IHG season
Jan-Feb 2007 -
Super busy the last two months. When I don't write anything on this diary it means that that's exactly because ALL the bloggable stuff is happening haha. But of course, it's precisely when one is living life that one has no time to write it down heh. Help! I'll never have time to write down all the lovely stuff that's been happening! :D Never mind... here it is in point form (sad, but that's all there's time for!)
Stuff I've been busy with includes...
- the Hall blog (see link on right) during IHG, Hall Play and XQRJ season
- the church youth group newsletter
- writing mid-year reports on Pubs Comm and KE7 CF (VCF="Varsity Christian Fellowship") as well as a long letter to Linus about the possibility of serving in Med CF next year
- Road relay 3 times a week in the last few weeks before road relay which was on 15 Feb
- and much of this was all during the COFM group project period too... which took up one's days...
Between all these things I was losing a lot of sleep heh... But I made it all up in the Chinese New Year break!
The Fun Stuff!
- XQRJ on 27 Jan, and Cha Wu, which I've already blogged about
- COFM presentations (I really thought these were highly entertaining... especially the Dengue group and the Stressed Housemen group. And the Q & A sessions were quite exciting heh it was really quite a thrill to hear all the intellectual engagement that was going on between our friends... not to mention the humour!)
- Hall Play on 2 Feb (went to see it with Faith, Danson, my beloved David *hem*, and Jeremy Mong, among others)
- Marvin's birthday celebration in early Feb... think it was the 11th. A really nice BBQ/potluck party at Jit Khong's house organised by Hamid, Meifang et al (I had to leave early though)... at which we carried out Meifang's idea of making many mini-pizzas haha :P With some most delicious chicken wings contributed by Adila!
- Meetings with Siu Qey and Charmaine to rush to finish Charmaine's present from us (a scrapbook). Charmaine's now flown off to Morocco for a semester studying there!
- Running. Before road relay, this was mostly intervals training with both my running buddy and the road relay team. Haven't run above 10 km for a long time though.. not counting one run to Pasir Ris over CNY to work off the ba kua.. which was more like a jog :)
- Studying in the library. Stress produces great creativity and humour. One particularly exalted (and side-splitting) moment was the formation of the Hum Sup Man's Club (HSMC). Membership stands at a total of 3. Foremost among the criteria for membership is a cheesy Hum Sup Man name (which could of course be a reason for the limited membership). Interested parties may contact 'Deathshaft', 'Iron Balls' or the 'Mongpire'. Another club that has since been formed is the Zebra Guys' Club.
- Swimming on CNY eve with Dawn and the Mongpire. (It was revealed that he was not as fat as he had always claimed to be.)
- Reunion dinner. We usually try to include our non-Chinese friends, and this year at my father's invitiation our guest was a PhD student from India studying at NTU - Ravi. To my chagrin, I forgot to invite Viknesk (whom I HAD been thinking of asking, along with Aeshan and Vijay). (Viks: "How could you forget us?! Especially when you had this Ravi character over instead!") Hehe... Am sorry Viks! :P Please come next year!
- Chinese New Year!! During these few days I had a REALLY good break from everything.. and a really fun time listening to the stories of all the people we visited :D Thank God for Chinese New Year!
- I also did BAKING over Chinese New Year! Finally baked Faith's WONDERFUL chocolate chip cookie recipe which I'd been asking for ever since she baked them for Christmas 2005 and was finally given :D And why?
Birthdays!
You KNOW how busy I am when I don't even write about WH Auden's 100 anniversary birthday, which was on 21 Feb 2007. Of course I remembered it okay! :D
Anyway, WH Auden doesn't get any cookies, but Jeremy (who shares his birthday) did, as did Zichun and my mother (who also share a birthday - 25 Feb) :P Haha. What an avalanche of birthdays. Happy birthday to my shi fu WH Auden... to these two De Ming guys both of whose Chinese is better than mine haha... and to my Mama :D
This brief account however leaves out what God has been doing in my life (some pretty major things too), to which I think I will devote a longer entry when I can write one.
Major exams coming up though! No writing for some time!
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16.02.07
IHG season ended with a bang for KE in Road Relay! :) Guys got 3rd (behind Eusoff and Temasek)! and girls got 4th - which was 2 places better than expected :D
It was very thrilling watching the guys do so well! This year our team was quite strong, with fearsome runners like Ma Rong who had trained very hard for their moment to shine. Nevertheless, we were amazed when Darius, our second or third runner, pounded in in SECOND place, having overtaken two or three runners to be AHEAD of (*gasp*!) Temasek... and all the rest of the guys held the lead for the rest of the race! We were pipped at the post though by the 6th TH runner, who in a fantastic burst of energy right at the end overtook Kumaran, our last KE runner, who was already giving his all, at the last turn before the end of the route... we missed being second by seconds! :P
But if we had gotten second Temasek Hall would have been very disappointed haha, because the road relay was really a very important event for them. Temasek and Eusoff were really neck to neck to be champions of IHG this year - Eusoff was leading by one point when the race began. Hui-En, who was the first girls' runner for Temasek, told me before the race that their guys were not expected to be able to beat Eusoff's guys, so the girls were under tremendous pressure to come in first place so that TH could equalise with Eusoff. But fantastically, they DID! :) Hui-En was the first girl to come in, a lead which TH held - and only increased - till the end of the race. So TH girls really DID win, and TH guys got second, which enabled them to draw even with Eusoff in terms of points. But because TH has a higher gold medal count than EH, it means they win this year's IHG. :P A close finish indeed!
