my mind.
I've toyed with ideas of occupations before, on this very blog even. Political science, literary analyses, historiography, anthropology, economics, both macro and micro, music, theater arts...... The list is seemingly endless, and the clues I have on how to choose seemingly nonexistent.
What am I going to do with my life?
What a bother.
Then there comes religion. What is God? Who is God? If God is omnipotent but evil, then he is a tyrant. If God is omnipotent and good, then whence cometh evil. If God is not omnipotent, then evil or good, why call him God? A simple logical question, the problem of evil. And I find myself without a convincing answer.
Will a wiser soul illumine the flaw here, for I have stared hard and long and cannot see it.
Yet religion is not dependent on logic, and regardless of rhetoric or argument I cannot deny that which I have seen, and that which I have felt. My senses tell me there is a God, and my faith tells me that he is good.
Yet the seed of doubt remains, buried in the darkness of my soul awaiting the ray of sin and temptation to grow it anew...
What a bother.
What of my country, my homeland, the place where I belong? Singapura! That sunny island in the sea. They're building casinoes now, Intergrated Resorts they're called. And I silently wonder, are we really headed in the right direction? The PM says so, and in keeping with Singaporean tradition: "If he say like dat, den mus be rite lah! Why you worry so much, you stupid ah!?"
Amidst the growing tide of competition, and the rising might and prosperity of our neighbors both near and distant, who can say what the future holds for our little red dot?
What a bother.
And the last worry I care to mention. My identity.
Who am I? Who am I to you? Is that the same? Should it be? Can it be?
Stupid philosophical questions that plague me. When I was a kid my folks asked me what our family was. "Well, Mom and Dad are Chinese, but Er Ge and Da Ge are English cos they speak English!" (Well something to that effect) My parents were very tickled, and repeat the story in front of dinner guests to this day, but the implicit question plagues me. What defines race? Is it birth and blood, or is it upbringing and society. Am I chinese simply because of skin colour, or is there a deeper connection that must be made?
My love affair with lego started a long time ago, among the fragments of my earliest memories. My family lived in a rather cosy house in one of the enclosed neighborhoods of upper Bukit Timah. Of the little I recall of what my life was like before going to Primary School, most of it is inextricably linked to that house. I remember the long lazy days of nothing but toy cars and action figures and TV watching. And I remember the cooking sets and the hawker stall me and my sister would set up, trying to get our parents to taste our non-existent cooking. And then there was the lego... I remember sneaking into the room of my Brothers while they were both at school and timidly touching and fumbling the lego sets they left lying around. A dangerous business, for the consequences of discovery were a harsh verbal lashing and a fierce glares. Scary business indeed for a 5 year old. But the allure of the lego was great, and I returned again and again, to the dismay of my older siblings (or at least one of them).
Eventually, I convinced my parents to let me have a lego set of my own. I remember it, a large (by lego standards) fire station, with a tall tower and helicopter as well as a fire truck (well fire van really, it was no where near the right size for a truck) and a few appropriately dressed firefighters. I was overjoyed, jubilant, it was awesome, at least, for awhile.
I don't really know why I decided to write about all this in the first place, but lets just go on and see where this leads me.
If this isn't already apparent to you, I think Lego is awesome. Its a magnificent concept, a toy block that, when put together with other similar toy blocks, has infinite possibility. With these blocks, you could make anything, anything a young boy's imagination could conjure, or at least, a good many of them. A towering castle with spires and battlements perhaps? Or maybe an impenetrable JSDF Battle Tank with rotating turret and pilot? Or maybe even a life size Darth Vader!
Whatever, you get the idea.
The point is that lego allows youngsters the freedom to express their imagination. To exercise (if you'll allow me the cliche) their creative muscles and gain imaginative muscle mass! I think its fair to say that that's fairly desirable.
After all, isn't innovation the driving force behind humanities' success. Is it not our ingenuity (or stupidity, depending on your point of view) that has allowed us to dominate this Earth and wreak havoc upon its environment (not that that's a good thing).
It seems like I've just created a serious flaw in my own argument... oh well.
For the sake of continuing the post, lets assume more creativity = more good.
Now back to the point: LEGO IS AWESOME! So we have point 1, lego promotes creativity. Point 2 is that I am really really clever, so you should just take my word for it and believe that LEGO IS AWESOME. Therefore I win!
So as to ensure that my argument is complete with all three forms of appeal (logical, ethical and pathetic), look at this Lego man's face!
It's just so pathetic you have to pity it!
So go out and get a lego set NOW!
Because they're awesome!
Ok obligatory blogging is done now, later folks.....
The sky is a pearl-blue colour, with tinges of orange, cast by the setting sun. The tree's are bare, skeletal, their shedded foilage masked by a blanket of virgin snow. Smoke rises in pillars from the center of the campus, from vents that protrude from the top of a short square dwarf of a building. They rise into the air, dissipating into the light mist that shrouds the University. A silence accompanies it.
The beginning of January. For students the world over, a hectic time of new beginnings and crazed working on holiday homework. Yet here at Hamline, it's quiet. Winter term classes start and end stealthily, quietly, as if trying to avoid notice. Students shuffle in and out of class quickly with little comment. The world seems a little grayer than usual. At sundown, campus is nearly deserted. A bubble world, a ghost town, right in the midst of the metropolis. I watch from the window of the library, the sole bastion of constant activity, and wonder idly......
The snow melts and falls and melts and falls and melts and falls again. A cycle, of sorts. The leaves are green, then red, then yellow, then brown, then dirt while new leaves grow again. Yet the cycle is not noticed. We see the leaves and they seem like they were that way forever, their color does not change before our eyes. Yet we look away and as we turn our heads again suddenly a season has passed and the same leaf is of a different hue. Regret, longing, what place have these in the whirligig of time? Who can say what merit there is in ignoring the present to live for the future only to be disenchanted and realize that it was another future you were seeking for, or that the future you seek is an idealized impossibility. Why then hope, for if hoping in this world leads only to dissapointment, why place hope in it at all?
Winter, a season for death; that is statistically proven it seems. The sun sets to early, yet the dawn does not hasten itself to the remedy. Therein, a pallor falls on the soul and many are driven to darkness. Is that not the truth? And not just for the common man too, look to the tidings of those great men. In the last year, how many have fallen? Ariel Sharon, Milton Friedman, Gerald Ford, men great in the world's eyes, stricken down by disease and death. A year of grave tidings is what we have left; but do we go to a brighter future? A dubious answer awaits...
A new year has come, yet winter has fallen upon us, and upon my heart. A darkness that weighs me. Melodramatic words fill my mind as the ground crumbles beneath my soul, casting it into a slushy pit of cold despair and solemn silence. A little longer though, just a bit more, and mayhap the sun will rise again. After all, the poet is wont to write only in life's extremes; at least it seems that way to me. This is just another rut I happen to have staggered in, and eventually, I will stagger my way out of it and cast these words out of my mind. Until then, I will wallow in the pit of my self-created misery, and wonder...
-------- J-term classes have started. I'm taking microeconomics. Its boring. Nuff said.
Looking forward to June, in case you couldn't tell.
Meh, the new year snuck up on me while I was watching anime.
Happy New Year Folks, while you may have botched all of last year's resolutions, there'll be many other things you should be worried about botching which are far more important. So take it easy, kick back and enjoy the New Year fireworks while you can.
