Randomness. Utter randomness. Haha.

Am busying myself going crazy saving Narnia icons from all over the place. Mostly of Peter and Edmund. More Peter than Edmund though. :D

I've always loved Peter ever since I first read the books, but William Moseley makes Peter a most handsome king indeed. :D And Edmund's cute because he has freckles. Susan's beautiful; the dresses they made for her in the film-- lovely. Lucy's adorable because she can't pronounce her R's! They all turn into W's, so "Are you all right?" sounds vaguely like, "Are you all wight?" Bless her little curly-haired head.

My little MSN message (you know, the little message you add onto your nick) currently says: "Flutterby, butterfly, er... jamfly? I'm a mad little Gerri, haha". Another brilliant moment of madness randomness mad randomness. :D

William Moseley really is so cute. But I've said that already.

Am slightly high, I think. Rambling in my excitement. Maybe it's the wine gums. I wonder if you ate enough wine gums on any empty stomach, would you *actually* get drunk??

Henry and I were debating my lack of normalcy over MSN just now; he thinks the world needs more people like me. Madness is underrated and overlooked and locked away; without us, life would be boring! And without us, there'd be less people willing to dare to shout when they're happy, dance and sing in the rain, run through a field just screaming for the fun of it, and do cartwheels in the surf.

Like the rainbow-coloured ink that someone spilled across the negatives of a black-and-white movie filmstrip. Colour and life and noise, haha.

Funny how it doesn't really feel like the holidays (or the year) are ending. :)

Post-Christmas "aftermath":

(Well, I like to call it "aftermath", haha)

Got back from Malaysia yesterday afternoon and met Pam in the evening to go watch Narnia; we finally managed to get a 9 pm show at GV Marina Square, and the movie was BRILLIANT.

Although there've been quite a few people who tell me that they think it sucked. And well... I might be able to see why. The thing is, Andrew Adamson's kept the movie really true to the book; I noticed the tiniest details in the movie which are mentioned just in passing in the book, but they're there, and for a fan of the books, it's that attention to every single detail that just makes you go, "Oh my goodness, they remembered even that!" and smile to yourself and laugh deep inside.

But admittedly, this makes the build-up to the climax of the story a long one; this works in books, but not in movies, especially when nowadays all anyone cares about is action.

For someone who read the books when I was about ten though, the movie was just, well, brilliant, because everything that you've ever imagined while reading it is there, in all it's beautiful glory. And if you've not read "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe" before, you read that last line right: "books". Plural, not singular.

I've already had to enlighten a couple of people on this, and conversation usually went something like this:

"Well, have you read the books?"
"Ah..?! Got more than one, ah?"
"Yeah... there're seven."
"Wah, even more than LOTR?!"

*exasperation*
"They're thinner, don't worry. And simpler to understand."
"Oh. So the movie's based on the first one, is it."
"No... actually, 'Lion, Witch and Wardrobe' is the second book."

*confusion appears on fellow conversationalist's features*
"Then the first one....?"
"That would've been kinda boring to make a movie out of."
"Oh."


Harry Gregson-Williams' music is breathtaking. The strings in the battle theme are glorious, balanced with the heavy brass and the choir, and it's everything that a battle theme should be; foreboding and hopeful and of courage with no room or time for fear. The sadder secondary theme which Mr Tumnus plays for Lucy also has a Celtic kinda feel to it that I like; I've always felt that Celtic music more or less sums up Life-- mournful but still singing of and looking forward to the days to come.

Says a lot about me doesn't it, my taste in music with contradicting themes.

Someone did tell me once that I am the most paradoxical person that they know, after all. :)

My sis and I are in Malaysia at the moment, in my auntie's house; we got here by coach last night.

And you know, along the North-South Highway, there're these toll booths? Well, at the last one just before you enter Kuala Lumpur, my sis and I saw the *funniest* thing.

Each of the pillars was wrapped in an opaque blue film, with large white letters (one per line) saying:

Say

No

To

(wait for it...)







Porn.


Heehee. The anti-porn ad which brought my sis and I much mirth. 

Yeah, you saw that right. :D My sis and I were like, "What?!??"

We thought it was gonna say something like "Say no to piracy", not "porn"!! Hahaha.....

