Cont'd from Previous
I'm so very sorry I've taken so long to get back here to update. The truth of the matter is, I've been so extremely busy these days and it's simply impossible to get a good Net connection around the area...and somehow I don't like the idea of barging into Claus's house just so I can blog or whatever. It just doesn't seem right. And now I find myself with three movie reviews to write, along with a summary of everything that's happened in the past three weeks, plus a complete account of the caroling (from the conductor's viewpoint!) and my church's Christmas celebrations. Not forgetting, of course, a little here and there about my daily life since moving into the Gorillas' place.
...now, where do I start? I do warn you, this is going to turn out extremely long, and I wouldn't be surprised if this post takes you ages and ages to read, never mind understand. Even I am stunned by the sheer volume I'm going to have to write to adequately express myself on the above matters. So, in chronological order...
For the past three weeks, I and Wolf have been meeting once a week, usually on Thursdays, to watch a movie. The schedule is usually as follows: I arrive at the Twin Towers, I queue and obtain tickets, then I wait for him to get there from school, after which we hit Kinokuniya and remain there for the following few hours until about half an hour before the show, when we get dinner from McDonald's (which we calculated, on the first outing, to have the highest mass of food-to-rinngit ratio). During this time, we chitchat about matters which do not concern you at all. The first movie we saw in this manner was, shock and horror, Eragon.
It's an absolutely rotten movie. The special effects aren't at all special, the plot (look at my post on the book) was simply brain-dead, the actors... well, to their credit, they tried, but failed all the same... and well, I got sick of pointing out the loopholes after the first ten minutes or so. I hated it. Wolf regretted insisting that we watch it (I suggested Barnyard or Happy Feet, but he has friends who are fans of the Pao-for-Brains). And we had a good time tearing it apart.
But his friends are still fans, even though they saw the movie too. Apparently they even cried or something when the hero was completely de-family-ed in the first five minutes of the show, with accompanying overwrought emotion. The whole orphaned-hero thing is simply too old by now to interest me, and besides, it just doesn't make sense. (Unless you happen, apparently, to be some teenage idiot bent on rewriting the entire works of Tolkien, LeGuin, and Jordan PUT TOGETHER.) And then they decided that the whole dragons-are-big-scaly-beasts thing is overrated, so the blue dragon (oh, they called her Saphira. REEEAAALLLY subtle, if you ask me.) got turned into a mutant. Fact: She has the wing structure of a bird: feathers, down, curved wings and all. Fact: She has the body of a supersized crocodile: clawed feet, legs sticking out sideways from the body, etc. Fact: Her mouth can both breathe fire as well as turn rocks into diamonds within seconds WITHOUT affecting anything else in the vicinity. Fact: She has the face of a primate: eyebrow ridges and cheekbones. Fact: She has the tooth structure of a great white: rows and rows or huge teeth.
Which all doesn't go together all that nicely, if you ask me. More so when you colour the whole thing blue.
And it was simply stupid when they tried to make Eragon into some kind of super-genius who masters magic in seconds WHILE at the same time being utterly stupid and insisting on always following his heart the way all great heroes do. Riiiiiight. I'm getting utterly, completely, totally sick of the way Americans insist on everybody following their heart and paving the way for themselves to turn into Hypermegasuperultraman and save the world from annihilation. If everyone did that... wait a minute, some people already do. That's why they have all those unwanted pregnancies and shootouts and street gangs and stuff. Idiots.
...so that was a total waste of the ten bucks we spent on tickets. Fortunately we didn't buy popcorn (then again, we'd just had dinner).
Let me see... that would have been the... 15th of December, I think. Yeah. And two days later, my sister took a plane off to the Big S, where she probably still is. The family has been making its customary trekking around the inlands of China, though, so I can't be sure: but last I heard, they were in Nanjing, wherever that is. And then on the 20th, I moved out of the hostel into the Gorillas' place, where I've been ever since.
