a modern day warrior

Moved to Wordpress.

One thing I've always hated about planning is that if I make it too fluid, I won't have the discipline to stick to it ("I said I was going to do it, but I don't have to do it now...") and if I make it too rigid, other people invariably come and screw it up. :) Which, for someone with as high a P score as I do, is a perfect reason to overhaul my entire plan. A plan, I might add, that is extremely flexible.

Right now I am correction-taping my planner and killing the plans I made last week for the next eight (now seven) weeks. But on the upside, I have somehow oddly conditioned myself to stay home and write the two films that have been festering in my head forever. I actually got home at 10 PM today. I think I have gone to Borders and Kino so much, and sat in the Cathay Starbucks and the Wheelock Coffee Bean (which I am now avoiding because I accidentally took another customer's iced tea, instead of my tea latte. Don't ask me how I did it. I was tired) that there is nothing left to do. Actually, I stopped having things to do in Borders when I finished reading The Wolf of Wall Street. Clearly my subsequent impulse buys of Meisner's The Art of Acting and Lance Armstrong's autobiographies (and the Les Miserables Complete Symphonic Recording and Original London Cast recording) were merely sad attempts at injecting some meaning into meaningless meanderings around town. Funnily enough, Borders does not seem to have Glamorama, but it's okay, I think I borrowed it from the National Library last week (unless it was Less Than Zero? Hmm oh crap I swear I borrowed three books, but I only see two. Oh never mind.) But well, it's good. Good for my wallet, especially.

I must admit at this stage it is a very refreshing thought, thinking of waking up next Monday, rolling out of bed and onto my chair, where I will have nothing to do but write those two damned short screenplays.

I still haven't packed my room. I really should. ... I really should. I wonder about the effect of packing my room on my willingness to work at home. If I turned my room into an office with a bed, drumset, guitar and wardrobe, hmm. Or, well, more like a study, since I have a stack of books behind me right now that's about half a metre high, and there are more books in the room. Hmm.

I have here a library book - Thornton Wilder's Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth and The Matchmaker. I just finished Act One of Our Town and the book is due tomorrow. I wasn't too impressed with Our Town the first time I came across it (Teo Gene-en's Lit tutorial) but I thought I should read it because Meisner, Mamet and Adler all mentioned Our Town. It... kind of grows on you. I'm not sure how to describe it. It's not spectacular and it's not brilliant, and it's brilliant for precisely that reason.

Rebecca: I never told you about that letter Jane Crofut got from her minister when she was sick. He wrote Jane a letter and on the envelope the address was like this: It said: Jane Crofut; The Crofut Farm; Grover's Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America.
George: What's funny about that.
Rebecca: But listen, it's not finished: the United States of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God - that's what it said on the envelope.
George: What do you know!
Rebecca: And the postman brought it just the same.

- Our Town, Thornton Wilder

I'm tempted to switch to Wordpress. I like how simple and efficient Livejournal is, but Wordpress is simply more powerful. Categories, for one. Pages, for another... and the option of more than one blog under the same account. Should I switch to Wordpress? I think I might.

Supposed to meet ZT at Tampines MRT in under seven and a half hours. Back to correction-taping.

HMM NYU offers Metropolitan Studies.

I just called Tisch Asia and, omg, they say that MDA will get back to them this week about sponsoring local students on the summer courses, and it could be up to a 50% subsidy by default!

:D

Look at that S$3500 magically appearing in my parents' bank account.

50% is not likely, but one can always hope. 20% is rather more realistic. And you know, I'd take S$1400 over no sponsorship any day.

And I have to say the Tisch Asia admin office head has got to be the nicest person I've talked to when it comes to enquiries. None of that "uh, I'm not sure", "wait, I check for you ah", "*sigh*", etc.

Back to typing.

I dreamt two nights ago, or was it last night, that I was back in DHS on a Wednesday relieving Clara indefinitely and I inadvertently missed 3E's lesson. When I woke up, you cannot believe how relieved I was I wasn't actually back there teaching. It was like waking up from a nightmare, only now I look back on it, I can't believe I managed to live like that for ten weeks. I admire all the relief teachers still slogging it out, because I couldn't. Or rather, I didn't, but I certainly couldn't do it again.

