frou frou my heart til it stops.

This journal, this piece of neverending prose, this long line of words spacing out into the ether is a representation of me.

I was it, and it was me.

I am it, and it will forever be me.

Yesterday, while I was cleaning out my room, I discovered a couple of diaries that I kept when I was around 9-14, in that impressionable age where I believed that writing down things would leave a permanent imprint of myself on the world. It wasn't the matter of being forgotten or being left behind. I remember thinking, "I want to stay here." Even though I scribbled, in childish Chinese words that said, "I hate my mother, she scolded me today" or "I love my dad, he promised me a present." and all those childish, immature and superficial wants transcending any other thing, I remember thinking "I don't want to grow up. I want to stay here. With my hate, with my love, with everything that I know so well."

It just doesn't happen that way, does it?

It reminds me of this snippet of a Woody Allen movie I was watching on Arts Central the night before my literature exam. This Italian mafioso guy, well, he was relatively uneducated vs the scriptwriter guy who took masterclasses in writing. But he had a feel for things. This undescribable genius, this incognito feel for drama because he knew what life was - he was living it. He was in the mafia, he was uneducated but he was a veritable genius. Then Woody Allen's voiceover says in a misty, fog-like manner: "These people are born with the inherent ability to do these things. They're just made for it. Some people can probably pick up a thing or two about the construction and structure in a class, but they'll never get it like these people do."

I'd like to think, to believe that I'm one of those special people he's talking about. Gifted, given, blessed, whatever, with the joy of something so inherent that it bursts forth and engulfs the paper or screen in front of me. I still believe that, to my conscience's behest. Ego isn't good for the soul, but the soul isn't good without the Ego.


So I'm sitting there with my brother at our tiny kitchen table. There's oil on his fingers, he's chowing down very hungrily at the murtabak laid out in front of him. My mother is pottering around the kitchen at 11:35pm late at night, doing God knows what and God knows why, and she yells, "Isn't there a fork there?!" when I scamper in looking for a fork to aid my brother in the Murtabak Wars. My brother chatters noisily at my father, insisting that "murtabak" is pronounced as "murh-tah-bahk" and not "moo-too-bak" like how my father does so. Disarmingly charming, my family is.

Anyway, today was awesome. I spent most of my day out at Vivocity and Orchard with my one and only Sim and shopped around for her prom bag, and my prom hair clip. I love walking around and just talking nonsense about nonsense. Nothing pretentious, no airs, just two great friends walking around the expanse of "Singapore's Largest Mall" for fun! :) I spotted the T3 girls there though, and a whole slew of SN juniors and CJ schoolmates while I was out though - slightly disconcerting.

The haul of the day? Volumes 1 and 2 of the Fables trade paperbacks (Hello comic lovers, or just people who like a good story, please consider reading Fables by Bill Willingham!), Sophie's World, Blind Woman Sleeping Willow (MURAKAMI YO!), two shirt from Topshop and a nice but effing expensive hairclip from Tangs. The total damage was really quite fatal to my wallet, but saved from total destruction with the $60 birthday money my brother gave me. I suppose that this holidays will be spent, a glorious time I keep on assuring myself, with books. Books from the library, books from the bookstore and books from myshelf ready to be reread another 20 times.

Seriously though, I don't know why I'm buying more books. I still have Lolita to reread (Nabokov is my second favourite author. Period.) and I have two more books from the NLB book fair that I still haven't read! One's a hulking hard cover and the other's just a John Steinback book. Whew.

And here, I shall insert a very apt Nabokov quote:

Vladimir Nabokov, "Lectures on Literature"
... one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do no have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous achievement of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is - a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed) - a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.

I feel like chucking this at my mum or dad everytime they ask me "Haven't you read that before?"

This is the coolest thing ever. I want one and I want to sit in it all day. I want this too. :D

If my heart skips any more beats, I swear I'm going to just stab myself to stop it from moving.

Books Actually is turning a year older on the 29th! I have a small wish that it was born a day later. Haha, but one can only dream of things that cannot be achieved. This warrants a celebration! Of waffles and tea, they say! Anyone, by that I mean the classmates, want to go down with me?