One more week and home.

I’m going to miss being on holiday here. But on the bright side, many people to meet and places to eat at! And an internship to look forward to…?

Holiday diversions.

It’s good that I am officially on holiday and have no work to do, because I am spending far too much time watching and listening to various playlists of top songs from the 90s/00s.

Eastern Europe – I call it that although it wasn’t really, but I’m not going to refer to it as South-eastern/Eastern/Southern Europe – was great. Vienna, which is definitely not really Eastern Europe, was as opulent as I’d expected it to be, but Bratislava, Zagreb and Ljubljana were all (surprisingly) charming. Budapest was my favourite city on the trip, and sort of epitomises it: slightly grimy, occasionally faded (the Communist influence), but mostly elegant architecture, grand buildings overlooking the river, wide boulevards or narrow tree-lined streets, shady squares, trams and their overhead cables everywhere, plenty of cafes, people bustling about… a very pleasant, atmospheric feeling of ‘real’-ness. Oh yes, forgot to mention: the unpronounceable languages too.

This trip has really whetted my appetite for more – not now I mean, I need a while to recover from 11 nights of less-than-adequate sleep – maybe for my grad trip, if I do get down to doing one. More of Slovenia and Croatia definitely. In addition to Norway, Prague and Krakow. It’s just so exciting to have all these travel plans… and I’m happy I got the chance to make plans in the first place.

It’s that mood that envelopes you on a cool summer evening as the light gets gradually gentler.

Last night I met Grace, and we talked about the weirdness of how our friends would be starting work. It’s strange how this only applies to the TSD people and not Boys and Girls. Perhaps because we spent 2 years together angsting about our futures and selling out and growing older without really realising in 5 years we would look back on all that with a wry smile (and probably some panic, proof that we’re not that grown yet, if at all). What feels strange now is not so much the certain fact that people are going to start working, but rather imagining them adopting and inhabiting all the little practices of working life, from the clothes – lawyers, I’m looking at you – to the business-type phones, to, I dunno, meeting at Clarke Quay for drinks or something. But it will all happen. How to accept it? Look into a sunset and breathe.

Freedom.

My one exam is over. There goes the last exam of my undergraduate life (I only submit examined essays for third year), and quite possibly the last one in my life. Celebrated with a dress-up dinner with the housemates at the very underwhelming Canteen Canary Wharf.

Off on a 10-day Eastern Europe capitals trip tomorrow – meeting Jafnie in Munich then we’ll be going to Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, Zagreb and Ljubljana (I’m still not sure how to pronounce it). Then three more weeks of bumming around and enjoying life, then home.

Hello summer!

Today I went for a pretty powerful performance of Titus Andronicus at the Globe. The most interesting thing about it was that it was in Cantonese. I could only catch a few words, but I’d managed to read the play beforehand so I wasn’t really lost. In any case it was a novel experience, to follow the trajectory of the play by going along with the beats, the voices. And of course it reminded me of TSD – even more strongly than normal because of the bare-bones staging.

There’s not much about this nostalgia for theatre and the bigger things it represents (idealism, being in-the-moment, the whole experience etc) that we haven’t already talked about before, or that I haven’t felt before, with different inflections, in the five years (already?) that have passed since TSD. But it was moving moments like the curtain call at today’s performance that make me feel so, so grateful that I was lucky enough – and survived the process – to get a glimpse into that chaotic world where crises, with all the ugliness and pain they involve, come together with beauty in the strangest ways. I feel like it all made me more sensitive to little things, a capacity which I am endlessly thankful for.

I suppose it’s apt in some way this song is stuck in my head. If I close my eyes it makes me feel like I’m floating. On cool water, or on a breath of sea breeze, my toes still lightly touching the sand.

weather woes.

I think since moving here to study the weather has become a much greater influence on my mood and energy.

So some sun now would be nice. 

I liked Amsterdam. Despite how we found it slightly boring after a couple of days walking around, it was still very picturesque, and I’m a sucker for picturesqueness.

Absolutely psycho weather here in London which makes me feel like lazing around – well, to all practical purposes I suppose I am.

I seem to be turning into a Jack Johnson listener. A sign of… age? Earlier today I listened to Green Day’s American Idiot for the first time in years and it’s just struck me 7 years separate my current self from the one associated with that album, the one that listened to it in buses back home from airport studying sessions and thought making novacaine the subject of a song was pretty cool.

I blog, therefore I remember.

It’s been a long time!

I’ve spent the last 5 hours or so reading my old blog posts. Not the old ones on this blog, but the old ones on my old blog. So really old blog posts. Stuff I wrote when I was fifteen and clearly raging through (post-)puberty.

It all started because after returning from the recent trip with my mother and aunts, I was putting the city maps I’d collected into my sentimental box. (Yes, I get sentimental over maps.) So then I started looking at the other stuff I’d put in the box – cards people wrote when I first came to London, my 22nd and 23rd birthday cards, etc. The only thing predating 2010 in that box was the notebook/journal I used during BMT, which I’d brought over in the knowledge that there would be days like this when I would read it and think. I read it from cover to cover, including the copious notes on hand grenades and stripping an M16 and so on. I re-read my diary entries, almost all of which were written during the initial confinement period (I suppose after that I had more or less adjusted, hence less angst). This was familiar territory, so just nostalgic smiles and nods. What surprised me were some scrawls on the final pages. Just a couple of them, but the one written in the largest font and underlined said (or rather shouted) “OUR ARMY? FUCK THE ARMY!!!”

It was amusing. I can tell this must have been written in some lecture or talk, and probably to one of my buddies who was as pissed off as I was about whatever the speaker was talking about. But I have no recollection at all of who was speaking or of the subject matter.