I took a few days to clean up the room. One and a half years' worth of junk doesn't disappear all on its own, you know. Most of the stuff I threw out. The rest is either in my room in the Gorillas', or in my sister's room in the hostel, whence I shall get it out when she gets back on the 1st. I managed, happily, to get it all done to the satisfaction of the hostel office, but it certainly was tiring, especially sweeping and mopping up several months' worth accumulation of dust. Niche, I'm sure, will be happy to see that side of the room empty: but I left behind bits of unwanted papers, planners etc. in his spacious cupboards as a surprise. Not very nice of me, I know, but... well, the very idea of his continued existence still annoys me. So there, and that's how quite a bit of my unwanted stuff got taken care of.
During all this time, I was kept quite busy commuting around (at first to and from the hostel, and then to and from the Gorillas') to Jogger's place or church to work on choir-related stuff. Somehow I got landed with the task of getting all the lyrics onto a PowerPoint presentation, and then it gradually expanded to filling in empty space (for the narration) and then it began to include finding photos and stuff to properly illustrate the message, and then the presentation was looked at and panned, and then I got stressed about it because the narrators wouldn't keep to any strictly ordered time and so went totally out of sync with the auto-animation and then I had to make it all On Click and mark down where the Click was supposed to occur...
I was so glad when I finally managed to get it done. Refer to the previous post. That's when it was done. After two cups of pulled tea, I pulled an all-nighter at Claus's to go through the whole thing, beginning at 2.30am and finishing at 6.30am when his parents woke up and went for a morning jog (I presume). I was playing MapleStory at the time because I thought I deserved it after all that work hunting pictures and getting them to come up in the right order. What, you think 53MB of animated pictures just falls into place by random?
Unfortunately, it turns out I shouldn't have played MapleStory that early in the morning, because Claus's parents have got the impression that I was doing that all night long. Parents have the tendency to go straight for the worst-scenario option whenever they see something slightly off: a trait I see in every set of parents I've ever come into contact with. Mention waKing up, and one pair will shake their heads while bemoaning the fact that their children glue themselves to the bedframe every night. Change the subject to the computer, and you get hit by a list of every single game on it-- complete with a record of how many hours in the past week were spent on each game, and how many in converse were spent on homework (always less than should be). And talk about school (God forbid!) and it's enough to convince you that schools are breeding grounds for smokers, drug dealers, players of truant, and that's just the teachers. So with Claus's parents, they gave him a talking-to when I'd left, and it appears that I am viewed as a Bad Influence of sorts.
Not unfounded, of course, since I'm the one who actually got him to start playing, but if only they'd seen the 4 straight hours of work I'd been doing, they might've had a different viewpoint. Still, there's no arguing with parents.
...Last Thursday, Wolf and I watched the Curse of the Golden Flower. Nothing to do at all with curses OR golden flowers, apart from the embroidered sort, because it actually revolves around a military coup planned to occur during a Chrysanthemum Festival. (I presume that's the curse.) The movie plays out like a giant soap opera, beginning with the queen who is the king's unloved second wife, taken only because she has a powerful father, and who is having an affair with the current Crown Prince, who is the king's favourite son because he was born by the king's loved first wife, who is presumed dead (in fact offerings are made to her spirit). The Crown Prince, in turn, is having another affair with the daughter of the Royal Physician, who is married to the king's former first wife (which means that the Crown Prince and the girl are half-siblings). And the king, who found out about all this a long time ago, has decided to hand-brew the queen's medicine (which she takes every two hours to treat her anaemia) and has added in a compound that will eventually turn her into a cretin. And then there's the second Prince, who is the real son of the queen, who just came back from some military campaign all decorated in glory, who is insanely loyal to the queen and decides to head a coup the moment he finds out about the poisoning. (The Queen hired a woman, who turned out to be the king's first wife, to find out what exactly was in the medicines, and then told the second Prince, who is very close to her.) And last of all, the youngest Prince, who is suffering from neglect and apparently an inferiority complex.
And then it all comes together in one big bloody (literally!) mess. Massacres left and right, and it looks as if every member of the royal family has their own specialised mini-army. At least, the king has his cool ninja dudes with sickles, and the Crown Prince has a bunch of palace guards, and so on.