KE girls did well too! :) I was the fifth runner - the running order was Esther (our fastest girl), Mindy (our pretty girls' captain), Huey Shin, Xin Rong (M1), me and Irene (M1). [Yes, out of the 12 KE runners, 6 were medical students - Enming (M2), Kumaran (M2) and Darius (M1) were running for guys.] Under race conditions, everyone cut off half a minute or even a full minute from their usual timing heh... except, I am embarrassed to say, ME!!... I ran three seconds SLOWER than in my time trial on Monday! It's great that it was a team effort heh because everyone else's improvement made up for my de-provement, and it was good that our last runner (the heroic Irene, who achieved the superhuman result of coming in over a minute less than her previous best timing!) came in a good distance before the next hall, which was Sheares, so it's not like if I'd been a few seconds faster it'd have made a placing difference... Still, I was quite annoyed with myself for not running faster heh.
Road relay is a race which involves 6 runners taking turns to run a 2.2 km route which starts and ends at the SRC carpark. The route takes one past UCC, out to Clementi Road, then back in again and up a punishing slope past the Central Library back to SRC. For my turn, I was a few metres behind the fifth Sheares runner when I started. I overtook her just before Clementi Road, but she passed me again when I was toiling up the slope and I finished with almost exactly the same relation to her as when we'd started. Even before I knew my timing, I KNEW I hadn't been running my best. Normally there'll be a point in the race when something will 'click' and I'll switch from feeling tired to feeling "okay, getting comfortable" and being able to breathe easily and regularly - like a shift to a higher gear. This time, though, my body never made that gear-shift and I kept waiting for it to come but it never came :( I *know* that if the shift had come, I could have run much better - maybe even shaved off half a minute like everyone else did. Sigh! I think I'm just not experienced enough a runner yet to remain unaffected by changes in routine (like the double-warm-up due to running fifth, which I felt affected me quite a lot - because I'll feel very tired if I warm up and then cool down and then warm up again - once I start running, I have to keep on running - if I stop, I won't be able to pick up speed the next time). Heh.. But thankfully it didn't make much difference to us lah... and thankfully everyone else did so well, so it ended up being a small thing :) I think I just need to train more until I can be unaffected by slight disruptions in routine like that :P but it was good experience!
Heh and I had so much support along the way man :) it was like - 'with so much support, how come I can't do better than this?' Viks, Jeremy Mong and Dawn (and many others) were there at the starting point... Then the marshal at the Clementi Rd corner was Zichun! And the next cheering face after that was Hui En's, who'd already finished her super-fast run... and the next marshal was another KE road relay member... and then going up the hill there were Hui Zhi and Eugene and about a dozen other familiar screaming Keviians... sigh I felt irritated with myself that I was not able to run faster for all of them :P And right at the end after I was done I was still able to breathe, not near-collapsing as most of the others had been heh whoops (Viks: "How come you can still breathe! Shame on you!" :D). I think I haven't learnt how to push myself to the max yet and squeeze every drop of speed out in a race so that I'm spent at the end - I have yet to lose the long-distance habit of conserving a bit of life for myself heh! Aiyah... after that I kept thinking about how perhaps I could have been faster than the Sheares runner if I'd only pushed myself harder at the beginning, and overtaken earlier... It was really a question of mental strength, not physical capability, because I do have the fitness... heh... I could have, I could have! I keep replaying a particular stretch when perhaps I could have forced a gear-shift by running faster and passing the other runner...
But never mind, we still did better than expected :) and that's what a team is for... to make up for each other's weaknesses!
And after that we all went to Ghim Moh in our 'indecent' attire heh to be treated to zi char by the three captains Mindy, Juncai and Dias... so nice of them! :)
Haha. Very exciting leh! I feel inspired to train harder and push myself for more speed now, not just more endurance :) Previously, all I wanted to do was to run the full marathon (42 km) at the end of this year :P now I want to be fast as well! There'll never be an end to how much you can push yourself with running I guess heh!
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14.02.07
Valentine's Day... or...
Oh, and here's a funny read for Valentine's Day - one hall friend's rant.