It’s a funny feeling that led me to go through my old blog entries, and that kept on surfacing as I read. I had written about so much that I remember nothing of now, but that clearly greatly affected me then. Almost all my entries from July 2004 to June 2005 angst about some aspect or other of being EDS chairperson, and I blogged almost every 2 days then. And some of it was real toxic, self-blaming stuff. Looking at much of it, I have no idea if I really felt that way or if I was exaggerating. I remember quite a few incidents which I blogged about, and I remember my emotional reaction, but it’s hard to know if I’m remembering correctly or if I’m looking at it through glasses tinted by time and (dare I say it) maturity.

I was blogging right down to the details back then, even what we were doing in Maths or Physics classes. And I marvel that I found the patience and determination to do so almost every day, even when I was under very evidently great stress. I know I found blogging a great form of catharsis then, but I’d completely forgotten the scale to which it served as a vent. I’m glad I was so detailed though, cause it really makes the memories brought back that much more vivid.

I read through my JC (read: TSD) entries, and the posts made during NS. Okay, I didn’t read all of them, I only read a few months’ entries out of the entire year. But I could really see the changes. I could see the mellowing through the changing tone of my posts, even through how the posts became much more widely spaced apart – a trend that has continued through university. I could see the loss, or maybe the evolution, of a certain sort of fierce idealism (?) – in 2006/7 I actually wrote a poem about not fulfilling hopes and dreams.

These are all very mundane observations I realise. But I cannot help feeling this great sense of – growth? that permeates these posts under the surface. They really show me how I was like at that point in time. See how my BMT outburst just illustrates a lot of the anger and bitterness I felt then. And it’s just… interesting, to see how far I’ve come, what I’ve gone through. I make it sound like my life has been a series of epochal shifts, which it hasn’t been, but it has in a way, you know what I mean. And not just me, but all the friends I talk about (and many I talk about I no longer talk to, which is in itself something else to mull over) as well. I can see how JC and especially TSD really kickstarted the maturing process, and NS started the mellowing part of it, both of which are hopefully even if haphazardly still continuing now. And all this just within 8 years. I can’t imagine how at 30 I might look back at this post and wonder what on earth I was talking about (I hope not!).

I think a couple of years ago or maybe even a year ago the thought at looking back on my life in middle or old age would have been horrifying or at the very least depressing. Guess I should take it as a good sign that now it’s just… a thought. Something to think about, to feel, instinctively. It makes me want to take my guitar and sit at a window.

And it’s highlighted the importance of keeping a record. I wonder if I should keep a (handwritten) journal now. I doubt I can ever go back to my Sec 3 blogging self and write about the minutiae of daily existence, but thinking about it now I’m sure there is a lot lost when I just go day to day largely letting things I encounter slip through my memory, which I have come to realise in recent years is not exactly very reliable.

Alternative is to blog more I suppose. Well, down to the nitty gritty of the second half of term – or what I remember of it.

Completed my essay-portfolio thing before term ended, which now looks like a very smart thing to have done, if I may say so myself. Submitted a short story which people and my tutor liked. Caught All-American Rejects at a small cosy venue and they were fantastic. Got through some really cold weather. Had a lovely birthday picnic at Greenwich Park (becoming a yearly tradition!) with housemates, Nicole, Michael, Joohee and Leyla. What else.

The trip with my mother and aunts was memorable. Not entirely for all the right reasons, but still. It’s funny, family. How complacent we get with them, how irritated we can be with them, and only miss them afterwards after they’ve left. I make it sound like a terrible trip – it wasn’t at all. We saw loads of things – the Giant’s Causeway, Carrick-a-rede and the Scottish Highlands were my favourites. We had really glorious weather in Ireland and Scotland (but rain in York, cold in Liverpool, and typical London rain). We had plenty of laughs – over conversations consisting entirely of talk about bowel movements, running in the cold, being out of place in a posh restaurant. I had my grumpy moments definitely, which I couldn’t help then but regret now. Anyway I hope they enjoyed themselves. If anything it was a good experience for me, and I’m glad, despite my constant thoughts to the contrary, that I got the chance to see so much. If you’d like to read more about the places we visited, keep a lookout on bits and pieces - I’ll be updating there soon hopefully, once I get over my procrastination.

Amsterdam this coming week. Till next time (with today’s realisation of how important keeping records is, hopefully soon!)

little beautiful things.

I had always heard your entire life flashes in front of your eyes the second before you die. First of all, that one second isn’t a second at all. It stretches on forever, like an ocean of time. For me, it was lying on my back at Boy Scout camp, watching falling stars. And yellow leaves from the maple trees that lined my street. Or my grandmother’s hands, and the way her skin seemed like paper. And the first time I saw my cousin Tony’s brand new Firebird. And Janie… And Janie… And Carolyn. I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me, but it’s hard to stay mad, when there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst… And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it. Then it flows through me like rain, and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life. You have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m sure. But don’t worry… you will someday.

- American Beauty

and also.

stuff like this make me want to write poetry.

insert cryptic title

it would make a post which is about nothing really seem much more meaningful.

I’ve been watching movies and playing a lot of guitar the past couple of weeks since schoolwork went into a bit of a lull. just watched Brokeback Mountain earlier (a little awkward… but great film).

been planning for the upcoming trip around Ireland and the UK with my mother and aunts as well. really looking forward to it though I will be glad once the (occasional bouts of) paranoia over minute details is gone.

one of those doubting, lethargic moods is coming on again. probably the closest thing to having a period I get.

I dunno why but not knowing what I want from life feels like a sin.