Retrospection

My Year in Lists (Cliché but fun)

This has been the most eventful year in the 17 years of my life. The MOST, hands down. The rest can’t really contend especially since I probably spent 3 years sleeping and on my knees, and the rest reconciling my identity (which still is a work in process) and hence just drifting through life, not gifted with the self-awareness that comes especially with age. In this year, my mental capacity has been stretched with the need to multitask, KI IS, debate, researching for COP16 to name a few; my emotional capacity with the stress, relationships with others, relationship with God. I have cultivated self-awareness as a leader in Earthwatch, been humbled by telling-offs from higher ups, been encouraged by the people around me that I’m blessed with.

I think this one year has really given me so many experiences that brought me closer to understanding the human condition. I have observed from afar, I have experienced first-hand, simply put, I have matured.

So here goes!

Places I have been
- USA- New York, Washington D.C for GYLC

(and technically Narita Japan due to the flight delay, yay)

- Cancun, Mexico for COP16

- Houston for transit. (I'm pushing it, I know :D) 

- Malaysia for annual family getaway to rural kampongs (I exaggerate)

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Performances I have watched

- Kings of Convenience, Mosaic Festival

- Wind Shadow, Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan

(DO NOT get me started on the acts I’ve missed, namely:

Broken Social Scene

Belle & Sebastian

St. Vincent

But also:

Andrew Bird
Patrick Watson
Florence + The Machine, The XX as opening act)

I’m not too keen on next year’s Mosaic because am not too familiar with the acts but listened to a few songs from The National’s album High Violet and do quite like it.

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Notable exhibitions I’ve been to
- Quest for Immortality- The World of Ancient Egypt
- Pompeii: Life in a Roman Town 79CE

- Parkett's exhibition "200 Artworks – 25 Years"

- Head On, Cai Guo Qiang

Greatest regret: 10 mins in the National Art Gallery is a travesty! I got to see a Monet and a Picasso but didn't get to see a Rothko which is impressive by size alone):): Oh well...

Mark Rothko, Four Darks in A Red

Looking forward to:

Singapore Biennale (It’s supposed to be once in 2 years, I don't get why it's being held next year instead of this year.)

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Music I’ve checked out:

Big Echo, The Morning Benders
Forgiveness Rock Record, Broken Social Scene
Swanlights, Antony & The Johnsons
The Sea, Corinne Bailey Rae
Belle & Sebastian in general
The Suburbs, Arcade Fire
I Speak Because I can, Laura Marling

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Books
I’m aware ‘novels’ have a more sophisticated ring to it but books, however juvenile-sounding, have been with me since my younger days.

Fiction

The Sea, John Banville
Fantastic carefully considered prose, with the sea as a versatile backdrop and reflection of the protagonist’s emotions.

- The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro

- When We Were Orphans, Kazuo Ishiguro

- Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro

For reviews on Kazuo Ishiguro, see here

Black Swan Green, David Mitchell

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky, Chris Greenhalgh

Slowness, Milan Kundera

The Joke, Milan Kundera

Immortality, Milan Kundera

The Reader, Bernhard Schlink

A Home at the End of the World, Michael Cunningham

The Hours, Michael Cunningham

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Crazy Heart, Thomas Cobb

Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates

Chocolat, Joanne Harris (Holiday read, excuse me)

Atonement, Ian McEwan

Non-fiction:

The Story of Art, E.H. Gombric

A Little History of the World, E.H. Gombrich

Dreaming: A very short introduction (too focused on dream science though)
Memory: A very short introduction
The Pig that Wants to be Eaten, Julian Baggini

Spiritual
- Pure Pleasure: Why do Christians feel so bad about feeling good? Gary Thoma's
- Who made God?:And Answers to Over 100 Other Tough Questions of Faith, Ravi Zacharias, Norman L. Geisler (Good read, halfway through though)
- 3: 16: The Numbers of Hope, Max Lucado
- Crazy Love, Francis Chan

Seeking C.S. Lewis books like The Problem of Pain, The Screwtape Letters presently. I have chanced upon so many wise quotes from him with great usage of analogies to illustrate a biblical point. A recent experience has sparked my interest in theology.

Poetry

- Two Cures for Love: Selected Poems 1979-2006, Wendy Cope (Bloody men are like bloody buses, heh)

- The Way Things Are, Roger Mcgough

- Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times (Best anthology ever, thanks Mr Teo)
- Penguins’s poems for life
- The New Penguin book of Love Poetry

Novels I couldn’t get through (but shall attempt as I age- I’m a firm believer that you need to ‘meet’ a book at a particular point in your life to enjoy it fully, like what The Sea was to me this end year)
- One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
- On Beauty, Zadie Smith
- The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner (my being adverse to stream of consciousness. I’m avoiding James Joyce like the plague)
- Great Expectations, Charles Dickens (I badly want to break through the classics world, but am stuck in contemporary fiction most of the time. Maybe Jane Austen or Charlotte Bronte sometime soon)

Novels I didn’t want to get through after awhile
- The Widows of Eastwick, John Updike (Witty, but too American centric for my liking)
- Essays in Love, Alain de Botton (Too frivolous, none of Kundera’s wisdom)
- The Post-birthday World, Lionel Shriver (Her writing is faultless. However, the subject matter of an affair is slightly too unpalatable and does her writing little justice. Will try We Need to Talk about Kevin soon)

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Movies
- Revolutionary Road
- Cést pa moi, je le jure!
- Inception
- Toy Story 3
- Never Let Me Go (I can’t help feeling smug about this, oops)
- The Lives of Others
- Up in the Air
- A Simple Man
- The Curious Case of the Benjamin Button
- 1/3 of Gone With The Wind
- Casablanca
- Where the Wild Things Are
- Pan’s Labyrinth
- Bladerunner
- An Education
- Grave of the Fireflies

I’m quite sure the lists aren’t exhaustive, I would have to excavate old library receipts and scour through my internet history links for them to be truly reflective. Enumerating the above brings about a certain level of satisfaction which I think works more to the benefit of yours truly than you, dear reader who probably just skimmed that whole chunk of alphabet soup.

