Episode 110: Han Dynasty

Went for the Han Dynasty buffet, which in my opinion, isn't as nice as Wing Wah's, but it costs half the price, so who's complaining? Wandered around Coventry for a bit after lunch, trying to find gloves. We started out at Debenham's, which I quite like, but it's really just a very expensive version of mass market fashion, so I doubt I'll be buying anything from there soon. Then we headed over to Primark, where Caleb ended up buying stuff and I didn't. So I still have no gloves. Sigh. Came back to my room, where I've been sifting through secondary material for my essay ever since. I doubt it's going to help much, and I know that I'm doing this just to avoid actually getting down to writing the essay, but well, I'll pull another all-nighter if I have to. Caleb very helpfully cooked dinner, which didn't turn out so bad, considering that his cooking skills are probably just marginally better than mine. Now have to find a way to finish my bottle of pasta sauce within the next few days because he didn't use it all up, although I suppose we actually could have. I'll be very glad when this essay is over and done with. Seriously, no procrastinating for the next one!

Episode 109: Dinner At Whitefields...

Went down to view the house with Chloe, Michelle and Samantha, but the tenants weren't at home, so we froze for nothing. Well, the girls went to Sainsbury's, so I guess for them that made up for the cold. I headed back to campus for dinner at Whitefields. Caleb's visiting over the weekend, so I brought him along to dinner. Had a lovely time there, just hanging out with everyone, not to mention the impromptu Romanian history lesson that I received. Despite Daniel's dire warnings, I'm sure we all enjoyed our Romanian meal of tochitură and mămăligă! I still insist that the latter, which is cornmeal, reminds me of tapioca, and not lemon sherbet, as Caleb suggested. We all ended up in Maria's room after Jason's yummy bread pudding, listening to Romanian music on YouTube and looking at pictures of the country. The Singaporeans have decided to reciprocate by cooking a Singaporean dinner next Friday, which I will unfortunately not be able to attend, since I'll (hopefully) be living it up at Electric City with The Culture Project people. Am still tweaking the introduction for my essay, but I'm hoping everything'll just fall into place miraculously over Saturday and Sunday. Somehow I have the feeling that I'm not going to get any sleep on Sunday night...

Happy Birthday, Mummy!

Episode 108: The Unbearable Elusiveness Of Beginnings

Got back my French test, for which I scored a respectable 85%. Am pleased with that grade, although I'm making the sort of minor careless mistakes that I really shouldn't be, given my background in the language. Sat through rehearsal, spending most of it trying to come up with a good opening sentence. Unsurprisingly, I failed, though I ended up being rather tickled by Laura's suggestions on Facebook. Seriously though, Facebook is possibly the worst thing to have ever been invented in relation to productivity. I spent more time checking it than forcing myself to think about the first sentence. I have managed to come up with one, but it's a little dry, especially when compared to what I used for my previous essay on 'Howl': 'Hell and literature are not unfamiliar bedfellows.' I am resisting the temptation, so far anyway, to open with an impressive quotation, as I know there's plenty of room for that later, and I simply don't believe that I'm incapable of coming up with a good opening hook. Between going to view a house and being invited to Whitefields for dinner, I doubt that I'll get much work done tomorrow. Perhaps if I'm really disciplined, and hence productive, in the afternoon?