I've never considered Valentine's Day a day of much significance - to me it's always been a commercial rather than emotional holiday, a festival only for people who already have other people in mind to get married to haha, and if one's single, one doesn't need to do anything about it, not even consider oneself left out - for singles it just doesn't exist :) or, I guess, it's a good excuse to thank your friends for being friends - but then it's called something different, like Friendship Day.
In a way it's good to have a day when people are reminded to appreciate their loved ones, but I think celebrating Valentine's Day materially is actually a rather unhealthy practice, unhealthy especially for guys as many girls seem to expect something extravagant from them on that day and will end up sulking if they don't get what they expected, unhealthy for girls because it encourages the wrong mentality that they have the right to demand material stuff as 'proof' of love, and unhealthy for everyone as it seems to encourage the falsehood that "everything can be made up for with some material gifts like flowers and chocolates" which is... simply wrong haha. To paraphrase the Bible's "I desire mercy more than sacrifice" - well, I desire ordinary little gestures of courtesy and friendship every day more than the the bumbling economic sacrifices of young boys who seem to assume that this day gives them the right to make quixotic declarations that they have no way of keeping on the other 364 days of the year!
Yes, there are girls who like to be made much of on Valentine's Day - but I belong to the other school, the school which would rather be made much of every day heh... in a much more undramatic but much more rewarding way. Many of us agree that if a guy spent a large sum of money on a Valentine's Day gift or bouquet, we would get mad at him haha -
1. because waste money
(Of course this does not mean that we hate all Valentine's Day gifts because obviously presents are nice - but we do not expect them, nor would we like a lot of money to be spent on them... the greater the economic sacrifice, somehow the less heart there seems to be in the gift... and besides, one does not want to marry a spendthrift)
2. because it's suspicious - what is he trying to make up for?
(We appreciate that sometimes guys would like to splurge out of genuine sentiment haha... but personally, I'd much rather that, when seized by such an impulse, they gave the money to a medical charity instead :P )
3. because flowers and chocolates are what EVERYBODY else is doing!
(You want to spend money to be like everybody else ah? That's like those Chinese essays on the evils of buying branded clothes we used to write in Secondary school haha. Of course, this does not mean that we do not like flowers and chocolates... we just don't understand why guys should spend up to 4 times their usual price to get them on the 1 day of the year when everyone else is getting them... that's like the LEAST special time of the year to get them in man.. what about the other 364 days? :D )
Yep... Actually I think the best-kept secret of Valentine's Day is that it's actually enjoyed the best by the singles haha - no stress! Guys won't have to worry if they are able to please their girlfriends and girls won't have to worry about whether their giddy menfolk will do something rash heh. In fact, as my first Valentine's Day for some years that's not been dogged by over-persistent, deluded or irresolute... erm, n00bs (for lack of a better word)*... a welcome breather, to not have to have Valentine's Day exist for me at all - it's a GREAT feeling! :) The word 'unclogged' comes to mind heh. And I'm planning on preserving this FREEDOM for a good few years yet! :P
*Lest it be thought that I am guy-bashing, let me clarify that the word 'n00bs' does not include all guys, only the few who have proved themselves to be so :D
And lest it be thought that I am declaring my independence from all MANkind haha, it must be said that this is not the case. I thank God for at least three splendid guy friends (you can probably guess who you are - haha anyway you all know each other also) without whom I would not have made it through 2006. Thank you for all your care and concern (and 'scoldings')! Your friendship really means a lot to me... I would not trade it for the world, not for a thousand *****s hahahaha. And many times that number again (of guy friends, I mean) whom I am always happy to see (and laugh at... uh, I mean laugh with, heh) and consider myself privileged to know!
So - perhaps this has become a Friendship Day entry of sorts then. Thank God for friends, male and female, at home or overseas :) Although I may not get the chance to speak to you much (and have been remiss with my Christmas cards for two years already), you play a much bigger part in my life than you probably realise, and I am glad that you are YOU... and that you are THERE :)
* * *
13.02.07
From the hall blog:
KE7 won both Soccer and Squash finals today! Both were played against KR.
Soccer at 5 pm was an explosive affair between two skilled teams which had met before in prelims (on that occasion we had drawn 1-1) which resulted in some spectacular play, dramatic injuries on both sides, and a 4-0 victory for KE.
Squash at 9 pm saw fine performances from Raymond, Chris and Jeremy, who won the first three matches 3-0, sealing Squash gold for KE as well.
Congratulations SOCCER GUYS and SQUASH GUYS! Great job indeed! This brings KE’s gold medal tally for this IHG to a total of 3 - “the best haul for years”, as a senior put it 
Thanks too to all supporters who have been coming down to support - your role has not been a small one!
Expect to see the detailed reports soon!
