O is for Ocular

We’re in the elevator going down two floors and Sanah waves a hand in my face.

– Are you there?
– Yeah.
– I don’t think you’re there.

I must look as bad as I feel. I’m dazed and my vision’s blurred. A whole day in front of the computer will do that to you. We get out of the building, Sanah gets into the car and Karen, who says nothing in the elevator, bounces to the bus stop. Not walks. Bounces. She says nothing the whole two floors.

I walk to the station. I’m dazed and my vision’s blurred. My eyes are getting worse by the day. In this state, road signs become generalised geometric shapes. Every blonde will look like Mandy Moore and every Asian guy will either look like Alwin or Ken. Meeting a friend in Chinatown will become an impossibility. My eyes are getting worse by the day.

Before that for three and a half hours I am sitting in front of the computer in class tracing a map of Japan. Before that, I work seven hours, again, in front of a computer. I am in class, sitting in front of a G4 Macintosh computer tracing a map of Japan with a Bezier pen tool. I start with the outline of the islands, then the first level of topography, then the second, then the rivers, island names, city names, and then I make it look pretty. Three and a half hours later, the whole exercise leaves me dazed and my vision blurred. Too much constant exposure to a computer can do that to you.

You take a pencil and hold it between your thumb and your index finger on the tip. Wave the pencil in front of your face in any conventional light and you get a continuous image of the pencil moving up and down, making an almost perfect fan shape. Do the same thing but this time in front of a computer monitor and instead of a continuous image, you see your pencil moving in steps. Your pencil becomes a raver dancing under strobe light.

This is because light is only coming at you from the screen half the time. It flickers fast enough to fool your eyes into believing that the light emitting from the screen is continuous. It’s this low refresh rate of a computer screen that’s the killer.

View a computer screen on TV and the flickering becomes obvious. This is because the TV flickers too. View a flickering screen through a flickering TV and the effect multiplies.

This is why computers are killing my eyes.

This is why computers are evil.

This is why I went to the optometrist this afternoon to get my eyes checked.

This is why meeting a friend in Chinatown will become a nightmare.

High five

Congratulations to Yao Ming, all 7’5” of him, who yesterday became the first Chinese basketball player to get picked first in the NBA draft. Not only that, he becomes the first Non-American professional to ever be drafted first. This is a big deal! There are now three Chinese players in the NBA (Wang Zhi Zhi and Menk Bateer – from inner Mongolia). Whether he will do anything special in the league remains to be seen. Players THAT tall haven’t had a good track record in the NBA… But good on you for getting this far!

Low five

Undercover Angels, that inexplicably bad TV show that puts Channel 7 to shame, now has it’s own soundtrack on the shelves. Ian Thorpe has his own CD! Ian Thorpe has his own CD! What the hell?!

N is for Next

Last night, I finished reading a book called Snowdome by an Australian writer named Bernard Cohen. I read all of its 180-odd pages and I can’t honestly say that I know what the book is about. I have no idea what I was reading but for some reason, I kept on reading. I can even say that I enjoyed reading it. Really enjoyed it. On its own, every individual passage in the book is a beautifully written piece of prose. Prose that I read with both admiration and envy. I guess what kept me going was the promise that something else good was coming up in the following passage… and the following page.

What’s next?

But now that I have reached the end, there is no next. I get to the final page and none of my questions are answered. I finish the epilogue… and none of my questions are answered. I guess I’ll move on to my next novel.

What’s next?

I am a consumer. I keep buying. I keep taking. I keep eating. Waiting for the next good thing. I think in the back of my mind, there must be some imaginary point of satiety that I’m aiming for. Otherwise, the practice of consumerism would be a pointless exercise. Obviously, I can never get enough…

What’s next on TV? What CD can I buy next? What movie shall I see next? Which restaurant do I try next? The anticipation is often more than the experience. I know this but I keep on consuming, and at a rate faster than I’ve ever faced before. I think. Waiting on the next good thing.

