the details in the fabric

jus came back from my most expensive theatre outing ever - ian mckellen in 'king lear' - but it was totally worth it! fortunately, i did my homework and read the play with explanations+++ beforehand, cuz shakespeare def spoke a different english from me. tat, coupled with the past 3 months' experience of watching jap interview clips, have prepared me for coasting along with only grasping the main gist of the story.

still, it was GOOD, with a superb cast and a powerful ending. and of course, 3-&-half hours of why sir ian mckellen is great :)

( tat i got to see them brought to life... )

with ref to the entry on 22/3, MAN can i whinge.  LOLZ!  看到自己写的东西都忍不住要笑了... reading chuck klosterman's 'this is emo' essay (which in tribute i shall probably type out and place as an entry here) has given me an insight into my ideas and concepts i have towards romance/intimacy.  and i think it is mostly SPOT-ON.  he manages to articulate the mindset with which i view romantic r/ships. which can actually be a sense of relief or totally scary, depending on how u look at it.  in a sense, it could be said tat this complete and total enthusiasm i have for the mass media and the entertainment industry has ruined my life (or more like, my love life, cuz i more or less like the other parts of my life, thx very much), since i am essentially using it as a baseline from which i construct my (generally hypothetical) romances.

and if u bring tat to a deeper level, since we're in the era of information overload, where everything is basically mtv'ised, from love, violence, family, friendship, work, play, spirituality, basically the entire fucking way one leads one's life -- then how do i noe tat wat i think is wat i think?

i guess it's pretty much impossible to think tat ur thots belong solely to urself, and the pinnacle of egocentrism is to really believe tat u came up with some idea all by urself, as meryl streep so eloquently points out in her put-down of anne hathaway's fuddy-duddy sweater in the devil wears prada.  however remote and unconnected it may seem, there's a link there - the flap of a butterfly's wings and all tat jazz.

yet it could still be tat one absorbs these ideas floating out there in the ether, and assimilates or recombines it into one's own, so altho it's a mish-mash of old ideas, yet it's something supposedly new?... ... ... it's all becoming confusingly circular, and i've managed to puzzle myself into blur-ness.

a colleague at work tole me the other day tat i need to start to learn to say 'no', and certain events last fri (which i'm still sorting out in my head to properly log as another entry), i guess she's very rite.  so while i'm pondering over... 'stuff', i'll type this article out for posterity, and to whack my wandering mind into perspective once in a while :p

Buddha Rising
Perry Garfinkel
National Geographic 

His ideas were based not on faith, as in other religions, but on empirical observation, starting with his own outside the palace.  He arrived at Four Noble Truths:
1. There is suffering in the world, whether mental or physical.
2. Suffering occurs because of too great an attachment to one's desires.
3. By eliminating the cause -- attachment -- you can eliminate suffering.
4. There is a method to eliminating the cause, called the Eightfold Path, a guide to "right" behaviour and thoughts.  

a rather cynically chilling metaphor of life, yet sometimes, strangely apt:

'In the game of Snakes and Ladders, the playing board contains a grid of 100 squares - ten down, ten across. With a roll of the dice, each player moves the allotted number of spaces until someone reaches the top square. To make the game interesting, certain squares can either help or harm you; there are ladders which boost your number of spaces, giving you a leg up, and there are snakes which swallow you whole, setting you back. This is where the game contains the idea of death, as do most games; in some versions, landing on a snake denotes starting over from the very beginning, making your chances of winning slim.

In some cultures, the game is a metaphor for life. Life is chance, a roll of the dice. It is pure chance that the player will land on a snake or a ladder after all, and there is no skill to be learned that can increase your odds. Life is monotonous, a set of one hundred straight squares, and you must cross a certain number before you can ascend. But at the same time, life gives you little pushes at times, just as it gives you little falls.

Life is a game of luck.'

----from a fic by sublimeparadigm

which is why i deeply believe in the freudian slip.

from one of favourite vanity fair writers:

Let Them Eat Pork Rinds
by Christopher Hitchens
Vanity Fair December 2005

( Barbara Bush's comment that the New Orleans evacuation was  )

i reached out my hand; england's rivers turned and flowed the other way;
i reached out my hand; my enemies's blood stopt in their veins;
i reached out my hand; thought and memory flew out of my enemies' head like a flock of starlings;
my enemies crumpled like empty sacks.

i came to them out of mists and rain;
i came to them in dreams at midnight;
i came to them in a flock of ravens that filled a northern sky at dawn;
when they thought themselves safe i came to them in a cry that broke the silence of a winter wood.

the rain made a door for me and i went through it;
the stones made a throne for me and i sat upon it;
three kingdoms were given to me to be mine forever;
england was given to me to be mine forever.

the nameless slave wore a silver crown;
the nameless slave was a king in a strange country.

the weapons that my enemies raised against me are venerated in Hell as holy relics;
plans that my enemies made against me are preserved as holy texts;
blood that i shed upon ancient battlefields is scraped from the stained earth by Hell's sacristans and placed in a vessel of silver and ivory.

i gave magic to england, a valuable inheritance
but englishmen have despised my gift.

magic shall be written upon the sky by the rain but they shall not be able to read it;
magic shall be written on the faces of the stony hills but their minds shall not be able to contain it;
in winter the barren trees shall be a black writing but they shall not understand it.

two magicians shall appear in england.
the first shall fear me; the second shall long to behold me;
the first shall be governed by thieves and murderers; the second shall conspire at his own destruction;
the first shall bury his heart in a dark wood beneath the snow, yet still feel its ache;
the second shall see his dearest possession in his enemy's hand.
the first shall pass his life alone; he shall be his own gaoler;
the second shall tread lonely roads, the storm above his head, seeking a dark tower upon a high hillside.

i sit upon a black throne in the shadows but they shall not see me.
the rain shall make a door for me and i shall pass through it;
the stones shall make a throne for me and i shall sit upon it...

---from jonathan strange and mr norrell by susanna clarke - long live the raven king! :)

this originated from my former mentor when i was training as an occupational therapist. he was the first person to speak about what we did on the 1st day of school - i dun remember the words, but i can still recall the inspiration and the excitement. with the passage of time and the erosion of spirit that work brings, one loses a lot of the idealism one used to possess. the world is gray, edging on black, and it's never more evident than when u're dealing in health care and disability. one has to truly believe in what one is doing to carry on in this business, otherwise u're jus an automaton.

i was watching kevin smith's 'dogma' again last nite, and there was this line where bethany talks about faith: faith is like a glass of water - when we're young, the glass is little, but as we get older, the glass gets bigger, and harder to fill. but from time to time, it def needs refilling.

this story is part of that refill.

( a little story. )

上邪！
我欲與君相知，長命無絕衰。
山無稜，江水為竭，
冬雷震震，夏雨雪，
天地合，乃敢與君絕。
──漢‧佚名

i jus recently discovered that my uni's student guild publishes a pretty spiffy mag. really cool, having everything on survival tips a student needs to the real essentials - books, culture, music, movies :p plus a really cool feature/theme for this issue. reminds me that i used to, and still have, a passion for writing and the way words connect that make them so utterly lyrical.

the article that inspired my previous entry:

( god is still dead: fear and loathing in 2005 )

left me with an irrepressible urge to go sweep thru hunter s thompson literature :p

forwarded from a friend:

One of the greatest corporate fallacies is that companies want people who "think out of the box". This is one of the most irritating phrases in the English language. Where and what is this box? And what is so bad about it?

( Now bright people are told to think freely, but are ostracised when they do. )

such a case of u're damned if you do, damned if you don't.