It's amazing when one starts to win, having hardly won anything before. When you're used to being last, every gold is such joy - a hard-won, precious victory. The sense of achievement is so great - I can tell you that this IHG season,
no one from Eusoff Hall or Temasek Hall with their pile of golds has felt as elated, as proud and as happy as every KEVIIan does tonight over our three hard-won golds for Soccer, Squash and Tennis. Those are more than gold for us - those are priceless!
It's almost worth losing all the time to feel the joy so strongly when one does do well haha... every victory means so much more when it is rare than when it is an everyday occurence! Three cheers for KE! When the hall wins I'm so happy too!
"What an eventful week!" ~Uncle Alex
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12.02.07
Guess what folks? Alexander McCall Smith, the author of the No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, is in Singapore and will be giving a talk tomorrow at The Arts House at 7pm on... BOOKS :) My mother and I are huge fans of the series (a more charming series is IMPOSSIBLE to find in this day!) and have made a date to attend it heh. Haha and because he's also going to give autographs, my mother is now ferreting around at home trying to find as many of the books as she can so that he can sign them :) heehee I didn't know she could be such a fangirl :D
And I wouldn't have known about it had I not happened to read Sunday's papers (sad to say, when I stay in hall I only read the papers once in a blue moon)! And of all the days I could have chosen to read the paper... it was this one! With the registration details! :)
Hurrah!!!
Heh unfortunately, as a result, I'll be missing the crucial 2nd half of tomorrow's SOCCER FINALS between KE and KR... and I'll also be missing the rehearsal of the short play starring *Uncle* Zichun n therefore the opportunity to laugh at him (just kidding just kidding).... sigh - ah well, can't help it, must trade one
Alex* for another.... !!!!! :D :D
*KE hall in-joke
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11.02.07
Haha guys, you have to take a look at Siva's report on the
KE blog about our
tennis finals victory over Eusoff on Tuesday - the first time KE has gotten a gold for tennis. It's so exciting that my hands were sweating while I was editing it haha. And I was there and saw the whole thing somemore!
(Ahahahahaha for a contrasting viewpoint, read
Eusoff hall's blog entry of the same match here. So cool! And I think the scores on both blogs are from the players' memory - so they differ! - with us remembering having gotten more points than Eusoff remembers and vice versa. Erm yeah... In the interest of exactitude... Actually, if I am guessing correctly, I think that Eusoff lost a couple of their best tennis players to migration to KE and to TH heh... I think Rags stayed there for a while until he decided to move to KE to join the other M4s... So indirectly it is the KE medic factor which helped us to win this year? Haha)
Aaaaand...
we just beat Temasek Hall today in soccer semi-finals 3-0! Haha. It's a heady year for Keviians!
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05.02.07
What I would really like to do now is write a Nice Long Entry on this diary :) Alas...
The latest IHG news:
KE7 beat Temasek Hall in Tennis Semis!! And have advanced to Finals on Tues!!!
KE7 Squash girls beat RH in prelims (they will face TH this coming Thurs) and the Squash guys beat KR and SH in prelims to advance to the Semis!!
Instead of Pharmaco and COFM being first thing on my mind as they should be, IHG is the first thing on my mind! Hmm it IS rather taxing being both the editor AND the person in charge of arranging the constantly-changing roster and the contact person with Sports Comm (not to mention the adder of pictures)... Arranging the roster takes up as much time as the editing itself (and, definitely, most of the SMSes that I send in a day... besides arranging for VCF stuff that is heh)!
Actually, I think the roster should by rights have been Aeshan's job :P But where is Aeshan? He is busy directing the short play for ELnD (with the script by me! - though most of the ideas that worked in the end were from Viks actually!) So... what to do... I have a good mind to put Aeshan on the handball match tomorrow hahaha...
Aiyah... I must make a resolution to study lah. There is just 1 month to 2 major exams! Tomorrow I will - I MUST - start studying for both of them.
MUST!!!!!
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Exclusive Pictures!
31.01.07
Hahaha Zichun is the star of this shot!!! I think this is a GREAT picture!!! :D "GO KE!!!" This was at table tennis semis on Wednesday - we turned up in full force to support Dawn (and the rest of the table tennis team)! :) Both Ching Mien and Zichun are radiating passion!! :D Never seen Ching Mien so fierce before haha
I didn't know Zichun's mouth could open so big! :D Hee but I spoil this picture lah... How come I'm not doing anything! My mouth should have been open just as wide as the others'! (Wai Kit - wearing enemy colours by mistake; Yueyi - extreme right; Ching Mien - hidden by camera on left)
I will add more pictures to the KE blog tomorrow! :)
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30.01.07
I have a sudden wish to make a banana pie. Surely one can apply the same principles involved in an apple pie to bananas and make a banana pie! :) Imagine eating it with ice-cream! Ooo! Yum!
An interesting question:
If ***** were less handsome, would I be taking a shorter time to get over him?