Oh well. I guess now we know where the Malaysian authorities priorities lie. :D

And here's a cute little ditty that I heard on the radio last week and just remembered today:


All I Want For Christmas (Is my Two Front Teeth)
by George Strait

All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth
My two front teeth, my two front teeth
Gee, if I could only have my two front teeth
Then I could wish you, "Merry Christmas."

It seems so long since I could say
"Sister Susie sitting on a thistle!"
Gosh, oh gee, how happy I’d be,
If I could only whistle.

All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth
My two front teeth, my two front teeth
Gee, if I could only have my two front teeth
Then I could wish you, "Merry Christmas..."

An early "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year" greeting to everyone who knows me; I'll be going to Malaysia tomorrow and will be away till Monday, so my Christmas won't be spent in Singapore.

I forgot to send out Christmas cards this year, so just for laughs, here's something:




...Haha..! Just kidding, really. :D

Happy Holidays, all. :)

Back from Kenny's bookstore opening.... :)

It's a lovely loft-looking place; wide open space and white shelves with white and green walls, and with childhood toys and vintage treasures dotting the place-- here's a small white typewriter sitting innocently beneath a sidetable full of books, old cameras lining the topmost shelf, and there's an old-fashioned little children's piano near where the music boxes are, the Nutcracker perched atop it grinning his face-splitting grin as someone winds up a music box and his Suite begins to play.

Although the music boxes aren't really boxes. They're really quite round. :D

William and Rachel were there, back from NZ-- William's hair is different now, all sort of flat (haha, :D) and Rachel's hair is longer-- Ivan was there too and of course, Kenny and Karen.

Ivan and I amused ourselves most of the time blowing bubbles; you know, the kind that they sell in the form of some rubbery gel in little metallic tubes, and which you blow by putting a blob of it onto the end of a little yellow straw?

Bubbles out of a tube, unlike the Western alternative, where bubbles come out of a bottle. :)

Took a picture with my new phone of the too-bright street lamp hanging from its metal limb right outside the window. And I could imagine in that very moment that if all the lights in the store were turned off, the street lamp would light everything in the room, casting light in angular patterns and the decals stuck on the windows like depictions of fairytales playing over the floor and the walls; the three bears out of Goldilocks hurrying across a shelf and dancing over the spines of Murakamis and Nabokovs and Orwells. And places where the light couldn't reach making calm shadows in quietly dark corners. And the picture of the white light on the white walls and the white shelves lined with their books looked and felt like winter.

Perhaps because of all the white. Perhaps because of a little flicker of a comparison of the rustle of pages in the wind and the crunch of new snow underfoot.

I want to buy shelves from Ikea and install them on the walls of my room... I need shelves. And I've kinda just realised that Christmas is less than then days away. Wow. Somehow days have lost their significance and only deadlines have any meaning anymore.

So I was stoning in front of the television, watching Arts Central.

Sat through the anime segment; something called "Hellsing" and something else called "Rumbling Hearts"-- lovely angsty sort of stuff. And the latter was something like a stumbling progression of scenes, and a collection of disconnected, disjointed scenes of equally detached characters. All looking like they're not sure of what they're doing with their lives.

Then, there was a short play of Samuel Beckett's on, entitled "Happy Days"; I still can't really figure out absurdist playwrights-- the only sense I could make of the one long, single scene throughout the short play of that woman sitting waist-deep in the sand of a barren waste, with a bag near her and muttering to herself, was the idea that Beckett was perhaps expounding once again upon the fatalism and how nothing that we create (or *don't* create, for that matter) doesn't last.

There's a clear sky tonight with a thousand millions stars out; at least, that's what it looks like. I can see all the brighter ones twinkling away, and in an empty patch of sky, I think I see the ones that are less bright, looking like shadows of pinpricks of light nestled in the purplypinkness of the sky. Or maybe it's my own eyes seeing illusions of the brighter stars seared onto my eyes and projecting them on the blank expanse.

Training restarts tomorrow morning-- good thing, I'm itching to shoot. And then I'll be off to Kenny's bookstore for his official opening. :)

Bleah. Something screwed up on my desktop at home; my personalised desktop on the home PC that is, not the entire CPU.

