dark and twisty

Quoting Meredith from Season 3 of Grey's Anatomy. I think the phrase is so cool in that it manages to make 'tormented' sound like a PG-13 Rugrats cartoon.

DancerFriend said something along the lines of how it was funny that I talk about mundane things when we meet, but go all dark and angsty on my blog.

I am not dark and angsty on my blog. It's such a stupidly happy blog, radiating optimism and childish enthusiasm.

Ok maybe just a wee bit dark and angsty.

But still, why the dichotomy? I figured it is a subconscious exercise of social work ethics, (as if I have already identified with the profession). I let people opt into my dark internal life (if it's dark at all). If you don't like what you read, then don't read. But if I'm blabbing my sad sorry life to someone in their face, not many people will actually say "Shut up I don't want to hear about your sad sorry life", even though they might be screaming it in their heads.

Good company is so difficult to define - you tread the thin line between suitable amounts of self disclosure and crappiness/joviality. The socially conscious people would try to determine the point of balance and act accordingly, with their friends around them being positive/negative examples of what makes good company.

Those who engage in incessant and excessive whining/moping/self-disclosure, or those whose talents lie in releasing a stream of incoherent and insignificant verbal diarrhoea are equally, not to mention totally, grating. These people should blog whatever they want to say first, before they meet anyone.

But I was also thinking, maybe these people construct their identity around being a whiner/moper/crapper, so they have to say what they say when they meet people, regardless of whether or not they already blogged about it. On the other hand maybe the friends of these people are drawn to neediness, because they need to feel like a saviour - wanted and needed. (Though Christ didn't really get a lot of that...). Otherwise they are drawn to crappiness and small talk because it makes them feel they have friends, and that they are happy and laughing, even if just for a while. Maybe friends are better than no one at all.

Is being stuck with yourself such a scary prospect?

allergic to noise

So Singapore Idol came and went, with too much time wasted sitting in a large room, watching people play bridge, watching the finalists rehearse their songs over and over and over because they were out of tune and out of beat and making Mrs Babes sigh. I thought that was particularly funny because Mrs Babes is normally very unperturbed about things.

The more memorable bits:

1. Freezing in a recording studio past midnight with toes turning blue with a rumbling stomach, while looking jealously at my desk partner's bedroom slippers that she took from the office during the break. Apparently the floor was expensive so we all had to record barefoot.

2. The waiting. Boredom never felt so tangibly painful. You feel your mind frozen in negative space, the rest of your body is restless, dying to do something, but the something that you can do (like study) you can't summon up enough energy to do. So you watch the others play bridge, and you just stone in all antisocial-ness.

3. Because of the boredom, you seek excitement from listening to other people talk. Like Tama Goh the tight leather pants band member, or Casey with the multiple ear holes with huge silver earrings, or Iskandar talking about how he hasn't slept in days. It's a Different life. And difference is so appealing. But at the same time it was a normalising experience - because "different" wasn't that "different". And "different" became an acceptable "normal". (Am talking in cryptic circles unintentionally - two days of minimal brain activity decreases abilty to articulate.)

4. When you hear finalists whine "I don't want to go for rehearsals", you know you're not the only one around who is bored and sian and tired of being bored and sian. But the boredom makes them do stupid things like randomly kiss female hands. Paul Twohill is mad. He doesn't look as hideous as he does on tv, but for some unknown reason everytime I saw him he went "Boo!", and I expect it's the boredom, but really, the whole hand kissing thing was gross, and I bet it was only to attract attention from the rest of the fans hanging over the railings trying to get a picture of him backstage. 10 minutes before we went on air I wormed my way out of the pit to run to the toilet and wash my hands. I felt so violated.

5. The sensation of fearing for your ear drums asnd going paranoid when you see your friend's mouth moving but there's no sound coming out.

Other than that, it's back to mugging and essays and meeting up with the friends I forgot I had.

sharpening teeth

A project groupmate uploaded her contribution to the essay's introduction. Half of it was plagiarised from a collection of a few articles. Thankfully I read those articles before, and so, identified them as being copied off somewhere. And then, I realised that if this is going to happen for the next 4500 words or so that the other group members are going to be contributing, there is no way I'm going to be able to keep track of the plagiarised bits, much less rewrite/rephrase everything for them. Don't people think anymore? If not for the grades of others, at least for their own grade?

It is exasperating, frustrating, depressing, and enough to drive me into another bout of turtlehood, but unfortunately I can't because there are still too many external demands on my time.

Turn up the voltage, fry the brains.

this chord

Slowly but surely, my mind is completing it's conquest over my self. I know it sounds insane but I don't know how else to put it. Maybe in the morning I would never have remembered that this ever crossed my mind - that would be when my mind has taken control over my self again - so I write to help myself remember.

And you, who are reading this, will be silent witnesses of this possession.

I remember in Haruki Murakami's "A Wild Sheep Chase", he writes about this Sheep Man taking over people's minds or something like that, and when that happens, these people become slaves to the Sheep Man and let him take over their minds and their person (or something like that).

Today my brain went on overdrive. It's hard to explain how it happened, it just did. One of those days, when everything seems so clear (and it's not because the rain cleared the haze). It was like, everything around had to be analysed, absorbed, picked apart. The conversations people were having on the bus, the number of ethnic minorities that seemed like a majority, who were ultimately undefinable - I replayed the various definitions in my mind, and throughout the day my brain was constructing mindmaps after mental maps after elaborate plans 4 steps ahead after not letting any sentence escape without draining its essence dry. And I couldn't stop it. (not "I couldn't stop myself"")

I don't think you understand it, yet.