WAHAHAHAHA
(After some thought, the answer is no! It's not looks I guess... but I think that if one has known someone very well, they'll look very handsome/pretty to you forever :D I think the pain of losing a friend is not just the implied rejection it entails; it is also the pain of losing someone who is
beautiful in your eyes. There is a sense of irreplaceable loss and of awful waste about it, as if one had a precious object, a treasure, which got lost one day; or as if a piece of art that one loved was stolen and eventually rediscovered broken and defaced.
But thank God, I am still surrounded everyday by friends who are just as beautiful to me! :))
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XQRJ and One Last Dance
29.01.07
I just thought I had to write something about XQRJ (Xin Qing Rong Ji), the annual Chinese songwriting competition organised by KE hall. I went to see the finals concert on Friday and sat with Jeremy Mong, Wai Kit, Dawn and Zichun. Zichun, who bought the CD, sent me 4 of my favourite songs after the concert, which makes me wonder if I should have bought the CD too :) (nvm lah spend the money on Handwritten Bible project instead!) This year's XQRJ received over 300 entries, and the concert we went to was of the 10 finalists, from tertiary institutes like NUS, NAFA, NTU, polytechnics, and so on.
The winning song was Xin Zhong De Ri Ji (The Diary In My Heart), which now that I'm listening to it again in the comfort of my room, I recognise as THE song which originally touched me so much at the free roadshow (I'd happened to be there entirely by chance) at the Esplanade Library on the 6th of Jan this year. When I first heard it performed at the library cafe that day, no frills, just keyboard and the singer, I really liked it a lot and thought it was very beautiful. The tune is innovative, there's a rap segment, and the words are very meaningful (I especially like the tone in which the rap segment is sung). The writer of that song had two entries in this year's concert (Xin Zhong De Ri Ji and Ya Yi Ya), and both of them deservedly won prizes in different categories. I agree with Zichun - they're very very nice, very creative and interesting for the ear, and personally I can identify a lot with both of them. Zichun voted for the winning song haha (yes, yes, you have good taste!! :))
My personal favorite from the finals concert, though, which I voted for, was a song called Fang Shou (Letting Go) which has slightly simpler lyrics and a more straightforwardly melancholy tune and could therefore be performed with such emotion that the whole audience was held breathless in their seats (until the spell was broken by the ludicrously funny MV, which like all the other MVs that night, filmed by the organising committee and not the singers, was quite comically incongruous with the song itself). My Chinese is obviously not very good, so when I listen to Chinese songs I tend to initially be more moved by the simple ones for the reason that most of the time I'm concentrating very hard to make out the lyrics and I can rarely be 'absorbed' into the song unless I know the lyrics well already - I need to understand them before I can be moved by them haha - and this one had simple and easily made out lines like "Wo men ze me le" - "What has become of us?" / and "Chen mo, ni you kai shi chen mo!" - "Silent - you fall silent again!". It didn't win anything, but I think a lot of people identified with it and Dawn, me and Wai Kit were moved the most by it.
The song that won second prize that night was Yu Ye (Rainy Night) - I guessed rightly that Jeremy was going to vote for it because when it was played it galvanised him into flipping the programme booklet to look at the lyrics haha! I think that going by lyrics alone it has the best lyrics of all the songs that night, and indeed it was singled out by the judges for high praise - one of the judges actually quoted a line he liked a lot, "wishing you happiness is the hardest form of comfort to say out loud - zu fu shi zui nan shuo chu kou de an wei" - and said, "This line will pierce the heart of anyone who hears it, whether guy or girl - this line can kill people"! :) Wah! Such high praise! (I hope that one day someone can say that about a poem that I write!) For me, personally, though, although I liked the lyrics a lot when I read them, I wasn't that touched when I heard the song cos I thought that the tune didn't have an effect of resonance with the lyrics, i.e. didn't take the lyrics as far emotionally as a sadder tune would have - but then again, it's just my personal preference for extremes of emotion :)
The other songs were all quite nice too. Despite a predominance of breakup songs (the 3 songs I have already mentioned are more or less breakup songs haha) with varying degrees of reflection, there were cute songs and sweet songs (the 'audience favourite' prize went to one of them, "I Do") and crazy songs as well. This is actually my 3rd XQRJ - I've been going all 3 years I've been in hall.
I remember the first XQRJ I went to I was so moved by the winning song that I had tears in my eyes! It was performed very simply, a one-man performance of the songwriter performing his own song and playing the piano himself. The central idea of the song was more or less "if I had never met you, I wouldn't be so sad now" heh and it actually had the words "xian nu" (nymph, fairy spirit), a rather archaic and poetic touch. Maybe if I heard it now I wouldn't cry so easily - but at that time I was two years younger than I am now and less inured to the disappointments of life...
