catching · ideas:

I guess this must be happy blog. Because I have been so cheerful on LJ these days, I haven't written any other posts because I can't bear to ruin the happy streak.

Anyway, I have finished a week of interning at Epigram Books, and what can I say but I think I've found my dream job. Not that I would admit it to my supervisors, because while the work is fun, my myopia degree is steadily climbing up with the amount of computer-related work they dole out to me. They're all very friendly, with just the right amount of gossipiness, and nearby there is an intern pal who's about the same size as Tweety Bird - equally cute - although she's two years older than me.

All I do is to read and read and read, all day, make some bitchy remarks about certain manuscripts for children's books, or wax lyrical about nationalistic prose. (Believe me, some are pretty good.) The office is clean and white, lined with walls of books; literary books and design books, some strange contemporary abstract frames of art, and somewhere behind a pillar there is a huge red and blue Obama poster.

There is also the house lizard. I have been warned to wash my cups before using them, always. This is a piece of advice I will stick to with much rigour.

if you believe, clap your hands
to see the tooth-fairy come in at night
and steal your tooth to build her ivory castle
she is so tiny and fast you can never catch her

chocolate milk comes from brown cows,
venus fly traps come from venus
and superman flies on the wind of his cape
if you flap your wings hard enough one day you will fly

listen hard enough and you will hear
little people living inside your clock
plants whispering in the wind
when you walk away toys begin to play

santa lives in a house on the north pole waiting
for the clock to strike midnight
but how does santa travel around the whole world in a day
and how does santa get in the house if there is no chimney?

if you really want to know, carriages turn from diamond to pumpkin
vines shrivel, horses grow into rats
dust to magic, magic to dust
all that is left, a pair of solid glass heels

or maybe you can't see them because only special people can see magic
somewhere faraway there is a school of wizards
maybe you're special, maybe you're better
if you believe, clap your hands

to the tune of the the pied piper,
if you follow him down to the river
second to the right, and straight on till morning

then maybe you will live happily ever after
if you believe, clap your hands.

I feel as if I have been unable to live up to expectations, that I have disappointed them in some way. I am clearly not a risk-taker. It unnerves me too much. I like my little hidey-hole the best, my cosy shell where events are familiar and safe. Worry rears its ugliest head now, again I find myself set loose from the sturdy construction of day-to-day happenings. Mountains crumble, avalanches fall. Brick by brick we build again

A couple of days ago, TKC, my lecturer for the photojournalism class I'm taking, spoke about the different types of photographers. Some are very aggressive, he said. They go around chasing for photos, pace up and down restlessly, looking for interesting things to shoot. Others prefer to stay in one spot and quietly wait for things to happen. After looking through my photos, he said to me, "you're a waiter, aren't' you?"

And that is largely true. During my assignment, which was to stay within a area to shoot photographs for two hours, the landscape never changed. All I did was to stay at one spot and hold up the camera to my eye, waiting, waiting… for the moment a stranger caught my eye through the lenses, or for a man in a fishnet t-shirt to pass by, absentmindedly rummaging through his pouch, or for a child to stare at me unabashedly. And then

--snap!

My first attempt at Dada poetry. That was fun. :D

I just applied to Ohio University for my exchange programme, INSTEP. It's a new exchange partner my school has, and by some amazing intervention I discovered that it is a school that will allow me to take all the courses I want to clear whilst overseas - you have no idea what a headache I had searching for schools that would allow me to clear Media Management AND Media Law at the same time. (although I'm not sure if I'll be allowed to clear Media Law as NTU is considering barring us from course-matching that, since frankly speaking it makes no sense to take a media law course overseas.)

And when I found out that Ohio offered Creative Writing courses, I squeaked in joy and relief and excitement and all things happy. The best part is that nobody bothered to research because it was a new university, and wasn't covered under the university database, so it wasn't a popular choice, as with San Diego and various Korean/Sweden universities. With my so-so GPA, Ohio was a welcome refuge from all the competition. Am very thankful to have found it.

There was some hassle over the application - these bidding systems encourage backstabbing and the like. How very distasteful. Perhaps disgust might be a better word. But ah, it's over and I shall not dwell on it. I spent a good part of the evening fretting over application rates. Gosh, if SMU students face this every semester, it's no wonder that they hate their school. At least, the friends I have spoken to.

This semester I have a grand total of 23 AUs, that means 6 mods, with just one exam that involves writing 3 news stories. The rest are all non-examinable; I foresee myself burning out somewhere in the middle of the semester, but at least I shall burn out happy! With courses like photojourn, photography, graphic comm, novella writing, and a overseas travel mod to cambodia to boot, I am going to be a very happy, creatively fruitful girl these few months.

Desmond has ruined my Chrome browsing experience. Whenever I start typing in the livejournal URL into the browser, autofill comes out as 'livescore.com' which is annoying because I have to type in the entire livejournal url. See, little things like that matter.

Anyway I was having a chat with Eileen and discovered she has a morbid fear of the word 'exams':

Eileen: AHHHHHH
THAT WORD AGAIN
*HIDES UNDER BLANKET*

Me: eileen
EEEEEXXXXAAAAMMMSSS
exams exams exams
EXAMINATIONS
exams are coming after you eileeeeennnnnnnnn

As the clock strikes twelve, new year's eve arrives, and I sit here reflecting about 2011. In twenty-four more hours, it will be a brand new year. 2011 was a dreary year for me, one of the years that have nothing very special going on. I haven't been very happy this year, more often bored than not, mooching around projects that never come to fruition. Being a procrastinator. This year, especially towards the later months, I lost my inspiration, and along with it, my ambition. Drifted away from some friends. Gained fewer. I honestly do not know where I am heading towards to, or who I am anymore, and I am unsure of what is important to me. Well. May 2012 be a better year, and may I rediscover myself.

I think I shall try to clean up my room. Yesterday I went through my cupboard of memories, as I like to call it - I keep all my old sketchbooks and journals in there - and went through everything slowly, flipping through the pages of my very first sketchbook that I kept. It was more of a homework diary, though there were scraps of ideas scribbled here and there, and tiny sketches carefully etched out in between the sparse pages of physics and chemistry notes. There was even some poetry at the back of the book. Quite childish, but I guess being fifteen doesn't give one much of a perspective in life. It was a nostalgic revisit to my old thoughts, riddled with amusement and admiration for my younger self. How strange my very own ideas seem to me now, five years down the road!

There was my old Rosyth teddy bear, and my Nanyang Girls' teddy bear keychain, and the cloth that I got from the first Singapore Biennale in 2007, one-third-filled with badges. And a bag of polished stones that I got from Deb on one of my birthdays, I remember being so delighted with them as she pointed to me the benefits (supposedly, anyway) of each type of rock. I like the metallic black one the most, it reminds me of a blob of silvery mercury. Then there was that tiny rock that was barely half a centimeter long, which she said she bought on ebay, that I put in a jewellery box. Till today I haven't any clue why it's supposed to be expensive, but I'm going to keep it anyway.

And my old journals. For a couple of years they housed my each and every thought as they came to me, and I would faithfully whip them out and mark a note. What I would give for that discipline again.

I took out my large, brown sketchbook that I abandoned because it was too big to fill, and looked at the brown pages I doodled on with my favourite arabic marker. It was actually meant for calligraphic writing, that marker, but it had a good texture to it, and it gave my lines some variety. In those three years of constant drawing, my life sketches never really improved. Still quite atrocious, in fact. But there's nothing like nostalgia to inspire; I'm going to start taking my sketchbook out for walks again.