February 2012
2 posts
2 tags
Detritus
You enter the profession teeming with knowledge. Then they send you elsewhere where you cannot apply that knowledge, where your audience simply cannot concentrate on that knowledge, despite how you attempt to package it, despite trying against all odds.
Your focus shifts.
Now you are required to dig up the dregs from your JC days and improve on a different set of knowledge. More and more...
2 tags
The Point
There is a critical point. After that you stop complaining.
January 2012
19 posts
4 tags
Excellence,
I miss
Excellence,
that luscious
Texture
of a
Beat,
perspiration
Timed
to the
Fall
of a
Stroke,
Tenacious
discipline on
Faces
lined with
Youth,
kneading the
Tone
of stick against
Skin,
stick against
Skin,
stick against
Rim,
rim,
Riiiiiiiim
rim,
RIIIIIIIIM
rim rim
(cresc.)
Passion
drummed with
lutes and
Winds and
Strings and
ZEAL.
(beat)
We practised to
...
2 tags
Surfeit
Drama dies when it reaches its surfeit, and words, fade.
3 tags
Yes
1. It’s easy to start something, but difficult to sustain it.
2. Often, those who have no power, can, while those who have loads, can’t.
3. Sometimes, the past deserves to stay in the past.
* * * * *
It’s so indicative of what I should be when I gaze at a two-line Air Force advertisement in the bus, weigh the syllables mentally, and admire the nifty use of iambic pentameter in...
1 tag
Decimation
In a poof, what is built tirelessly today is destroyed tomorrow; people disappear; loves vanish.
3 tags
Turn
The tragicomedy of life dictates that he who invests most gets sidelined most, passed over for another to fervently invest in him and in turn receive a similar fate.
The turning point of the same life dictates a gradual maturing into the understanding that you will one day reach this epiphany: that old friends are the only ones who can bring a true smile to your face by reminding you who you once...
2 tags
Space
People always speak about what they want from you. Only the rare few speak about what they have to share with you without imposition.
* * * * *
The more you’re assaulted with “experts” telling you what you need to know to be an “expert” yourself, the more you find yourself doubting yourself and losing the confidence you possessed while excitedly crafting lessons...
2 tags
Hyperemia
Everyday, we are assaulted senselessly by people telling us things they think we should know.
Everyday, we are inundated by work and more work, demands after demands, roles after roles.
With no space for a breather, the purpose is fatigue: the body is tired, we stop thinking, we buy things we don’t need, we work without questioning, status quo is preserved,
hegemony shows.
4 tags
Violence
Furniture tossed around and cupboards slammed vehemently in counterpoint to a child’s heartrending shrieks. A few floors down, fingers pause above a handphone, mid-contemplation over a music collaboration aborted at the clamour of domestic violence.
A memory.
Accelerando.
Which is crueller, a punitive system that chokefeeds barrelfulls of content and shuts down the thinking that makes us...
3 tags
Brevity
It takes a birthday for existential brevity to kick in so strongly that you purposefully exile yourself from school and spend me-time elsewhere with history and art as companions. There is no full-stop to work.
There is a full-stop to life.
4 tags
When telegraphs and trains brought in the idea... →
2 tags
Hidden gems
The best part of teaching? Lesson ideation –
and stumbling upon gems you never knew before along the way.
1 tag
Sovereignty
Sometimes the hardest thing in the world is to actually do what you love and love who you love without being apologetic about it.
1 tag
“Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They...”
– Middlemarch
3 tags
Doors
All the scribblings, doodles, writing, spontaneous advertisement-design from colleagues’ ideas, quotes-collation, penning of dialogue, jotting down of the littlest things in life, capturing the sun in all tones, studying an array of angles in superb photography, notebooks, blogs, tumblrs, puns, punchlines, the desire to craft one’s own creative path & never look back - a sliver of...
“Someday, we’ll run into each other again, I know it. Maybe I’ll be older and...”
– Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac by Gabrielle Zevin (via creatingaquietmind)
“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making...”
– Neil Gaiman’s wish for 2012 (via creatingaquietmind)
December 2011
10 posts
2 tags
An Educated Person - 3 Characteristics →
3 tags
1 tag
Good bad
All bad things are actually good things, because they put you right in Empathy’s shoes and help you understand others better.
2 tags
“You know, like he wants to tell you he loves you but he can’t? So he asks...”
