Bugger It All

1 Sentence Stories Yo

2008-09-02T18:13:00.005+08:00

Based on the characters in the story I sent to the Renaissance Writing Competition.

#01 - Walking
Charlie had never actually found walking by one's self to be a lonely affair, but she soon found out why Two had always been the more popular choice.

#02 - Waltz
Oliver taught her how Waltzing could be a dangerous activity when, after watching Strictly Ballroom had infused the need for him to try it out, he had decided to do it in the bookshop and promptly sent the precariously stacked books tumbling over them.

#03 - Wishes
Charlie was still waiting for her Magic Lamp to appear, but she decided that the sudden appearance of one Oliver King had considerably made the wait for the former easier -- and much more fun since she now had somebody to help her scout through thrift stores.

#04 - Wonder
It was really a wonder that Oliver King had managed to stay single for this long and out of the clutches of desperate women - and a few men- who looked at Charlie with a mixture of something akin to jealousy, disbelief, wistful longing and resignation.

#05 - Worry
However, any worries that Charlie might have about Oliver possible being whisked away were all unfounded; She knew that there was no one else to whom he gave that dimpled mega-watt of a smile to.

#06 - Whimsy
Charlie decided to stop correcting Eric's mis-assumption on the correct use of 'whimsy' after seeing the look on Emily's face when Eric told her, with a slap to the back, to "Stop being such a whimsy".

#07 - Waste/Wasteland
She decided not to comment either when Oliver strode into the bookshop one day, walked up to her and took her hand, all the while singing at the top of his voice in a rather off key fashion: "It's onleeeeee teeeenage wasteland! Charlie, take my hand.. we'll travel south cross land!"

#08 - Whiskey and rum
It was not simply the whiskey and rum talking when she realised that he did, in fact, intend to 'travel south cross land'.

#09 - War
The Baking War, a contest set up between Emily and Eric to decide who was the Best Baker in Simply Ever Ever was a cooking contest of truly epic proportions and Charlie and Oliver had gladly volunteered out their taste buds for it.

#10 - Weddings
Charlie knew that there was a highly probable chance of more than one wedding looming up in the future... now if only Emily and Eric could stop fighting long enough to find that they had, in fact, fallen for each other harder than what a suicide did when faced with a bridge.

[[Note: The person who manages to find out what song Oliver was singing in #07 without googling it up wins...a prize.
Well, ok, not really... but you'll win my respect. =) However much good that would do you.
Hint: House
Another hint: And not the brick/cement type of house either.]]

The 5 Best Buddies Stereotype in Motion

2008-08-28T16:16:00.002+08:00

I am beginning to realise that I am starting to have a habit of listening in on other people's conversations. Well... not really all the time, per se, but simply when I am bored or have nothing better to do and what you're talking about seems really interesting or that YOU'RE TALKING SO LOUD THAT I JUST CAN'T HELP OVERHEARING, are the times when I find myself privy to personal details of other people's lives/nonsensebabblechatter etc. etc.

Other people = Those group of tiny ohgoshsoadorable Sec 1 VS guys

I don't mean "adorable" in the "wow, that guy is cute, date me prz" sense, but just simply adorable cute. No, really, they don't even look like they're in Sec 1. They're all primary-school sized and they still have that innocent kiddish air about them.
There does seem to be a recent trend of the sec 1 batches this year all still looking like they're fresh out of primary school... I don't know. Maybe it's just me.

What caught my attention about these group of guys at first was that they seemed to have stepped out of a book. Specifically, that they have the whole Fictional 5-Boys Best Buddies Gang thing going. They even have five of the stereotypical archetypes!
1) Nerdy, bookish type
2) The Joker
3) The Tall Loud One
4) Feisty Smart Ass
5) The Wallflower

The first one that stepped into the bus was No 1. And here I have to point out that he's not really the Classic Nerd but rather The Guy who Reads Shonen Jump and Bumps Into Stuff Because He's Too Engrossed.

Because he would've continued walking right on to the end if it wasn't for his friends who all kind of yelled and formed a human barrier to sort of close him in and usher him to a seat.

They had to do the same thing again when he left.

Here's the thing, No 1, does not and I mean DOES NOT EVER look up from the Shonen Jump mag he's reading. Even when No 3 sort of reached over to look and went all,
"Tch'. Why are you reading this? It's so outdated. You can find all the chapters online anyway."
"........"

That aside, I'm now only going to be concentrating on No 3 and 4. Because it was just all about them at that moment in time. If this was a slice-of-life series starring all 5 as the protaganists, this would be the episode arc about 3 and 4.

They got into a fight apparently. Because 4 wants 3 to do something about his intimidating way and how he just forces people to his opinions and it's no wonder that the whole class is scared of him and stuff like that.

