Tag Archives: uni

Where did all your love go?

[Is Anybody Out There? – Maroon 5]

So starts my bid to write in here everyday, or as frequently as I possibly can.

Today, I noticed how passive-aggressive is a lot more hurtful and spiteful than massive-aggressive. In my Asian PR tute today, for some reason people seemed to want talk over me all the time. It was one of those I wait for a pause in conversation, and try to cut in, but the moment I do so someone else talks over me, so I look at them and I do that semi-wave thing like, “oh do go on” but they keep talking instead of the usual “I’m sorry you started talking first” BECAUSE I DID.

Anyway, it got to the point where Annie had to say out loud, “wow you’ll never get to speak today will you” and the teacher actually had to point at me before I could get a word in edgewise.

In other news, today was the first day in almost 3 weeks where I woke up during single digits, and didn’t have coffee, as per an agreement with Cindy (a name which I know is new here, but a friendship whose genesis I am way too embarrassed to write about. Let’s say I met her at a party, and, incidentally, I was drunk). She broke the agreement, I didn’t. So, at lunch, the caffeine deprived Alex ended up having a shouting match with a good-food deprived Clare, but then I accidentally groped her and then she pinched my face, and everything was smoothed over.

Here’s to my best efforts at writing here everyday. Thankfully tomorrow should be eventful enough to fill out a good 700 words or so.

Alex.

Oh crappity crap crap

2 blog posts this month, what a disgrace!

I suppose  I can do a meta-thing and have a look at why I haven’t been blogging.

It hasn’t been because I haven’t been online. I’m sure if you check out my Tumblr (link at the side), you’ll see I’ve been spending copious amounts of time tanning by my laptop light.

And it hasn’t been because I haven’t done shit all in the past month but tanning by my laptop light because a lot did happen, but I think…

For some reason I don’t deem my life interesting enough to document anymore. I mean, looking back, I used to write about getting coffee after school. But now I don’t even mention that I had an assessment performance for which I didn’t do so well.

Alright so here it is.

On Wednesday past, I had an assessment performance for Script for Performance. I dragged loads of uni friends along so basically on entire wall of the joint was occupied by my Asian friends – not many Asians doing that subject, as you can imagine.

My script, I admit, was shoddy, but I relied on my ability to project my voice to carry me through. I got laughs where I wanted laughs, but my tutor, the sneaky man, saw past my gimmicks and told me I needed to polish up my style and structure.

So I went home and reworked the entire script, starting from the style, going along the structure, the delivery, and even the overall tone.

Perhaps he’ll be proud of me.

Other events that happened was my oral presentation for Hollywood and Entertainment, where I had to give a presentation on the comic book aesthetic in film in regards to Scott Pilgrim. I used my Tumblr as a way to present my work which went better than normal.

I don’t think the essay that I wrote for it was very decent, though.

Apart from uni, I suppose I’m correct in saying not much has been exciting in ways of social life. Everyone’s bunkering down for end of Semester assessments and exams, and being 2nd years, people are actually caring (I am too, just not as obviously. I have a reputation of bad-assery to uphold). I’ve made more and more friends at work which is always a bonus…until they realize how strange I am and shifts become awkward.

Looking forward to the winter holidays, not only because I have my 20th birthday coming up (well this is just terrifying), but because I can sleep in and watch loads of TV basking in the glory of my laptop light.

Alex.

P.S. Next month marks the coming of winter, and so song name titles will make its appearance again.

P.P.S. I will try to find another 30 day writing challenge or whatnot to up my count and continue my writing.

P.P.P.S. After the assessment date of the script, I’ll post it up here for y’all to enjoy.

I Only Want Sympathy In The Form Of You

[Dance Dance – Fall Out Boy]

This is from the life and laughs of this uni assignment

This really isn’t that fantastic a rant but I told myself to write at least 2 blog posts a week for CMEL.

I had this thought a few years ago:

I was walking home from school in Yr 8 I think it was, and it was around the time when Pokemon came out with FireRed and LeafGreen.

I remember that this caused my friend’s (apparently non-Pokemon literate) sister some confusion. We explained that FireRed and LeafGreen were revamps of the original Pokemon games for the GBA, so they’re essentially the same game but it looks better and a few more features, right?

Then she asked, “But weren’t the originals Red and Blue?”

I answered, “In Japan, when the games first came out, they had Red and Green. For some reason when the US picked it up, they changed Green to Blue. Obviously for the remake they decided to go back to green.”

