most extraordinary

the most extraordinary thing has happened to me. just about 5 minutes ago. i drank a cup of tea; and i actually liked - get this, liked - it.

i'm not a tea person, hell no. i've always hated the bitter icky leaf taste and aftertaste and horrible feeling of purgation. hated it with a vengeance. a rather disproportionate vehemence for one so young and innocent.

but drinking that cup just made me see things - everything - with the utmost perspicuity and clarity and everything. it bonked my mind, kindof. unfortunately my mind wasn't focused on anything except the tea, so it just went wow cool hey let's have some more of that.

granted, it was

1. dilmah
2. peach-flavoured (left over from ms johnson's wedding lmao)
3. iced
4. laced with enough sugar to make ants diabetic

so perhaps the purist might complain. but i strangely enjoyed it. i actually caught myself in the act of enjoying a cup of tea.

fucking insanely weird. hrmph. inexplicable.

christmas morning

christmas day 2007 - definitely the worst christmas i've ever had, and more than half of it's gone already. nothing particularly special.

my dad's back in hospital for the 4th time this year, tied to a drip and a piss-tube. not even a fucking christmas eve dinner, no food allowed. don't ask or bother to leave sympathetic messages it really doesn't concern you at all so it's fine, don't need to fake anything. i don't feel much either in the emotions department, i'm kinda blase about vomit and blood and tubes and injections and absence already, no gnawing emptiness or whatever, anyway there's already enough on my mind. my mom's visiting him in hospital. i'm going in the evening.

cos of the family stuff tt's been going on the last month i told my mom nvm about the presents lah. "pile it on me, i can take it, i can do sacrifices, martyr me plz". yeah i didn't expect it, but she bought my whole self-sacrificial act so as a consequence i don't have the ipod that she was thinking of getting last weekend. fuck. didn't expect my christmas present to be a hug, but oh well. you can't put a price on love i guess.

i got myself the roald dahl short story collection but there's nothing in giving yourself presents, no surprise, no "ooh this blows" feeling. and of course no budget.

yeah christmas doesn't really mean much to me, i expect it doesn't to most of you either, except presents. don't leave messages telling me about christ's love or the true meaning of christmas either, i'll feel it/find out about it when i do, thx for asking. and i'll fucking convert when i fucking like, or when i decide to care about my eternal soul. thx adam for never ever inviting me to a church in the five years i've known you.

as you can tell my thoughts are in a bit of a mess, what with my personal life screwing up massively, and the general antipathy to life and stuff.

and i still have the chicago essay to do. balls.

that was a fucking scroogish post but i'm completely not in a christmas spirit mood, you must have surmised already.

merry christmas to you.

smootz party/other stuff

woot for smoot's xmas party yesterday (22nd)... food was awesome (smoot! send apple pie recipe so i can saikang my mom plz =D ) games were fun thx to smoot's and shawn's brilliant plans. twister was seriously twisted and owned! nice try at obstacle course haha it wasn't made for people with long legs like me who vaulted over the raffia unlike everyone else who squeezed and scraped on the stairs =P and yay for funky offbeat presents & cards & letters. thx smoot & chua & everyone at the party you guys made my day!

-----

i have also utterly fucked up a friendship that means a lot to me way beyond fuckage, thanks to my being me. what in the name of fuck was i thinking. would that i could curl up into a ball and hibernate out my shitty rat-arsed existence. dun think i can repair anything or patch things up, at least not for a time. i have screwed up colossally.

am depressed despite the lovely party -.- and went and listened to the beethoven 9th (again) for therapeutic purposes. didn't work since i dragged myself back into my maelstrom of thoughts by writing this post. and i still have 3 essays to write - yale, chicago, and the PSC one. damn it. really can't concentrate and it's nearly christmas alr.

this is worse than A-levels; this is real life. i probably should get drunk.