Every little insignificant ridiculous thing was stimuli in its penultimate form. My mind was like the unstoppable force without the immovable object.

"was" - because suddenly, on the way home, after the quartet's Dissonance Rampage, it stopped. And I found myself catatonically staring into space. Well, not really 'space', but someone's butt that was in my face. And it was insanely quiet up there.

By now, the best and brightest would have diagnosed this to be - fatigue.

Maybe.

But this quiet bred sparked off a nagging disquiet. a sense that I finally knew why I was pushing myself to constantly do more, even though I'm only taking 4 modules this semester. My mind isn't satisfied with what I'm doing, because everything I'm doing is what I want to do, as opposed to what my mind wants. And so it has, for a while now, managed to con me into thinking that what I want is what it wants, which is why I think that I want to read (my readings, especially).

Maybe.

I thought I could keep it out, at least out of my after school activities. Stop the incessant analysing, picking people's brains. It's not really working because my mind, the Sheep Man, is taking over.

You once used the word "disarming" on me - if that is true, I see how that might have inadvertently served the purpose of my mind - it gets people less guarded, which leaves more raw material for my mind to devour. That is so scarily manipulative.

(How would you classify this weird occurence in terms of locus of control and responsibility?)

Even in this entry, my mind surfaces occasionally like a Jack in the Box, adding qualifiers, rationalisations, humour, so that no one can possibly take this post seriously, and when anyone sees me after this phase has passed and my mind has taken over again, they will be utterly convinced that this post was an anomaly - some strange unexplainable event in some random act of weirdness.

Is it, really?

The whole calorie counting/weight watching thing is currently my only way to retain any sense of control I have over anything. There is a certain comfort in knowing that your actions can tip the balance either way.

Why is control so addictive?

So psychoanlyse this, laugh at this, dismiss this as something irrelevant; my mind will love how it has less mess to clean up after this saga. This post will be probably the only reminder (to myself at least), that I tried.

Does having no definition for this mind possession syndrome mean it doesn't exist?

the long walk in

So today was the day of reckoning, for more than one reason.

Part I: Meet-the-Teachers session at KoolPurple school in the morning. Getting lost on campus was such an oddly unfamiliar feeling. Unlike NUS, this school has no signs and I bet it was purposely built to ensure that non-students and staff get lost. Other than that it wasn't too bad. The motormouth plays the oboe (I knew it!); the strings coordinator is a double bassist and she's the one that has been teaching the cellos, which is pretty amazing because I thought it would be more different - cello and bass..

They pay well, but they require teachers to do so many things - so many forms to fill, reports to write, and I don't see how you can squeeze scales pieces and theory into 30 minutes, which is the maximum time they allow for each student. They seem pretty eager though - especially the double bassist, who asked if I could teach vibrato and position shifts. (There! I knew it had to be different somehow..)

So I landed the job, which means more responsiblities - we have to give internal tests too. and award certificates. and teach them to play in ensembles - and less of my desired bummer life.

(But of course my inner slavedriver/mugger/workaholic is doing cartwheels.)

Part II of the Day of Reckoning was the Caran d'Ache showcase (? - I don't know what it was actually.) Stick thin models holding pens and bags and whatnot - half of the people were looking at their skin not the products. Quartet hopping has it's perils, because you play with people different from what you're used to. Different seating, different repertoire, different sounds, different everything. Not to mention loads more female energy. But it wasn't so bad after all, despite the whole having to 'look ladylike' thing which I think I will never be successful at doing.

We should form a union of cellists to protect us from having to wear skirts just for aesthetic reasons.

subjective distress

My throat feels like I swallowed a handful of broken glass. My nose is officially malfunctioning as a breathing apparatus. In short, I have been unceremoniously dumped with the inescapable gift of the Sick Role, which allows me to be out of (social) action for a while. What a relief.

Recently, for purposes of a project, I have been reading up on the Hikikomori phenomenon in Japan - that is, people who withdraw from society for above 6 months; they stay in their rooms and only come out occasionally, like for late night trips to the convenience store to buy food. Ironically, these people withdraw from society physically, but fratenise with a vengeance on online forums, chatrooms, blog circles etc.

Presently my state resembles an online Hikikomorian - someone who withdraws from the internet community but spends much time in face to face socialisation. Although the latter is more out of necessity and imposed circumstances rather than a willing decision, I suppose it is in sharp contrast to my online hermitdom. At least until this blog post.

It's scary how things like MSN result in such a great encroachment of your private life that suddenly you find yourself surrounded by 'imaginary' friends, some of whom you talk better with online than in real life. (When I say "you" I mean "I"). And the recent blog death was in part because I was wondering how, in making my private life public, I was changing my own perceptions, sensationalising events that would not have had any more meaning than their face entertainment value.

But there is no total honesty, and one life can be lived and told in so many different ways, that it's paralysing in a Hamlet sort of way.

I could talk about the cat whom I snuck up on when it was peeing, how it scuttled away so fast and vanished, rendering my efforts to find it useless.

I could talk about how a yr 2 struck up conversation with me in a way that seemed like she knew me for ages, when I didn't even know her name.

I could talk about how I was at a total loss for words when confronted by an American motormouth of a music teacher from a particular World-ly College who asked me to go down and see if I could teach cello to 2 kids.

But these all require energy that is so hard to come by these days, and I'm feeling the interminable effects of aging.