Movies: Star Wars Episode II: Eh, OK. It’s alright. Yoda’s pretty cool. What’s next? Spiderman? Excellent! Great! Wonderful! What I’ve always wanted! But now… er… what’s next? Minority Report! Yeah! Good. Pretty good. I liked Spiderman better but.

What’s next?

CDs: Stop it now! There’s too much to buy! If I had faster internet connection, I might be tempted to download whole albums… nah! Toploader: Onky Wonky Something or other, crap. Let’s return it. Next! Josh Joplin: Useful Music, Yeah. OK. About three good songs. Er... um… I’ll keep it. What’s next? Eminem: The Eminem Show, Excellent! Actually less disturbing than his other offerings! Just as good to listen to! Woohoo! Next! The Doves: Last Broadcast, First Song’s good, second is good-ish… third…um… fourth… Oh guys could you cheer up a little?! Eh… I’ll keep it for when I’m in the mood. Next! Matchbox 20: Yourself or Someone like you, and Hootie and the Blowfish: Cracked Rear-view, yeah they’re old. And I’ve actually already got them. On tape though mind you. But they’re classics and only $10! So what’s… What? K-Mart has a stocktake sale?! CD’s for $12?! Cool, Live: V And Kid Rock: Cocky. Eh, if you’re a Live fan, don’t buy V! They’ve climbed to new heights of pretentiousness! Kid Rock’s actually quite fun… and the dude can sing! Not bad. One hit, one miss… moving right along. Waiting on the next good thing… found it! John Mayer: Room for Squares, man this guy’s good. First new artist I’ve gotten excited over (no, Audrey, not THAT excited!) since Michelle Branch. He looks like one of those ‘geeks-turned-cool-with-fame’ kinda guys. Sort of like Ben Lee. ‘Your Body is a Wonderland’ — questionable song title, great song! But it sounds like before he was famous, he was probably singing ‘MY Body is a Wonderland’!

What’s next?

Counting Crows, Motor Ace, David Franj, Nickleback, Rachel Kane and The Whitlams are all releasing new albums! Arghh! Have… to… buy.

What’s next?

What’s coming up after Z? What comes next? I think I have some idea now. I have some direction. And in time, I may even meet my final point of satiety. Until then…

What’s next?

M is for Me

Yo yo! xtn in da house! Put yo hands up in the air and wave ‘em like you just don’t care…yo…ho! What you say dawg? I’m the illest brotha eva! You diss me, I bust a cap in your ass, dawg!

OK, that’ll do. Just practicing my street talk for City Live tonight. Obviously needs a bit of work. Even all those Eminem records don’t help. Problem is, I don’t hardly swear none (ya like that one? ya like that?!). You can’t talk street without swearing. OK. Enough of this. Focus back on the blog…

As if writing a regular blog isn’t self indulgent enough. Now I’m writing a whole bloody entry on just how much I love myself! So, without any further nonsense, let’s break into song, shall we?

It had to be me
It had to be me

I wandered around
And finally found
Someone who could be
So happy and free
Just watching TV
Or even be glad
Feel not a bit sad
Eating KFC

Some others I’ve seen
Might never be mean
Might never be cross
But I couldn’t give a toss
Cos they’re just not me

Cos nobody else
Gives me a thrill
With all my faults
I love me still
It had to be me
Wonderful me
It had to be me!

L is for Learning

I’m a pretty fast learner. Or at least I can be when I want to. Throughout my whole academic career, I’ve always been good at understanding concepts right off the bat. I can find patterns, I can make all sorts of different information click together and it all makes sense to me.

The trouble is, that’s where it stops. Other people catch up. They sit, read things over and absorb the information. I watch TV, daydream and everything flows right out, leaving only shells of information that I can palm off as trivia at parties.

Mmmm the land of chocolate…

I remember I did a philosophy subject called ‘Personal Identity’ and after every class, my friend would ask me to explain stuff that was said over the lecture cos she didn’t get it. I got everything. I was never lost in class. I could and would participate in all class discussions (unless I was asleep… but that didn’t happen much in this class). I was passionate about this subject. We were talking about really whacked-out abstract concepts — the stuff that matters most to me. But come final assignment time, she panics and stresses her way to an HD. I relax and barely scrape a D.

