Wherein I Find Delightful Gems And Film Legs

Oh the sweet little gems you find when you look. I borrowed a CD player from my sister(well, took) so that I could listen to my CDs without having to waste precious memory and CPU cycles on Windows Media Player. Inside the player was a CD, obviously burnt by mysester judging from the surreptitious label of "Rock" and the smiley face beside it. If it had been me the audio CD would have a list of at least the titles on the face(I can't stand surprise singers), and if my brother nothing. So it had to have been my sister's doing.

Now, I love my sister as any other brother might, but I hardly trust her taste in music. After all, she used to like.. the Spice Girls and other assorted girly singers. Of course, since she's six years younger than me she has the prerogative to idolize singers a lot younger than me. I dislike intensely singers younger than myself.

So this compilation, after identification as my sister's doing, was discarded by me to a corner of the table, in favour of Yuko Yamaguchi.

But you can only take so much of YY(how can you not like a singer whose name alliterates?). So I changed to good old Tori, but on seeing the sad little pirated CD lying there, all alone and dusty I decided to give it a try anyways.

And it turned out to be pretty good. I was rather pleasantly surprised to hear mostly Third Eye Blind, Matchbox 20, and Hoobastank. All rather commercial rock, but probably as alternative as my sister can take. And about as mainstream as I like, so I have been spending much of the evening listening to it and finding the lyrics to every song and arranging them all into a nice little webpage and listing all the songs...

Yeah. I like order. And I can't listen to music without doing anything else.

And after I'd sorted out everything satisfactorily, I found myself with nothing much to do. So to soothe my conscience at listening to Never Let You Go I find myself writing this.

And... now I have nothing else to write.

Uh oh.

So I'm now in this project organized by my University's Office of Student Affairs that tries to help people who have poor english improve it by having someone speak english to them an hour every week. Of course, an hour a week is hardly going to help you improve your english, but the idea is that hopefully some of the conversation peers(as we hepers are called) will form friendships with the foreigners and speak to each other more in their free time.

And they want to produce this video for the training session that the conversation peers will have to go through, see? But they don't want to spend any money, see? And that all adds up to Student Power(ie free labour). I was called up last week to see if I was interested in helping out with the video editting of aforementioned training video. Having had a very little experience in this, I thought it would be a good chance to improve my not-so-l33t skills and get to know some foreign friends at the same time, so I said yes. Then they called me again to tell me they didn't have a cameraman, so could I do the recording. It was only gonna be a handycam anyway, which I've used before, so that was also okay. Then I went for the shoot and it was realized that there was no script, no planning and no one had any idea what to do. And the nice lady in charge told me to help direct, too.

So many people in the movie industry would be happy to have such rapid promotions(cross-production-line movement?), I'm sure.

Now, directing a video isn't quite as easy as you might think it is. And I ended up not doing anything - luckily the "actors" had enough initiative to go it on their own. Unforuntely for some poor girl named Woogle(name changed to protect her identity), who came for the filming in a tiny mini-skirt and who was the most animated and talkative AND was possessed of a pair of very long and beguiling legs, the camera caught as it's primary focus the legs.

Even my inexperienced film-critic eye can see that, for reasons I cannot explain, my filming was centred on her legs. They sit there in the middle of the screen, twitching slightly from time to time, staring out at the rest of the world like two... bronzed, long, thin legs(I am only thankful she never did the crossing thing Sharon Stone did in Basic Instinct). The guy sitting beside her, though I'm sure he harboured no ill-intent, seemed like he was staring at her legs every five seconds. And when she talked to me, I should have turned the camera off before I answered - with the camera centred on those legs, even my most innocuous replies made me sound like a porn director directing the girl to perform acts of minor(or major, depending on your religion and your sexual experience) immoral nature.

When we viewed the tape later, the lecturer had few requests. She trusted that I knew what she wanted and that I'd do a satisfactory job. And I tried my best to live up to her expectations, but one thing I couldn't get rid of, though... you guessed it - the legs.

They were in the centre of the screen. There was no cropping method I could use that could get rid of the legs. Not without severely reducing the quality of the video.

I hope the presence of the legs will turn out to be a good thing. Maybe the video will attract more attention during the lecture with rather than without them.

Wherein I Declare Preserved Food Day

So yesterday was microwaved food day. I bought a couple of packs of frozen meals from the local supermarket and was determined to find out exactly how it felt eating the unhealthy food that gets slammed so much in health news.

It was rather bad. There was the chicken pie with the non-flakey crust, the thai fried rice that had so much sugar in it I actually gagged eating it and of course the chicken sticks. Well, the chicken sticks weren't really that bad. They tasted quite good, actually, if a bit dry. The problem was clearing up after them, though. Turns out that the sweet sauce coating the chicken was full of sugar which promptly melted after a few seconds in the microwave, leaving a coat of black gunk on my plate. Had to scrub like crazy to remove it.

Natural laws state that if food tastes bad, it probably isn't very healthy. I believe it applies here.

I think from now on I'll just stick to instant noodles.

