Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Work is CONSUMING my life. -_-

But I have found something to keep me occupied. Unfortunately, it's a sedentary activity. I've started reading a hell of a lot of fanfiction again, and found a few new fandoms, while at it.

All of which are anime/manga.

And recently, I've started on Prince of Tennis. My god, the monstrosity that is this fandom. It's all over the place! Manga, anime, live action movie, and even musicals. A SERIES of them. That's still ongoing.

I don't even remember how I got started on it.

No wait, I do remember.

I have a liking for Miyano Mamoru's voice; he has a nice voice and he's very versatile, in the sense that if he voices a character in anime, I can tell it's his voice, but at the same time, he doesn't sound exactly the same as any other of his characters I might have seen before.

He currently does Kid's voice in Soul Eater, and when I went looking around to see if there was anything else he'd done, I came across Vampire Knight. Which seriously must have the most screwed up characters ever, I tell you. Anyway. Watched the anime and finished the manga for that by now.

And then, I noticed Prince of Tennis on the page with all his other work.

And it's one of those animes/mangas which I've seen all over the place but I've never bothered to find out exactly what it is. I don't really like starting a new anime or manga; once I've started watching or reading it, it's okay, but I just don't like starting it. I'm weird that way.

So, little old me finally got curious enough to go poke around at it.

Started on the live action movie first, since I figured that would probably be easy enough to find on YouTube. Was ok, but the most hilarious things are the special effects for the characters' special techniques; they probably look cool in the anime or manga, but in a live action film they just look absurd, lol.

And then I got started on the musicals. And I'm not sure if Japanese musicals are different from English ones in general, but the Prince of Tennis ones are quite different. That difference is quite interesting, and I'm still fascinated by theatre effects. When watching musicals when I was younger, I was always amazed at how actors could find their mark when the stage was pitch dark, and that still remains while watching the Prince of Tennis ones.

Anyway. Have decided that the second generation cast for the musicals is my favourite, so here's something I found. At times like this, I wonder if I should consider moving to LiveJournal. Or maybe Wordpress. Hm.


The Second Generation Tenimyu Seigaku Cast is Forever Love
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Monday, December 01, 2008

Meh. FF7 is eating my life. Nah, not really.

Good thing the PSP belongs to my cousin and I can only get my hands on it at night, when he's home and studying for his exams. Hahaha.

Funny when I think back, but the original FF7 came out at a time when I wasn't very into computer games, and even a while after its release and I *did* get started on games, I drifted more towards stuff like Dungeon Keeper and Theme Hospital and Red Alert and the C&C universe, where I could build stuff.

But anyway, was watching my cousin's Advent Children disc a few weeks ago when I was slacking at home on a weekend with nothing to do, and I realised that there're a lot of "gaps" in the movie. Coz hey, that's like the latest part of the whole long complicated and emo storyline.

Seriously, I think FF7 defined "emo". It created "emo" before there was "emo". It made "emo" cool. You get my point.

So, before I digress. Me being me, does not like "gaps" in my nice storylines. So. To Wikipedia we shall go. XD

So I poked around on Wikipedia and found that the story is long and convoluted and oh my god, still expanding. Will it never end.

But! It has all sorts of elements that I like, like the angst and the lovely characters. Gerri loves her main characters wonderfully flawed, and let's face it, isn't Cloud the most damaged thing you've ever seen? The Japanese make stories right up Gerri's alley, yes sirree. XD

And Crisis Core is kinda fun. Except for cutscenes where certain characters spout long lines of quotations which make no sense. Those are annoying. Quit quoting your stupid book at everybody! I still don't get why the silly book is so relevant to the storyline. *scratches head*

Ladeeda. Rant over. Now to find some nice wallpaper. My desktop needs a change of scenery.

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Thursday, November 06, 2008

Dear Jared.

Wish you were here.

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Wednesday, October 22, 2008

"Well, you have a melancholy soul, don't you think?"

Strange how that suddenly comes to mind, and the whole deluge of thoughts that follow behind it.

It must be... -six? seven?- years since we last talked- or communicated, to be more precise. You and I have never really spoken to each other. We've never heard each other's voices, and yet we managed to make each other's lives that much more bearable. I still wonder how we did it.

But sometime in JC I was reminded of you when a friend of mine received a phone call from someone she didn't know, who didn't give his name, and who only asked if she had the time to listen.

Too stunned at this strange turn of events, she simply replied, okay. So listen she did, and talk he did.

Not too unexpectedly, it was a story of unhappiness, of feeling somewhat lost. He did sound depressed, she said. And after all was said, he merely sighed, said thanks, and when met with her stammered: "er, you're welcome" and awkward silence, he said goodbye and hung up.

She couldn't call him back; there was no number to do so. And we still think that maybe he just punched in a random number, hoping whoever was on the other end would be a sympathetic ear and nothing more.



Sometimes I think of you and wonder who you really are.

Sometimes, on bad days, I write things like this and put your name in the salutation.

And on days like this, I remember things that we spoke of once.



"Well, you have a melancholy soul, don't you think?
Like all those poets. All the same."