Episode 107: Weird Fiction

Michael Hulse couldn't see us today, so I frittered my time away watching Little Nonya. (I've actually just finished the last episode, and I must say that I agree with Bernard. Disappointing! It felt like the writers were trying to tie up too many loose ends in too little time.) Met Samantha in the Arts Centre to catch up over lunch, which was immense fun. There was markedly less smoked salmon and cream cheese on my jacket potato than the last time though! China Miéville's lecture-cum-workshop this evening was pretty awesome. Then again, it's hard not to be impressed by someone who can talk intelligently and lucidly about something like weird fiction. Now I really feel like reading his novels. On top of the writing exercises from Maureen Freely's seminar in the morning, I've probably got more creative writing to do over the weekend than I've had in a long while. Not that I mind though. I quite prefer that to the 'Howl' essay that's been gnawing at me for the past couple of weeks in some way or other. I've decided that attempting to read all the secondary material I've gathered is quite a futile exercise, especially since I seem to work best when I already know what I want to say and I'm just cherry-picking quotes that do the job better than I could. So I'm going to mull over the introduction while falling asleep, and hopefully, an outline will come to me. If I can just nail the introduction, the rest of the essay will just be expanding and breathing life into it, so it has to be absolutely killer. Once again, I'm stuck trying to come up with a snazzy opening line. Well, snazzy to me anyway, I'm not entirely sure how impressed Adam Putz was by my previous one: 'Hell and literature are not unfamiliar bedfellows.' It sounds a bit too pretentious, now that I think about it!

Episode 106: I'm Reading Lovecraft!

Lecture got cancelled today! Only found out like a couple of hours before, but it's all good because I ended up having time to finish my e-mail interview for Education UK, post my 16-25 Railcard application, and deposit my money. Have also finished reading The Call Of Cthulhu and Notes On Writing Weird Fiction, and am now trying to finish At The Mountains Of Madness in the middle of rehearsal. I absolutely have to start reading my journal articles for 'Howl' tonight, otherwise I'll never be able to get started on the essay tomorrow afternoon. Was spacing throughout Adam's seminar today because I hadn't read the Said reading, but I did realise that 'Howl' actually ties in really well with Aristotle, Burke and Shklovsky, at least according to the sheet describing the unit in my Reading Pack. Will probably use that to jog my thought processes? It means I'll have to re-read the entire unit again, at least the relevant parts, but hopefully that'll result in a totally brilliant essay by next Monday. I really, really want to write something good, if only because the unassessed ones I did earlier have been decent, if not downright good, stuff.

Episode 105: MobTV Sucks!

Am in the middle of the first rehearsal for The Culture Project using the script, and it's pretty cool to hear people reading out something you've written. My attention is somewhat divided though, as I'm trying to read 'The Call Of Cthulhu' in preparation for Wednesday's Weird Fiction module. Have already read my assigned Orwell essay for Thursday's EN123 seminar, and I can definitely rattle on about it for three minutes, so that's something settled at least. I was hoping to start reading for my 'Howl' essay today, but I don't think that's going to happen now. The translation test in the morning was pretty okay, but I don't think I'll fail, which means the whole thing will simply fail to have its intended effect, i.e. to scare students into swotting for the final examination. I already made a few gaffes, including translating something that was supposed to be about plague as being about starvation, but even with negative marking, I think I should scrape by. Ah well. I've also subscribed to MobTV to get my final bunch of episodes of Little Nonya. I must say that MobTV is such a con job! For a paid service, the quality of the videos is terrible, and they look essentially like really bad TV-rips. The size of the video is pathetically small and Mediacorp doesn't even bother to edit out that irritating scrolling news ticker! The preview episodes are in fact better, since they don't have the news ticker, but because they're also episodes that haven't aired yet, Mediacorp somehow decided not to put in subtitles. Not that I can't understand the dialogue without them, but it just goes to show how bloody lazy the company is. Am definitely not renewing my subscription after three months...

Episode 104: Stressed!

Just got back from a meeting for The Culture Project. Have not studied for the test tomorrow, which consists of two sets of about 10 lines, one taken from Sir Gawain And The Green Knight and one taken from any of Chaucer's tales that we've studied. The small consolation is that glosses will be provided, so perhaps not all is lost. I still feel slightly guilty about walking into a test completely unprepared though, so I will try to read as much of Tolkien's translation of Sir Gawain And The Green Knight as I can tonight. It's more than 2000 lines, but I'm sure if I focus, I can do it. Heck, I could probably read the original Middle English text, but it doesn't seem worth the effort, not when the test doesn't count for the final grade and serves more to scare us into putting in more effort. If I don't fail, or barely scrape through, I will be quite disappointed. Need to start thinking really hard about 'Howl' again, and am a little worried that I won't have enough to say about its 'redeeming social importance'. At least I have a very clear idea of what constitutes a First to my tutor, so I'm not writing blindly. Would be nice to produce something utterly brilliant, especially by bringing in Aristotle, Burke and Shklovsky properly, instead of just contriving a few lines and twisting quotations to fit. We shall see...