And it’s this same pattern that’s been repeating itself since I started high school. People get the impression that I’m smart (hell, I get the impression that I’m smart!) and so they all invariably get disappointed time and time again as I keep getting mediocre mark after mediocre mark. I haven’t excelled academically since year 6!

I don’t think I have ADD or any other pseudo-psychological conditions. I’m just lazy and I get cocky so I don’t try very hard. I think that’s it. And I’m not trying to suggest that I’m really some genius that just needs direction and drive to catch up to my superhuman intellect. I’m just good with concepts and not good with much else. I’m fascinated by concepts and I love absorbing information, but I don’t want to (and can’t) work on it to get good marks in an exam. I don’t want to (and can’t) skew it to fit a traditional essay format. I just like to sit around and talk about it. I’m a bum! I think a whole lot but I do very little. And I don’t discount the value of hard work either. Hard work is discipline but it’s also a skill like anything else. Karl Marx said that ‘quantity is its own quality’. I say:

Hard work is its own talent.

The reason I’m thinking about all this is that we have an assignment coming up in class (My $8,000 graphic design course). So far, I’ve been breezing through all the material we’ve learnt. Last week, I finished four hours worth of work in less than three. But now I gotta put something on paper. And I’ve learnt enough to expect to be disappointed.

Oh well…

Other tidbits

Spider-man the movie is now in 5th place on the all-time box-office list. The only movies ahead are Star Wars, Titanic, ET and The Phantom Menace. Spider-man is expected to go past The Phantom Menace by the end of its run. However, when you take into account inflation (who has time to calculate all this?), Spider-man is only placed 45th on the all-time list in front of Batman. So it’s still the best-selling comic adaptation of all time but there are 44 other films ahead…
__________

I’ve been consuming way too many CDs. I have to stop. But it’s not my fault that there’s a $10 CD store in Pitt Street and it’s not my fault that K-Mart is having a stocktake sale…

K is for Chicken

My mother told me this morning, as she was driving me to the station, that someone is now saying that chicken is really bad for you. The reason of the week has something to do with antibiotics being pumped into chickens. I wouldn’t know. I don’t often listen to the news. But it doesn’t matter. There’s always a new unhealthy food or a new super-healthy food or just the same ones going around in cycles. My mum’s really into that. Whatever’s just been said to have ten times the vitamin C content of such and such, or a gazillion times the protein of so and so, that’s what we’ll have at least once in the next week… until the next one comes along.

That’s all fair enough. I didn’t mind the oat bran craze of the early nineties (ah, those good old oat bran days…). It’s just that our family’s diet is also wildly inconsistent. Along with the healthy vegetable of the week, we also eat frozen chips, frozen hash browns, frozen patties of some kind and frozen fish, all cooked in its own congealed fat.

And we have chicken. We have lots of chicken. And we don’t just have any chicken. When we have chicken, we like it Kentucky Fried! We love KFC. I love KFC. And I loved it even better before it was called KFC. It’s the greatest chicken in the world! No matter where you eat chicken, how it’s cooked or how much it costs, there’s no way that it’s any better than having it Kentucky Fried!

KFC almost makes me buy into that Bible passage that says that animals are for man to eat. It’s the ultimate culinary experience — a gastronomic explosion of eleven secret herbs and spices (one of which, I’m told, is chicken…).

I know it’s probably not doing my body any good. But you can probably already tell that I don’t care enough about that. Cos when our family gathers around the TV, eating golden brown chicken Kentucky Fried to perfection, rehydrated dehydrated coleslaw, powdered mash potatoes with powdered gravy and soggy chips sprinkled with more of the eleven secret herbs and spices (it’s not normal chicken salt!), all served in cardboard containers so greased-up that parts of it go transparent… well… nothing brings us closer together.
__________

Bits and Pieces

It feels really good to listen to old cds and actually surprise yourself at how much you still enjoy them. I consume an enormous amount of music cds and I get usually get sick of them after overplaying them to death. But it’s good to listen to them again after some time. Really sorts out the classics and weeds out the duds.