I really am quite satisfied with 2010. Guess the premonition I mentioned at the beginning of the year which came from the song ‘No One Said This Would Be Easy’ did materialize but boy, did I gain much from the trials.

Everyone is cowering in fear because of the daunting task that lies ahead, that is confronting the A levels beast, I guess I’m no exception. This picture summarizes our fear I suppose:

Hokusai Katsushika, The Great Wave of Kanagawa

But I have special antidotes that will bring me through. *brushes off holiday glitter* I may not be ready, but I’m anticipating. I may not know where I’m going, but I will follow. I may not see but I will have faith.

2011, what will you bring?

Pleasure

You Puritan.

Convalescence

*gasps in horror at my SATS diagnostic test score.*
There's a looong way to go.

I can feel the workload moodiness gently blanketing my soul and weighing it down, gradually intensifying, leaving me crying out in pain and desperation when it becomes too great to bear. I shrug off that coat of heaviness and trade it in for your jumper of levity.

It's that familiar scent. I have always had heightened experiences with the olfactory. The musty smell of a book, the scent of grass after the rain, sandalwood... (you)

I feel like a scholar with a tower of books next to me.
Booklist:
E. H. Gombrich: A Little History of the World
The New Penguin Book of Love Poetry
Keith Jenkins: Re-thinking History
John Tosh: The Pursuit of History

Shall blog about my gripe with Nex another time.

Holiday madness

This is not so much a blogpost as it is a to-do-list of sorts. But before that, I've been musing over this theory.
I really shall not gift upon it the name 'theory' but this quickpost is not a time for semantics.

My theory is that we have areas in our lives that we are concerned with, and exert much control over, causing us to neglect other areas of our lives. In economic terms, it is kinda like a trade-off. But here is what it entails: Because of the past 2 weeks of busyness at Cancun and a emotional rollercoaster after (there were highs, there were lows), I've been losing control over a typical routine in my life, like sleeping at odd timings, and been kinda just drifting through life.

As if the slowness and lepak-ness will somehow make up for the madness that was the last 3 weeks, and perhaps more, extending way back to promos- PW- pre-trip preparations period.

Sample:
Sleeping from 5-7.30pm
Waking up to bathe, eat, tinker around the computer for abit, before sleeping again
Waking up due to restlessness, peering into the refrigerator to look for something remotely appetizing at 5am in the morning. Settling on apple pie cookies Mel has kindly offered as part of her fatten-Yiying-up-like-a-stuffed-turkey-at-Christmas package. (Applesauce, poptarts, cornbread muffins, seriously Mel tsang?!)
Returning to sleep, waking up at 8.30am.

I'm such a pig/ sloth/ (insert animal here)

THE LIST
Study for SATS
History H3
KI IS
Read read read to make up for the projected lack in the upcoming year

Btw, Never Let Me Go ain't fantastic. The director took the storyline too literally, almost till the point where scenes appeared to be shot straight from the novel and pieced together afterward. A pity with great child actors and the thought given to the colour palette of the costume and English countryside which I feel translated the fuzz of childhood memories, as well as the beauty in bleakness from the novel very well.

After reading 3 books from Kazuo Ishiguro, I can safely say I know his style well enough to move on. I think maybe I should read authors by the threes, mechanical as it sounds so that I don't make sweeping statements since I will probably identify a common style underlining them all.

For Ishiguro, I began to dislike his dubious conclusions which I find to be too traditional for my liking; conventional in its conflict-climax-resolution elements in which resolution tends to be an all-revelatory conversation between relevant parties as with When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go. Fortunately, The Remains of The Day dispelled all disappointment in his conclusions as it ended as gently as it started, the very rational and reflective tone of the persona a constant throughout.

When We Were Orphans was probably his most eventful book, naturally, with characteristics of the typical detective novel. Still, it never escapes from the silent observations the characters in his novels always seem to make from afar. The flow of the novels also always almost occur through the reflection of the protagonist.
-(event A)-
- But I suppose before I launch into this, I shall have to tell you about (insert event B)-
- Now you know what I mean when I say this about (event A)

I find it too clinical and abstract. The characters never seem to be living beings one can identify with, but more of writers musing in their autobiographies during their retirement.

I realize I sound too critical but the fact that I've gone through 3 books does show that I've derived some enjoyment from reading his books. They are fairly straightforward and very classic, especially because of the quietest of details in the settings drawn out.

They're the sort of books I imagine one read while sipping Earl Grey tea on the lawn, idealistic as it may be.

Lethargy

I feel like burrowing in the covers and not surfacing for at least 72 hours.

The Sea

What a little vessel of sadness we are, sailing in this muffled silence through the autumn dark. 

- The Sea, John Banville