knanaki

The limited trajectory of the short narrative concentrates its meaning. Sign and sense can fuse to an extent impossible to achieve among the multiplying ambiguities of an extended narrative. I found that, though the play of surfaces never ceased to fascinate me, i was not so much exploring them as making abstractions from them, I was writing, therefore, tales...

Formally the tale differs from the short story in that it makes few pretences at the imitation of life. The tale does not log everyday experience, as the short story does; it interprets everyday experience through a system of imagery derived from subterranean areas behind everyday experience, and therefore the tale cannot betray its readers into a false knowledge of everyday experience.

"Afterword to Fireworks" by Angela Carter

Call me slow, but regarding Watchmen, I'm only getting it now:

In Watchmen Moore posits the existence of costumed superheroes in the real world... subtexts of the genre that stand revealed when placed in a realistic setting: the rold of violence in determining a hero's prupose, the sexual energy overtly exhibited while simultaneously (even paradoxically) sublimiated, the profound changes wrought upon a world by the existence of even a single super-powerd being, etc.

Steven Tice, quoted in B. Keith Murphy's "The Origin of the Sandman"

i found the file but no one's seeding it... damn.

still writing my lit essay... bleagh...

941/1500

The more i read the questions set by En Ai Ee the more confused i get... I missed the days when you come up with a question that can be encapsulated in a single line or a short paragraph. Questions from the institution are one and a half pages long, AT LEAST. by the time you get to the end of it you've forgotten what it said at the start.

Too many words, too many conditions, too many componenets, too many things to look at! How to write like that...

I completely missed the mark on my first essay apparently cause i misread the question... half-way through writing my second essay i suddenly had a panic-attack and thought i read the question wrongly again and started calling everyone in my phonebook till someone picked up the call to clarify...

sigh.

complaining and whining and whinging when i really should be gritting my teeth and writing...

sigh.

boooooooooored.

not being mentally stimulated...

sigh.

i wanna get this over and done with. bleagh.

damn cough...

I learned something new today... don't eat garlic anything if you have a cough/sore throat... you'll feel like you have a mini forest fire in your oesophagus...

in other news...

there's no other news. oh no. ack.

still trying to write my lit essay... not enjoying it at all... so painful...

must get it out by tonight so i can have long guilt free stretches of fun over the weekend !!!

I foresee myself finishing that Carter book i've been carting around these past few days and finally starting on my new books!! Can't wait to start on The Sandman Papers... tee hee hee

This is so strange but I can't stop thinking about it...

If there is one thing I could go back in time to change right now it would be my microteaching.

I just can't stop thinking about how badly I think it went and how much I wish I could do it all over again to change things. The one thing I want right now more than anything else is the opportunity for practice. I just want to get out there and teach and keep practicing so that I can see in a real classroom situation, what the right tone of voice should be, how much interaction i should encourage with the class, how much explicit teaching i should do. I want to put all the theory they've been filling our heads with into practice and see how well it works in the real world...

I just want an opportunity to test out ideas, i want the opportunity to practice and start honing my skills in front of a class.

and it's really driving me up the wall and making me feel very listless that i really won't get this opportunity till next year feb, and by then it might be too late cause i'm going to be judged on it already.

And this feeling of restlessness and listlessness that is filling me up makes me think of the 'fort'-'da' game in Freud and the drive for mastery.

I feel like the child in the cass-study, a passive participant subject to an unpleasant experience. And being overpowered by said experience all i want to do is refashion it as a game or practice that i can do repeatedly over and over again as an active agent so i might relive the unpleasant experience over and over again and hope to eventually gain mastery over my feelings of the incident because this time i would be the active agent and therefore in control.

Does this make any sense to you?

egad, so frustrated...

...a new phone so bad i dreamt i already bought it... it was a Blackberry Bold...
...to watch Eva 2.0, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Informant, Zombieland, and an assortment of other shows with good company...
...to eat well
...to lose weight
...my lit assignment to magically write itself
...more time to sit and read trashy things
...to be a better teacher
...to be a better person

it feels good to want stuff... i feel like it's giving me direction

I watched Paranormal Activity, Jennifer's Body, and Julie & Julia over the last two days.

Having been deprived of my much deserved excursion to the cinema last friday, I decided to do the boderline illegal and just stream my movies, and this is what I have to say...

WHAT IS THE BIG DEAL WITH PARANORMAL ACTIVITY???