We liked it, although we found it rather confusing as to chronology: nothing in the movie is properly put in perspective as to time, so cause-and-effect are rather blurry. In any case the movie has a certain amount of humour in it, but the ending was too ambiguous to be enjoyed.
This was on the 21st of December, Thursday. I remember because I was late for choir practice: the first time in the past four or five months of practice that I have been voluntarily late. Fortunately I didn't have a particularly major role so my absence wasn't particularly noticed, I think.
On the 23rd, caroling began, and with it, my stress. We had the practice at 4.30pm... at least, it was scheduled for 4.30pm but it actually began a lot later since we had to deal with the usual tardiness. Well, if you saw my post about the prom night, lateness gets me on edge. It's one of my weaknesses that I like things on schedule if they're important. Well, we had a practice, and I suppose it went OK even though nobody remembered their parts and the arrangements went out of whack and the guitarists were somehow off. But the actual thing went well: it's nice, you know, to be able to do something well. I like beauty, especially aural, since I don't have much of the visual sort myself. (Incidentally, I was all decked out in new stuff that night because the Gorilla said a conductor must dress formally. It turned out to be a good idea, even if it cost me more than RM200.) We ate a lot that night since we weren't very rushed for time.
The next day... it was Sunday, so we had the practice after church when transport would be easiest to arrange. As it turned out, we shouldn't have. Everybody was fractious and had suffered amnesia after the previous night: a slight success had, it seemed, driven all memory out of their heads. It went very badly in the beginning, since we got a bunch of noobs who didn't know the first thing about singing--their idea of singing is probably Do-Re-Mi in any combination--and they were really getting on my nerves.
And then the Coconut's mother suggested that we break for lunch, and I said OK, hoping that maybe a drink or two and a little relaxation would get them to calm down enough to sing. But it didn't, and when 20 minutes was up, next to nobody was back and ready to sing. They began trickling back in after about 30 minutes, and even then they simply wouldn't get back into position and prepare for practice. Well, nobody can say I didn't try. I tried to ask them to get into shape, but since nobody was listening, I had no choice but to lose my temper.
Now, one thing. I lose my temper ON PURPOSE. Ever since Form Three, I have never lost my temper accidentally except on one or two occasions: all other times, I have done it deliberately, because quite often I find that it works when nothing else does. In most cases, I store, so to speak, all my stress in a metaphorical container, then let it out when necessary: in sufficient volume, this translates to a loss of temper. If nothing more, it gets people to pay attention for more than 20 seconds, which is quite enough to get them to start following orders. Hence, "I had no choice but to lose my temper".
We went through the rest of the practice with little or no memorable incident, apart from that a table was broken (not by me) and some of the carolers got scared. (Well, I meant for them to be scared.) I suppose I might have been a little scathing in my speech, but I really was very tense at the time. From my point of view at least, it's all about the quality. As the conductor, it was my duty to get them to sing well... and at that time, they weren't doing so at all. It was extremely annoying for me. Well, no matter. It's over now.
That night we did very well. I made sure to tell them so, in a sort of recompense for the events of the earlier day. And we ate a lot; I could barely move at the end of the day. (Note to self: pumpkin pie, if done right, is heavenly.) So that's that with the caroling, except that if they should ask me to do this again next year (if I'm even around!), I shall print this post out and read it again at every plea, to stop myself from saying yes. Not in another hundred years shall I subject myself to this kind of stress. Even if we did sing Feliz Navidad very well, and most of the hosts complimented me on the job, and everybody actually managed to get the arrangements right, and... if this goes on I just might convince myself to do this again next year.
The next morning, I was hoarse, both from yelling at the carolers during practice and from singing all night with the carolers. Maybe all the soft drinks had something to do with it too. My arm was also sore, but that was unimportant since I wouldn't be using it for a long time. This, of course, was depressing during that morning's practice for the choir presentation later: I'm a tenor, and I couldn't hit the high notes with anything approaching 20% accuracy. (Which, as anyone will tell you, is not a good thing.) Thank God my voice came back? was restored? after a cup of hot Milo, and I think we did OK during the actual presentation. There was a music teacher in the audience that morning, and she sent her compliments: so we can't have been all bad.
