Monday, August 18, 2003
Mood: Subdued frustration
Music: None, for fear of a PC meltdown triggered by OS instability
ARGH the computer AND the connection are conspiring against me! How am I supposed to increase my work productivity given all the technological inconveniences these darned contraptions bring?
I
stupidly scheduled 3 things on Saturday only to have them all clashing with/ coming dangerously close to one another. Choir busking is on this Saturday at Wheelock Place in the afternoon (3 slots) and Plaza Singapura at night (mainstage performance), and I moronically forgot
all about it until today. Meanwhile, I had planned to spend a happy evening buying new photog equipment for myself (since budget issues on the CCA side remain vague/ unresolved) and dining out with sis and dad.
Before Saturday afternoon when I saw the disasters that came out of Fotohub, I had wanted to watch 'Tosca', an opera put on by the S'pore Lyric Opera as their only production of the year. (Melodrama galore, shooting scenes and the great aria 'Vissi d'arte'... I wanna watch!! /cries/ *it's a Puccini opera damnit!* /weeps/)
But but but. Goodness me, is my short term memory really that limited? Am I that incapable of juggling simple schedules?
So now it's either rush madly down to City Hall after registration at 6pm, wolf down dinner, whirl through Peninsula Plaza in time for performance at 8.30pm, or else scrap the plan. Or plead for special concessions from choir... doubt they'd be very impressed, though.
Sometimes when I'm feeling complacent enough about schoolwork to take a break from it, my mind wanders over to peer vaguely at the unpleasantries of personal existence. I say 'vaguely', because mindlessness has been the rule where self-reflection and interpersonal awareness are concerned. I gave up on trying to understand people years ago, mostly because all my desperate efforts at logically deciphering certain adults came to nought and that confused and discouraged me to no end. A friend in secondary school once told me that I was very 'transparent', and perhaps that's true. A shallow puddle is pretty much see-through, it can't harbour any life (apart from perhaps unwise mosquito larvae) and it dries up fast. It's essentially a dead patch of inorganic H
2O waiting to rejoin the mundane water cycle... but I'm going off-track. My point is, sometimes when I allow myself to think, I do believe that the reason why I like to read is to compensate for an inherent lack of substance, drought of inspiration, superficiality of thought, all-round emptiness, what-have-you. And these days, I feel this all the more keenly.
I'm slipping. I've never been a brilliant artist or poet, my personality tends towards the boring, routine and mechanical. There's no art in me, just craftsmanship derived from study and practice. My musicality is next to zero: I have to think in terms of clearly spelt-out dynamics and tempo. Such a clumsy grasp of philosophy and human relationships. Such irritating vacillatory weakness. And so on and so forth. Sooner or later I'd just fade away into the faceless grey production lines of society, make my insignificant contribution to the GDP, and then quietly, unobtrusively depart.
I shall stop before this degenerates into a bourgeois self-pity session.
Interestingly, some my classmates thought I was an only child, even though I've got a younger sister whom I'm very attached to. Do I give everyone that impression? What would that imply, I wonder? The things I can think of are generally not very positive, although that could be due in part to this little mood I've got myself into.
Ah, what the hell. Put on the techno, will you.
words were spilled on Monday, August 18, 2003