It wasn't half as good as I expected it to be. I was low-budget and it LOOKED low-budget. The acting was bad and so was the scripting! I mean most of it was ad-libbed and that's probably the reason why it was so bad... especially for the characters other than the principle actors...

I was so disappointed that Jennifer's Body came as a huge relief. It was brainless mindless fun. But at least it had special effects of a respectable standard. But that was also a stupid show though... I mean the plot was just waaaaaaaaaay too convenient and exploitative. But like I said, at least there was eye-candy... for the guys that would've been megan fox but for me at least there was some aestheticised blood and gore.

Then last night I watched Julie and Julia which was good... but still sorta didn't hit the spot for me. The acting was good (can't expect anything less from Meryl Streep and Amy Adams XDD) the food looked mouth-watering... but the plot felt a bit like there was not head and no tail for me. Just a stringing together of certain events that seemed to overlap in the lives of these two women who lived years apart. But one of the things that is infinitely more fun about watching a movie online than watching it in the cinema is that immediately after the film you can trawl the net for extra tidbits of information XD

I went to look for the Julie/Julia Project blog... and found it. It was fun. It would've been more fun of course if there were actually pictorial accompaniments to her cooking entries. But of course there weren't . And Amy Adams' version of Julie Powell seems to have more of a softglow or halo of light around her that can only come from being backlit on a Hollywood soundstage than the real Julie Powell who seems more hard-edged and real and just... less sugar and spice and everything nice, i guess....

anyway, it's time i did some decent work and stopped bumming around for the weekend.

As a sidenote:
It seems that teaching doesn't come as naturally to me as everybody seems to think it should after all... I guess I just need some time to get used to the feeling of having 40 eyes on me waiting for me to lead. I hate leading... that's why I always took vice-chair/president positions throughout my school years...

after a week of labouring over my weekend plans i find that not only did I not get to catch Paranormal Activity, I missed two buffets, one at Kushinbo and the other at Carnivore, in a row!!!

AAAARRGGHHH!!!!!

hmph. So angry. Missed Kushinbo on Thurs cause our lecturer wanted to finish his slides which ended up in class ending half an hour later than it should have leaving us only 15min before the last order at Kushinbo... I'm still dreaming about the baked salmon for that one... all that slurpy omega 3... disgusting, I know... XD

Then today, I was suppose to catch Paranormal Activity which I've been looking forward to for like weeks, and pig out at Carnivore at CHIJMES which i've also been looking forward to for weeks... but alas... a dastardly and not to unmention untimely case of food poisoning (or is it stomach flu?) left me alternately tossing and turning in bed since 5am and squatting over my dustbin/sink/toilet bowl at various points of the day waiting to throw up... which I never did in the end... My stomach still churns right now if i move too fast... bleagh. ergh.

I wanna watch Eva 2.0... Must call up lynnette... perhaps she'll be able to appreciate it with me XD
I'm considering catching paranormal activity online since no one else was really interested in the first place and had to be coerced into going anyway...

erm... haven't updated in a while... I guess that means ilfe's been good. Which is great. I still have assignments due, but I'm enjoying the company i'm keeping these days. Everyone's just so lovely.

hmm... yup. there's really nothing else going on except this stupid bout of food poisoning, so I guess this post sums up the past few days of my life. yay.

Even when completely uninhibited I'm a complete pain in the arse. sigh.

Other than that, I have the strongest urge to rewatch Fullmetal Alchemist from top to finish... sigh. I need better things to do with my life than repeating stuff i've done before.

As the years pass, i think friendship continues to elude me because it is based on reciprocity. I expect others to confide in me yet refuse to confide in others. I think it odd to hear myself talking out loud about weaknesses, frustrations, worries... I've always felt that if i can vocalise or verbalise what my worries are then i can deal with them because if they can be defined i can start to unpack them and take steps to improve my own situation... I only fear what I don't know and what I don't know I can't talk about and so cannot confide in anyone. Because of this I appear cold, aloof, unfeeling, controlled, insincere, patronising, glacial, apathetic, and a whole bunch of other things.

I feel an odd shift since tuesday. It's like my sudden outburst about something other than work stress has suddenly humanised me in the eyes of others. I sense a warmth coming from the people around me suddenly. It's heartwarming but at the same time disturbing, as if i can only express myself in extremes... with an emotionality that has flat-lined or one that has spiked off the charts... I desperately need to find a balance. And I need to deal with my control issues.

1500/2000...

This is so painful. It's like giving birth. Lit essays never felt like that... I think.