I have received my gifts, and so far 80% of them are T-shirts. I can only conclude that my wardrobe thus far has been unutterably boring to everyone else, and that they have taken it upon themselves to rectify my poor taste.
I went to the Coconut's house for Christmas dinner that night, and stayed overnight. We played Pig, SitBigTwo, and we would've played Mafia if there had been more people around. At any rate I got to Maple the next day. It was great fun. And I've gotten hooked on Law of Ueki, simply because it's interesting reading (even though the main character gets too strong too quickly). I just have a problem with how all the characters either have huge cat eyes or tiny slit eyes. After awhile everybody looks the same.
And then last night, Wolf and I watched Night in the Museum (based on the book of said title). It's a really good comedy, none of that tear-jerking in the middle that happened to You, Me, and Dupree or Click, and it still manages to get a bit of moral value across. (It appears that the movie is trying to promote Honesty or Dependability or something of the sort.) I liked it very much, and I want the DVD. Unfortunately, words are rotten at describing comedy scenes, so I'll just note down some of the bits I liked best and if you've watched the movie, you can check to make sure I didn't forget anything.
...when Attila got his head in the elevator and went "ting!"
...when the T-Rex went doggy
...every scene involving Jedediah and Octavius (love those two!)
...the miscommunication with Sawagawea (I think that's the correct spelling...)
...the TV news bit (cave paintings in the subway!)
...when Attila went for counselling sessions
...when the monkey stole baby toy keys
...when the pharaoh began complaining about stuffy sarcophagi
...when Roosevelt's top half got separated from his bottom half
...the short old security guard ("You crackin' wise on me, shortstop?")
...the dance scenes at the end.
Of course, it's all bad science. T-Rexes don't chase bones. Neanderthals would never get addicted to EATING dry ice. But who cares? It's a comedy. Of course, if it were some thriller, I'd tear it to bits. But it's a comedy. It's not meant to be clever or whatever.
Y'hear that, scriptwriters of Hollywood?
...I came across yet another all-Malaysian novel in Kinokuniya yesterday. Lydia Teh's Honk! If You're Malaysian. And I'm sorry to say I found it lacking, yet again. It gives off that almost-there aura I always find in Malaysian published writing. They're all very much the same, you know, all those books on Malaysian Horror or Malaysian Life or whatever they're writing now. They all attempt to prove that Malaysia is just as culturally rich and layered as any other country or nation or whatever, and that's where they all go wrong.
There is simply no sense in writing a book to be funny. Wit, like loads of other good things, comes when you least expect it. You cannot turn on a tap and expect it to permeate everything. And there's no point digging around to "prove" that we are different, because we are, and there's no changing that. No argument whatsoever. It's a nice try to put us on the literary map, but we're going to need so much more before we can get there.
For one thing, no more of this "Malaysia Boleh" nonsense. It's as bad as the "Follow Your Dreams" nonsense. We need real quality writing, properly edited and published. I don't think the world needs yet another book on "My Culture is Funny! Really! We're Weird and All That". Frankly, there is no sense in proving anything is funny. To call something funny for everyone is to assume everybody has identical senses of humour, and anybody on a playground knows that simply isn't true.
If you insist on writing about the weirdnesses of Malaysian life, by all means do so. But don't attempt to be funny about it. Just write what you see, and the wit or wisdom will come in all on its own. Neither of those needs forcing. In fact neither of those will come by forcing... and, unfortunately, Honk! If You're Malaysian has too much of the forced-humour aura about it.
I spent the better part of my waking time today, so far, watching anime on TV. (That's the nice thing about being here. Free TV.) And I found this new series, called R.O.D. The TV, that's caught my interest. Odd name, but it's nice anyway... the title, you see, has nothing whatsoever to do with the subject matter. It's about these three girls who manipulate paper. The eldest can stick paper together by telekinesis, the second can turn paper into weaponry (her favourite is a bow), and the youngest turns paper into knives. And all three can make paper as soft or hard as they wish. So... yeah, it's interesting. Go watch it. (And they all live together with a famous novelist with writer's block.) I like it because a lot of the main characters are obsessed with books and reading, rather like myself.