=====

A Certain Person (so I won't risk ruining his/her Good Name, if it was very good to begin with, but after this will have fallen through the bottom of hell) asked yesterday, "Shoot shag marry a bear, a hippo and a sea cucumber."

He/she asked Charlotte "privately", but Charlotte announced it to the entire table, upon which he/she declared, as if there were nothing wrong, that he/she would marry the sea cucumber.

After a while, he/she complained that he/she had asked Charlotte a "private question, but now you've gone and announced it to the whole world". Charlotte gave a look.

A while later, the table was rocked by another explosion from Charlotte - "Would you believe what he/she just said! - He/she said, 'But don't you think about these things?'"

=====

Zach, talking about what book to bring to NS in case he gets depressed and wants a book to "push [him] over the brink".

Zach says (3:31 AM):
or should i just read more dickens
Zach says (3:31 AM):
i always find his stuff sad
Pong says (3:31 AM):
up to you.
Pong says (3:31 AM):
I find French stuff tends to be sadder
Pong says (3:31 AM):
American novels tend to be more desperate.
Pong says (3:32 AM):
so if you want to be pushed over the brink, an American novel might not be a bad idea
Zach says (3:32 AM):
french stuff...
Pong says (3:32 AM):
but American novels aren't like falling off a cliff
Pong says (3:32 AM):
more like falling into an abyss
Zach says (3:32 AM):
i suppose this is as good a time as any to start proust....
Pong says (3:32 AM):
French novels are like falling off a cliff.
Pong says (3:32 AM):
OH MY GOD O_O

I woke up from an odd dream and the lights were on. What must have happened was, I sprawled on my bed to write something, I thought to myself, "I'll just put my head on the pillow for a bit..." And then no prizes for guessing what happened next.

Anyway, a couple of days ago at the National Library, I was walking to the bookdrop to return a book. There was this man with his son who was staring at the bookdrop like he'd never seen it before. I walked past them and was taking my book out when he said, "So when I come to return my book, I can just put it in here?"

Yep, I said.

He and his son watched as I dropped the book - Alec Guinness's My Name Escapes Me - into the bookdrop. The book fell in, and the little screen above the bookdrop showed the book being spewed out onto the tray. The tray, which was full, then moved away to make way for an empty one.

I turned to look at him, and he had the most amazed look of wonder on his face.

"Is that cool or what?" he said, with a distinctly non-Singaporean accent.

I grinned weakly and went in to the library, completely thrown off, because of what I'd just thought to myself. He was a Singaporean who I could tell had been out of the country for a long time. I had just placed him as a sort of non-Singaporean, which meant that there must be something that is Singaporean. And all this while I'd been struggling with the question, I'd just decided that perhaps being Singaporean didn't actually mean anything. Or at least it didn't mean anything positive. Or, at least, I'm not the person who can decide what being Singaporean means except to myself, and to me, being Singaporean means nothing other than being Asian and speaking English natively. No, really. But evidently it means something else. What?

I'm trying to figure out.

I am contemplating something... dodgy. But I think, I think I'll do it. Now how to ask my parents.

I am contemplating taking the Tisch Asia Sight and Sound course. It costs S$7000. Registration closes in two weeks.

agh agh agh.

Then, I might not. But... but... but... I sense my chances of making it to film school triple, if I go, even if only for the extra line in the CV. But I think (yes, honestly, even after seeing Stick Boy and Foreign Domestic Worker) it will be worth it. And I think it will give me some direction at this moment.

Sigh. What to do what to do

Incidentally, the course instructor happens to be called David Irving.

I will update this as I pack my room. That way, packing my room won't seem like such a pointless exercise in futility. Motivation, in a way.

I want to put up pictures of my very messy room but I can't find my phone's USB cable. So, only later, when I've found the cable in this pigsty. It's worse than 24, I think.