It was the memory of this powerful encounter which brought me to last year's XQRJ, though I was a bit disappointed as I wasn't touched in the same way by any particular song. Jeremy, who went last year as well, agrees with me that this year's songs were better than last year's haha... although of course part of the reason I might have not enjoyed last year's as much is because Jingxiang's song didn't get into finals, so I went expecting all the songs to be better than his but still came away with the feeling that his should have been among them :D (maybe it was stronger on lyrics than music though - cos hearing this year's songs, I think the winning songs really score on innovative/unusual tunes/skilful instrumentation, and perhaps his was a little too generic).
* * *
Today I went to see
One Last Dance (Cha Wu), the crime-noirish Francis Ng show produced by Singapore's Mediacorp Raintree Pictures. I really liked it! (And so did Jingxiang! Or rather.. he LOVED it haha!) I heard that Ong Sor Fern (well known to be a subjective critic though) gave it a bad review, but I'm glad I didn't read it because I didn't get put off seeing it because it was really a good show, which I'm glad I went to see.
It started out a bit unprepossessing, because there was a lot of emphasis on small details of conversations, which made the story hard to follow at first.. But after a while I found that I really liked the way it was filmed, all the little stylistic details and artistic touches - the recurrence of the imagery of clock faces and hearts, the unique atmosphere of the different set-pieces, not forgetting the innovative scene-changes. At some parts, it was as if I was watching something out of Kafka, something out of a Dario Argento horror movie (especially the sequence in the train station); at other parts, it felt like one of the blood-and-thunders of the 1930s (like
The Saint in New York), and at other parts, like what it
is, a crime thriller with no good end, with a tone similar to that of
The Untouchables.
Like America's
Memento and Hongkong's
Infernal Affairs III, it is also a story with a shifting timeline, but without the jarring quality of the former. And while
Infernal Affairs III is consistent in its effect,
One Last Dance is slow in the beginning, but the tension builds up imperceptibly, with clues you don't even realise are clues accumulating in the storyline and in the visual details, until near the end of the show - snap! - Suddenly the taut story thread is cut as if with a scissors, and all at once, it is revealed what has been going on all along (the clues were all there, just that we didn't see it, and didn't even realise that there was something there to be guessed) - and with a jolt, one realises that what had seemed till then an okayish show suddenly has become a very, very good show.
Above all I loved the imaginativeness of it, sometimes to an almost 'cartoon' degree - the playful way steam coming out of a teacup was used, the way a flashback can be played on a broken TV in the background of a scene, the way a shot of water going down a sink transits into a shot of the wheel of a Honda spinning round and round. The show did have its faults - some of the content did seem quite banal, some of it was lame, and some of it was sentimental bosh that was out of place in a show like this - but the 'kick' of the denouement was quite powerful, and all in all the attention to detail, though occasionally inane, generally worked to its advantage.
In fact, all the visual details can give one a lot of food for thought, as many of the inanimate objects shown on screen have some meaning connecting them to something the characters said - in fact I'm still chewing over the significance/symbolism of
tea and
coffee in the show!(the 'Cha' in 'Cha Wu' is the word for 'tea' - it refers to the 'order' of things, both moral and chronological - a reference also to the deceiving timeline of the show. It also refers to a pun involving the Italian phrase 'te amo', which in the show is the name of a place as well as a state of being! See the complexity? :D and yet you don't even notice most of this until you go back and think about it haha..)
I can't say what my favourite part was without giving away the story, but it was that part - when realisation dawned - that gave me quite a jolt. I also liked, as a matter of personal taste, the colour scheme of the show - generally monochromatic, with splashes of startling red in some scenes, like the part where the lead character breaks a window, cutting himself in the process so that a smear of red blood is visible for a second. This wasn't a show which gets one very emotionally worked up, I felt (I still think
The Untouchables is, well, untouchable among shows which try to achieve the same mood), but it was a show which certainly did engage the brain and, in its chilly, chiaroscuro way, was a feast for the eyes.
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22.01.07
The whole of the last week went splendidly - absolutely nothing went wrong (apart from small things), which was very unusual haha, I had lots of very very entertaining conversations which I must write down soon, some with people I'd never talked to before, and God revealed a few beautiful truths to me. :)
Then today I got into another of those mournful moods when you feel that you can't trust anyone with a Y chromosome haha (well, with two or three exceptions maybe). But I think it's a lie. I will reject it. I will consciously reject my strong desire to bash guys at times like these haha :D I need to learn how to snap out of these moods. But it's no longer like those MacNeice-like fits of paralytic depression, agoraphobia and paranoia I used to have all the way from the age of 8 to the age of 21 heh, this is just a passing squall...
In fact, I've stayed largely depression-free after crying so much last year haha... Think I've done enough crying for a lifetime already that's why :P it's like I've faced the worst and survived... so nothing can ever be worse than that - I can't be shocked by the ugliness of human nature any more heh. I've been such a happy person since then actually! I cry quite easily nowadays, but I think allowing the tears to come out quickly has a detoxifying effect and I'm rarely sad for long :P
I feel quite happy again now...
