Episode 230: Waiting For Godot

The Irish literary critic, Vivian Mercier, once described Beckett's Waiting For Godot as 'a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats. What's more, since the second act is a subtly different reprise of the first, he has written a play in which nothing happens, twice.' Seeing it performed really brought out the humour in it though, enhanced by Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart's comedic timing. I did find it a bit hard to stay awake in the first act, as well as not being used to having to strain to hear the dialogue. No more cheap seats for me in future! They were awfully uncomfortable too. Incidentally, I loved the lighting at the end of both acts. It was gorgeous! It looked like it had been filtered through a dense network of branches, so the pattern of light and shadow on the stage had a really dreamy quality about it. Could have just been me, but I thought it was really beautiful. Tried to work on the coach trips to and from London, but I only managed about 300 words getting there, and while I did type out a fair bit of stuff in my handphone, I didn't write all that much while we were travelling back. We were seated on the upper deck, so the swaying just made me feel sick. Am going to nap for three hours, and then wake up and make a final push to get Super Monday stuff over and done with!

Episode 229: Waxing Philosophical

Spent most of the day trying to make headway on my Heart Of Darkness essay. It's not going so well, but at least I'm almost halfway through, although I doubt the essay is going to be as fantastic as I want it to be. So I can't believe I just spent three hours engaged in a philosophical discussion on a matter that is of absolutely no personal relevance! I must say that it was quite intellectually satisfying though, at least when compared to getting on with my Super Monday deadlines. Also found out that Conrad can't make it for the play and Emily might not either, so have been trying to find people to take their tickets. Managed to get Owen to take one, since he wanted to see it, but I didn't know him at the time when we bought the tickets, much less know he wanted to watch it too. Anyway, I think I've pretty much done as much of the essay that I can for tonight. I could force myself to carry on, and I might finish before it's time to walk to Cannon Park Shopping Centre, but it just doesn't seem worth it. Will probably regret not working harder and earlier the same time tomorrow night, but it's about 3 am and I have to be up in just over five hours to catch a coach to London to wait for Mr Godot. Can't be helped. Nothing to be done. I guess I really will have to pull an all-nighter again when we get back from London...

Episode 228: One Year Older, One Year Lazier

Full disclosure is always a bad idea if you don't look like you belong on a runway. Enough said. Anyway, last night was rather entertaining, if you ask me. A whole table of people singing a birthday song I am incapable of working on any sort of regular basis. It always has to be some sort of frantic rush with me. The price, of course, is the quality of work, though not always. The most recent EN121 essay was an unfortunate casualty, I'm afraid. A 2:2, which shows how erratic performance in the module is. To be fair, I do like the Renaissance poetry, just not The Faerie Queene. Long poems like that and Sir Gawain And The Green Knight are such a pain to read! Will have to though, within the next two weeks, since I'm actually better at writing commentaries on specific passages and poems than writing topical essays. Am thinking I should be able to scrape a low 2:1 for this module, which will hopefully be offset by a good showing in my other modules. Am now having doubts about that Freud/Carter essay for EN122, which has resulted in a redoubled desire to nail the Heart Of Darkness one for EN123. Am somewhat paralysed by self-doubt on one hand and perfectionism on the other. At least my EN124 portfolio is totally out of the way now. Okay, shall go off and try to rephrase my introduction to the essay, the outline for which came to me after I got back from Varsity last night. The outline still makes sense in the clear light of day, except now I actually have to word the introduction so that the idea behind the whole essay is clear, since apparently I don't have enough original thoughts of my own, according to Sarah Poynting. She's probably right about that, since I was basically desperate to finish that essay, quality of work be damned. There is still time to make this one good though, so I will try to do so.

Episode 227: Feeling 22, Acting 17

The title is kind of true, I guess. I generally don't act my age, although that presupposes that there is a proper way to act when you're 22. Ah, whatever. So today, it was my turn for a birthday 'surprise'. Not bad, the Singaporeans actually managed to find me outside the Language Centre. Chernise made a delicious cake, which was definitely on par with stuff you can get at the bakery! Anyway, am a little annoyed with myself for some of the mistakes I made in the rédactions that I got back because one of them, erroneously substituting 'concernant' for 'en ce qui concerne' is so obviously a case of transliterating English into French. Sigh. Must be more careful, and possibly write French rédactions in future under less pressured conditions. I'm thinking that over summer, I should put in place some sort of system, whereby I go through one language each day of the week. I don't actually have enough to fill up all seven. At least I don't think so. English, Mandarin, French, Cantonese, Spanish, Latin, Quenya, Italian. Hey, I guess I do. Not sure what English is doing there, although I suppose I could spend that day devoting myself to reading and writing exclusively. More (good) poems, yes? Also received my attachment posting, and it's to North View Secondary School, right beside my home. Very convenient, although it's a bit weird to know that the students I meet could potentially be my neighbours. Good for bonding on some level, but also a bit too much blurring of the professional-personal life divide. It would be quite funny if after the attachment, I ended up hanging out with the students at, I don't know, Northpoint or something. Haha!

Episode 226: Elections!

Just got back from the Singapore Society elections. It was seriously stuffy in there towards the end! Congratulations to everyone on the new executive committee! Am now starting to reply to the birthday wishes that are trickling in on Facebook, when what I really should be doing is figuring out the introduction to my essay. Did get a bit of reading done in the Library in the afternoon, after I went to have a haircut, but it hasn't been enough. I vaguely remember that there was a good introduction sentence somewhere, but now I've got to go hunt for it again tomorrow, between EN123 and LL208. I'm sort of taking the line that Heart Of Darkness is one of those texts that just lends itself to a multiplicity of interpretations, but that they can still be related back to each other. Am thinking of discussing imperialism and gender, since that's the parts I've read so far which make sense to me immediately. In any case, it's just 2000 words, so no point spreading myself too thin and trying to cover every possible interpretation of the text. Thanks Marc for a long-overdue dinner! I promise to return the favour after summer. Haha...