– S. on her father
3 tags
Technology
An incidental experiment reveals computers rob me away from real reading and writing, i.e. the act of reading and reflecting upon that writing, the habit of observing and writing, the sanctum of unadulterated reflection, one at a time. My writer’s notebook was never more filled when I had nothing but a pen for eight days in a foreign environment.
Time for a conscious revamp.
2 tags
Inchoate
You don’t pen something surreal. Like the Romantic spirit, you are afraid it will flee upon its lexical immortalisation. Worse, you are afraid its patina of perfection will meet the friction of reality,
and fade.
1 tag
Marketing
The key to most things is marketing and the presentation and organisation that come with it, as well as archiving and portfolio-making. Most times, however, real artists and teachers obsessed with their art and lessons have no real time for such purposes - not when they are the proverbial ones struggling with dough, manpower and resources, not when they cohere with the unstructured, bohemian...
“Swallow your feelings. Scoop them neatly and don’t let them spill or leave a...”
– Swallow Your Feelings - Julie Beck (via creatingaquietmind)
“You get in life what you have the courage to ask for.”
– Oprah Winfrey (via creatingaquietmind)
“December
The white dove of winter
sheds its first
fine feathers;
they...”
– Linda Pastan, from “The Months” (via bookoasis)
November 2011
13 posts
“First: we are told from childhood onward that everything we want to do is...”
– (vi, Cohelo) The Alchemist (via forks-on-the-left)
2 tags
Count
How do you get someone who’s used to counting to not count?
And someone who’s used to buying to not buy, to not perceive everything as a transaction, a one for one,
to buy into your upbringing of one for nothing?
2 tags
Human
If we were to perceive the people around us, from loved ones to strangers, as Human Being, and treat them the way sentient beings should be treated with no other intention in mind, how different would our lives and relationships be.
2 tags
Words
Words, when kept for too long, lose the poetry that first birthed them, modulating into the timbre of the everyday.
1 tag
Unsaid
It’s often the things unsaid, which cannot be said, that pulsates beneath the veneer of everyday civility.
3 tags
Journals
He photocopied his Romance of the Three Kingdoms, pages and pages of them, and cut out the comic strips one by one. I told him, journal not so important, do other homework first. So he got up at 5 a.m. in the morning to continue cutting the rest. 5 a.m. He even got his twin brother to help him.
* * * * *
She would fiercely guard her journal. She says it’s a private conversation with you and...
1 tag
Relief
Thank goodness, thank goodness, thank goodness my professors replied. Thank goodness. Now I don’t have to worry about my two academic references. Now I needn’t be seized by irrational fears of rejection again. Now I can continue applying for my Masters in peace, with the rest of the application within my full control.
There is a limit to exhaustion and the interminable wait for...
2 tags
Buddies
Writing is the perfect companion for Solitude.
Solitude is the Siamese twin of Reality Check.
3 tags
Relatives
Ah Gong: Must be patient.
Dad: Be positive and persevere. Be firm, strict, fair and friendly.
Sa yi: Insistence; consistence; persistence.
(From more than 40 years of leadership and nearly two centuries of living)
October 2011
49 posts
2 tags
3 tags
Scribbles
“Among the ideas simmering in his head is… one of many ‘one-page book treatments’ he dashes off on rough paper while students complete assignments.”
I opened today’s papers and found me. Except that I don’t spin fantasy novels in class.
I write about my pupils, humanity amidst examinated calm, the quotidian elevated by ideals.
These writings are...
4 tags
“Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us...”
– Norman Cousins
3 tags
“Growing up is difficult. Strangely, even when we have stopped growing...”
– Jeanette Winterson, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/oct/28/jeanette-winterson-all-about-my-mother?newsfeed=true
3 tags
Neutral class (II)
Not entirely oblivious to their fate, they question, nascent thoughts from awakening minds, mature ideas in the wrong context where narratives get buried, bull
dozed.
And then they grow up. The straitjacket still lurks behind their blazers.
“I wasn’t very good when I was young.”
“I failed my exams.”
“I can’t study.”
Good men with scars of...
Sharing Poetry: Brian Patten, "Sometimes It... →
sharingpoetry:
And sometimes it happens that you are friends and then You are not friends, And friendship has passed. And whole days are lost and among them A fountain empties itself. And sometimes it happens that you are loved and then You are not loved, And love is past. And whole days are lost and among…