'Weep for yourself, my man,
You'll never be what is in your heart
Weep Little Lion Man,
You're not as brave as you were at the start
Rate yourself and rake yourself,
Take all the courage you have left
Wasted on fixing all the problems
That you made in your own head'

Mumford and Sons, Little Lion Man.
Now I dare you to say that this isn't poetic in the faintest.

I wonder, does writing here gives the false impression of substantiality? Of intelligence, of sophistication, of wisdom, of having sound opinions?
Most of my days are spent struggling between working and not working; the time spent doing productive work and wanting a break from it, and the time spent flopping about while feeling guilty about not doing work. I'm a rather crude person, with an all-or-nothing way of emotionally reacting to something, which exhausts me. Being me exhausts me, and I'm rather bored of being me these days, after 20 years, if I'm honest about it. But still, I suppose this is the only mode of living since we're not allowed to be different people on different days. This is the character you're stuck with, which is very tedious.
Oh, I don't really know what's the point I'm trying to make, and this is written very badly. I'm swamped with assignments, and feeling rather uninspired.

I'll play my escape card and show you something brilliant instead of actually writing something.
This is Hugh Laurie, who besides being funny or being a TV doctor, is now also a certified blues musician.




If we can be different people on different days, I want to be Hugh Laurie on Tuesdays, please. Such intelligence, such wit. And I'd get to talk to Stephen Fry loads, which can't remotely be a bad thing.

Fear and loathing.

Something must be done about the cockroach on the third floor.
I was lying on the floor after a bout of migratory reading, having a very short nap. The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was a large cockroach in my vicinity.
It's disgusting. The shape, the color. The way they move. The way their legs scuttle. The quick, loud scrapping noise it made when it scuttled across the room. Everything about it is positively nauseating. So much so, that I had no pity for the obvious, very potent fear it's clearly displaying.
Is this what racism is about? Is this why they gassed Jews in Nazi Germany? This irrational disgust and lack of pity and empathy and humanity?

I can't kill it, so I'll catch it and dispose of it somewhere. But where?

Well, darlings, assignment fever is upon us again. This is, genuinely, stressful yet exciting. Anything with a deadline and expectations are generally stressful yet exciting.
It's also in times like these that I most often imagine sequences of self-harm. It typically comes hand-in-hand with a sort of desperation, which probably instigated the sequences anyway. Entirely cartoonish, but they would, morbidly, involve stabbing myself in the abdomen with a pencil, or putting a gun to my head and pulling its trigger. The sequences have a sort of tragicomedy feel to them, and are entirely unreal; they're probably an outlet, my instinctive way to resolve the desperation.
Well it's better than beating someone up or overeating or kicking poor kittens, I suppose. Entirely in the head.

Stressed by assignments. Can't write well. Tired too.
Full day of classes tomorrow.
Goodnight.

Look, pictures!

Sorry for the very tumblr-like posts. Please forgive because they are after all pictures of books arranged in a very pretty manner, which surely are redeeming qualities.
From bookshelf porn:

Literary.

I was at the makeshift booksale at KL Central this afternoon, whiling away the time waiting for my next train.
There was this young man there, who I noticed was holding a copy of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cresadia, while he was putting back a book on TS Eliot.
I thought, "You must be interesting", and asked if he'd hand me that Eliot book.

How often do you see another person, young or otherwise, who'd be holding a copy of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cresadia, while putting back something about Eliot?
Infrequent enough that I thought this little thing warrants a mention in a blog post.

Lordy, I have 99 words left and I still have the CSR practices of law firms in the UK, the US, EU, and Malaysia, to enumerate.
This would be fun.

The assignment and Other Doings.

I'm 300 words until I reach my word limit, with loads more to stuff into my assignment. My assignment is a turkey given to me that is way too small for the stuffings I've prepared. But such is life.

Want to place bets on how much I'll exceed my word limit this time?

I've been a faithful visitor to the Guardian's fashion and beauty page, especially to the video-only content of their How to Dress segment. I'm not a stickler for fashion, and I hate buying clothes (all the changing and deliberating and assessing - they're a bother I'll only indulge in once a year); God knows why, but they're so therapeutic. I keep telling myself, Right, this is the last one. Go toil over your assignment now; but I keep watching another, and another, and another. I don't even plan to buy anything featured there because they're not really my style.
Is it a British thing? Shows and things about fashion and clothes and beauty that does the miracle of not irritating me? You should go watch an episode of Gok Wan's How to Look Good Naked, or some other of his fashion advice shows. They're also very therapeutic, and aren't ditzy and blonde and irritating.