Episode 225: Must. Do. Work. Tomorrow!

Just got back from cell. Elizabeth's cake was good stuff! I should learn how to bake. One more thing to master over summer. Probably should get back to playing the guitar too. Am officially done with the EN124 portfolio, and will resist the urge to tinker with its contents any further. Time to move on to the essay on Heart Of Darkness! It will be intelligent, and sophisticated, and just plain brilliant. If I tell myself that enough times, it's actually going to happen. I'm going to go to the Library tomorrow, and just research this essay so thoroughly. I've definitely got enough books to do it! A couple of hours of solid research with Jerrick for company, before dinner at Marc's place and then elections. Hopefully, some essay-writing will happen after that too. Randomly, I currently have the full version of Gareth Emery's 'Exposure' playing on iTunes now, and can I just say it's probably the first original trance tune that I like in its own right, as opposed to stuff that is a remix of someone else's music, although that's enjoyable too. Also randomly, I had a pint of Ben & Jerry's today, for no reason other than that it was there and I needed something to occupy me while watching Gossip Girl, which is building towards what looks to be a spectacular season finale, in case you were wondering.

Episode 224: 4000 (Sort Of) Down, 6000 To Go

Had a short training session for Hot Chocolate, followed by lunch in The Dirty Duck with the rest of the CU people. So it was about 3 pm by the time I got back to my room and actually started doing work. The poem about islands hasn't materialised, but it's partly because I haven't been trying hard enough to write it, so I'll give it one last try tomorrow, between my only lecture and cell. If nothing comes to mind at all during those hours, I'm putting the idea aside, as I already have about 4000 words for my portfolio. Nope, it's not because I wrote the locksmith story, which has already been filed away under the category of interesting-but-unwritten. It's thanks to another piece that was actually a class assignment, which I've edited from a third-person narrative into a first-person monologue, which I'm sort of hooked on at the moment. Am going to try and write a snappy one for the portfolio, just so that I can end with the words, 'My name's Elizabeth. Countess Elizabeth. But you can call me Lizzie.' Yeah, I'm writing about Countess Elizabeth Báthory, prolific female serial killer and rumoured to have bathed in the blood of young women in order to maintain her youth. It's the rumour that I'm going to use as a springboard for my little flash fiction. It's going to be delicious.

Episode 223: More Poems?

Came back from lunch at Varsity with church people, and have been working on my portfolio since. Incidentally, it was a really bad idea to leave my room without a jacket today, despite it being a very sunny morning. I was freezing the whole time that we were sitting outside at Varsity! Anyway, by working, I really mean scavenging from things that have already been written rather than producing anything new, which is a state of affairs that I'm not happy about, but time is of the essence and I'm starting to get antsy. Have managed to bump the word count for my portfolio up to around 2200, although I would like to take it even higher by producing some new poems over the next couple of days. Thanks Alex, Dan and Shirley for the feedback! Right now, I'm aiming to finish a series of haiku based on a nursery rhyme, as well as a long poem about four islands (Singapore, Pedra Branca, Christmas Island and Great Britain). Am tempted to get a bit dark and write stuff about Countess Báthory Erzsébet or Armin Meiwes, but maybe that's veering too far from the overall tone of the other poems in my portfolio so far. Perhaps just the two poems that I have in mind now, and then fiction to bring the word count up to the required 4000. Then I'll need ideas for fiction. Only have one at the moment, which is about the locksmith. Sigh...

Episode 222: Scum!

Today, I was finally the victim of racism. Some guys drove by in a car with the windows rolled down, and yelled 'Scum!' at me. I'll admit to being startled, simply because the abuse came out of nowhere. I was just walking back from Tesco after getting some food, minding my own business. So it's taken seven months, but it's happened after all. It says something about me, doesn't it, that my first reaction after the initial shock was to think of writing a poem about it. Am slowly building up the portfolio, and I'm not above culling some of my older work and including it, in what probably amount to literary self-cannibalism. Reading over what I wrote in the past though, it's struck me how self-consciously 'poetic' I tried to be at times, and also my tendency to have epigraphs that sound more meaningful than the actual poem. I still think that 'Another Night On The Patio' was really a breakthrough of sorts for me, since it showed me it was possible to marry strong imagery to flexible syntax and get a good poem out of it. So will have to be quite sparing in what I include from my older work. Have picked out three so far, and that's likely to be all, though I wouldn't rule out taking specific lines from elsewhere and spinning something brand new out of them.

Episode 221: Picnic!

Am about to grab a tub of Ben & Jerry's from the freezer and finish it, before moving on to start on some writing. That's the plan anyway. Was originally going to head over to The Dirty Duck and then Kasbah, but some stuff cropped up and that's not happening tonight, which means I really should put the time to good use instead. I've got two ideas for fiction pieces at the moment. One's going to about a locksmith who gets approached by someone who wants him to make a bump key, and the other's going to be about the secret lives of clouds. I know that doesn't really make much sense, but I don't care! Will endeavour to get at least one of those ideas fleshed out, even if it's just 100-200 words and the story isn't actually finished. The afternoon was gloriously unproductive because the Singaporeans had a picnic in the middle of the field outside Mathematics & Statistics. Food, games and sunshine. What more could a student ask for in terms of procrastination? Meant to write something during the picnic, but I couldn't come up with anything beyond a very lame first line. That was for the locksmith story. What I need is something punchy, a hook to grab the reader right from the get-go. My litmus test: I must want to read the story if it had been written by anyone else other than myself.