waldstein again

i've just finished a brilliant about-90%-there run of the waldstein sonata. it's one of those beethovens that makes you exult in the glory of being alive and breathing and running your fingers over the keys. lovely piece. admittedly my playing was not entirely lovely =D but woohoo. i could almost love that idiot driver in my previous post - obviously i mean love in the sense of caritas/agape. lol

i think someone said that if bach's well-tempered clavier is the old testament of keyboard playing then beethoven's 32 sonatas are the new testament. brilliant guy.

morning jog

yup i did another 10km today, this time in 50 minutes flat. (ok, excluding short breaks in between the bedok reservoir rounds)

since david chan (who's my moral compass when it comes to jaywalking) is away in italy, i'll have to rant here. i haven't showered yet but i'm ranting now cos i'm fuck-pissed at the fuckwit drivers of bedok north.

ok an explanation is in order: to get to my 10km route i have to cross one road. in the morning ~6:45 when i get out of the house i can usually get a break in the traffic to safely jaywalk across without stopping a whole line of cars. so i cross intact and the cars zoom by happily without getting stopped by one jogger.

now when i come back from the 10km i'm pretty knackered as normal people would tend to be, and this is usually about 8:20 (cos i take a slow walk back from the reservoir). unfortunately this is also peak traffic and i can't ever cross without getting the green man.

so i pressed the traffic light button. at least i had the decency to wait for one side of the road to clear right? but this arsewipe takes it into his fucking brain to honk me as i ran across. i mean, i don't run across the road to taunt him, i run across so that he gets a chance to demonstrate his lack of moral scruples by beating the light and crossing anyway. but he HONKS me. demonstrating he's nothing more than a law-abiding fuckwit. who lives by, if i'm not mistaken, stage four in kohlberg's moral taxonomy.

fucking hell. i mean, yeah ok i could have waited 15 minutes for traffic to clear on both sides before crossing, but which nutter does that? and besides DC my jaywalking moral compass never ever jaywalks, i'm told =D

in a manner of speaking yeah you could say i infringed upon his right to cross a pedestrian crossing without getting stopped. but on the other hand if he didn't stop he would have infringed upon MY right to cross the road without getting run down. what blooming nerve. it's not even like he could have been getting his pregnant wife or aged parent to hospital for a delivery or a hip replacement, it was the wrong side of the road to get to changi hospital anyway.

weighing things up i think both law and morality are on my side when i press the traffic light to cross the blinking road, as long as i wait until the moment when i stop as few cars as is humanly possible. and i think he was utterly unjustified in honking at me. what do you guys think?

tt's why i hate road crossings on the park connectors.

cringefest

zh and i had a funky time this afternoon cringing at our screwups during our gliere tarantella recording. shud compile a blooper tape. at one point the pages all fell off the piano; another time he started recording before i stopped sniggering O.o damn exhausting - either pno missed some notes or bass intonation cmi. i think we must have done ~15 takes lol. but it sounds pretty good, if i may say so myself =D thx to zh's best efforts.

ok tts it i'm into bed. night all.

knackered

yes i finally whacked myself into mental shape for a 10km run. that's 1.4 down the canal, then 2 loops round bedok reservoir (4.3 × 2). in just under an hour. (ok 1:04 including 2 breaks ~10mins). that's one week before my target date. woot. weather held up but now its raining pretty heavily. passed all the walkers like 2 or 3 times, quite cool. amazingly after that i wasn't crawling home or anything like that... i was walking slowly but perfectly fine, pretty good shape, who gives a shit.

dare i set another target before 10th jan?

i'm daring myself now. this is crazy. heyo eli i shall beat your half-marathon timing grrrr. =D

(now does anyone know a good route for 21 km that doesn't involve crossing roads? -.- it's quite the bummer waiting for the traffic to stop. or, indeed, running around bedok reservoir 5 times.)