Cold Bloodedness

So once upon a time in India I was on a Youth Expedition Project(charity work cum self-discovery thing sponsored by the Singapore government) and a friend of mine, my angel(honourific for some game we played), told me(or rather everyone else there) that I was possibly the most cold-blooded person he had known. And that he thought I was very likely to kill someone whilst proclaiming in a calm and emotionless voice that it wasn't personal, sorry.

He's right, of course.

That's when it comes to work, though. I know I can be a bitch when it comes to doing stuff ordained by the powers that be - meaning my boss. It comes from having had to do too much admin work - somehow it's easier to fuck the person whose pleading clemency than to challenge the well-established rules that you've been following.

And then there's precedence, of course. Ellyn explained it very clearly to me, with some examples, of how it's never a good idea to be kind to one person only to have the law come crashing down becauese then everyone else will expect to be judged on the same terms.

And if you could have a day off just because your grandmother died, then... a lot of grandmothers would die.

In any case, I do not deny that I am quite the cold-hearted beast when it comes to work. I've done the standard receptionist's 'Oh, I'm sorry, but there's nothing I can do for you..." when I knew full well there was bloody lots I could have done and with a few simple clicks of the mouse, too.

But... what about friendships?

I don't know. I suppose it's a matter of opinion. I do try to be nice and all, but when it has to be a conscious effort I don't suppose it is a good thing. To my credit, I don't think I've ever really hurt anyone very badly before, not to the point where they have bawled all over me and all, so I can't be that evil. But then again my friends have a tendency to be on the less emotional side, so I suppose it's a biased observation.

But really - to be cold-blooded... isn't it also part of the position of coolness(I refer more to the definition from cool-headed and calm than anything else)? Aren't cool people also cold-blooded? Of course, if you ignore the positive/negative connotations of the terms used, you'll see they're actually both sides of the same coin. Thankfully, I can proudly say I have never been cool in front of my friends. I've been cranky, crazy and cooky, but never cool.

So I guess I'm not that cold-blooded after all.

Mind you, though, I'd still kill you in a second if my boss ordered it. And if you were quite weak and easy-to-kill. Otherwise it might take a few weeks of planning and poisoning.

Speaking of cold-bloodedness, I found this article about the recent tsunami being the handiwork of a christian God against the persecution of his covenent. Of course crazy idiots who make claims like that aren't uncommon, but look at this quote from a more "reasonable" voice. Todd Johnson, director of the Centre for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary says of the fact that the regions worst hit by the tsunami were those that had exhibited extreme persecution of Christians - "It just doesn't make quantitative sense in that respect," and "It's hard for me to believe that these folks (in South Asia) were the most sinful people in the world," because, evidently... there are worse places! Yes, folks, there are sinners elsewhere who deserve to be killed by that tsunami that weren't.

Pity, that. All those homosexuals, pagan-worshippers, hedonists, drug-takers and more importantly, MUSLIMS were spared! Where's the divine justice?

Sometimes I'm happy I'm not christian. The logic of faith just doesn't stick.

My Life Here Now

So I finally decided to move entirely to Blogger. The decision was fuelled in part by a desire to get away from people reading all the old posts, and also partly because I don't want to be reliant on the NUS server any longer. Any thoughts of keeping a website are on hold at the moment, at least until I can get my life sorted out.

Why do I even bother to keep blogging? So much that should be said can't. I'd post anonymously, but that would just be silly - if it isn't post-friendly it shouldn't be posted at all. And the internet is not a friend to reveal your secrets to, no matter how anonymous your readers are.

You should only do that on IRC.

When I go jogging, I tend to think a bit - it distracts me from the lack of air in my lungs. And this thought keeps coming back to haunt me: me telling Ling that she was rather boring for a Lit major. I think I said something along the lines that I had thought Lit majors would be filled with angst somehow and full of anger and stuff. Of course, I know it's an erroneous ideal, but I guess it was fueled by my own insecurity.

I do it a lot, slamming people when I really feel insecure about something myself. My closer friends will have felt the barbs, but really, I seldom make fun of someone without being a little bit self-reflective about it. Nick should know. I always tell him his degree is pretty useless in the industry, but... it's more because I know it for a fact that mine is too. I always tell my sister she's stupid, but it's really myself I'm talking to.

And if I were a Lit major, I think I'd be a lot more interesting. More interesting than I am now, really. I think that's why it bothers me so much that Ling is so well-balanced and adjusted. I just thought, given more poetic friends, I'd be a lot more... interesting. And now I don't know. Really, what do I have to offer anyone in the way of an interesting life? The angsty people would just look upon me as another sad mugger whose paltry, unromantic problems might rub off against themselves and end up turning them into sad little salarymen too.

In fact, am I a boring friend now? Am I a really bad friend? The kind whom you go out with half out of pity because you know he doesn't have anyone else to go out with? Do I put you to sleep with my conversation? Do you bloody pity me?!

I'm afraid I might.

Okay, piss this. I'm going jogging. Gonna try for biathlons, perhaps running will make my life more interesting.