Je Pense, Donc Je Suis

Moons and junes and ferris wheels

The dizzy dancing way that you feel

As every fairy tale comes real

I’ve looked at love that way

But now it’s just another show 

You leave them laughing when you go

But if you care don’t let them know

Don’t give yourself away.

2011 was all about contracting my panoramic worldview and paring it down to a microcosmic plane. Like a good sauce, I reduced, reduced and reduced, and left everything to stew till I was left with only the good bits. I threw things I no longer needed away, I let irrelevant passions lie latent, I let people go, and I left love and the past behind as if they never mattered. 2011 was about coming to terms with the fact that people will always let you down.

2012 is all about accepting the journey. It may not see the accomplishment of grandiose ends or fulfilment of dreams, but it will see the the means through. As I’ve gotten older, life has gotten simpler. Less hazy, amorphous, indistinct. The cacophony of life deafens and sometimes you can’t hear the words you should be listening to. So block things and people out, and your way will be clear again. And you realize it’s not really about the end, but the people and the path you traversed to get you there. 2012 is dedicated to loving what I have instead of having what I love.

It’s been my first Christmas away from home and the longest period I would have been away. But thank God for my family, who proves home is where the heart is. Their constant plans to visit warms my heart and keeps me going. And for the few, but more than enough, good friends who have each inspired me to be better. 

Love love, love life!

11 months since I’ve left you, and it’s as if I never have. And in retrospect, as if everything never was.

Life is merely pockets of moments strewn along a vast galaxy of amorphous, temporal happenstances, and all we can really remember are the moments we either fought to be perfect, or through no action of our own, ascended to a perfect unity of time and place and heart. This is one I fought for, and the next is one that I fought for too. It’s been years since that perfect period of time, and really, who knows when it’ll come again. But I hope and live for that, and love like the world is ending, in between. 

         
Via: OnlineSchools.org

In an ideal world, I’d have a veritable menagerie sharing my bachelorette pad! Already I’ve Fiyero, and he’s an absolute dream. Wish I could afford (financially and parentally) to start breeding them, the genetic morphs are so very exciting! I’d love to breed a leucistic; there’s something about white that is so pretty. 

But I digress. In this wildly chimerical construct of mine, I’d have a coterie of Border Collies, German Shepherds, Great Danes, Corgis and Samoyeds, a clowder of Russian Blues, Turkish Angoras, Sphynxes, Savannah Cats… I’d have Chinchillas, Ferrets, Sugar Gliders and Capybaras… And all manner of lovely constrictors; they are my favourite kind of snake (: I do love Red Tail Boas, Burmese Pythons, Dumerils and Green Anacondas… The latter might have a certain propensity to eat me though, and is certainly possessed of the might to do so, which means I’d probably have to put that pipe dream on the back-burner for awhile. 

Oh la vache. Something monumental happened on Saturday 8.1.11. I’ll never forget. And today, 11.1.11, marks the first day of the rest of my life, when I welcome a new part of me home (: I can hardly believe it, I can’t even sleep with this intoxicating deluge of unadulterated emotions cleaving my system…

Seems fit to commemorate today with an homage to all the pets I’ve known and loved so far.

Pet #1: Henryk Chinchideryk

Given to me by Henryk on my 18th birthday (: The sweetest darlingest thing ever.

Pet #2: My First Snake

Henryk caught him for me! (: Knowing how much I love snakes, he just whipped it off the floor and brought it home, despite not knowing if it was venomous or not hahaha. Researched on it and realized it was an egg-eating snake. Awesomeness. 

Pet #3: Flippy Baybe

Henryk bought her for me when we were studying apart during our A levels! 

Pet #4: Socrates

Henryk helped me get my little kitty <3 He lived in my dorm and was the most amazing sweetheart ever, except for the fact he treated my fingers as his favourite chew toy.

Pet #5: Fiyero Gaston

After years and years of research, perusing reptile forums and websites, I finally got my much beloved Royal Python (: My very favourite snake in the world!! He is a sweetheart cutie pie and the most docile pet ever. Freaked out my family though, their reaction was truly hilarious.