(This was borne out in the third episode when they went to town, saw a bookshop, and went "Wheee! Books!!" And later when they bought out an entire bookshop. Literally.)
...now, where do I start? I do warn you, this is going to turn out extremely long, and I wouldn't be surprised if this post takes you ages and ages to read, never mind understand. Even I am stunned by the sheer volume I'm going to have to write to adequately express myself on the above matters. So, in chronological order...
For the past three weeks, I and Wolf have been meeting once a week, usually on Thursdays, to watch a movie. The schedule is usually as follows: I arrive at the Twin Towers, I queue and obtain tickets, then I wait for him to get there from school, after which we hit Kinokuniya and remain there for the following few hours until about half an hour before the show, when we get dinner from McDonald's (which we calculated, on the first outing, to have the highest mass of food-to-rinngit ratio). During this time, we chitchat about matters which do not concern you at all. The first movie we saw in this manner was, shock and horror, Eragon.
It's an absolutely rotten movie. The special effects aren't at all special, the plot (look at my post on the book) was simply brain-dead, the actors... well, to their credit, they tried, but failed all the same... and well, I got sick of pointing out the loopholes after the first ten minutes or so. I hated it. Wolf regretted insisting that we watch it (I suggested Barnyard or Happy Feet, but he has friends who are fans of the Pao-for-Brains). And we had a good time tearing it apart.
But his friends are still fans, even though they saw the movie too. Apparently they even cried or something when the hero was completely de-family-ed in the first five minutes of the show, with accompanying overwrought emotion. The whole orphaned-hero thing is simply too old by now to interest me, and besides, it just doesn't make sense. (Unless you happen, apparently, to be some teenage idiot bent on rewriting the entire works of Tolkien, LeGuin, and Jordan PUT TOGETHER.) And then they decided that the whole dragons-are-big-scaly-beasts thing is overrated, so the blue dragon (oh, they called her Saphira. REEEAAALLLY subtle, if you ask me.) got turned into a mutant. Fact: She has the wing structure of a bird: feathers, down, curved wings and all. Fact: She has the body of a supersized crocodile: clawed feet, legs sticking out sideways from the body, etc. Fact: Her mouth can both breathe fire as well as turn rocks into diamonds within seconds WITHOUT affecting anything else in the vicinity. Fact: She has the face of a primate: eyebrow ridges and cheekbones. Fact: She has the tooth structure of a great white: rows and rows or huge teeth.
Which all doesn't go together all that nicely, if you ask me. More so when you colour the whole thing blue.
And it was simply stupid when they tried to make Eragon into some kind of super-genius who masters magic in seconds WHILE at the same time being utterly stupid and insisting on always following his heart the way all great heroes do. Riiiiiight. I'm getting utterly, completely, totally sick of the way Americans insist on everybody following their heart and paving the way for themselves to turn into Hypermegasuperultraman and save the world from annihilation. If everyone did that... wait a minute, some people already do. That's why they have all those unwanted pregnancies and shootouts and street gangs and stuff. Idiots.
...so that was a total waste of the ten bucks we spent on tickets. Fortunately we didn't buy popcorn (then again, we'd just had dinner).
Let me see... that would have been the... 15th of December, I think. Yeah. And two days later, my sister took a plane off to the Big S, where she probably still is. The family has been making its customary trekking around the inlands of China, though, so I can't be sure: but last I heard, they were in Nanjing, wherever that is. And then on the 20th, I moved out of the hostel into the Gorillas' place, where I've been ever since.
I took a few days to clean up the room. One and a half years' worth of junk doesn't disappear all on its own, you know. Most of the stuff I threw out. The rest is either in my room in the Gorillas', or in my sister's room in the hostel, whence I shall get it out when she gets back on the 1st. I managed, happily, to get it all done to the satisfaction of the hostel office, but it certainly was tiring, especially sweeping and mopping up several months' worth accumulation of dust. Niche, I'm sure, will be happy to see that side of the room empty: but I left behind bits of unwanted papers, planners etc. in his spacious cupboards as a surprise. Not very nice of me, I know, but... well, the very idea of his continued existence still annoys me. So there, and that's how quite a bit of my unwanted stuff got taken care of.