Phase 1: Clear all the newspapers from The Pile.
Phase 1, I think, is complete. I think. I think.

Okay, I'll do this slowly. Sigh.

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

:D

I'm going to sleep now. In peace.

My waking hours have been turned right side up - I woke up at 4:30 PM today and I am going to sleep soon. That put my bike commuting time (when I rode to the Tampines Mart Macs to mark and then home) at 1:30 AM and 4 AM, very nice traffic-free timing.

But that's not what I came to post. I saw that the I Don't Want To Miss A Thing video was on iLike (Facebook), so I decided to watch it before going to sleep. Unfortunately, one particularly persistent thought plagued my mind: Liv Tyler clearly got her looks from her mum.

What is wrong with you? You have only 24 of those things to go, then you are free! Then you can go back to more mundane things like packing your room, making films, playing the drums, and cycling.

What happens when two ultra-defensive Scrabble players (Yong En and myself) play a Scrabble game?

Walking home from the MRT station tonight was almost a spiritual experience. For some reason I had a bottle of Starbucks Caramel Frappe in my hand (I was at 7-11 looking for a drink. I decided against the coffee at first, but then I decided I'd probably need a kick tonight and if I thought coffee was too stiff, well, I needed to HTFU). A bit into the stroll home, I realised just how much the teaching stint hit me - it taught me how to drink coffee. I've never liked the taste of coffee - as far as I'm concerned, it's self-inflicted torture. I remember the day I slept three hours because I'm habitually nocturnal, and I had to do FOH for The History of Singapore that night, and I was practically sleepwalking around town waiting for FOH to start. When you're in that kind of situation the horror of drinking coffee pales in comparison to the kick it promises to give you, so I ordered myself a mocha frappe and then sat around wondering what I'd just done. It didn't work, by the way. I didn't feel any kick. Clearly by that time I needed something far stronger than a mocha frappe.

So the frappe proceeded to leak out of the bottle all over my hand like all frappes do, and I was irritated enough I ended up not drinking much on the way home. But anyway, no wonder almost the entire VJ arts department is alcoholic.

So as I walked home, I suddenly looked up at the sky and saw a star. I stopped. I haven't seen stars for a very long time - I recall Hengjie asking during the night cycling trip if anyone else had the impression that they saw more stars when they were younger, and I realised that yes, I don't seem to see stars these days. Then I noticed another star, and another, and what was probably a constellation of them.

Then I did something inexplicable - I tried to count them.

Of course when I did, I inadvertently thought of The Guide - "He started counting the stars. He said to himself, 'People will say, there is the man who knows the exact number of stars in the sky...'"

Yeah, I'm not sure why I did that. I think I wanted to know how this sudden explosion of stars in the night sky would compare to days in the future - that if I were to walk home tomorrow, would the stars still be there, or am I just lightheaded tonight? (Clearly I'm lightheaded - they probably won't be the same stars.) But there is nothing like seeing stars - not one, but many - in the sky to put you in your place. I am reminded now of Troy and its terrible screenplay, "Greece was Greece long before I was born, and Greece will remain Greece long after I am gone."

I think I need coffee.

And my second attempt at going to sleep, at the unearthly hour of 4 AM, fails!

I need to play some sort of game, like "Mark each script in one minute". Then I'd be done with the pile in under an hour.

That thought is very liberating, actually.

It occurs to me that I am terribly bad at motivating myself to do things I don't want to do even more so than the average person. I recall playing Pokemon with a self-imposed rule, "Do not leave a patch of grass once you have stepped in until you have fought five battles." That was because the simple command to myself, "Train your Pokemon", did not work.

Okay, I'm going to mark each script in one minute now. Be back in an hour.

I was going to go to sleep early today and get up early tomorrow to ride, bringing my marking along to do in between laps on Coastal. Motivation, I thought to myself.

Wishful thinking.