Still, I think that if people do not make a conscious effort to grow up and be constantly tuning and refining themselves, they will end up hurting a lot of people in their lifetimes. The world does not owe you a living, nor is your main purpose in life to enjoy yourself and place your personal happiness above the good of others. Yet the more I live life, it seems that the fewer are the people in the world who live for others instead of themselves, even in the medical faculty, and this scares me.
Help me! I'm a
Stoic in a world of
Epicureans!
And why are all these Epicureans MALE, may I ask? :D
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12.01.07
After I went back and read the Wikipedia article on Wedge (which must really be very recent due to the quotes from 'Rogue Leader') in greater detail, I conclude that while extremely well-researched (written by someone who's not a pure X-Wing fan, so that there are details of his career from many other serieses which many Wedge fans, me included, don't know everything about, having been more interested in the personality of the character than his career.. as well as some apocrypha), it is not free of inaccuracies (heh I've spotted a few) and I know that at one point of my life I could have written a better one :P But to do so now would necessitate reading through the 9 comics and 9 books again (plus all of Timothy Zahn's books, a couple of 'classics' like Truce at Bakura and the New Rebellion, and a few of the NJO as well).. and well, though enjoyable, it's just not a priority anymore :P
Ah, these old flames.
12.01.07
Haha I'm so proud with myself for updating the KE blog to include lots of pictures! :) - link on right
Also, I just found out that in all the time I've been neglecting Wedge and Star Wars (because their role in my life has been greatly diminished), momentous things have happened. An exhaustive Wikipedia (or rather 'Wookiepedia')
article on Wedge has sprung up, which did not exist when I last updated my X-Wing site. From whence I see that the "Fake Wedge" has actually been identified!! His name, which eluded Star Wars fans for 29 years, is
Colin Higgins. Apparently a sharp-eyed Star Wars expert spotted him in a bit part on a TV programme and looked him up haha. I'd known he was in "Brideshead Revisited", having spotted him in it, but I didn't know the character's name so I couldn't check who the actor was hahaha. And... ta-da! I have been vindicated!! He IS in "Brideshead Revisited"!! :D :D ...as Partridge!
And meanwhile, in the Star Wars Universe, shocking things are afoot. Jacen Solo, of all people, is turning into a
Dark Lord of the Sith!! Haiyah!!!! I dunno if I should torture myself by even trying to follow that series haha. Anyway... One of Aaron Allston's books for that series is already out and another will be released soon. And Rogue Leader (the comic which I was half-heartedly awaiting last year) has also been released. Strange though, I haven't seen them in Singaporean bookshops!
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10.01.07
Hmm today I ran for KE in the 4x400 race for track, the first time I've been a participant in IHG :P a mark of how much we lack track runners I guess must be that even a recreational long-distance runner like me could still be wanted for a competitive
sprinting event! I actually felt quite stressed before it because I knew I was very slow - I'm not a sprinter at all and have never been in a formal race besides inter-block games heh (and that was 2 km!). Haha and J Mong (formerly in DHS track for a while) was 'scaring' me with talk of baton passing and spikes and shoes which I didn't know anything about :D I didn't even know how to start in the sprinters' crouch position heh until the guy with the whistle motioned to me to get down! so I just tried to mimic what the other people were doing! In the end at least when my turn was over we were still in front of the Raffles Hall runner heh so not so lao kui lah... I got a timing of 1 min 24 s (which I guess must be pretty fast for me though I don't have any previous timings for comparison) - but I think for these events to be competitively viable one must get sth like 1 min or less leh... But I think KE did well nonetheless, despite track being one of our weakest points :) Hopefully we'll be able to do much better during road relay!
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Susan's introduction to Jay Chou!
06.01.07
In other news, I have introduced Susan to Jay Chou! As I had been meaning to do ever since she horrified me by saying that her impression of him had always been a trashy-lyric-teen-idol (SO NOT TRUE) haha :) Amazingly, yesterday we had 3 hours to kill before Nat and Pearlly's birthday celebration at Suntec Marche that evening (I have NOT ever had 3 hours in which I didn't have anything already planned to do for what seems to be months haha). So me and Dawn persuaded Susan to climb the 126 steps up to KE hall to visit our lovely room (with the breathtaking view).. and to hear Jay Chou for the first time haha. Susan is a non-Chinese speaker (though with not a bad basic vocab heh), so I let her read my English translations (which I created partly for this exact purpose), which so far I've been able to fit to the original tune. Anyway I reassured her that since Jay Chou slurs his words, most Chinese speakers can't hear what he's saying anyway unless they look up the lyrics! (or rather they can hear just enough of the best bits to be tantalised and then look up the lyrics)
Susan's comments:On Qing Tian: "It's such a sad song!" (I'd told her that it was one of those breakup songs that seemed to fit everybody's breakups, along with Shan Hu Hai, except that Shan Hu Hai tended to make people cry more than Qing Tian!)