Ever since the com came back from service, the Microsoft Office programs no longer work on any of the personalised desktops (mine and my sis'), and just recently this week, for no damn reason at all, Firefox stopped working on my desktop. Everytime, it just loaded halfway and no matter where the hell I clicked, the only thing I could do with the window was close it.

So I gave up, personalised a new desktop, and then started moving everything over by going through the "Profiles".

Only just finished moving all my bookmarks; think everything's there, so I shall be going off to bed now.

Yesterday had to be one of the happiest days of my life.

Turns out that the AAS competition gave out prizes both for ranking and for knockout rounds for the individual events.

So I got third for ranking and fourth placing for the knockout round.

Knockout, is a series of matches wherein, if say we took the top 8 archers, No. 1 would be pitted against No. 8, No. 2 against No. 7, and so on and so forth. So I was against No. 6, an NTU girl named Iris, and I beat her by 12 points.

Then came the second round, and I was against the NTU girl who'd been shooting in my lane the day before, Eng Shuen Hui, if I remember her name correctly. And that one was a bit wasted.

During our third end, she had one arrow in black, and that would've been a good time for me to catch up, seeing as the difference between our scores wasn't that much. But I took too long to focus, didn't hear the thirty-second call, and didn't get to fire my last arrow. Shame that; I lost to her by five points, and I could've got second at least, but I guess shit happens. :P

As it turns out, later, the lady that I was up against for the bronze medal match had also lost because she didn't get to fire her last arrow in the last end of the previous round. All the juniors who were watching were saying that the bronze medal match was more exciting and more closely matched than the gold medal one, hee.

Kristy, Norisha and Pecilius took bronze for the Standard Recurve Ladies' Team event, and Huiting won fourth place for her Standard Recurve Ladies' Individual knockout as well, and fifth for her ranking. James only just lost to his NTU opponent by 6 points during his knockout round, and Kristy and Norisha both lost to their opponents; who were also teammates. :P

By virtue of the ranking, Norisha was against Huiting, and Kristy against Mabeline.

As it turns out, none of our guys in Open class made it to the knockout rounds; Vincent was ranked 40th, but the guys' standard really is damn high.

We did all right though, I think; definitely much better than last year. And to top it all off, when I came home, I had a new phone waiting for me. My mum had traded in my dad's old Nokia 2100 for an Ericsson K700i, so the first thing I did this morning after it was charged was to take a photo of my trophies. :D

Shall upload pretty pictures when I've installed the software that allows me to transfer stuff from my phone, and when the people who took pictures upload them. :D

NUS ARCHERY! I'M SO PROUD OF ALL OF YOU!!!! :D

Well, this is going to be a short post, but I'm really happy about today!!! :D :D

All the juniors whom I'm mentoring have been ranked in the top sixteen of their categories and are proceeding to the knockout rounds tomorrow! And the two girls have made it into the team event as well, which is only for the top four teams with the highest combined individual scores!

James is ranked 10th in Recurve Men's Standard class; in Recurve Ladies' Standard class, Kristy is ranked 8th and Norisha is ranked 11th; Huiting is ranked 5th, Mabeline, 9th, and Pecilius, 12th. We have *five* girls in standard knockout! :D :D

Now all that's left to make it perfect is Vincent's score, which he's agreed to message me later when he knows. But he should be all right, I think; he should be able to make it into the knockout round.

I have a high success rate, haha...

Imy and I qualified for knockout as well (automatically, really, since there're less than 16 archers in Recurve Ladies' Open class), but what really surprised me is that I'm ranked third. 0.0

I'll keep my fingers crossed and hope everything goes well tomorrow. We shall bring back more than a few medals!! :D :D :D

Sighting later today. Score for one end yesterday was 225/300; Vincent was looking at it halfway through and he was saying that it might be able to hit 230, but ARGH, it *didn't*. Nghh.

Must stop hitting so many damn blues. Bow arm is not steady.

Had a good rest last night, and Huiting lent me her copy of "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" yesterday! I've been reading all over the web about the sudden depth of character development that J.K. Rowling gives to Draco Malfoy, and that's just made me itch to read it, haha.