During all this time, I was kept quite busy commuting around (at first to and from the hostel, and then to and from the Gorillas') to Jogger's place or church to work on choir-related stuff. Somehow I got landed with the task of getting all the lyrics onto a PowerPoint presentation, and then it gradually expanded to filling in empty space (for the narration) and then it began to include finding photos and stuff to properly illustrate the message, and then the presentation was looked at and panned, and then I got stressed about it because the narrators wouldn't keep to any strictly ordered time and so went totally out of sync with the auto-animation and then I had to make it all On Click and mark down where the Click was supposed to occur...
I was so glad when I finally managed to get it done. Refer to the previous post. That's when it was done. After two cups of pulled tea, I pulled an all-nighter at Claus's to go through the whole thing, beginning at 2.30am and finishing at 6.30am when his parents woke up and went for a morning jog (I presume). I was playing MapleStory at the time because I thought I deserved it after all that work hunting pictures and getting them to come up in the right order. What, you think 53MB of animated pictures just falls into place by random?
Unfortunately, it turns out I shouldn't have played MapleStory that early in the morning, because Claus's parents have got the impression that I was doing that all night long. Parents have the tendency to go straight for the worst-scenario option whenever they see something slightly off: a trait I see in every set of parents I've ever come into contact with. Mention waKing up, and one pair will shake their heads while bemoaning the fact that their children glue themselves to the bedframe every night. Change the subject to the computer, and you get hit by a list of every single game on it-- complete with a record of how many hours in the past week were spent on each game, and how many in converse were spent on homework (always less than should be). And talk about school (God forbid!) and it's enough to convince you that schools are breeding grounds for smokers, drug dealers, players of truant, and that's just the teachers. So with Claus's parents, they gave him a talking-to when I'd left, and it appears that I am viewed as a Bad Influence of sorts.
Not unfounded, of course, since I'm the one who actually got him to start playing, but if only they'd seen the 4 straight hours of work I'd been doing, they might've had a different viewpoint. Still, there's no arguing with parents.
...Last Thursday, Wolf and I watched the Curse of the Golden Flower. Nothing to do at all with curses OR golden flowers, apart from the embroidered sort, because it actually revolves around a military coup planned to occur during a Chrysanthemum Festival. (I presume that's the curse.) The movie plays out like a giant soap opera, beginning with the queen who is the king's unloved second wife, taken only because she has a powerful father, and who is having an affair with the current Crown Prince, who is the king's favourite son because he was born by the king's loved first wife, who is presumed dead (in fact offerings are made to her spirit). The Crown Prince, in turn, is having another affair with the daughter of the Royal Physician, who is married to the king's former first wife (which means that the Crown Prince and the girl are half-siblings). And the king, who found out about all this a long time ago, has decided to hand-brew the queen's medicine (which she takes every two hours to treat her anaemia) and has added in a compound that will eventually turn her into a cretin. And then there's the second Prince, who is the real son of the queen, who just came back from some military campaign all decorated in glory, who is insanely loyal to the queen and decides to head a coup the moment he finds out about the poisoning. (The Queen hired a woman, who turned out to be the king's first wife, to find out what exactly was in the medicines, and then told the second Prince, who is very close to her.) And last of all, the youngest Prince, who is suffering from neglect and apparently an inferiority complex.
And then it all comes together in one big bloody (literally!) mess. Massacres left and right, and it looks as if every member of the royal family has their own specialised mini-army. At least, the king has his cool ninja dudes with sickles, and the Crown Prince has a bunch of palace guards, and so on.
We liked it, although we found it rather confusing as to chronology: nothing in the movie is properly put in perspective as to time, so cause-and-effect are rather blurry. In any case the movie has a certain amount of humour in it, but the ending was too ambiguous to be enjoyed.
