In my headlong rush to get on with life, I dropped a few things along the way. I’ve been discovering new, bright and shiny things though, too. After the explosion, the emotion, the venting of frustration – synthesis, at last.
What still stands and what has fallen? All that the world had promised shimmered and disappeared, and there were no words left upon which to stand.
Here we are, still facing the same direction – forward – and still filled to the brim, more feeling than ever.
Introduction
I wouldn’t say I have anger management issues. But I feel like sometimes I have anger issues. I don’t know exactly when I started to experience rage, but I believe it’s become something of a problem sometime between 2003 and 2007. I think it’s when I ran out of patience.
You have anger management problems when you can’t control how you act when you are angry. I don’t think I have a problem with control. The problem is the feeling. I get ragey. I get palpitations, my ears turn red, my heart thuds so hard I feel like I sway back and forth to the raw beat of it. I think I DO see red. I get dizzy.
IF YOUR LIFE WAS A MOVIE, WHAT WOULD THE SOUNDTRACK BE?
So, here’s how it works:
1. Open your library (iTunes, Winamp, Media Player, iPod, etc)
2. Put it on shuffle
3. Press play
4. For every question, type the song that’s playing
5. When you go to a new question, press the next button
6. Don’t lie
***
Opening Credits: Don’t Know What to Say – Ric Segreto (HAHAHA)
I never thought myself popular in middle school, or in high school. I was always one of the weird ones. I spent part of high school among the Beautiful Ones, yes, but I was always gawky (then again, who in high school wasn’t?), uncomfortable and… weird. Always a little out of place among the Beautiful Ones. Even at uni, I wouldn’t have counted myself mainstream. But I wasn’t really on the sidelines, either. Most comfortable on the fringe, but not fringey enough for the people who really lived there. I kind of hovered somewhere in between. My own little world.
Bitter disappointments, bitter cold nights. I spent a lot of time brooding, as teenagers do. When I got older, I began to “contemplate”. The term to use was “reflect”. But it was all the same thing, really. Little did I know that I was on the hunt for Truth and Beauty.
Oh I completely forgot to mention one of my most favorite posts from Eclectic Outlet – a post about the most heartbreakingly beautiful of songs, I think. It was the one on “The Blower’s Daughter” by Damien Rice. It was an epiphany I had having a fag break behind bars. This one I’ll definitely try to reconstruct. It’s my favorite after the bears frolicking on Alpine slopes post.
In a moment that was necessary to save my life, I deleted without remorse my old blogspot blogs. Lazy days, hazy days, angst-filled gritty blazing days from 2004 to 2007 dissolved into thin air. No regrets. There will always be memories and there will always be words.
It’s important to remember, though. So, from the recycle bin of my mind, I unearth and commemorate my favorite posts from Exploding Starfish and Eclectic Outlet. Here are the Top Five(ish) Lists:
Continue reading ‘The Best of Some Blasts from the Past’
I’ve been into this song for almost eight years, singing it at the KTV (by ear, of course, only) playing it while having a fag in the swirling leaves of autumn, knowing only that it meant that love was like a tornado. I never knew exactly what it was about until now.
Love is like a tornado? Life is like a tornado. Get sucked in the vortex that swallows you whole, ripped up and torn apart and swirling until you find youself in Oz for a few weeks’ vacation then spit back down into the high grass of Kansas only to find you’ve left a shiny red shoe behind somewhere and your dog’s writing you post cards from Acapulco.
The first time I ever heard of Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto in G Minor was when I was in high school, when I was playing time-keeper for a music competition. I watched an 11-year-old Korean girl play the 3rd movement flawlessly. Technique, tone, tempo – all of it (at least to me) was perfect. I would like to believe she went on to win the school-wide inter-scholastic competition. What she missed, though, was emotion. It was mechanically flawless but a little wanting of soul. Perhaps it was her youth.
These judgments, however, are clearly only my humble opinion. I don’t claim to offer any authoritative criticism whatsoever. It’s funny though, what people have to say about musical performances. Some people are experts, others amateurs. Some people just judge based on emotion. Some don’t offer any sort of productive feedback at all. Me – I can only base things on what I like, really.
So here are my two cents on five performances of the 3rd movement of Bruch’s Violin Concerto in G Minor presented on YouTube. I try not to read the comments until I’m well into the performance, so I can get my own impressions. I find that I tend to agree with the general gist of some comments, though others I am keenly against. Furthermore, I am in no way, shape or form claiming that I can play even close to 1/1000 as well as how these people play – I just know what I like to see and hear. And, maybe to some extent (I say guiltily), I like what adheres a little more closely to the breathtaking and masterful Itzhak Perlman (with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andre Previn) recording I grew up with. Either way, I’ve tried to take these pieces on their own merit. The sample is taken from YouTube (which is the easiest access I have to many videos/recordings in one sitting) and is in no way, shape or form random. I just picked the ones that I found were nice to hear and see. So much for the disclaimer.
Without further ado…
The seminar we kind of “co-hosted” today was a bit of a bust. Or else I don’t really get what the whole point of the technical assistance program from which we are “benefiting” is. Of the twenty market participant… participants that were invited, only four showed up – all from the same institution. It was a good series of presentations, but I think we really could’ve gotten more out of the whole thing. I did get to meet quite a lovely fellow (the resource person), though, with whom I think I’ll try to keep in touch.
On my way out, I happened upon a colleague sitting at a registration table in front of another meeting room. There was clearly something going on, and I was curious. A press conference? For the release of the Inflation Report for the 4th Quarter of 2007, you say? Oh! Well. I’ll have a little sit-in and see what these things are like! I knew I’d be at work ’till 7 anyway, to wait for the traffic cops to stop paying attention to the last digit of my plate number.
Unfortunately, the two big cheeses were stuck in a Monetary Board meeting and couldn’t come up to the press con as they usually do. The venerable Managing Director of the MPSS, whom I quite admire, conducted the press con instead. I must say, the woman did a fine job as per usual.
If you run a search on Google for my name (in quotation marks), ten links will turn up. You’re likely to find among them four links that refer to me as an actress (15 seconds of fame in a fabulous indie film done in 2005 called Big Time). There will also be a link to my Friendster account, which I haven’t properly used in about 3 years. The rest, well… One’s a link to a petition I once signed barely a year out of uni and another’s got my ICQ number on it (read: high school).
The other three links on that first Google results page are most definitely not me. I don’t have a friend named China and I am not a parek (whatever that may mean). I most certainly am not a 58-year-old Safeway cashier in Honolulu and Hilo who is now dead.
So, having embarked upon this voyage of self-discovery, I have… discovered what I am and what I am not. I’ve also learned (or affirmed) the following:
Of course I’m defensive – what’s an online search anyway? I really get into the cop-out justification with talk of how Google searches actually work, and how… Well, I trail off. Because at the end of the day, that’s really all the tired words add up to: a cop-out.
The real question I should be asking myself is after all these years, what have I accomplished? Like really accomplished?