The Wallflowers have officially passed its two-year test.

I saw the Spider-man movie over the weekend and boy was it good! It’s about as faithful as a comic geek can hope to get. Although critics on the whole have liked it, some still criticise it, comparing it to Superman, Batman and The X-Men and saying that Sam Raimi has sold out to Hollywood and created a film without bite. Come on, you have to remember that Spider-man is the result of forty years of sequential art history, a lot of which has had prominent influence on pop culture. The movie simply rides that wave. All the poses, the corny lines, the awkward geekiness of the comic are here. Batman was a great movie, but it wasn’t really Batman. X-Men was also good but, again, it wasn’t really the X-men (where the hell was Gambit?!). This, however, is Spider-man, and now that Raimi says the set-up is all done in this first movie and he can begin telling a real story in the sequel… this is gonna be good. And I can’t wait (though I will have to since I have very little say in the matter).

J is for Junk

I’ve been seeing this ad on TV where there’s a family messing up their house. The daughter is cutting up a pot plant. The mother is tipping rubbish into the kitchen sink and then grabs a glass of dirty water from the sink and gives it to the son to drink. The dad is watching some TV documentary about the destruction of the environment and stuff. I can’t remember what else they do, but by the end of the ad, the living room is all dirty and disgusting, and the slogan is something like:

It’s your home.

It’s an ad for some environmental awareness thing I think. And it’s a pretty good one I gotta admit (though now I can’t even remember who exactly is advertising what). It’s just that ads like this don’t really work on me. For one thing, I don’t really care about the environment and conservation and stuff. Well, I don’t completely not care. But I obviously don’t care enough to do much about it. It’s apathy. I know. It’s just there and I just say:

Aww, poor trees. Aww, poor koalas. Um… what else is on TV?

The other thing is, my bedroom looks pretty much like the living room in this ad. That’s why no one’s been in my room for over half a decade! I watch this ad, read the slogan ‘It’s your home’ and I think:

My God, they’re psychic! It really does look like my home!

I like junk. I like muck. I like being in muck. I like rummaging through the crap on my floor and finding an unopened letter that someone sent me six years ago or photocopied notes that I needed three years ago for an exam but couldn’t find. It’s like living in a giant Kinder Surprise (TM)! There’s always something exciting, something to play with and, occasionally, I even find chocolate in there!

OK, sure sometimes it’s frustrating when I can’t find something that I need to find. But I say:

That which does not kill you only makes you stronger.

And besides, my frustrations are always eased by the comforting knowledge that:

It’s in there somewhere. It’s only a matter of time.

It’s not messy, it’s organic. It’s ordered chaos. It’s functional in its own way. And until I can be bothe… I mean, get around to cleaning it up, it’s my home.

Other tidbits

Last Sunday was the first time (I think) that I have ever had coffee one-on-one with a married woman! She’s my friend, from my high school years, and I don’t think I’ve had a proper conversation with her for over five years. And now she’s married. The idea is rather frightful to me. I’m feeling old. I’m twenty-three and I’m already feeling old. My sister would clobber me on the head for saying that! It was really nice though seeing my friend again. It’s nice knowing that she’s doing really well. I do hope that wasn’t a one-off. I do hope we keep in touch…

Yesterday I was playing a game of ‘How old are you?’ with an acquaintance of mine.

- So how many years did you work there?
- Was that your first job after uni?
- I see…
- Is he an older or younger brother?
- I thought so…
- So how long did you go away for after that?

I think it would be so much easier if we just asked each other. My guess would be 26. Maybe 27. 25 would be wishful thinking.

I do hope they never read this.

I is for Interlude

I’m taking a break from talking about myself. I talk too much anyway and there’s still J-Z to go (hey, sounds like that rapper).