This was on the 21st of December, Thursday. I remember because I was late for choir practice: the first time in the past four or five months of practice that I have been voluntarily late. Fortunately I didn't have a particularly major role so my absence wasn't particularly noticed, I think.
On the 23rd, caroling began, and with it, my stress. We had the practice at 4.30pm... at least, it was scheduled for 4.30pm but it actually began a lot later since we had to deal with the usual tardiness. Well, if you saw my post about the prom night, lateness gets me on edge. It's one of my weaknesses that I like things on schedule if they're important. Well, we had a practice, and I suppose it went OK even though nobody remembered their parts and the arrangements went out of whack and the guitarists were somehow off. But the actual thing went well: it's nice, you know, to be able to do something well. I like beauty, especially aural, since I don't have much of the visual sort myself. (Incidentally, I was all decked out in new stuff that night because the Gorilla said a conductor must dress formally. It turned out to be a good idea, even if it cost me more than RM200.) We ate a lot that night since we weren't very rushed for time.
The next day... it was Sunday, so we had the practice after church when transport would be easiest to arrange. As it turned out, we shouldn't have. Everybody was fractious and had suffered amnesia after the previous night: a slight success had, it seemed, driven all memory out of their heads. It went very badly in the beginning, since we got a bunch of noobs who didn't know the first thing about singing--their idea of singing is probably Do-Re-Mi in any combination--and they were really getting on my nerves.
And then the Coconut's mother suggested that we break for lunch, and I said OK, hoping that maybe a drink or two and a little relaxation would get them to calm down enough to sing. But it didn't, and when 20 minutes was up, next to nobody was back and ready to sing. They began trickling back in after about 30 minutes, and even then they simply wouldn't get back into position and prepare for practice. Well, nobody can say I didn't try. I tried to ask them to get into shape, but since nobody was listening, I had no choice but to lose my temper.
Now, one thing. I lose my temper ON PURPOSE. Ever since Form Three, I have never lost my temper accidentally except on one or two occasions: all other times, I have done it deliberately, because quite often I find that it works when nothing else does. In most cases, I store, so to speak, all my stress in a metaphorical container, then let it out when necessary: in sufficient volume, this translates to a loss of temper. If nothing more, it gets people to pay attention for more than 20 seconds, which is quite enough to get them to start following orders. Hence, "I had no choice but to lose my temper".
We went through the rest of the practice with little or no memorable incident, apart from that a table was broken (not by me) and some of the carolers got scared. (Well, I meant for them to be scared.) I suppose I might have been a little scathing in my speech, but I really was very tense at the time. From my point of view at least, it's all about the quality. As the conductor, it was my duty to get them to sing well... and at that time, they weren't doing so at all. It was extremely annoying for me. Well, no matter. It's over now.
That night we did very well. I made sure to tell them so, in a sort of recompense for the events of the earlier day. And we ate a lot; I could barely move at the end of the day. (Note to self: pumpkin pie, if done right, is heavenly.) So that's that with the caroling, except that if they should ask me to do this again next year (if I'm even around!), I shall print this post out and read it again at every plea, to stop myself from saying yes. Not in another hundred years shall I subject myself to this kind of stress. Even if we did sing Feliz Navidad very well, and most of the hosts complimented me on the job, and everybody actually managed to get the arrangements right, and... if this goes on I just might convince myself to do this again next year.
The next morning, I was hoarse, both from yelling at the carolers during practice and from singing all night with the carolers. Maybe all the soft drinks had something to do with it too. My arm was also sore, but that was unimportant since I wouldn't be using it for a long time. This, of course, was depressing during that morning's practice for the choir presentation later: I'm a tenor, and I couldn't hit the high notes with anything approaching 20% accuracy. (Which, as anyone will tell you, is not a good thing.) Thank God my voice came back? was restored? after a cup of hot Milo, and I think we did OK during the actual presentation. There was a music teacher in the audience that morning, and she sent her compliments: so we can't have been all bad.
I have received my gifts, and so far 80% of them are T-shirts. I can only conclude that my wardrobe thus far has been unutterably boring to everyone else, and that they have taken it upon themselves to rectify my poor taste.