She asked, “What difference does it make, apart from the fact that Blastoise got replaced with Venusaur?” (She didn’t actually say the names. She said “the big turtle thing with the water hose”, and “the big plant monster”.)

And at that point, the Yr 8 me started going off on a tangent about the meaning of words. My friend and his sister got very bored very quickly, but I think I’ll explain what I ranted about, to the extent that I remember:

There really isn’t that much of a difference aside from the fact that at the start you now get to choose Green as your name instead of Blue. Everything else is pretty much the same – the same Pokemon are available and inversely unavailable on LeafGreen as it was on Blue. So, really, it was just some stupid choice in words and colors.

I wondered (out loud), what got people to choose the words “blue” and “green”. My grandparents used to mix the words “blue” and “green” together (in Chinese) when describing something that is colored blue, and something that is colored green. Mostly, they use “green”. So for example, the grass is green, and my blue sweater is “green”. There probably is a historical/linguistic reason behind why older generation Chinese people do this, but I don’t know it.

Now, there is obviously a difference between “blue” and “green”. Blue is the color of the dashboard on this blog (unless of course you changed it) and green is what trees would look like if Melbourne left the drought. But why are there two different words (we say two, but let’s not argue over cerulean and celadon – yes, more Pokemon references) for these two different colors? Obviously my grandparents went through the better part of their lives differentiating between water and grass using the word “green”, so it’s not like the world will implode if we bunched those two together. And yet in school, Naiads, the blue house of water nymphs never cheered for Dryads, the green house of tree nymphs – or, for a much better metaphor, Ravenclaw never cheered for Slytherine. We would have been mortified if someone said that the blue house and the green house were “the green house” (especially the blue house).

We differentiate between these colors with our words because we want to, not because we need to. It makes life easier and more varied if we have two different words for what obviously can be a mixed concept. I know you’re probably thinking “yeah but if we say the ocean is green, we’re in for an environmental disaster and not doing anything about it” but that’s because you grew up being told the ocean is normal when it’s “blue”, and if it’s “green” it’s dirty. But we have words for “contaminated water” so it is feasible that we can go through life knowing the water is “green” but not to go in if it’s “contaminated”.

Anyway I want to get my 8 hours’ of sleep so I’m heading off. See how much thought Pokemon can provoke?

Alex.

P.S. Title has almost no relevance to the blog, which isn’t a great idea.

I will try my hardest to incorporate Pokemon into anything.

Alex.

My Lungs Refuse To Breathe The Air Without You Here

[Without You Here – Pensive]

Hello Winter! Hello another 3 months of song titles.

Yesterday I went to dinner with April, Simon, Oli- (April and Soph’s older bro) Soph, Erh-, Kud, Andrew and DANI!!! (Left the best part ’til last.) Yep, Dani was in Melbourne, so we all went to dinner.

We went to Sante’s at Crown, which I realized upon getting there that I’d actually gone there before, for Gina’s birthday back in Yr 9 or 10. I was immediately relieved that my starving myself earlier in the day paid off because Sante’s is an all-you-can-eat buffet!

Dani gave me this really really awesome book which is titled The Ants Are My Friends, by Martin Toseland. It’s about “misheard lyrics, malapropisms, eggcorns and other linguistic gaffes”.

And we laughed and laughed and laughed at just about everything. Dani, Andrew and Kud were finding it hard to eat their fill because they had a huge lunch.

April ate food!

I had a huge plate (with lots of coleslaw haha) and then I ate a 2nd serving…OF PRAWN CRACKERS! Let me tell you now, Prawn Crackers with mint sauce is a-may-zing.

Also, I discovered crackling pork through Soph. I like it, but I think it’s really fatty so I didn’t have more.

On the train home, I introduced Wutinie to Fruit Ninja and suffice to say, they are hooked. Dani and I (unsuccessfully) tried out hand at Sudoku and Crossword. I used to think I get words fast at the Word Scramble, but that was before I had to go head-to-head with April. Crazy April.

So far I’ve finished 2 out of my 4 subjects. Now I have to start on my two 2000-word-essays. I dread it.

I hope to visit Canberra this winter. Hope. Hooooope.

Alex.

Winners Of The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

This is again, a handout from my Creative Writing tute this Friday (the last one). I’m going to miss these little things I get given.

So the handout came with a URL, which I suppose is where all the info is from.