"I tend to think of it as a throwaway soul."

"Same difference.
I bet you only like beautiful things because you're thinking they won't last."

"Insightful of you..."

"Why throwaway? You haven't been discarded yet, have you?
At least not that you've told me."

"'Yet'?? You're *so* optimistic..."

"*shrugs* We all get kicked to the kerb at least once in our lives, I think."



We both had the same strange problem, didn't we? Somehow we felt too little and we felt too much at the same time.

There was something which made us both strangely detached, like we lived in this world but were not of it, which caused so much tension for both of us, made it difficult to comprehend us, to live with us.

And yet the slightest thing which some would never take notice of could make us both mope for days. Weeks. Months, I remember. But lucky for you that turned out to be nothing.

Between then and now, I've been told many things; some of them you've heard before, some of them are new.

I'm cold, detached, have absolutely no EQ. I'm aloof, I'm unbothered, I'm unfeeling, I can't provide emotional support at all. And those are just the ones I think you've heard before. And I think an echo sounds in your head when you read those words.

But I've psychoanalysed myself a ridiculous number of times now and the only explanation I can offer is that I express myself differently.

I don't hug much, I don't smile much, I don't even have physical contact with people much. I don't talk much sometimes, even around people I've known all my life. I don't understand how they want me to be when they say they don't understand how I can be so unfeeling, and I wonder, is some spark missing somewhere...?

I'm not particularly good with my hands; I don't make gifts, and I never know what to make. I don't give out small little nothings to everyone I know on things like Valentine's Day with messages which are all one-liners and all the same. I don't know a whole lot of places where people go to have fun.

Me?

I leave things on people's desks which I think might be useful, tidbits of information I scrounge together from somewhere and save and print because I think they could use it.
I make soup and trot down to the convenience store for medicine when they're sick.
And sometimes an idea for a gift does come to me, and I turn it into one massive undertaking.
I buy things which end up being terribly belated birthday presents because I hadn't thought of it or hadn't happened upon it and thought, hey, that'd be just the thing, before the big day arrived.
Sometimes I iron clothes they need tomorrow.
And sometimes I just sit and watch, thinking of how their lives could be made better.

But that's all just unfeeling, I know.



On days like this, I wonder who you are, where you are, and if you're happy. And I wonder if either of us realises, in the grand scheme of things, how much we gave each other, even if neither of us knows for certain if any of it is real.
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Friday, October 10, 2008

Dreams are strange things. At least to me they are.

My subconscious mind has always disturbed me in some way; it's always told me things that somehow or other turn out to be true.

And the most freaky of them so far has to be the time two semesters ago when I was taking that shortcut from AS4 to the space between LTs 9 and 10, that narrow little lane next to the windows of the AS4 staircase, and I just stopped dead in my tracks suddenly because something just felt very wrong.

And the very second I stopped, a penknife blade landed at my feet. Someone'd thrown it out of one of the windows upstairs, I guess. I never looked up to check, just froze for a while there, then quickly went on my way. But it did freak me out.

And my brain seems to be working overtime these past few months-- or at least one part of it is.

The dream of the lady in black recurred again. Just a few nights after Joseph and I broke up. The dream of the lady in black in an empty dark room, lit only by the lights of a city nightscape. Where a man with no face comes to hold her, touch her, kiss her fears away, but in the end he only leaves with one of the gloves off her hand.

The first time I saw it was during the time shortly before Joseph and I got together, and I didn't understand what it could possibly mean then.

But when it revisited, it suddenly occurred to me; maybe that dream was telling me all along not to say yes to you.

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Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Estella

This space, cleared and replaced;
A heart with an empty sort of cold.
Not hope nor love lives here;
None but a tired weary ache.

They've all passed now, dead and laid to rest,
These shadows of my once-was loves,
The brittle broken pieces of mine heart
Scattered o'er the coffin
Like many red, red shattered roses.

And our hope lies smothered
In a decaying wedding dress;
Love chained to the hands of dead clocks
That remember too well
When the bottom fell out of the world.
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Thursday, July 31, 2008

A lot's happened in the last three months. I've just been too lazy to blog. :P

My last exam was on 2nd May, my Commencement ceremony was on 10th July, I went for my first international competition in Thailand on 17th July, and of course, my birthday was on the 22nd.

And shortly after that, on the 27th, Joseph and I broke up. Well. That's the gist of things.


Commencement was a... chaotic affair. After the ceremony and we'd all got our scrolls and everything, everyone was trying to take pictures with everyone else. We might really never see each other again, sadly.

While we were all seated listening to the speeches, Ivan actually messaged me to wish me happy commencement. And I wondered why Joseph didn't do the same. We actually hadn't spoken for almost a month; his reservist was 3 weeks long and started on the 24th of June and only ended later that week. I never really knew when was a good time to call, and when I did call, he was always out elsewhere with other friends. He said he'd call back, but he never did. And I just chalked it up to his usual forgetfulness, or maybe he was tired and had to be up early the next day.

Things hadn't been feeling right for a long time.