-----

dinner last night with random YO pple. waited ages at cafe cartel, plaza sing, for a table for 8 (became 7 in the end) -.- dinner was ok, nearly wordless at our table (could feel the Li family vibes heh) - but at least no pressure to make conversation, which was a slight relief - and 2 of us had post-dinner activities. sigh... good for them.

uhrm. things to look fwd to, rest of the week and pre-christmas:

1. finish uni apps, finally. and do the psc essay. must get it done before this weekend, no way am i going to be bogged down doing it post-christmas.
2. do the recording with zh (this afternoon) hope its passable & doesn't screw up. (zh: i owe you!)
3. xmas party (22nd) with cool people: me and cool people can go together. is this a sign that things are looking up wrt my social life? O.o
4. & therefore xmas present hunt (bummer. hopefully meet peck and pick up cool stuff.)
5. meet up with adam and get my dostoevsky back and, hopefully, some really cool stuff! (when?)
   

not too shabby indeed.

Immortal words from Avenue Q:
There is life outside your apartment -
I know it's hard to conceive -
But there's life outside your apartment
And you're only gonna see it if you leave.
There is cool shit to do, but it can't come to you
And who knows, dude, you might even score;
There is life outside your apartment -
But you gotta open the door.

clearing out my room/YO emo

i've been clearing out old programme booklets... even stuff like that can make me go a bit emo. esp the YO booklets. must be a sign i'm getting old and losing it a bit -.- nuts.

-----

damn. i really miss YO. i know i've wallowed in it before but its not enough, they were really fantastic heady times. less than 4 years back (march 04) i was still in TO and watching their concert (UCC, copland and the trombone concerto)... and then suddenly i got promoted to the big time even though i played utter nub stuff in the auditions - i think it was elephant and some noobish sonata O.o - and mr casteels smashed me for not doing the vibrato on the top notes. and i was in there, right at the back and not giving a crap, i was up there in YO wow not the kiddos at TO any more. woohoo!

and we had great laughs at LJS at j8 after mep on the way to thurs night rhsls talking cock all the way from 2:30 in ri (was that when mep started?) to just before 7 when we walked into the room and the bass section was froody and ike did frog faces and zh was smitten with random someones and one glance from rachel was enough to make both of us laugh at the last joke, never mind what it was, never mind that it was communicated by the eyes and obscure hand gestures and invariably misinterpreted, never mind we were halfway across the room, never mind we were both in the middle of the freaking PIECE-

and then next year mr lim came in and i broke into the big time - the REAL big time, section-leaderhood - and there was rooming in vienna with remus and shag, cards with jon lee, people scrambling onto my bed to play heart attack and bridge, partying and pigging out, looking for owls and squirrels, chasing out the pigeons and gurning at their poop on the carpets, people emoing in hotel corridors (although i was asleep when the search was on), wild times, crazy times, brilliant times.

and then suddenly a couple more camps, a few concerts, all the oldies zaoed, newbies like adriel wenyi leening (hang on leening were you there before me? gosh i can't keep track alr!) remus (no we came in same time... did we?); even more recently people like zenn and justin and real kiddos like ryan kwan and lanabel (no offence! you're really little critters from my perspective xP)

wham bang chairman wham bang gone. it's been a dream of heady madcap times.

time to move on, pretty soon the Y part of SNYO will cease to apply to me, there's so many new people in the vlns and winds that i will never know their names; i'd just vaguely got the hang of some of the older faces but whoosh i'm gone already; even good old mrs wong might be retiring soon, and she changed her shoes - the clacketty sound that defined a generation of young eager musicians in rehearsal, that's gone now - she's an institution unto herself, she's awesome. that was a brilliant swirl of thoughts, and i'm sure i could pull out many many other fond memories.

but that's what they are, memories; they leave a nostalgic waft of emptiness behind in their wake like the air after your aromatherapy's burnt out. i'll probably never be at rehearsal with all these fantastic whacks of friends ever again; that's an incredibly sad realisation. seeing these people around still makes me remember the great times we had. amazing how rachel and i could still mime at the violin competition quarterfinals and we still understood each other - i hope she understood me heh. amazing the way friends spontaneously brighten up and give megawatt smiles when they locate each other. amazing people. amazing.

waves of nostalgia keep on hitting me; i feel like i have a lot in common with a beached whale though, in the sense that it's all over for me now. i hope we'll all keep in touch, despite all the funky places we'll go and all the things we'll be... i hope those memories will keep us together, friends pals all.

