Musings. Ex Libris

I’m afraid I have to say I have long passed the teenybopper phase of keeping idols. Someone you revere is most suggestively not to be met brusquely, it is believed. I once read how Robyn Hitchcock met Syd Barrett after the former Pink Floyd lead vocal retired from the music scene, and the encounter was apparently too disappointing that he did not even bother to prolong the description. Sometimes you have to put into account that your idol still runs to the grocery and wears shorts. Therefore while walking to school I try not to dwell too long on one specific object lest the longer I dwell upon the oftener I will like to come across it every day, and an astonishing disillusion is prophetic and imminent. People often end up reversing to what images you inflict upon when you first meet them, and being one who affirms accurately of how one’s appearance suggests, I feel like the easiest math question which contains merely a + and =. Incredulity is often foolishly magnified when countering s...

The gust exerts its full force and crackles mercilessly the frail windowpane, well-secured from the impervious inclemency, the owner of the room quibbles with a trifle cold. A dismal day reminds me of some Impressionist painting- blurry, sombre, patchy, with smudges of blue there and grey here. An indisposed state evokes the childhood memory of incessant bedridden days, in which the vapid image shows its rays of hope with the installation of the sickly heifer’s mom. Story after story the mother tried to invoke, her incantation even more alluring than the Magical Flute, and image after image those stories played up before that heifer, with snots ceaselessly dropping into her wide-opened mouth. My mom loved to read me stories when I was young. However, while most of my childhood memories are recklessly blocked out, it is often those unfestive moments that I remember the most. The bedtime stories that still retain their vividness are those I used to digest when I was overcome with a fever...

Passed the scaffolded History department while nipping to my class. A strong desire of barging into that dilapidated building welled up in me. Ever since I had the fortune of visiting that building every week for one of my class last year, I have deemed it my favorite spot in the campus. The interior of the History department is an unsolvable arithmetic question itself. Corridors coming out of nowhere, leading to nowhere, and rooms with mysterious doors that are inexplicably sealed. The building is also pungent with the smell of rotten wood, the smell that I could still catch its whiff under a drizzling day. I went to the History department every week to attend the sexual history class, a class with which I still lament of my inadequacy of delving more into. I happened to come across a Martin Price’s literary criticism in which he tries to draw a resemblance between reading a fictitious character and staring at a nude model. His theory is thus: a fictitious character can be as tangible...

On the eve before coming to Auckland last year, a question was seriously pondered about in my head. For a brand new chapter of my life, shall I be more of a submissive person or a self-assertive one? I’m never one who relents to neutrality so I must choose to be either, and while “reticence” had been tagging along like a dogged will-o’-the-wisp, a decision was made within seconds that I would stride in New Zealand burst with indestructible boldness. And one year later I’m still thinking about the same question. Apparently the ceaseless alacrity exuded from the Kiwi’s baffles me, and has left me tongue-tied whenever I was good-humouredly confronted. Most of the posts I’ve written since studying in Auckland are more or less dealing with the record of my amateurish linguistic study of Kiwi’s accent. Those posts are no less than sheer nuisances, but what I’ve always wanted to expound on is how accents can cause a stirring among people. And even typify people. Not intending to sound scathin...

I’ve long held a firm belief that once you start fussing over the inadequate amount of time for finishing piles of readings you oblige yourself to do, your academic occupation has a budding potential to take flight. Whatever dazzling pictures you have of your near future when you’re certain that once the attitude is set, nothing can be in the way, something still stands in the way nonetheless, and with a wry smile it holds a scintillating knife, ready to kill your ephemeral ideal with no vestige of mercy whatsoever. For a well-organized expert will reduce his words into extreme brevity, precise and nail-on-the-forehead. A woeful disorderly one like me will eventually extend his sentence so tediously, that a comma or a dot can hardly finds its niche to fit in. Stripping bare of the superfluous rhetoric, it is exactly organization that I should do, with which also creates a distinction between a substantial consequence and a eternal illusion. I also learned the importance of organization...

It seems needless to elaborate our horror more when seeing the dreadful calamity on telly the past two days, and it is always at the likewise moment that we have the inclination of closing our eyes and rattling off profuse gratifications like how wonderful it is that we are here at this time/ at this moment, and how the incident gives us a lesson of seizing every moment we breathe. And how life is more worthwhile than to be frittered away in front of a computer I’ve got a bitter lick of techno-misfortune (that is literally how I like to term it!) for days, and the situation seems hopeless to look up even for the much-exploited weekends. I reckon it a sort of backlash of what I’d been fatuously prophesying on a few past posts: of how I lamented about several mishaps in my life which truthfully after hindsight were hardly hassles; of how I thoughtlessly expressed my ideal of living as a recluse, hemmed in by trees in the middle of nowhere, living in some place with wall-to-wall books, re...

With the herald of the sixth post of my Down Under journal, a fundamental question triggers: of all the posts am I always specifying the truths? Aren’t there some bits that I inevitably need to conceal or fib about? Exactly how much rate of credibility can be found in my journal? Before clearing off the above suspicions, I should first refer to how I visualize my journal; how I want my journal to be. A lonesome tourist wandering on a foreign territory- passersby sense something outlandish about this person but pay no heed to suss him out; that tourist, on the other hand, detects the queer nature of his surroundings yet refuses to slow down his pace and relish upon everything. The passersby and the tourist bump into each others multiple times in various occasions, every time with complete reticence. Two curved parallel lines they are walking about. My scrawl matches the route the tourist traces, and you passersby judge me as if I was some drunkard drinking to his fill of alienation and ...