Anyway, this is the introduction, as it is on my handout:

Since 1982 the English Department at San Jose State University has sponsored the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. The contest (hereafter referred to as the BLFC) was the brainchild (or Rosemary’s baby) of Professor Scott Rice, whose graduate school excavations unearthed the source of the line “It was a dark and stormy night.”

I won’t write it all up, but I will show you some of my favorites (I think they’re meant to be so ridiculous that they’re funny):

The countdown had stalled at T minus 69 seconds when Desiree, the first female ape to go up in space, winked at me slyly and pouted her thick, rubbery lips unmistakably – the first of many such advances during what would prove to be the longest, and most memorable, space voyage of my career. – Martha Simpson, Glastonbury, Connecticut (1985 winner)

The bone-chilling scream split the warm summer night in two, the first half being before the scream when it was fairly balmy and calm and pleasant for those who hadn’t heard the scream at all, but not calm or balmy or even very nice for those who did hear the scream, discounting the little period of time during the actual scream itself when your ears might have been hearing it but your brain wasn’t reacting yet to let you know. – Patricia E. Presutti, Lewiston, New York (1986 winner)

“Ace, watch your head!” hissed Wanda urgently, yet somehow provocatively, through red, full, sensuous lips, but he couldn’t you know, since nobody can actually watch more than part of his nose or a little cheek or lips of he really tries, but he appreciated her warning. – Janice Estey, Aspen, Colorado (1996 winner)

The moment he laid eyes on the lifeless body of the nude socialite sprawled across the bathroom floor, Detective Leary knew she had committed suicide by grasping the cap on the tamper-proof bottle, pushing down and twisting while she kept your thumb firmly pressed against the spot the arrow pointed to, until she hit the exact spot where the tab clicks into place, allowing her to remove the cap and swallow the entire contents of the bottle, thus ending her life. – Artie Kalemeris, Fairfax, Virginia (1997 winner)

They had but one last remaining night together, so they embraced each other as tight as that two-flavor entwined string cheese that is orange and yellowish-white, the orange probably being a bland Cheddar and the white…Mozzarella, although it could possibly be Provolone or just plain American, as it really doesn’t taste distinctly dissimilar from the orange, yet they would have you believe it does by coloring it differently.  -Mariann Simms, Wetumpka, Alabama (2003 winner)

So I tried my hand at my own “horrible” fiction starts:

The first time I met him he’d run at me with uncontainable joy, his silky golden locks bouncing on his teddy-bear-like body with the same enthusiasm as that of a fat man’s bosoms. His tongue smeared my cheek with the fury of a fully-paid carwash service, attempting to encase me wholly, to the last inch of my life, in his warm saliva. His breath was on my ear, toasty like a dog’s – which was fitting, was because he was indeed a compact little Maltese Cross.

I’m in my Day 1 of my 11 Days of Writing Hell. So far I’ve finished 1 essay, and I will attempt to redraft and finish off my entire short fiction piece, thus finishing 1/4 subjects, by dinner tonight.

Alex.

2 Weeks

My net uncapped!

But because for the next 2 weeks I have all my final essays to write, this is what I shall do:

Today: Watch 1 ep of NCIS from last week while nomming on coleslaw, then finish my Cinema Studies ACMI close analysis essay.

Then watch 1 ep of GLEE from last week, and then finish editing both my close analysis and my Creative Writing short fiction.

Then watch 1 ep of How I Met Your Mother from last week, and then start violently on my “Travel Piece” for Professional writing. Write at least 200 words.

Then watch 1 ep of The Big Bang Theory from last week, and then write another 200 words of Travel Piece.

That’s it for today. Tomorrow I might be going out but tomorrow I aim to finish the Travel Piece, as well as the episodes of House and FlashForward from last week.

This month I aim to not download anything until the end of the month. I also figured that Megavideo streaming uses less downloads than those from, say, Zshare, so I will try my best to cope with the time limit on Megavideo.

I don’t know how I would cope with not getting new Glee songs.

I shall edit this piece later tonight to tell you if I managed to do this.

Alex.

/edit I finished Cinema Studies and I remembered that the Creative Writing piece can be workshopped on Friday so I don’t have to worry. Other than that I haven’t started on my Travel piece but I will bring a notebook to the city tomorrow and start writing it.

Stuff Summer, Stick With Savior

These are the 2 pieces of poetry that I plan to submit for my Creative Writing assignment.