/emo

grammar nazi has a problem

yah i pride myself on my use of the language but i'm ashamed to admit i don't know this:

when referring to some kind of experience, is it more idiomatic to say
a) "I am the richer from it"
b) "I am the richer for it"

and does it go with or without the "the"?

i need help fast! comment plz (reply a) from or b) for, and with/without "the"). google search for idioms throws up no real hints, it's a rather unusual or archaic expression i guess.

if you could i'd love a citation or sth. from a book, OED or another dictionary, whatever. thxvmuch!

EDIT: i'd also like to add this message: screw american spelling, it's giving me a headache on the uni apps. bloody anal point i know, but american spelling is sending a chill up my spine! i mean, judgement looks so right and divine; judgment looks positively fugly. and things like organization and globalization just seem like an excuse to use the z key. -.-

few thoughts

conquered bedok reservoir. including the distance to and from home thats just under 7km. screw you, babeeeee... now to do 10k under 50 mins (ok fine mebbe 1 hr lah =D ) before christmas.

zomg i has friends on facebook! O.o coolio. 8 emails this morning including one "Leong Wei Shin added you as a friend on Facebook..." (!) w00t. mr leong teh froodiest teacher ever. mep was a blast.

ok now princeton apps. nearly there...

piano

just freaking went and broke ANOTHER fucking string. the lowest F. on the sf F in waldstein, 1st mvmt, last page or so. must be the weather. damn and blast. it'll never be fixed and tuned before 10th jan... the tuners are bloody slackers and not like my parents are going to be highly enthu about getting them in either. piano's my biggest therapy. i'm going to be reduced to a gibbering twit; my music therapy's gone now. damn damn damn damn damn. now i've really got to finish up the uni apps

/catharsis

setting up facebook

i see mrs malani d'cruz (sec 1 english teacher and legendary staff-pantry-inhabitant) on facebook while i'm adding contacts. lmao×10. and sithu haha (sec 2 english teacher, also legendary). didn't add them though, it would take weirdness to a level high enough to warp space-time.

but after david chan of all people sent a facebook invite i thought i'd stop holding out against evil social networking sites. so here we are. if dc has facebook and the space-time continuum hasn't folded into a flapping origami swan, then why not me?

though i still think its ridiculous how anyone could claim to have a freaking 100+ friends. or that daniel ong's status is reported as married (rofl).

blogs.

in the last couple of weeks i've helped persuade a couple of old pals to start or restart blogging - zh & ike. grats you two! quite cool, staying in touch, helps me know what funky shit they're getting up to and all that. also found jiggy's blog - "Identity: For me to know; for teachers to find out" yeah right lol. pungently - no, plangently - opinionated is a phrase that springs to mind. used more fuck's on a single page than i've ever heard from his bro. gosh kids these days tsktsk. (i realise i'm treading on really thin ice here lmao)

i guess some pple hold back from blogging cos yeah, it's a window to your private lives, and some people don't like that - "I wish to remain an enigma" lol. others aren't sure what to post about... they've seen the canteen-table derision daniel got (and deserved) for his notorious abu dhabi post haha.

but considering that after years of being in the same school, joking in the same canteen, cursing at the same teachers, procrastinating over the same assignments, mugging for the same exams, laughing at the same people, swearing at the same RI nubs crowding our canteen... its kinda sad that we're just zaoing off randomly to ns and unis, the world is our oyster and stuff. and well, blogs are one of the ways to stay in touch lah. share your funny/amusing/evil thoughts, funky stuff you've done, people you've met... not really private stuff, just everyday experiences & thoughts. surely friends deserve, if not a window, at least a tiny peephole into each others' lives?

trying to convince dc and shag that they should get blogs too. heh.

oh yeah shoutout to leening: remus said you popped by. grats on vln comp! and haha yeah i swear that much. =D oops!

wtflol

finally found this vid. zh sent me half of it ages ago and it never occurred to me to go look it up on youtube.