Anyway, am about four chapters into the book right now, and for once... Draco Malfoy was mentioned earlier than Harry Potter. Haha. Well, sort of anyway, if you don't count the first chapter where Harry's name just sort of pops up in the course of conversation. When I say "mentioned", I mean "mentioned" in the sense which makes them crucial to the plot of the current book. :P

Currently quite taken with Jack Johnson's songs; they're happy, light acoustic which just makes me want to bop along. Especially songs like "Breakdown" (doesn't sound as dismal as its title makes it out to be, I promise you) and "Bubbly Toes". And "bubbly toes" sounds like something *I* would say, haha!

Maybe there's finally someone else out there in this world who would understand what "happy toes" are. :D

Sad-- it seems like no one else whom I know is as excited about the Narnia movie as I am. Expect maybe for Pam, but Pam's different; she's a movie person, so she'll get excited over most movies. :P As long as she likes either the story or the characters, I think. :D

Anyway, here's something I've found: a NINE-minute-long Narnia *supertrailer*.

The link here takes you to NarniaWeb where you can download it; the super-high resolution Quicktime format of the supertrailer is about 100 MB, but it's worth it! It's absolutely lovely. But it IS full of spoilers, so if you'd rather not know, then please refrain from clicking on the link.

I love the music already; I want the soundtrack! The strings on the main theme sound glorious.

And while we're on the subject of Narnia, why on earth is it opening here only on the 22nd of December, when it opens in Malaysia (and worldwide) on the *9th*?!?

Sigh. I suppose while waiting, I'll just sit here and nurse my poor sore finger.

5 days to competition, and best score is still 438/600. Lousy.

Lookie what I found...


Forever as One

Isn't it pretty. :D

Well, okay, so I watched Harry Potter. It was... okay.

(I should warn you now that if you haven't seen it and want to avoid spoilers, you shouldn't read this. Now, shoo.)

But the graveyard scene was the best. That had to be about the *only* intense scene, really; the only scene where you could feel something for the characters. For Daniel Radcliffe's vocal cords' sake, I hope they didn't have to do too many retakes of that scene. *snigger*

The dialogue in this one was very different from the last three; it doesn't help character development much because most of it is just bland statements which contribute to the status of things at the moment in the plot rather than drawing in some way upon the relationship that the characters are supposed to have.

Like when Harry tells Ron that he's a "right foul git", and I was like, "Yeah, so?"

Seems like Ron thought the same thing. Haha. How childish.

Quidditch; HOW can we have a Harry Potter film WITHOUT Quidditch, goddamnit!?!? Yeah, they show us the beginning of the Quidditch World Cup and everything, and then you see the Irish and Bulgarian teams come out, and just as they're letting everything build up and Fudge begins the game, you find yourself back in the Weasleys' tent and it's like, "What, THAT'S IT?!???!! Where the F*** is the Quidditch?!?!??!"

*fumes for a minute*

And the Horntail! The Hungarian Horntail in the first Task isn't supposed to get OUT of the arena!

But, then again, I suppose they're trying to make up for the GLARING LACK OF QUIDDITCH, so they probably figured, "Well, how about instead of having two mad Bludgers chasing after Harry and him chasing the Snitch, we have a raving dragon chase him and have him fly around the school and smack himself into the architecture? How 'bout it? Sounds brilliant, innit?"

Bollocks to that, hell, no.

And I am forced, once again, to bemoan the tragic lack of Draco Malfoy scenes. Even more so for this movie coz Tom Felton just makes him look absolutely yummy droolworthy hot. XD

Really. That first scene which he has, when he enters the Quidditch stadium with his father? It had to be pretty hot with all the people around, and he's wearing that black suit with a black turtleneck? Someone tell me it didn't just get hotter. Haha... XD

I'm fangirling, I know. 'Tis the result of reading too many lovely H/D slash fics over the last few days, in particular, this one: Life, As Experienced Through Your Fingers by Gold-Snitcher.

There's no magic in the story, but our favourite familiar characters are all in there (with some new names added), in the setting of a school for the arts. You know, liberal arts; music, art, drama, the like. Am now thoroughly in love with the thought of a piano and violin duet, and I wish I hadn't stopped piano when I did. Sigh.


Camille Saint-Saens' "Danse Macabre" is exhilarating.

And this piece by Michael Nyman is a beauty that makes me want to laugh and cry and dance and run and stand still all at the same time.