On An Jing: (really quite affected by An Jing) "So sad! This one is even sadder! Did he write the lyrics himself? I feel quite sorry for him!"
On me (I'd explained each song so thoroughly to her cos I didn't want her to lose any of the nuances): "I think any musician would be so happy to have you as a fan of their music!"
Haha and Susan also watched the music videos of Yi Fu Zi Ming, Zhi Zhan Zhi Shang, Qi Li Xiang, Shan Hu Hai and Ting Ma Ma De Hua (which she thought was very funny)... and was suitably impressed :) because Jay Chou's best MVs are really very good, and they all tell a story!
And then, to round it off.. we watched Jingxiang's own MV of Jie Kou which he filmed for DnD last year - the very well-done one starring Weesoon, Ruxin, the other members of the band, and Larry's little blue car, filmed on location in the Med Library and many familiar places on campus haha. Susan and Dawn, neither of whom had watched it properly before, were extremely amused! And we relived the days when we were all so much younger and more innocent and Weesoon still had hair haha (it seems like a really long time ago).
I must be Jingxiang's 2nd biggest fan heh I really think this video was very well done (impeccable sense of comic timing, and all the little details)! And I also really like the song which he wrote in M2 and entered in XQRJ - and to this day I think that his song had better lyrics than any of those that got into the finals!
One thing I wanted to do before 2006 ended, which I still haven't gotten to the point of being able to do, was to write my first song/poem in Chinese. But my Chinese proficiency is still not good enough. I think I will make that one of the things I want to try to do in 2007!
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05.01.07
Wah everyday as the KE7 sportsmen are fighting on the field, the court and the pitch against the other halls to bring glory to our hall, the head of Publications Comm is fighting a lengthy battle with WordPress!! Today, trying to post the latest report on Girls' Hockey, I was so irritated with the STOOPID way it kept REARRANGING THE CODE
AFTER I PRESSED THE "SAVE" BUTTON... I had to edit and re-edit the post for at least 30 min (about 5 or 6 times) after that.. I really dunno WHY it has such a problem with paragraphing!
Am reminded of how J. Mong, Sirui and Kokwei used up all their swear words in Nepal climbing killer mountains! @#^%$@^#!@#$!!
But I am starting to wise up to its cunning ways... In future I will write all posts in html first... Then I will be prepared that it will re-paragraph itself and I will edit it after that... But before I press "Save" this time, I will DELETE the first few paragraph breaks and then create them again to get rid of any hidden code that will cause the paragraphing to shift!!
Graaah!!! So irritating!! The price one pays for "hip"!! Bah! *I* am hipped!
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04.01.07
On the other hand, WordPress is proving to be unfriendlier than I thought because it has a nasty habit of arranging code after you save it so that it
plays hell with the paragraphing/italicising... so that every time one edits an article one has to go through reams of code and re-paragraph everything! ARGH! Lesson learnt: try NEVER to edit an article after it has been uploaded - and even if one has to, arrange ALL the paragraphing in Notepad first before pasting the articles into the Wordpress editor and then never, never, never change the paragraphing again. Urgh. I'm annoyed with all these fiddly things that switch between visuals and code (like Microsoft Frontpage Editor - which is why I don't use it)!! Let me write my own code lah!! Still, that seems to be its only bad point so far. On the plus side, it lets you upload photos and has quite a handy photo viewer.
So far, I think Diaryland is still the most user-friendly of all the free diary services, except that I still don't know how to get it to display Chinese correctly (any tips?). The only downside is one has to pay to upload pictures. I think for now I will start to use a blogspot account for picture-heavy entries (more convenient). Then I can finally blog about Mo and Neela's party haha.
And now I have to rush off for my 'date' with David at Parkway to buy stuff for our VJC friends' gathering later haha :)
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02.01.07
The KE7 Hall BlogExtract from publicity emailThe year 2007 is starting with a bang. IHG is coming! This is the time when all that hard training on the part of the sports groups will be put to the test. It is a time to do battle, play our hearts out and yell our throats sore... and to have fun!
At the same time, the date draws near for Hall Play and XQRJ. Many people have been working hard to make them possible and activity will be escalating in the run-up to these two events!
To keep you updated with the flurry of news as three of the biggest events in the hall year make their approach, Pubs Comm has created a brand-new blog to coincide with the new year for you to follow the events and post your own comments.
ke7news.wordpress.comGO there now to read interviews with some of the sports leaders, as well as the leaders of Hall Play and XQRJ ... And stay tuned through the whole of the months to come! Our reporters aim to provide day-by-day updates on the matches which KE will play so that you will have quick access to reporting on IHG!