damn cool wtflol. except vengerov has that punch-me face. oh yeah. apologies if you're offended by that german woman right at the end, she sounds like she's swearing but she's actually thanking the pple. yup.

walk in the park.

so i woke up at 6:30 this morning, went out and ran along bedok canal from my house right up to bedok reservoir - to and fro and back about 1 + 1.2 + .8 + 1.2 + 1 + .4km bonus for running UP & DOWN the blasted cyclist bridge over PIE, TWICE =) that makes about 5k in half an hour (excluding walking to the canal and bits of walking in between, admiring the kingfishers and egrets). which i guess is ok for someone who never exercises. this is my third morning run, ever - i did about 3+km on fri and again on sun. and i swear i'll reach ~10km by christmas. plan: this routine + the 4km along bedok reservoir.

the scenery is... decent. i mean, if you're sleepy and its really early morning dawn light and you reaaaaaaally can't see well and you just flick your eyes across it for half a blink, bedok canal kinda looks like the seine in paris. (don't laugh) theres this condo which is faintly remniscent of some paris apartments, in the sense that they're both sandstone and have blue roofs.

that canal smells of seawater; every canal in singapore probably smells of seawater at high tide. in december there're koels whooping in the trees; white-throated kingfishers, iridescent opal with ridiculously huge beaks that look like some rotting dead flower; little egrets - the small white kind with a really fetching stooped pose and a majestic wingspan; and tiny hunched grey-brown egrets (can't rmb the name). all of them (except the koels) sitting and attempting to catch i dunno what in the hopeless silty water. futility ftw. takes my mind off the running. really cool.

-----

i've finally sight-read the entire les adieux... the third mvmt is kinda icky, just lots of arpeggios on the I and V of Eb major. not as great as i'd hoped. 1st and 2nd make it pretty worthwhile though.

and then i summoned up the courage to go directly into waldstein. my best waldstein ever, except i haven't quite worked out the 'turkish' triplet section in the 3rd mvmt to muscle-spasm skill level. and i still need to figure out the octave gliss. other than that, not that bad actually, just need to pract.

got a nice sense of achievement now.

ok 5th day of procrastinating over uni apps awaits.

vacations.

dc email:
hahaha bro
Going overseas for awhile at the end of the month.. to italy =P quite excited!

hot damn. nice one dc. though i'd prefer to go in summer. fantastic scenery i imagine.

heh if i get to LSE i'll be backpacking my way round europe wooot. imagine taking the orient express down to istanbul. or a budget trip to spain plus ferry to casablanca. maaan... is oktoberfest in term time? damn. weekend break to munich, pon a monday to recover?

sweet dreams lah.

i'll be holidaying vicariously as usual these hols haha. oh well. grats to everyone who's going away, especially to geneva =P (damn i'll have to leave this post up till the 19th)

so.

right. time to oust that previous post from its top spot. i think in time i'll be able to laugh at it. not quite there yet though.

-----

watched vln competition yesterday - jon lee told me about it. missed lee ning (damn!) but watched from outside. solid bruch. couldn't hear the bartok very well, it was the speakers' fault defn not hers.

went in for the second quarter-finalist. ouch i dun think the second one would have passed grade 8 -.- or the last two - quite bad. sigh. heard the junior and intermediate were even worse. gosh.

junqi was good, alan was amazing (that bach was awesome) and the judges stopped him at the tzigane orchestral entry lol which means he could have played without an accompanist at all. she was just sitting pretty the whole time lmao.

artist category wasn't too bad but many of them attacked bach with sheer vengeance, carving knives and all. performing bach badly is really just wrong; it's like pissing on a tombstone.

if you're a violinist (or cellist, or pianist) who can't play bach, there's just this element of musicality that's somehow lacking. something not quite right. alan's bach partita was really clean, intonation almost perfect, articulation crisp but not overdone... bow control a tiny bit wobbly though which was i think the only spot on a really solid bach. fantastic. you don't often hear that kind of performance - i think i was holding my breath.

confession: i can't play bach myself. my technique sucks. should go sort out a couple of partitas besides tackling the beethovens - waldstein and lebewohl/les adieux.

i must rant about the utter arsewipes who were sitting behind me. some mom brought her 3 kids down or whatever, making a crapload of noise stamping on the sucky recital studio floor and chatting, that kind of thing. and for someone who gets pissed off when shaggy breathes too loudly during concerts, that was sheer hell. lots of people (including me) were giving them stares of utter fury. bastards. thank goodness she had the decency to bring them out after the 4th perf (i think that was after alan). although the quality after that wasn't really good lah. /rant.