I really should get used to the idea that if I am going to sleep early, what is going to happen is that I will sit around in bed and not do anything and fail to fall asleep. Then I will pick up a book to read. Then I will remember something I need to look up, and switch my computer on. I will observe, then, that I am not tired at all, and that I feel like having instant noodles, but instant noodles are not a good idea at the moment because if I'm not going to go and ride after all, I will wake up (huh) tomorrow morning (huh) feeling stuffed.

So right now, I am sitting in front of my computer (duh) eating a can of tuna.

Sigh. At least tomorrow = tuition = $$. Not that I'm getting the money this week, only next week. Hooray, $$.

Now to get myself motivated to mark. One last pile of marking... then I am THROUGH.

Not good to read Stella Adler the night before marking a pile of film studies tests. I find myself having to resist the urge to scribble on every script - "mood is determined by location and circumstance, not by acting", and "stop indicating", and "lacks imagination and detail, can you actually see this in your head"...

I'm going to sleep. I'm too wonky to mark. Hopefully this last pile doesn't take too long to get back to them.

What happens when Zach and I arrange to meet at Tampines at 10 AM to go to VJ to ask about references?

9:30 AM - I call Zach.
"I'm still tired. Can we postpone it to later today?"
We arrange to meet at 12.
Zach: "Good. I'm going back to sleep."

11:30 AM - I call Zach.
"I'm supposed to have lunch at home and I just woke up. Let's postpone it again."
We arranged to meet at 2.
Zach: "Good. I'm going back to sleep."

1:30 PM - I call Zach.
"I fell asleep. You know what, let's just go another day."
Zach: "Good. I'm going back to sleep."

I bought Lance Armstrong's autobiography on a whim, and geez, it's a good read. There was something else I was going to say but I forgot.

"I had learned what it means to ride the Tour de France. It's not about the bike. It's a metaphor for life, not only the longest race in the world but also the most exalting and heartbreaking and potentially tragic. It poses every conceivable element to the rider, and more: cold, heat, mountains, plains, ruts, flat tires, high winds, unspeakably bad luck, unthinkable beauty, yawning senselessness, and above all a great, deep self-questioning."

Maybe it's just me and the way I attach a Notes-From-Underground importance to everything, but...

There is an unthinking simplicity in something so hard, which is why there's probably some truth to the idea that all world-class athletes are actually running away from something. Once, someone asked me what pleasure I took in riding for so long. "Pleasure?" I said. "I don't understand the question." I didn't do it for pleasure. I did it for pain.

I am a sick man. I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man. I think there is something wrong with my liver. But I don't understand the least thing about my illness, and I don't know for certain what part of me is affected. I am not having any treatment for it, and never have had although I have a great respect for medicine and for doctors. I'm besides extremely superstitious, if only in having such respect for medicine. (I am well educated enough not to be superstitious, but superstitious I am.) No, I refuse treatment out of spite... I know better than anybody that I am harming nobody but myself. All the same, if I don't have treatment, it is out of spite. Is my liver out of order? - let it get worse!
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground

I left the house intending (but not quite) to go and watch Fat Kids Are Harder To Kidnap. I ran into Kok Jun at Tampines Mall and then I took the train with him to City Hall and I went to Funan for dinner and with twenty minutes to the start of the performance I chickened out. I made some silly excuse to myself that the Substation box office was probably closed because it keeps rather odd hours (odd in the sense that it keeps almost office hours) but the real reason was a mixture of the fact that I felt lazy and I got the writer's version of stage fright.

In the first place I wasn't quite invested in my two-minute play, it was something I cooked up to meet a deadline that I had forgotten about (which happens very often... the forgetting about deadlines, not the meeting them). But I suppose more importantly I didn't want to watch it and then think to myself... sheesh, I wrote that???

No... rubbish. That was part of the reason, but there is a more fundamental reason I cannot quite articulate. The fear of putting what is essentially you out to a group of people who may be more hostile than you prefer, and knowing that they cannot hate the art without hating the artist, because... "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" (Yeats).

Okay, I will stop here before my rubbish-thinking-aloud-talk reaches monumental proportions.