Liberte! Liberte!

I will readily admit, albeit after having downed (though not all together) at least three glasses of Traminer Reisling, that I am not an idiot savant when it comes to dates.

In fact, were it not for the timely intervention of one Shakti Kaur a.k.a. Shaks, the indelible reminder by whom thundered out of my phone at me one drunken tipsy night while I was squinting in vain to read Making Money in the hotel balcony's half-light:

"DOESN'T THE 26TH OF AUGUST RING ONE VERY LOUD BELL IN YOUR BLURNESS-STUFFED
EAR??"

As usual, such astute rhetoric from a former drama associate turned fellow book fanatic who, being a girl, is particularly intuitive in memorizing important dates and recognising my lack in ability thereof.

Audible sigh, so I set down to writing a (now belated, holy crap) birthday post for Mmi, forum associate turned MSN associate turned partner in crime, sounding board, encouraging critic, theological rant buddy, late-night companion, and all round mushroom goddess.





It may either be an unfortunate or fortuitous fact that the one person on this earth who rides the same wavelength as you can be more easily found on the net than in real life. It sounds sad, yet it's probably a blessing in disguise; most people never really know what they're like until they meet themselves.


And it's true that we're almost too similar for our respective sanities, Mmi & I; with the lame jokes, quirky asides and inadvertent slang-dropping, it's a wonder we haven't annoyed each other to merciful non-existence yet.
And for some reason -no matter where we start off with- our conversations always end up on the philosophical, edging on existential side. Yet this is where Mmina shines: For here is where she displays a remarkable amount of insight into some of Life's most depressing Conundrums.

For all our concordant trains of thought, however, for either of our open/neorotic mindsets, there exists an intrinsic difference between us: Where I am selfish, so is she selfless. Where I am cold, so is she warm. Our respective capacities for compassion lie at opposite ends of the spectrum.

If there was a prize for Person Most Like Me Without The Egotistic Bits, she'd win it hands down.


As this birthday post comes to a close, I want to say that I truly remembered, that I took the time to burn three simple yet deviously elusive numbers into my cranium, I really do; but while exaggaration is a tool of the trade, dishonesty is not: So let me apologise for the lateness, as well as probably not being around when you needed me too; I did agonise a bit over the present, since I can hardly get you anything tangible, short of sending an ugly mug over by snail mail, which would probably be broken pottery by the time it gets there, so-


Here's a sunset from start to finish, taken from last week's jaunt to Bukit Tinggi; hope you like:

Orange slide, the sky that it reflects
Sponge's pride, being dangled

Spider!

The apprehension that was caught alive
It's okay even if I don't hide it
I want to have colored dreams

RIDE ON SHOOTING STAR

With the voice of my heart, like a shotgun I kept on singing

Grunge hamster, be grown up
Lobster of revenge, bring it along

Sniper!

I'll say, "What can you see in that fringed world?"
I want to touch it before I aim for it

RIDE ON SHOOTING STAR

Searching for you, and in withdrawal syndrome
I told a lie

RIDE ON SHOOTING STAR

With the voice of my heart, like a shotgun I kept on singing

Happy birthday, Mmi~

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed cat is king.

A ragged ear, whiskers

Like stalks of wildgrass

Twitch

To jarr the perfect asymmetry:

The Rogue.




A solitary eye of sable

Luminous,

To gaze out in casual fascination

Like lamps of piercing darkness:

The Seer.




A mangled visage

To shatter the illusion of the World;

Like the last living being that draws breath

Abreast

The Night.





Beating a hasty retreat from chicken rice, mundanity, and delusions of poetic adequacy, ==.


Cherries~

There I go again.

It's like a disease. Everytime I write, all the long, impressive-sounding words come out. It's not intentional. I can't help myself. Slip of the mind, you know?


But it gets to the point where writing here is like painting with a brush ten times the usual size. You dip it in words and you paint on the canvas of a post - great care taken not to apply too much pressure - else the brush slips, and huge blobs of 5-6 syllabic words are painted. People are left staring, slightly in awe, but mostly in confusion at the array of colourful blotches.


When sometime later, the painter looks back on his own "masterpieces", they hardly make sense to him either.




Bombasticism.


People think it's a good thing to know almost every word in the dictionary. It's not. Sure, you impress some people in the same way, oh, a circus seal impresses us by balancing a ball on its nose. "Wow! How clever," you remark while clapping enthusiastically, because most of us wouldn't know how to juggle a ball for nuts.