"You just don't get it! He didn't answer you because he didn't want to. What was he supposed to say? You know, you just can't get a hint. When people don't answer after a long time, it's because they don't want to. They don't want to talk to you! This is why so many people find you intimidating. You don't know when to back down."

"Oh yeah?" No 3 was lost for words here so he just went again, "Oh yeah?"

And then he decided to bring up some earlier incident of which I didn't really understand the details but it had something to do with the Mrt Station and they started squabbling again and then when things got really heated up the entire conversation took a 180 degree turn when No 3 sort of wilted and said in a hurt voice,

"Well, if you don't want to talk to me, just say so then."

"*frustrated* It's not that I don't want to talk to you! I do! It's just that sometimes, you have days where you just want some time to yourself and you don't feel like talking at all and you have to get the hint when that happens..."

"*wilts further*"

"Oh what the hell- Look, I'm sorry ok? Ok?"

And then they made up and everything was fine and dandy. XD

I am not making this up. All of this really happened. I have to add here that at this point I was looking out of the window with this huge child-eating grin on my face which would have surely freaked out the passer-bys outside.

Hai...young friendship. It's so innocent and sparkling. I had no idea until now that guys had these kind of conversations too.

In Which Lower Appendages Are Reached For and The Hair Mystery is Solved

2008-08-04T18:02:00.005+08:00

I CAN TOUCH MY TOES.

Can you not hear what I say? Not to worry my friend, for I shall say it again.

I CAN TOUCH MY TOOOOEEESSS!
Cries of joy and happiness and glee!

Yes, I know it might not be much of a great deal to all you toe-touchers out there, oh yes; I have seen how all of you possess the ability to easily and smugly simply reach over with nary an effort to touch your lowest appendage.

Well, I have never been able to do that before.

But after recently doing The Six Stations at school, and barely passing the Sit and Reach, I reached home and contemplated the question: Why am I the only person not able to touch my toes?

I can touch it only if I do it once at a time, as in, stretching out my right leg with my other leg folded and then touching my toes and vice versa. But both at the same time? It had been an impossibility all this while.

Until recently.

I told myself, If you can do it one at a time, then why not both!?
So I willed my self forwards and stretched out my fingers. They went slowly onwards, slowly, slowly...until, miraculously enough, they reached the toes.

So for this whole weekend, my family has been treated to the sight of me cheerfully doing the sit and reach and touching my toes while standing up. The only downfall is that now my ribs hurt (is that a normal thing?). If I touch it there, it gives the kind of pain similar to when you touch a bruise. But it stops hurting so much if I don't reach for my toes all that often.

Edit: Today, my Bio Teacher was talking about internal bleeding and he just so happened to use the Sit and Reach as an example. He said you can stretch too far forwards and your capillaries might burst. O___O
Of course, I think he was joking but... What if that is what has happened to me?? I may look fine on the outside but right at this very moment my internal organs might be scrambled and bleeding due to my inflexible body recently having found the secret to contort and me overdoing it. AAAAAAAAH.

But moving on from the topic of toes and internal bleeding... I had Econs IR today and Mdm Goh could not contain it any longer and finally exclaimed about the state of the floor area around the teacher's table.
What is wrong with it?
I'll tell you.

It is full of hair.
It is scattered with long hair and it has accumulated over the years because no one bothers or is too disgusted to sweep it up.

So she went, "Aiyoooooooh, look at the state of your class! Hair everywhere! Where did all this hair come from? Pontianak come into your class at night is it?"

And we were all doing the Econs worksheet when she said that, so everyone was quite serious, which didn't help one bit since I just wanted to burst out laughing.

Seriously, can you imagine it?

In the dead of night, the Pontianaks float in through the windows of the 4/1 classroom in TKGS and gather there, the long wind blowing through their hair. Then, one of them reaches for the class computer, turns it on and they start...
ROCKING OUT.
They partied and head-banged like no one has ever partied and head-banged.
When sunlight starts to creep in through the shutters, they simply drift away again...
Not realising that they have left incriminating evidence behind in the form of shed hair.

Mdm Goh has uncovered the secret of all the long hair gathered there without even quite realising it.

20 Things That Make Me Happy

2008-07-30T19:12:00.003+08:00

(Off the top of my head and in no particular order)

1) The smell of books

2) Lame puns and jokes
(the lamer, the better)

3) A love unrequited requited

4) Feeding the birds

5) A lone man standing on a hill

6) The oh-so-skillful fingers of a hairdresser massaging into your scalp when they wash your hair

7) That afterglow which seeps the world after rain

8) Leaf-interlaced light

9) Reunions after long partings

10) Long lazy holidays

11) The crinkle in the corner of the eyes when someone is truly smiling

12) Long stretches of desolate paths and wide empty spaces

13) Bargain sales

14) Failing terribly at DDR and laughing about it

15) Asking somebody, "Then? THEN? What happens next?"