My lecturer just flat out told me to stop thinking like a uni student.

I think i'm officially in the throes of an identitiy crisis.

But how do you just give up four years of education at the snap of your fingers? How do you drop back into the mundane when your eyes have been opened by minds many times brighter than your own. How do you close your eyes when faced with the brilliance of academia?

It’s not fair.

I'm just not willing to give this up, yet.

So when I say this is an epic fail, I'm speaking of myself. I just don't love pedagogy enough to give up my love of learning.

( Read more... )

In other news.

My grades so far have been a B and a B-.

I don't know what i'm more perturbed by, my lack of perturbation over my poor performance or my poor performance?

OOOOOOooooo!!!

I just bought the ultimate evil ring. It's the perfect excuse for world domination. kinda like the fulfilment of a childhood fantasy. I feel like I've finally grown into the piece XD

caught the news today, which in itself is a rare occurrence. Apparently there's a new campaign to bring down the number of female smokers between the ages of 18-29 which has seen a 4% increase since 2004 by tapping into a woman's basic need to look good...

Hold up.

Basic NEED to look good?
What kind of sexist statement is that?
Why do we even NEED to look good?
I don't think it's a NEED so much as something we do occasionally because we have to. Like say when we have a formal party to attend or a presentation to give.
I take offence that dressing up and looking good is deemed a Basic NEED in a woman.
I know some people like dressing up, and there ain't nothing wrong with that. But to say it like it's encoded in our genes is a little insulting. I'd like to think I get to CHOOSE if I want or don't want to dress up for the day... rather than have that impulse reduced to a basic need...

Just griping.

In other news, quite literally, Crystal Storage. Amazing amazing stuff. Again another rare occurrence, I read the newspapers today... I honestly don't know how I'm going to be a teacher next time if I check out the news so bloody infrequently, but never mind, moving on... apparently once they perfect the technology (which they say will be within the next decade or so), we'll get to store stuff in 3-D rather than 2-D like on CDs and DVDs. PLUS, a crystal cube the size of a sugar crystal is suppose to be able to store up to 2TB. 2 freakin' TB. Just try and wrap your mind around that... that's an enormous amount of information in such a small package... I think it's mind-boggling.

But it also makes me think about the amount of information we're generating with the internet. We seem to be churning out facts and crunching numbers and statistics at an exponential rate, and any tom, dick or harry can put up an entry on their blog about some random fact or random piece of information they've come across and this is all counted towards the growing amount of information we're amassing online...

It's like, where is all this information coming from? When Shakespeare was around you only had the greek/roman classics, the bible and Montagne to read and if you exhausted those three categories, you could be learned and a scholar. Now there are so many disciplines with so many journals and so many papers being written and published around the clock the whole year round that suddenly there is a NEED for crystal storage just to keep track of all this information, and soon TERAbyte isn't going to cover it anymore, we're gonna need a different type of byte, just like how mega- and giga- has become everyday terms when we talk about computer storage...

Right.

Apart from that, it was a most unproductive day today. I lazed and slept instead of doing work. So did my group members apparently... sigh. Lucky we started early and all this was anticipated XD

example of second person narrative

[Miller] is the playwright of an audience that believes the frightening complexities of history and experience are to be met with a few ideas, and yet does not even possess these ideas any longer but can only point significantly at the place where they were last seen and where it is hoped they might still be found to exist. What this audience demands of its artists above all is an intelligent narrowness of mind and vision and a generalised tone of affirmation, offering not any particular insights or any particular truths, but simply the assurance that insight and truth as qualities, the things in themselves, reside somehow in the various signals by which the artist and the audience have learned to recognise each other.

Warshow, Robert. (1962). The Immediate Experience. New York: Doubleday. pp. 189-203.

When I read this, I kept thinking of all those infuriating avant garde plays that they stage at the Esplanade that purport to carry the truth of the universe in them then hold it just teasingly out of the audience's reach. It makes me wonder if they actually know what they're going on about or is it just another case of an empty centre, an empty signifier. Or a bunch of signifiers pointing at the empty centre. It's exactly like what he says isn't it? we recognise the signs and the signals and we begin to regard that as sufficient indication that a truth is buried somewhere in art. But is it really? or have we just grown so afraid of analysis, so afraid of murdering to dissect that we've sort of grown content with being lazy readers instead of rigorous investigators, ever ready to unpack a text and wring out as much meaning from it as possible?

It's gonna be another one of those nights...