I left for a competition in Thailand on the 17th, and Joseph said he wouldn't be able to come see me off coz he had to give tuition in the morning. For a minute I wondered, isn't seeing your girlfriend off more important than giving tuition..? But I decided to let it go, since he's always been so work-oriented. Eugene keeps telling me I made too many excuses for him.

So Wai Xin, Xingjuan and Weiquan's girlfriend, Jeslin, came to see us (Fred, Weiquan and me) off at the airport, and just before the plane took off, I sent Joseph a message; since it was our anniversary that day, I said bye and I'd be back in 5 days' time, and happy anniversary. I never got a message back.

Thailand was fun; we landed in Thailand in the afternoon, and the people from the Thailand Outdoor Archery Club were there to pick us up at the airport. They brought us round the shopping district, and we bought ourselves a few things. They dropped us off at the hotel in the evening so we could check in and leave our baggage there, and then they brought us to the competition venue, just 800m from our hotel, haha. So we got to see the competition venue in its early stages of setup, and then we set off to find ourselves our dinner.

The next morning the van driver who helped drive us around the previous day brought us round to do more sightseeing; we actually intended to get a look at the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, the Royal Palace Gardens and the Temple of the Sleeping Buddha (Wat Po) just opposite the Royal Palace, but when we got there, the Emerald Buddha was closed the whole day for some ceremony, and we spent 3 hours just in the Royal Palace alone! So that meant we didn't have time to see Wat Po before the van came to pick us up and drive us to TOAC's range where that was a dinner-cum-team briefing session.

TOAC's range is a nice place too; their range is small, but in a cosy kinda way. The area where archers stand to shoot is sheltered, and just behind that, there's a pro shop and small cafe where the archers can get refreshments. If only that kind of thing existed in Singapore.

The next two days, Saturday and Sunday, were competition proper. Saturday morning and the earlier part of the afternoon were individual ranking events for us; I shot in the morning, and the two guys in the early afternoon. Later we went for lunch, and in the evening we had the team event for the University category.

Fred, Weiquan and me were the 5th seeded team; we weren't expecting to win anything, since it was an international competition after all, and we thought that the overall standard had to be pretty high.

But we beat our first team opponents, Chiang Mai University, and then we went on to face Ramkhamhaeng University. And when we beat Ramkhamhaeng, we realised we might actually have a chance of winning something. Coz after Ramkhamhaeng, it was down to the top four teams, and surprisingly, of the top four, three of the teams were Singapore teams. Our team, from NUS, and the two NTU teams.

Unfortunately, because of our initial ranking and the bracket that we were in, we went against the first-seeded team first, and we lost, leaving us to compete for the bronze medal against one of the NTU teams. We beat them in the end and managed to bring home a bronze medal each, but I still think that if we'd been up against one of the NTU teams first, then we'd have got silver instead of bronze. XD

So we came back on Monday night, on the 21st; our plane only landed at 9.30 pm coz it's been delayed by about an hour in Thailand. The only people who came to receive us were Wai Xin and Jeslin again, and Fred's parents. No Joseph again, but I thought it was probably pretty later for him and maybe he was tired after work. More excuses made.

My birthday was a rather dismal one; two weeks before, I'd already received the only present I'd receive this year-- ten people in the club had got together to buy my bow from the club and give it to me. So my bow of three years now is finally really mine. Thank you Weiquan, Wai Xin, Fred, Connor, Sylvia, Joshua, Xingjuan, Serene and Joseph. :)

But my birthday itself was quiet; Weiquan and I dropped by the range in the morning to see Fred, who was still conducting training despite getting back late the night before. Then we went for lunch and I went back home. Happy birthday messages trickled in, including one from Joseph which simply read "Happy 23rd Birthday!"

And I wondered why he couldn't even be bothered to call after I hadn't seen him for almost a month.

Even the breakup was done by way of an SMS, five days later.

I suppose you're right; I'm not the kind who's good at providing emotional support. Perhaps I'm really just selfish and I keep relying on someone to make my life more bearable while not reciprocating.

And you say that your feelings changed, that you felt our relationship had gone stale. And I remember what you said in the beginning, about how you were tired of playing around-- I wonder, if you were really tired of playing around, wouldn't you have made more of an effort to see that it lasted?

I'd had my own suspicions for the last month. Everyone else has their own. And y'know what they say? They say that you've been seeing someone else for some time now. And perhaps I'm not all that surprised; you left another girl for me, after all. And perhaps... against my better judgment, I said yes to you. Because I thought at that time that you'd only realised you'd made a rash decision too late and that you and that girl were not really to be. Because I thought that you were a better person. But it seems I judged wrongly.

I've asked for all my explanations now, and I can't really tell anymore how much of what you've said is truth or lies. But if you say that you haven't got together with anyone else, then who's the girl in all the Facebook pictures that you went to Bintan with?

Maybe she'll make you happy. Maybe all the numerous girlfriends you've had all this time were really just keeping space warm for her. Maybe this one will finally last and you'll find that candy-coloured forever so many of us will never reach.

I hope you won't let her down like you have the rest of us.

But I suppose that isn't my place to care anymore.

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