16) Snooty british accents

17) Encouraging/Discouraging my siblings when they're fighting particularly hard bosses

18) The artificial sweetness of Orange Julius
(it doesn't even taste like an orange at all, despite its name)

19) A poem well written

20) Happy endings

In Which Fairy Tales (whether Disney-fied or not) Are Discussed

2008-07-19T20:44:00.003+08:00

I remember reading a book once that said:

People need to be storied to get over their fears. Apparently, people who have never read fairy tales have a harder time coping in life than the people who have. They don't have access to the lessons learnt and significance of, say, the journeys through the dark woods or of the kindness of strangers treated decently. The knowledge that can be gained from the company and example of Donkeyskins, cats wearing boots and steadfast tin soldiers. The kind that seep up from your subconscious and give you moral and humane structures in your life. That teach you how to prevail and trust. And maybe even love. The people who have missed out on them have to be re-storied in their adult lives.

As a child, I had never really been read fairy tales by my parents. They deem it sufficient enough for me to be 'storied' through the books brought home from the library and the movies that we watch together. I don't have snippets from my childhood of me lying curled up in bed with either my mother or father sitting by the side, letting the lilting tone of their reading voice soothe me to sleep eventually.

My parents have never really been the 'read out loud to your child' type, and falling asleep mostly consisted of flopping down onto my bed till fatigue or boredom drives me into the clutches of slumber. My parents were not the touchy-feely type (no hugs or bednight kisses here) but I didn't really mind as I wasn't one either. We each had our own way of showing our affections and that was enough.

Out of all the fairy tales that I had had a passing acquaintance with through my childhood, the one that I was most fond of had to be Sleeping Beauty and The Little Mermaid. The former because I could connect with the main character, Belle. A bookish girl with her head almost always either in a book or stuck in the clouds. Even so, when the situation called for it, she met the challenges head-on with considerable strength and determination. She was thrown into a huge, cold castle with just a cranky (and often times quite violent) Beast as the only other (living) tenant, but over time, decided to not not let it faze her and managed to win over the hearts of the occupants and the Beast himself in the end.
Those traits appealed to me even when I was young. They were the sort of traits I wanted to have when I grew up.

As for the latter, it was simply because it fascinated me that a mermaid, who should surely have a much more wonderful time Under the Sea, could ever want to become a human up in this sticky, sweaty, polluted land of ours. It has something of a similar theme to Beauty and the Beast too in the fact that both protaganists have been thrown into different environments in which they have to adapt to.

And now as I type this, I realise that those fairy tales have had a slight influence on my taste in later years. I have a penchant for tales involving unrequited love. It makes my heart ache in a good way, although of course, I would much prefer it if it were to be requited in the end. If I like the story and characters a lot, I will get emotionally involved and when I am emotionally involved a Happy Ending is a must. Oh yes, they could get thrown into utterly appalling and dreadful situations or trampled on again and again but the Happy Ending makes all that forgiven. Books that have characters that are deemed Different by other people and who generally tend to get avoided due to their eccentricity, weirdness, personality trait... etc. usually make me want to read it more.

(On a rather long side-note: I'm not going to reveal the title but there was one series that went for 40-ish volumes and it is very hard indeed not to get emotionally invested into something like that. The characters suffered from a very, very bad case of unrequited love through several centuries. Yes. You would have thought that several centuries would be enough time to get over all the issues - and they have a lot of issues - but after each re-incarnation they went through, somehow, it just got worse. The ending had the main character dying in the end, and I remembered being utterly miserable after finishing the series. One of my net friends confessed to flinging the book across a room in public after she had finished the series.
There was another one in which the girl had to make the choice between the Respectable, Safe, Dependable Guy and The One that could make her heart beat in a way that the latter guy never could. Unfortunately though, The One is the kind of guy that your parents would never want you to marry. He's temperemental, cold, manipulative and has even stated once that he is not the kind of man to make a woman happy. Still, you can tell that he cares deeply for her, something which he doesn't do much for people, and that despite everything, they do go very well together. Guess who she chose and got married to in the end?
Hint: It is a realistic choice. The kind of choice that most people in real life would make. A choice that made me miserable for days on end too.)

I also admit that I have a penchant for romantic relationships that are rocky at the start, but that turn out well in the end. A tad cliche maybe, but it has shades of what Beast and Belle had which is why they appeal to me.