I can’t actually stuff the Stuff Summer one, because I need to have 2. I’m hoping that 14 lines of a dodgy Shakespearean sonnet (that is, a sonnet with the rhyming scheme of abab cdcd efef gg, as opposed to a Petrarchan sonnet, which has the rhyming scheme of ababcdcd cdecde…but you don’t really care, and neither do I) and a strange free-verse poem will be enough.

So here is the free-verse:

Stuff Summer

Summers are not family friendly.

Family friendly is when children

Can run around, laugh, eat dirt,

Whatever, without having to slip, slop, slap,

Wear sunglasses,

Wide-brimmed hats, Shirts,

Zinc, a bloody suit of armour.

Summers are not family friendly.

Because you expect clean and comfortable days,

But instead you get sleazy ones that

Make you uncomfortable in your own skin.

They come up to you, gives you a drink,

And the drink tastes kinky, and you want to

Kill the come-on.

Or, go with it, and then tell your friends about

The half-forgotten stuff that happened

after.

Summers are not family friendly.

Go to the beach – no seriously, go;

You’ll never want to go back again.

Disgusting, engorged bodies, dripping in grease.

(You’ll never eat at KFC again, either).

And you’ll have to slip,

slop,

slap,

Sleaze. And I’m not talking about the heat

I’m talking about those ON heat.

Everywhere is out of bounds, even the underfoot burns.

And God Forbid if you leave garbage behind;

Because the beach – and summer – isn’t dirty enough already.

And here is the sonnet:

Savior

The day I met you I’d erred and made you cry,

You forgave me, yes, but still I pulse in debt.

Overdrew not only tears, but I

Will not look back and feel a ray of regret.

Your inner light broke down my cellar heart

Speared through me, and pulled me into the depth,

I felt the quiet inside of me depart

And in this glow, gratefully, I wept.

I saw the world through glasses tinted rose,

But then the thought drove daggers into me:

Despite the girly whims and pretty bows,

The infatuation ends at this degree.

The reality that I’d almost forgot;

I’m not in love with you, I swear I’m not.

I hope you enjoyed reading it, because if you don’t, chances are my profession won’t, either.

Alex.

Acquiring Target

That’s probably a creepy way of describing what I’m trying to do.

There’s a really cool girl in my Professional Writing. I want to make friends with her but I don’t seem to be able to. It’s made worse by the fact that she’s not in my tute, so I can’t exactly properly get to know her there.

I tried to say hi to her today as she walked past me – I’d even gotten as far as a half wave – but she didn’t see me.

Okay, to clarify, I’m not really that creepy! I mean, perhaps my reasoning for wanting to be friends with her is shallow; she’s cool, laughs at the good jokes, pretty, and her hair is really soft and shiny-looking. But you have to allow me to want to make friends, right?

Also, last week at the Tute I corrected my work which was put on the board. This prompted my tutor to point me out in the lecture today. It made me look a bit like a teacher’s pet…which probably didn’t paint me to be a very cool friend material.

So…wish me luck…

Alex.

Ice Blocks Keep Fallin’ On My Head

I think this will just be written to remind myself later of the…

GIGANTIC HAIL/THUNDERSTORM THAT FELL YESTERDAY!

Before 3 pm, I was just home bumming online. On Facebook, I saw some friends from west-side mentioning some sort of storm. Us east-siders thought nothing of it, but I decided to tell my dad to close the garage door and windows anyway.

Sure enough, as the clock-hand shifted ominously past the 12 to meet its fatter friend resting at the 3, a loud bang announced the arrival of the hail.

I’d first thought that yet another stupid bird had flown into our window, as it was a bit windy and dark outside. But when the 2nd, 3rd, and subsequently 15th “stupid bird” crashed into our windows all around the house, I’d decided either I’ve become Evan “Almighty” Baxter, or this was no bird stupidity.

I ran to the front door, and looked out.

Hail the size of half of my fists were falling outside, and there were so many already that it looked like my trees had a bad dandruff problem. I ran upstairs to my bedroom to check my windows, because my window faced south and the rain seemed to be coming down from that direction. From my window I could see the sad little chili patch my dad was trying to grow. Well, that was dead.

Within 10 minutes, a Facebook group about the hailstorm was made.

I heard that the CBD got pretty flooded. Melbourne Central and Flinders got flooded, and Southern Cross closed due to damages.

Yikes.

Tomorrow I still have Uni, despite Labor Day. Apparently it’s meant to rain again today, so I wonder how tomorrow is going to go.

I should probably wear shorts. I hate shorts. And shoes?! WHAT AM I MEANT TO DO THERE?!

Alex.