Episode 103: Exploring Kenilworth

The weather at present is so cold that even my French Connection jacket can't keep me warm. Also, the gloves I bought yesterday from Tesco are rubbish! The threads are coming out already, and it's not like I've been doing any sort of unusual stunts while wearing them. I'm going to take them down to Tesco tomorrow if I'm free and get a refund. If I can't, I'm going to complain until they give me a new pair, though I'd much rather be refunded because the gloves can't even keep my hands warm. Very disappointed! Headed down to Kenilworth today to grab a bite at Time For Tea. We waited really long for the food though! I thought my cheese omelette was not bad, but not good enough to really justify the long wait. Still, I might go back again. Funny thing happened, incidentally. We had to leave the table by sometime after 3 pm because it'd been booked. Turns out that it was Chernise and her friends, Wenxian being among them, who had booked the table. We found out because we all wound up taking the same bus back from Kenilworth. Haha! Like Eugene Chan says, he's constantly pushing people to explore places that they've never been to, so today, I discovered that you can take really pretty pictures at the lake in Kenilworth, and that it's a wonderful place to have a picnic. In spring or summer. I've started researching my essay on 'Howl', so that's a good thing. I haven't read enough for the translation test on Monday, so that's a bad thing. I'm quite prepared to fail it, since it doesn't actually count for my final grade, although it would be nice to actually be able to translate something on Monday rather than staring blankly at the given passage. Shall go do some reading out of desperation...

Episode 102: Exploring Coventry & Leamington Spa

I did manage to find the new KJ single. Unfortunately, his distribution label has gone bankrupt, so no iTunes for me. Adriana and Ranon have written their monologues, which means I will almost certainly rewrite the script to incorporate these monologues. Spent the afternoon exploring Coventry and Leamington Spa with Eugene Chan and Keegan, which was quite fun. Ate the obligatory Chinese meal at Noodle Bar, which was yummy, of course. Today, I saw parts of Leamington Spa that I've never explored during daylight hours. Like Jephson Gardens, which is really pretty. We even went into the Royal Pump Rooms, which was interesting, but not the sort of thing that makes for repeated viewing, that I must say. Went to Tesco after we got back to stock up on groceries and thereby stake a claim on space in the fridge, which I have successfully done with several plastic boxes of fruits. I found sliced mangoes at Tesco! They're pretty hard and sour, but what the heck, I'll take what I can find over here for now. Am now sorting through my iTunes collection again before going to bed. Managed to wash my sheets today, and realised that they're actually not really white, but bluish-white. Fascinating, isn't it?

Episode 101: Rewriting

Have finally got around to rewriting the script, only to realise that most of Bella's comments are more to do with staging, and as such require minimal changes to the dialogue. I've tried to trim anyway, since we're definitely running over an hour as it is, and I'm going to add in an additional scene she requested as well as change some of the lines to make the Chinese couple more 'balanced', but other than that, I don't think I'm going to majorly rewrite the script, at least not before I've seen it done at least once in rehearsal and can see what works and doesn't work from the point of view of the audience. Spent a good part of the day looking for new music, including that song from Wild Child that I found so catchy. I now know it's 'Let Me Think About It' by Ida Corr, as remixed by Fedde Le Grand. Unfortunately, I don't quite like the original, let alone the rest of her album! Have managed to find Ari Gold's albums, which I couldn't while I was in Singapore a few months ago. Am still searching for KJ's new single because I couldn't find it on iTunes for some reason. Eugene Chan's visiting over the weekend, so spent most of the afternoon talking after Keegan came over. Then Sarah came over and we cooked dinner, to use up everyone's groceries. Bella joined us for dinner, and now everyone's outside watching The Matrix Reloaded, while I rewrite the script. Poor me! Haha...