-----

damn. should get started on the uni apps.

letting go.

two of my good friends are paired off now, finally. i should be happy for them, fuck i really should.

nope i can't, not yet at least, i'm human, i'm not perfect, i can't do this letting go thing, in the way that i thought i could. i act like i can, but it's all churning inside me. emotion and crap. i spent most of last night and this morning turning - not tossing - in bed. (no way should you toss around in bed; in the conventional meaning it's physically difficult esp with the sheets on, in the less conventional meani-- nvm) quoting adam: "I have until next week to stop being a basket case. fuck fuck fuck."

taking two lines of Cecil Day-Lewis completely out of context:

Selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.

fuck, indeed.

prom

last night was the most camwhoring i've done in my life. possibly more than i've ever done before.

food: sucky.
entertainment: mostly ridiculously sucky, especially the MC.
company: decent.

i really had the frowziest jacket in rjc [frowzy: negligent of neatness especially in dress and person] which i suppose was a statement in itself. paired with one of the better shirts around i guess. so not style disaster after all.

some dresses were pretty cool. but for the guys what i didn't expect was to see everyone else invariably in formal suit and tie. except for some sans tie. and weirdos who thought that huge 70s collars on tuxes were the in-thing again (they're not. really. they never were. dream on.)

the worst disaster dress of the evening really took the cake, peck and i had a massive laugh over it, but i prob shouldn't embarrass the girl in question, some of you might know her even though i don't. just: wtf was she thinking? prom isn't belly-dance auditions!

ok pple with my photos plz send them over, you know my email. lol esp. peck =) whose cam i kept on borrowing. thxvmuch

scariest nightmare of my life

i just woke up from the scariest nightmare of my life.

it was the day they were releasing A level results, but they hadn't sorted out our individual certs and stuff so we were standing around looking at the notice boards they posted up showing the grade distributions for each subject (how many pple got A's & B's & C's, that kinda thing).

First notice board i saw was lit, there were 7 A's in the entire cohort... and i think about 20-something B's, but can't really rmb. then maths, the maths dept being guailan & extra as usual posted up names of the people who "improved" their grades (i.e. from prelims), didn't see anyone from arts there. though shaggy's name was on it; that's strange, how can you improve on a grade A alr? damn dream logic. that means 2 A's dashed alr.

geog being geog with only 3 teachers on the dept they hadn't got the charts out but i saw mr lee and ask him how was it - he refused to say anything but his face was pretty black. ooh. i didn't get round to finding the econs board. or, come to think of it, the GP or h3 boards. and then i think we heard something about the certs only being ready for collection on the next day. suspense ×10.

fuck me it was hell-scary. i was sweating all over when i woke up. and you guys know it's been pretty cold nights the past few days. woah i hope its not a recurring dream. and that it doesn't come true. oh man... (i hope i don't dream out my results tmrw. gaaah)

gliere tarantella

gliere tarantella for double bass

if you don't know the piece (face it, no one does) watch this really valiant attempt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6eQ27euuvc

what can i say about the piece. at my level it's about one of the best pieces - probably the best - i can decently manage. it's got good melodies, some attempt at weaving a bass accompaniment line around the (pno) melody (that ultimately ends in failure in performance)... very nice romantic russian thing. there's an inescapable pathos about it that's quite unavoidable. the middle section melody is filled with a deep heartfelt yearning - i think it's the held-over notes that do the trick.

but the main reason why it evokes pathos is something you can't realise till you've actually played the piece. i need to elucidate, it's quite a simple but profound point.