Sure, it blinds the teacher to grammatical errors when marking essays. The reasoning is that a person who knows his dictionary inside-out could only have been careless when it comes to punctuation - which is completely wrong.





Unless you don't mind if your name gets spelled wrong on your tombstone;

"Here lies Gabriel Gun,

Who might've been Gan

But we're not sure.

He was quite blur

To let us write

His epitaph

With poor eyesight

and one bad draft."

But the point is this: What's the point of knowing so many words if you don't know how to use them?

On a related note, what's the point of using so many words when one or two will do?



Bugger.




Then again, there may be some use for the jumble of technical jargon jostling for space in my head. As observed by Calvin:

* * *

Stayed up for the Perseid meteor shower tonight. Then I went outside to find that whatever bits of the north hemisphere (where the stars were supposed to fall) that wasn't blocked by my house was covered in the only tufts of cloud in the whole upturned ricebowl of the sky.



Arrg. So much for some new pics. And my eyes are getting that frying-in-deep-oil feeling when I stay up till 3.


At least there's no college tomorrow.




Morning all~

See the paper faces on parade, every one a different shade

I'm not sure it was worth the 4 hours frantically cobbling together what was basically a placard with holes in it from disparate pieces of paper and aluminium foil held together by glue and curses.

I'm not sure it was worth the 60 bucks admission, or exhuming that old dinner jacket from its casket under the bed, or even the application of contact lenses, which I heard were damn eye-wateringly itchy.

Frankly, I'm not sure it was worth all that fuss for a masquerade ball, 3 hours of an unfilling six-course dinner, various pleasant performances, two lucky draws (the majority of which were scooped up by the Ausmat cohort), a best mask competition, and a lot of shaky photos taken of people sans masks, all of which I won't post here to spare you the....pleasure.

But what can I say? It was fun.

The dancing especially. Some people can really bust a move. Julian and Vno, for example. If dancing were words they'd be poets. Contrast that with a guy in an old dinner jacket who skittered around the dancefloor looking like an epileptic seizure standing up. But that's okay. I doubt anyone could see through the strobe effect on the lights, flashing like a million cameras at the Oscars and half-blinding everyone in the vicinity, which was probably why they put it in the first place. No one can see how badly you dance when everyone's busy trying to keep from being stepped on by everyone else too blinded to see straight. You gotta love them strobes. If beer helps ugly people find love, strobe lights make left-footed chickens look like greased lightning.



I've been feeling a curious lack of angst recently. It's unlike my usual self, what I like to call "brooding" but more accurately described as "emo", "boring" or the classic "stoned". It's a nice feeling, this lightness of mind, though it probably spells doom for any opinion I might have left after such a dose of ambrosia. Which basically means nothing I write here anymore will be of any interest to anyone with a brain...



Why is it that all the best literary works are serious, brooding, and dark while the stuff that gives you a glowing feeling afterwards hardly get a mention? (Ok, if you can't relate to books replace "literary works" with "movies", or whichever area of geeky expertise you prefer. Excepting tanks.)

Because the former is deep, that's why; it plumbs the depth of human emotion, it propels the mind to think in widely divergent directions. Compare that with Confessions of a Shopaholic, a read that tickles you to the bone (or so I hear) but doesn't make any inroads into the human psyche. Unless to prove beyond a doubt that some women can't live without Shopping; which isn't bad or anything; just something we all pretty much knew since the dawn of time.

But it's kinda sad that more happy things aren't mentioned in the history books. There's one in my house called The 20th Century: A Pictorial History and it's full of inventions, war and famous people, but not one mention of a stirring "feel-good" event. Even beer, one of the greatest inventions known to man, isn't in it. Goes to show, doesn't it?

Maybe because Happiness is such a hard feeling to pin down; it's like a wave you crest or a mountain peak you scale; sooner or later you'll have to come down, because it's tricky to stay at the top. The concept of Happiness also differs widely from person to person - one man's beer is another man's dishwater - but the feelings of sorrow and loss, as well what we feel them for, is universal.

So in the end, chick lit will never make it into the puffin classics; likewise, people will go blind on cereal before Scary Movie gets in the running for an Oscar. But maybe fluffy, mindless fun will get the last laugh. Michael Bay himself must be in stitches all the way to the bank after the overblown, much criticized vehicle that was Transformers 2 raked in $394 million at the box office. And don't get me started on Twilight.



Wealth or fame. Fame or wealth. Hmm. Somehow, pragmatism always wins out.



Until some bright spark invents a means to live quite comfortably on ideals -