Anyway, if you’ve been reading my blog, perhaps you’d like to consume some of the stuff that I’ve been taking in. Not that it would necessarily give you any more insight into me but still…

What my stacker is playing
- Eminem: The Eminem Show (White boy rapper with a foul mouth) — Yeah, its more of the same but good same is good good. Plus you get the added bonus of hearing his three-year old daughter join in and rap about chainsaws and stuff… good wholesome fun.
- Michelle Branch: The Spirit Room (19-year-old girl with a guitar) — It’s beginning to lose some of its lustre due to my overplaying it, but if you read D is for Delivered, then you probably have some idea of how highly I think of her.
- Ryan Adams: Gold (A guy who ISN’T Bryan Adams, doing an alternative country/rock hybrid) — Good stuff. This is who I listen to when I’m not listening to other guys with guitars.
- Jack Johnson: Brushfire Fairytales (Hawaiian surfie-dude with a guitar) — Good music to relax to. Jazzy, folksy, bluesy. I can’t understand why people listen to that ‘chill out’ crap when there’s stuff like this around.

What’s fresh on my non-existent bookshelf
- The Anubis Gates (Tim Powers) — This is what might have been, had Dickens decided to write sci-fi. A tight-knit story of time travel and magic, set in a very Dickensian London backdrop. Often freaky but an excellent read.
- Stardust (Neil Gaiman) — A nicely crafted adult fairy tale. Is it gonna change your life? Probably not. Would it bring a big fat smile to your face? Hell yeah!

What I tune in to on TV (among others)
- Always Greener — Maybe I’m just excited about being excited about an Australian show. It’s not the greatest show ever or anything. But it’s quirky, clever and doesn’t pretend to be cool. To me, that makes it pretty cool.
- The Practice — I think this is the best show on TV (apologies to Buffy).

What I DON’T tune in to on TV
- Big Brother — Make it go away! Please!
- Undercover Angels — OK, so the babes aren’t too bad… but Ian Thorpe (or Ian Sorp, as they say in Japan…) as a TV host?! Fine, so he swims pretty fast. But don’t give him a bloody TV show!

What I’ve seen on the big screen
- Life as a house — Hayden Christensen looks like he may have graduated from the Keanu Reeves School of Acting, but Kevin Kline carries this movie so well. The comparisons to American Beauty is unfair though. Life as a house more heartwarming and less cynical. Admittedly, it’s a tear jerker, but a well–made one. This is the most enjoyable movie I’ve seen since Ocean’s 11… not that the two movies have anything to do with each other.

Websites to watch for
- www.y2khai.com — Ignore the somewhat rude pics on the bottom. Just download the video clips. It’s an Asian guy, dressed like Elvis and rapping. The best farce on the net.
- www.monkeypeaches.com — A surprisingly good site about Asian (or Asian-related) cinema. It’s even in authentic badly-written English! This is where I found out that Chow Yun Fat just turned 47!

BLOG plugs for friends
http://izms.blogspot.com — Benjamin Chew’s site. It’s where I first discovered blogs.
http://thrilmalia.blogspot.com — If only Audrey would stop writing about Big Brother, I’d give this site more support!

The latest beauty pageant I watched on TV
Congratulations Miss Oxana Ferodorova (Russia) on becoming Miss Universe 2002… if only anyone actually cared... She’s your typical winner: tall, pretty, looks good in a swimsuit. Yeah, whatever.

Miss Panama (second overall) was better. When asked what country other than her own she’d like to represent, she chose Puerto Rico… which just so happens to be where the pageant was hosted this year… surprise surprise! Bloody suck-up.

Special mention must go to Miss China (third overall). Choosing to go without an interpreter (idiot!), she was asked what she thinks are misconceptions about her country. Her answer?

Er… western people think Chinese are short… er… traditional…and… er… quiet… but… look me!

Yes, look her! Well done Miss China!

Song in my head
- The theme song to Gummi Bears
Dashing and daring
Courageous and caring
Faithful and sharing
With stories to tell
All through the forest
They sing out in chorus
Marching along
As the song fills the air!

Gummi Bears!
Bouncing here and there and everywhere
High adventure that’s beyond compare
They are the Gummi Bears
They are the Gummi Bears!

Magic and mystery
Are part of their history
Along with the secret
Of Gummiberry juice…

Does anyone know the rest?