*The Assignment and Other Doings would make a good band name, wouldn't it?

False promises.

I'm teetered at home today by the promise (not artificial, I hope) of a delivery of something expensive, that everyone is anxious about it being submitted to the delivery process. My parents are certainly more nervous about it than myself, if being woken up several times in the morning gives any indication.

It's my expensive thing - you can call it a decent tool for work or an expensive toy. But it's something I'm not very excited about (I'm just mildly excited) while feeling immensely guilty over, because it's so expensive, and I don't deserve anything so expensive; and what am I thinking spending so much money anyway?

Its last status, as indicated by the DHL's tracking site, said that it's being stuck at clearance at the Shah Alam airport, so I don't think it would be coming today; but still, another hour of waiting to be sure.

I've spent most of my day in an intense, concentrated state; reading, copying for my assignments. So at the end of the day, I have nothing else to offer here. I'm drawn out - all I want to do is nothing.

I'll dazzle you with this instead:



Isn't it wonderful? I listened to this clip exclusively while I was sloughing through my work. There's infectious enthusiasm, a great pick-me-up in the form of Mumford and Sons' The Cave, and the sheer coolness of Bob Dylan (that man radiates cool. It's in his every movement). The fact that all of them up-and-coming folk bands are so childishly excited to be playing for Bob Dylan. The standing ovation at the end.

Art is beautiful.

I should have had a schedule.

It's almost bedtime now, so I'm worn out. Hmm, funny, I thought I've had a very productive day, but on review, I'd only chalked up about 6 pages worth of notes? Come now, that's ridiculous.

The deadline for my assignment is exactly next week, the 17th, and that impending deadline is sending me into a slight panic. I've planned to start writing today, a week before the deadline, but I'm not happy with the amount of information I've amassed, notwithstanding the fact that 40 A4 pages of small script sounds monstrous. So today, and I fear, tomorrow, must be spent in a slight panic, clutching whatever I can to my bosom of notes, while intermittently berating myself for procrastinating. A bit like a flurried squirrel gathering nuts for the quickly-approaching winter, in fact. Squirrels are lovely things, and a friend did say I'm positively squirrel-like in nature, minus the buck tooth and fondness for nuts, so squirrel-analogy it is.

The self-criticising part of me has leaned back and looked at what I've written so far, and said that I've given this impression that I'm diligent and studious and hardworking, and spared no effort when it comes to doing this assignment. Oh, if only you'd known! On the contrary, I don't think I've done enough. I feel like I'm missing something somehow, some important article citing figures, a nice research to make things definite. And the writing part is positively scary - really, a roller coaster ride or a jaunt through a haunted house isn't as scary as this, because those two things aren't parameters to assess your worth, and wouldn't have much of an influence on your future. On the scale of things, writing an assignment is scarier. Everyone else seems to have it so neatly together, while I feel like my seams are falling apart. Of course, I wouldn't know because I haven't seen what they've been doing, and this might be a very pessimistic estimation I'm inflicting on myself, but best not to ignore it and reassure myself and slack off and spend more time watching tv or writing here and -

My eyes are this > -- small now, and I'm peeking through my eyelids with my laziest lazy-face on. Time to put myself out of my misery. Goodnight!

Childlike sincerity.

After a while, I faced the realities of my situation, threw in the towel, and went to nestle on the couch with a cup of milo and a list of ted talk videos streamed to my television.
And of all the videos I watched, it must be that I love the one from the '1000 awesome things blogger' the most. It's only natural, really.



 I think it's the childish enthusiasm, the 5-year-old sincerity engulfing that talk, that got to me.

I'll attempt to provide a more through explanation here tomorrow, but for now, it's to the comfy embraces of my bed.

Goodnight!

In a limbo between sleep and wakefulness.

