Spring-Cleaning

Spent the whole day shoveling out the old and welcoming in the new. Clearing up my shelves to reconvert them back into bookshelves meant basically gutting all my files. Kept all my essays and stuff but with a heart-wrenching brutality I was forced to dump the rest, even the History stuff. How quickly two years' worth of effort can be transformed into scrap and disorder. Spring-cleaning shows how the universe itself always tends towards chaos...

What a slaughter of paper! Two years had produced enough to make a tower 1.3m tall. There is a sort of sadistic pleasure in seeing that white basilisk on the waste newspaper pile, a mild sort of masochistic pleasure I guess.

But have to say that it's nice to have my shelf space back. Now I can actually stack some of my books vertically instead of lying them on each other horizontally. And there is definitely satisfaction at being able to place the lit texts into the collection, especially the faithful Lit S works. Aah...pride of place for them =) Now the only thing left is that I need to get some glue to fix my model ship, which is in a really sorry state. And then the only thing left would be to wait and see how long the pristine state of my bookcase lasts before books get tossed everywhere and new trinkets accumulate on every surface =P

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Prom tomorrow. Already got the costume, all thanks to my bro and my cousin! Hehheh really quite impressive, their sense of style. It's something that I think I should acquire now...at least a working grasp of the vocabulary of aesthetics. First time that I actually felt enthusiastic about an outfit, first time I really appreciated how colours can come together flawlessly. Well...it's not black, which fulfills my main objective. I only hope it's enough to add a dash of colour to the photos of tmr night. But definitely not out to get too much attention.

I wonder how one is supposed to behave at something like this. Is there a set and approved range of conversation topics, some system of etiquette that I don't know about? Always at the back of my mind now is the concern that somehow I'll gaff it up. May lead to excessive self-consciousness, which, as I learned four years ago, is tantamount to social suicide. And what is a prom if it isn't an elaborate social ritual? Heh, couldn't stop drawing uncomfortable parallels between prom and the practices of war-paint, mating ritual and aggressive colouring...in nature, the more stunning the colours, the more poisonous the plant.

Ah well, at any rate it'll be an interesting experience. Never been to something in a suit before (school functions don't count because I didn't own the suit, and I didn't have a choice anyway). Can hide behind my camera if need be. And hopefully the food is good! I hope no one minds if I suddenly forget that I'm in a 6-star establishment though.

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Went to the coolest bar yesterday form Claud's birthday! Heh, if I'd known Eskibar existed earlier, I'd be a regular customer =P Going in there is like entering the Alps again...you need to wear like three layers if you even want to think about staying in there for more than ten minutes...in fact you need that much if you want to think at all =P Really shiok to feel the heat being stolen from your body like that. And the drinks...maybe the cold accentuates the tastes, but they were good too! Hehheh brings me back to those happy days on top of the Italian Alps...except now you don't have the option of keeping warm by skiing because there's nowhere to go except pacing around the central column (the freeze room, as it's called, is built in an industrial freezer).

Now got another place to get happy at =P Fifteen bucks for a shot at happiness, at the kind of cold when you're just exhilarated even though you can feel your ears freezing off. Basically the type of cold that is still associated in my mind to the happiness of snow.

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American Gods by Neil Gaiman is an interesting piece of work. Just started on it, and it's quite intriguing, the scenes and plots that he draws out. It's kind of...I dunno...gothic? Like a Sandman comic, something like that. I wonder where he gets his ideas from, what kind of imagination can throw out scenes of such fascination and disturbing-ness. It's not a hard read, which I'm grateful for...the patterns of imagery and whatever are intricate, but immediately identifiable. The kind of book that lets you feel intelligent without too much mental effort.

Still, at this point, not sure what to make of it. Definitely something to continue reading, but with an ambivalent attitude at the moment. Eagerness to know what happens mixed with a healthy dose of wariness of what is being painted in my mind's eye.

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Somehow these last few days have been a bit of a daze. Too many things happening, I guess, and have been out of practice for too long with the norms of socialising. With a jolt yesterday I realised that I may eb sliding back into the Frexprog One frame of mind, the state in which I couldn't be bothered to care, and would rather be alone. Dunno what exactly sparked it off, what ghost rose and saw my familiar face and decided to pay a visit. Ah well, but thankfully, today is better. I think the spring-cleaning helped. I hope it holds out till tomorrow at least. And I'm sorry to the people who had to bear the brunt of my off-kilter state. It wasn't anything personal, and I'll try my best to suppress it, at least for tmr night! Time to suspend self-consciousness and skepticism, and carpe diem, as the old Captain used to say =)

pondered by phoenican @ 6.12.05