I went to the Coconut's house for Christmas dinner that night, and stayed overnight. We played Pig, SitBigTwo, and we would've played Mafia if there had been more people around. At any rate I got to Maple the next day. It was great fun. And I've gotten hooked on Law of Ueki, simply because it's interesting reading (even though the main character gets too strong too quickly). I just have a problem with how all the characters either have huge cat eyes or tiny slit eyes. After awhile everybody looks the same.
And then last night, Wolf and I watched Night in the Museum (based on the book of said title). It's a really good comedy, none of that tear-jerking in the middle that happened to You, Me, and Dupree or Click, and it still manages to get a bit of moral value across. (It appears that the movie is trying to promote Honesty or Dependability or something of the sort.) I liked it very much, and I want the DVD. Unfortunately, words are rotten at describing comedy scenes, so I'll just note down some of the bits I liked best and if you've watched the movie, you can check to make sure I didn't forget anything.
...when Attila got his head in the elevator and went "ting!"
...when the T-Rex went doggy
...every scene involving Jedediah and Octavius (love those two!)
...the miscommunication with Sawagawea (I think that's the correct spelling...)
...the TV news bit (cave paintings in the subway!)
...when Attila went for counselling sessions
...when the monkey stole baby toy keys
...when the pharaoh began complaining about stuffy sarcophagi
...when Roosevelt's top half got separated from his bottom half
...the short old security guard ("You crackin' wise on me, shortstop?")
...the dance scenes at the end.
Of course, it's all bad science. T-Rexes don't chase bones. Neanderthals would never get addicted to EATING dry ice. But who cares? It's a comedy. Of course, if it were some thriller, I'd tear it to bits. But it's a comedy. It's not meant to be clever or whatever.
Y'hear that, scriptwriters of Hollywood?
...I came across yet another all-Malaysian novel in Kinokuniya yesterday. Lydia Teh's Honk! If You're Malaysian. And I'm sorry to say I found it lacking, yet again. It gives off that almost-there aura I always find in Malaysian published writing. They're all very much the same, you know, all those books on Malaysian Horror or Malaysian Life or whatever they're writing now. They all attempt to prove that Malaysia is just as culturally rich and layered as any other country or nation or whatever, and that's where they all go wrong.
There is simply no sense in writing a book to be funny. Wit, like loads of other good things, comes when you least expect it. You cannot turn on a tap and expect it to permeate everything. And there's no point digging around to "prove" that we are different, because we are, and there's no changing that. No argument whatsoever. It's a nice try to put us on the literary map, but we're going to need so much more before we can get there.
For one thing, no more of this "Malaysia Boleh" nonsense. It's as bad as the "Follow Your Dreams" nonsense. We need real quality writing, properly edited and published. I don't think the world needs yet another book on "My Culture is Funny! Really! We're Weird and All That". Frankly, there is no sense in proving anything is funny. To call something funny for everyone is to assume everybody has identical senses of humour, and anybody on a playground knows that simply isn't true.
If you insist on writing about the weirdnesses of Malaysian life, by all means do so. But don't attempt to be funny about it. Just write what you see, and the wit or wisdom will come in all on its own. Neither of those needs forcing. In fact neither of those will come by forcing... and, unfortunately, Honk! If You're Malaysian has too much of the forced-humour aura about it.
I spent the better part of my waking time today, so far, watching anime on TV. (That's the nice thing about being here. Free TV.) And I found this new series, called R.O.D. The TV, that's caught my interest. Odd name, but it's nice anyway... the title, you see, has nothing whatsoever to do with the subject matter. It's about these three girls who manipulate paper. The eldest can stick paper together by telekinesis, the second can turn paper into weaponry (her favourite is a bow), and the youngest turns paper into knives. And all three can make paper as soft or hard as they wish. So... yeah, it's interesting. Go watch it. (And they all live together with a famous novelist with writer's block.) I like it because a lot of the main characters are obsessed with books and reading, rather like myself.
(This was borne out in the third episode when they went to town, saw a bookshop, and went "Wheee! Books!!" And later when they bought out an entire bookshop. Literally.)
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