i mean, it's absolutely hopeless trying to get a bass to carry a melody. when you actually get down to the brute-force string sawing wrestling with 4 thick steel cables to try valiantly to express a deep emotional torment, there's actually a deep emotional torment going on in you right at that moment, founded on this simple premise:

what in the name of fuck am i doing this for? the harder i try the more it sounds like shit anyway.

making a double bass play a melody as ornate as that is simultaneously the highest honour, the greatest challenge, the worst torture, and the cruellest irony. that's where pathos lies.

that's what was going through my mind when i played it at my lesson today (first lesson in 5 months!). lol ms yeo was rather impressed, and that takes some doing. =D she usually lets rip about making a good sound and slow practice but woah none of that this time. immense relief.

todo

it's december (stating the obvious, what an utterly brilliant way to start, as ever) with its ridiculous weather. hot sun, driving wind, inexplicable heavy rain and nighttime temperatures that feel cold but still don't dip below 24. ideal weather for sleeping in, quiet pensive reflection - or indeed rollerblading at east coast, if i could (and if i had the blades, of course)... damn. rollerblading would be nice.

with great freedom comes a great and gripping need to make to-do lists.

1. don't malu at prom & post-prom
2. learn to whistle. i regard it as my most profound personal failure. have been practicing all day only to get one tremulous tone that doesn't sound remotely like a whistle but is at least a recognisable note. a B-flat. i think this means i'm doing it wrongly.
3. waldstein
4. write a symphony (pipe dream, i know). it had better not be crap.
5. get some worthwhile bass stuff sorted. gliere, polish off the koussevitzky for the last time, stuff like that.
6. uni apps. fuck. loads of essays whoring myself in strange, guailan and indeed kaleidoscopic ways - while not actually looking like i'm whoring myself. character-prostitution.
7. get a recording done. for uni apps.
8. psc essay. more whoring. but i need a scholarship to go anywhere other than nus so... ah well i'll just have to sell my soul.
9. beat myself into some semblance of shape for ns. as it is now i probably can't survive a 30-min run. target: 10km in 50 minutes before christmas. <- realistic? sigh. more like too noob for words lah. respect to eli for doing a half marathon yesterday, and to anyone else who went.

btw grats to zh who's back to blogging.

quick update

went to sitex and bought 2 gb of ram and a new 19" philips LCD monitor wooooot. that means that with 2.5 gb of ram now (it was 1 gb earlier) my souped-up comp doesn't lag with caesar IV until i've played about 4 hours at a stretch. and it looks uber cool. downside is that the monitor makes more noise than a conventional CRT. another downside is that when the comp starts up it takes more time to do the memory count lol. upside is i can't hear it over my altec lansing speakers/sucky headphones. next thing to get is a set of sennheiser headphones so i can hear the one nirvana track i have in true eardrum-bursting skull-splitting bass glory.

(note to self: stop bragging, you bastard.)

got my prom outfit. it will either be a style explosion or (more likely) a style disaster. this isn't a suit-and-tie event right? more like a casual-jacket-and-frowsy-shirty-thing event, no? anyway i successfully convinced my mom that giordano would not do this time, which is good news i think.

i've conquered about 70% of waldstein. 1st mvmt is nearly there alr, just that the last couple of pages have some semiquaver runs which need work. 2nd mvmt is sounding good; 3rd mvmt is the killer but i've nearly got the trill-and-melody bit sorted. triplet semiquaver runs and the octave gliss technique still elude me though. looking good...

lol that must have bored the shit out of you guys... tts my life lah.

diarist par excellence

this guy has got to take the utter fucking cake.

Wikipedia - Robert Shields (diarist)
Daily Mail - Discovered: The world's longest diary - all 3.75 million words of it
NY Times - Robert Shields, Wordy Diarist, Dies at 89

37.5 million words (the daily mail got their decimal point wrong lol). wtf. including 3 dozen ways to describe urination -.-

does anyone else notice the similarity between diarist and diarrhoea?