Today is going to be amazing. So amazing I can hardly breathe. I love the world today (:

On the flight home, I ruffled through the foreign language films in an artsy pastiche of that which is peregrine and romantic. We were starting our descent when I caught a glimpse of a portly, sandy-blonde man, particularly thick round the middle and possessed of a tragically bulbous nose. Gerard Depardieu in celluloid, I guessed, and lured by the prodigious reverence of him observed in my French textbooks, curiously watched on.

In those ten minutes before the film ended, he found himself. He found a box his mother kept full of his baby momentos, found out his girlfriend was joyfully with child, found himself in a park feeding pidgeons and found an old lady he’d been searching for in a home and made off with her. And as the wide open road raced to embrace them as they made their getaway, she laughed, saying, Oh, what an imbroglio!

An imbroglio indeed, those capricious and quicksilver turns destiny thrusts us into. Coming home, I return enriched. And to what effect that non sequitur of a film? Merely a tangible doppelganger of that heteroclitic whimsy of life; in the haze of experiences and friends and mistakes and beauty and life, yes, in that immense mess we inexorably forge on and we are forced to smile. But you know what? Eventually the facetiousness and the farce is eroded by circumstance, and therein lies happiness, and that is where I end.

Meet my snowman. His name is Georgie! He was the lovechild of the snow on my terrace and frenzied numb hacking with sore T-rex arms. Gestation period was 4 hours or so. Death by birds eating his carrot nose; I do hope this eulogy is sufficient to convey my affection. I love never running out of firsts!

Fare thee well my first snowman. Though the sun has claimed you for its own, you frolic eternal in the blizzard of my own tempestuous emotions, far from the inclement portents that conquered you, for you are that of beloved fairytale and childish myth, and cannot ever really be destroyed.

                   
Moments by Phantasmagorist 

Hasty montage assimilated from the subconscious

Having amazing fun mucking around with Jeff’s DSLR and totally gorging on all of London’s gastronomical delights! So much has transpired since exams and yet more to come, but I must say, it is exquisitely wonderful to be reunited with family again! Lovelovelove.

Love capturing the memories, whether through DSLR, vivitar, holga, polaroid, digicam or webcam. I didn’t realize how much I missed each my mum and bro. Planning to see the sights tomorrow, updates will have to wait till Sheffield!

Finally got round to answering some formspring questions I’ve left stewing for the past week. See/ask here! Exams are over but there’s still really so much to be done.

In a string of unrelated facts, I have the best parents in the universe, retail therapy appears to be physiologically inextricable from my brand of catharsis and I am so very excited about the prospect of getting a DSLR and embarking on a photo-project with my fellow photography buffs aka dad and brother while spending a month in Hong Kong. Going to use my Dad’s old vivitar and experiment with black and white film and wipe the dust off my holga and try for the panoramic superimposed shots I’ve always wanted to experiment with when I go to London with Jeff!

Ask me anything http://formspring.me/phantasmagorist

Cannot wait till this mindless tedium is done with! Then to Cambridge to visit Kelvin, and to London with mum and Jeff. 6 more days! Till then, I shall be trying to deflect boredom with doodles and as the Chief Architect of my castle in the air, I will publicly state that it is very trying to concretize everything what with Law getting in the way. I have not opened my textbooks.

All I really want to do day to day is to devote hours researching Art, catch up with my Literature and delve in to my pile of Philosophy books! And master french. I shall be much relieved when pursuing my Masters, when leisure will then coincide with work. 

Il est très facile d’oublier les sentiers qui nous mènent ici. N’oubliez pas, n’arrêtez pas de vous réjouir à chaque petit moment de ce que la vie condescende à vous donner! Tu me manque.

                          Are you human? from GDFB.tv on Vimeo.

Interesting art concept by German artist Aram Bartholl that humanizes and integrates the idea of identity within the internet age by juxtaposing the digital and the material. Love!

Bought mice for Fiyero today and went off the beaten path with my Canon. My stifling ennui lulled by the whispers of spring in every step, caressed by winds so redolent of inexorable vicissitude… Ugliness, prettiness, that saudade, mitigated by a peregrine spirit and bleached clear and clean by the waning sun.

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.

- Robert Frost (1915)

To always have the courage to take the one less travelled by, to fight and to dream of the anterior that so inherently figures in my construct of the universe…

questionableadvice:

From the Toronto Sunday World; Toronto, Ontario; June 17, 1914.

Lovely advice!