Oh darlings, I'm tired, so tired today.
There's this blockage at the part of my eyes nearest to my nose. It's the point from which this tiredness emanates - I'm sluggy, I can't concentrate well, and all I want to do is sleep it away. There isn't enough work done to make me happy - most of my time was spent moping listlessly between my bed and my computer, a battle between wills - the desire to sleep, and the desire to be productive.
And dearies, I've tried everything that would normally work - the tea, the naps, the nasal inhaler. Blowing my nose, clearly my nasal pathways, breathing in a specific way; nothing worked. In my desperation, I even tried walking around the living room, vigorously, for 15 minutes - that didn't work either.
Is it hormones? My slothful, unhealthy lifestyle finally catching up with me? Is it a sign that my sinus problem really needs to be looked into? I can't know.

Meanwhile, I do hope I don't wake up like this tomorrow. Please, ye Gods of productivity. Bestow upon me energy and vitality and if you can, inspiration. I am determined to send in well-researched, well-written assignments, things that I can really be proud of - it'd be a waste to let this determination go to waste just because I'm too tired. Any help you can spare would be much appreciated. Thanks.

X
Mei Yen.

Writers.

I like writers. They observe life and present it to you in a neat, beautiful whole.

I'm dipping into Virginia Woolf's Selected Letters a lot these days, as I intermittently would, and I'm slightly saddened by the fact that I can't write anywhere as lovely as she does.

These days, I'm buoyed up by a sort of hope. I'm sure I would do injustice to that emotion with bad prose - besides, it's quite disgusting to talk about one's hopes and fears and dreams and sorrows in the public sphere. It's this happiness to write, and to write well. I'm swamped by three assignments now (oh, the injustice!), and I'd rather write something here, fretting about how a sentence would sound, than to read articles for my assignments.

Wherein I painfully discover that the 'bagai isi dengan kuku' analogy makes a lot of sense.

I'm in such an irritable mood today that I've half a mind not to write anything. Can anything written in an irritable mood be any good anyway?

I did something very odd almost as soon as I woke up in the morning - before I even got downstairs. There I was, walking downstairs in no perceptively different manner, when I hit my right foot against the back of my left one. What followed was a sharp, burning pain; and blood seeping out from under my toenail.
I had, for all intents and purposes, stubbed my toe rather badly against the back of my other leg, which as you can tell, is ridiculous.
To make this sounds more ridiculous, there was no perceptible injury whatsoever on the other leg. You wouldn't have thought pliant flesh would survive such an assault by something like a nail (made of considerably sterner stuff) completely unscathed, but that's what happened.
I'm convinced that this is some miracle of physics.

It still hurts all the time - a sort of tender throbbing that's almost ticklish. I'm still hobbling everywhere, and my brother is still very curious about my toe-injury, and exceedingly apologetic when he does anything to injure it. Like poke it.

Unhealthy cravings. Will die before 30.

I'm having a craving for Dauphinoise potatoes.
This isn't a craving born out of deprivation, because I've, almost single-handedly, finish a kg's worth of potatoes baked in fat cream last week, in the span of two days.
My mother, the purveyor of my weight (a responsibility she has decided to delegate to herself), would be outraged.

I'd like to think this is great practice, a nice-getting-used-to Britain, the land of potatoes and heavy cream (or so I've been told).

And oh, pepperoni pizzas. I think I'm looking ahead to a long life with cravings for pepperoni pizza humming constantly in the background. No matter how much I've ate, or the duration between pepperoni pizzas, I would want some the moment I'm reminded of them.

Fantastic creatures.

Have you ever seen an animal that isn't absolutely wonderful?
Discounting the cases where the animals are ravaged with some disease, or abused to the point where they lose their majesty, animals of any sort naturally inspires a sort of awe, if you're sensitive towards those things.
It might be the majesty of a big cat, the dainty, quick cuteness of a domestic feline, the staunch look of a lizard, the eerie, human resemblance of a giant panda. They just have this sort of majesty humans don't.

Well, I suppose the human form is quite lovely too, if only they don't ruin all that lovely impression by speaking.

If I have my way, I'd have at least two furry creatures padding around the house.
A friend of mine has 14 (at last count) cats going in and out of the house throughout the day (being cats). I think that's wonderful.

I'll leave you with this picture of Tasmanian Tigers (now extinct).

Aren't they lovely? Dog-like with tigers' strips. Australia has a wonderful mix of animals so extraordinary you can't believe they're real.