It has only been recently that I have discovered the real versions of the Disney-fied fairytales. A note, you can stop reading here if you do not want to know as the true versions might not be to your liking.

Luckily, Beauty and the Beast remains more or less the same, but not so for The Little Mermaid. In the true story, she gets killed. Like in the Disney version, the Prince marries somebody else, but he does not - to quote a modern term- 'ditch' that somebody else in the end for the mermaid. A knife is given to the mermaid, and if she kills the prince, she will get to turn back into a mermaid again. She chooses not to at the last moment and turns into sea foam.

=(

In Sleeping Beauty, the prince's mother has cannibalistic tendencies and sent Sleeping Beauty and her children to a secluded house where she proceeded to give orders to the cook to prepare the boy for her dinner.

The Wicked Queen in Snow White was forced to wear heated iron shoes and to dance in them till she dies as a punishment.

Goldilocks, in some versions, actually gets eaten by the Three Bears.

The story of Little Red Riding Hood might also have sexual connotations to it, with the Wolf representing the laviscious man preying on young girls.

As you can see, the original versions might not neccessarily be all that suitable for young children. I understand why it had to be altered and some of the parts cut out. I would have certainly have been horrified as a child to find out the true ending to The Little Mermaid.

It is best for children to remain children, in which such things as True Love and Happy Endings are as believable as that letter from Hogwarts that would come round eventually, that umbrellas saved you from falling off buildings and that your toys secretly came alive at night.

In Which I Type Out of: How This Came to Be

2008-07-07T09:04:00.000+08:00

I am the kind of person who will almost always get bored once I've gotten what I wanted. It's a trait about me that I don't necessarily like, but that I just can't help. I remember the countless times I've made a mad-dash-mrt-hopping-getting-sidetracked-from-time-to-time trip around Singapore trying to find/get/buy whatever has caught my fancy at the moment - be it book, dvd, comic or even a piece of food. If I feel the urge for it at the moment, I will want it right here right now in front of my face and in my hands. If I can't get it, I will start suffering what I call "Unfulfilled Want Withdrawal". I'll start getting jittery, anxious, worried and my mind will start conjuring up all sorts of horrific scenarious. What if everything is sold out? What if the last piece gets taken by somebody? OMG WHAT IF THE COMPANY GOES BANKRUPT AND THEY WITHDRAW EVERY SINGLE AVAILABLE STOCK? I know. Paranoid, much? Yes. But it's what happens. And the maddeningly, infuriating, tear-your-hair-out thing is... once I've achieved said Object of my Desire, the burrning scrabbling itch that was at the back of my mind before? It just turns off. GONE. That Desirous Object? I can leave it lying somewhere for weeks before I pick it up again. It's like, there's a part of me that goes, "Well. Since I have it now and no one is going to take it away from me, I can damn well use/watch/read it anytime I please". Delayed gratification mentality? I don't think so. But I don't know if there's a better word for it either. Anybody who wants to enlighten me, please go ahead.

But to get back on track, Project Blook caused the burning scrabbling itch thing that I mentioned before to start up. I kept telling myself, "No. Don't do this. Remember that vow? The one about not ever having your face plastered on the net? And about all those stories of how those same faces can be photoshopped onto nude bodies by shady guys in equally shady businesses? DON'T DO IT WOMAN."

But the burning! It was too strong!
See that below? It was the picture (which happens to be a spur-of-the-moment scribble I did) I tried using as a (what I thought at the time) suitable substitute for my real photo. Of course I don't look like that in real life. I wish I did though. Net cookies for anybody who manages to figure out, despite my lack of drawing skills, who exactly I was trying to make a passable sketch of.

But of course, the people over at Renaissance Publishing were too smart and managed to see through my cunning and well thought out plan and in the end, I had no choice but to send over a photo. At this current moment in time though, it has not yet been uploaded onto the website's main page (thankgod), so I'll still be able to sleep well. As of this moment in time too, I am under what Renaissance calls a 'Probation Period'. Yes. Apparently, my photo shenanigan didn't go down too well with them. *insert sheepish face*

So. To bring about this Probation Period post to a satisfying conclusion, once I had been (sort of) accepted into Project Blook, the flames of desire died down but, here's the but, I'll see this through. Because as we all know it (yes, I'm talking about all you other Blook-ers out there), only one of us will (might?) be chosen in the end and see our net posts published in all its papered glory. Wait. Wait a sec... There. I am now playing Daft Punk's Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger. Setting the mood ya know? Alright, where was I... Yes, so this project will most probably keep me interested for a long time coming and you can expect more posts from me in the future (Good thing? Bad thing?) mostly pertaining to the subject of Varied Nonsense.