* I met a dog in bad shape today. I don't know if it's the natural ravages strays go through, or if it was abused. It had haunting eyes - one brown and one black, used to give me a fleet, haunting look.
In the same vicinity, I saw a quick, adorable cat moving between tables soliciting for food. I noticed a long, wide scar on its back in between fish-feeding cycles. 
Now, I might be paranoid and very cynical, but I suspect abuse. 
I feed the strays outside my house. We have an odd sort of friendship. One of them is quite aggressive towards other dogs, and probably get into fights quite a lot (comes with the territory of being aggressive, I suppose), but they don't have scars or injuries that look like that. Both those animals have injuries that looked unnatural. 

:(

How do I go about saying this? - a glass of water was emptied all over my iPod Touch. The culprit my wilfully reckless brother.
The backlight doesn't seem like it's working anymore.

I was plunged into this stupid cycle of fury, frustration, and self-loathing for feeling angry and frustrated for what is essentially the lost of a luxury gadget.
It really isn't starving in Africa or the earthquake-tsunami-nuclear disaster in Japan. Quite disgusting, even to me. It's really a display of first-world brattiness - privileged 20 year old moaning about being 'unjustly deprieved' of the use of a luxury gadget. How selfish.
All that too well chronicled on twitter, so no repetition here.

Wednesday

Today is a day packed to the rim with dizzy excitements, all with the benefit of happening in the comforts of one's own home!

- I made the Dauphinoise potatoes again, by myself! Tastes perfectly this time - I smarted up and added a little more salt than I thought was necessary. Turned out to be just perfect.
A blog post about it might come up? With pictures and everything.

- a lot of tweets. A lot. Ranging from something food-related, to travel, to quoting Oscar Wilde, and to typing out funny things about Harry Potter. Hello, that's variety.

- today, I have tasted the smartest chocolate ever. It was an 'alcoholic' chocolate in the shape of a wine bottle. Expecting a normal chocolate that tastes faintly like brandy, I bit into the center of the chocolate and tasted potent alcohol, in liquid form.
So in effect, the chocolate layer serves the purposes of a wine bottle, containing the alcohol inside.
Isn't that a very smart thing to do? I beam with joy just thinking about it :)

Sentences of sheer beauty.

'I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age...The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring; I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colour of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder...I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.'

- Oscar Wilde, De Profundis.

This dream must confirm that I have a deep, secret love for A4 paper.

After running out of A4 paper recently, I had a vivid memory of mum bringing back a pack of them and casually handing them to me. I also remember putting it in a certain spot, heart filled with a secret sort of joy because I like stationaries, and because I can now resume my normal note-taking.
I even remember walking to some spot in the house while thinking about how much I like stationaries.

How can all that be a dream? :(
I mean, I understand the possibility of having dreamt up getting a supply of A4 paper, but to the extent of placing them in a certain spot? And who, in their dreams, would think about how much they like stationaries?
Everything seemed normal, until some time later I found my printer in the spot where I had supposedly put that stack of A4 paper. My 'supply' of A4 paper was nowhere to be seen :(
I had to ask mum if she had bought A4 paper, to confirm it was all a dream :(

But you'd be glad to hear that dad has brought home a pack of A4 paper today :D
(glad for the sake of my sanity, because you are all nice people)

I now have Hitler pictures in my blog.
Not just pictures, but moving gifs.

Does that make me a bit scandalous?

I've just discovered that there probably is more than one tumblr-blog dedicated to David Mitchell.

But don't bother pondering whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. Just savour the loveliness emanating from those tumblr-blogs. Like this:

 

I should probably point out that David-has-Hitler-hair is a running joke in the comedic circles.

David actually seems more aggressively angry than Hitler in this set of comparative gifs. He was arguing a very minor point in a panel show. Hitler was probably giving a speech.
I'd say 'we now know who the real Fuhrer is', but that doesn't make any sense at all.

*don't know which blog to credit, because I don't get the whole reblog thing. But thank you, blog owner. This is a thing of brilliance.

Wherein I discover that there might a tumblr-blog for every conceivable thing in the universe.

Now, about tumblr.
I don't quite understand tumblr, this complex system of pictures and reposts and 'likes'.
It seems to be mostly about re-posting pretty pictures that resonates with you. Now, re-posting pretty pictures made by other people doesn't seem like the best way to explain yourself, which is surely what a blog is about? It seems to be an amalgamation of pictures you find pretty, which is alright for those who wants to collect pretty pictures. But everything doesn't seem quite original, doesn't seem very expressive. Or maybe I'm narcissistic enough to think that having an original voice is necessary for self-expression.
It's just not for me I suppose. Wrong medium of expression - pictures instead of words. I love frolicking about with words, which is why this blog has little to no pictures. Here I should apologise to the ADD ones amongst you looking for a picture or two to give relief to the monotoneous black-and-white. I am sorry if you should one day snap from the strain of it, and go into a nervous breakdown. I try to make things better by embedding in YouTube videos which I have no doubt you would never watch.

But while postulating that I might be the secret love child of David Mitchell and Zooey Deschanel that turned out to look strangely Chinese (why am I typing in such a tedious form today? Postulating?), I turned to google to see if anyone else has used that comparison before.
This is when I found a whole tumblr-blog dedicated to David Mitchell.
It is scary, it is obsessive. It's also glorious.
Reading it, continuously clicking on the 'next' button, will making you hate yourself for procrastinating whatever you're supposed to be doing, and because this reminds you of something a crazy-stalker-fan would do. But a place filled with gifs, pictures, and quotes of David Mitchell being funny, with the occasional video thrown in? It can only be described with the word 'Hallelujah!'.
I am now quite, quite convinced that there is a suitable David-Mitchell-expression for every occasion.

But think about it - if there is a whole tumblr-blog devoted to David Mitchell, there must be tumblr-blogs in the tumblr-world out there devoted to just about anything in the universe.
Pens. Notebooks. Handphones. Every celebrity of any significance, even dead ones or fictional ones. Tea. Politicians. Uranus, Mars, Neptune, Jupiter. Other stellar systems. The meaning of life, the universe and everything.
And of course, naturally, tumblr-blogs made by individuals who decided to have an tumblr blog dedicated to chronicle their lives, like how I decided to have a blog dedicated to chronicle my life.
(Oh god, now that I've put it that way, I sound incredibly narcissistic.)

But isn't that a slightly scary thought, the notion that just about everything has a tumblr-blog dedicated to it?

Interlude

In need of a bit if a rest (and inspiration, to be honest) I tinkered around with the new blogger app, and played the video of the Oscar Wilde documentary I embedded a few posts ago.

It's lovely.
Wilde does make being different look glamorous. So very glamorous.

Dauphinoise potatoes.

The Dauphinoise potatoes project was finally put to bed on Friday.
It was intense - we peeled, sliced, grated, seasoned, and baked with enviable concentration. For a girl who doesn't know what a peeler and a garlic* looked like, it was relatively intense. It was so intense that halfway through I was dizzy from the intensity of the thing, and I had to take a rest, like a pathetic weakling not up to the challenge of a bout of intense cookery.
(it was actually probably because of near-total lack of sleep, but let's go with the theme)

But the result was decent, though under-seasoned. Proper seasoning, I realise, is a skill that only comes from experience. When the recipe says 'season according to taste', there is no way you can get it right if you're an amateur seasoner, unless you're tremendously lucky. But no harm done, perfectly easy to add lots of salt and pepper before consumption.
And funny enough, it tasted better the second time I had it, after it had been in the fridge for a day and re-heated. The lack of sleep probably affected its flavour on the first day. It tasted glorious on the second - rich, creamy, yummy potatoes. Mmm.

No pictures though, because a person who is disoriented from lack of sleep isn't good at taking pictures. A person who is disoriented from lack of sleep doesn't do too well when it comes to remembering to bring along the camera either. Which is actually the first problem of the whole no-pictures fiasco - even if I'd been up to creatively figuring out how to take a picture of something from an odd angle to make it look unconventional, all the perseverance in the face of adversity would have all gone to waste if one doesn't have a camera around.

I still have extra cream (glorious cream!) in the fridge though, so if I can get mum to remember to buy another kg of potatoes, I can give the thing a second go, alone! Pictures may surface if that is lucky enough to happen.

*To clarify - I have seen a peeler and a garlic before. Just, you know, in my life, the occasion where I have to connect the word 'garlic' or the word 'peeler' to a visual object has never arisen before, so both visual objects remained vaguely disconnected to both words until now, where an occasion has rendered such connection necessary. Sentences like these also demonstrate how I bullshit in legal essays.