Anansi Boys is out in Australia

I must not buy that book until the exams are over.I must not buy that book until the exams are over.I must not buy that book until the exams are over.I must not buy that book until the exams are over.I must not buy that book until the exams are over.I must not buy that book until the exams are over.I must not buy that book until the exams are over.I must not buy that book until the exams are over........

ARGH.

Murphy's Law: Books you've been wildly anticipating will always get released in the middle of your exams.

I can't wait till the 14th November.

You might as well live

It's the Melbourne universities exam season and I'm facing a particularly tough year.

Blogging will resume after November 15, assuming my brain isn't melted by then.

I leave you with a poem by the incomparable Dorothy Parker who has provided me with much dark amusement over the years. This is one of her longer poems; most of her pieces are simple, pithy, short and dagger sharp. For a good example of her poetry and possibly reasons I relish it so much scroll down a little further and read the piece that I'm really fond of.

Truly, there is no better entertainment while struggling with morass of contradictions that is the Law.

Symptom Recital

I do not like my state of mind;
I'm bitter, querulous, unkind.
I hate my legs, I hate my hands,
I do not yearn for lovelier lands.
I dread the dawn's recurrent light;
I hate to go to bed at night.
I snoot at simple, earnest folk.
I cannot take the simplest joke.
I find no peace in paint or type.
My world is but a lot of tripe.
I'm disillusioned, empty-breasted.
For what I think, I'd be arrested.
I am not sick. I am not well.
My quondam dreams are shot to hell.
My soul is crushed, my spirit sore:
I do not like me any more.
I cavil, quarrel, grumble, grouse.
I ponder on the narrow house.
I shudder at the thought of men.
I'm due to fall in love again.

Résumé

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

Am so going to turn into a muttering old singleton/witch with many black cats around. Anyone need an extra for Macbeth, just call me. I'll even provide my own hooked nose.

Note to self

I realised about a year ago that some of the worst decisions in my life were made at the instigation of my parents.

Don't get me wrong, I love those parents of mine to bits, it's just that they seem to have this uncanny ability to pick the very things that are the worst for my spirit and mind.Even worse is the fact that despite this awful track record, I still consult them about most major life decisions.Because if nothing else I can always count on them to tell me which route looks the most practical, economical and stable. Unfortunately, the route picked out usually turns out to be all wrong for me as a person, despite its otherwise sterling qualities.

See, when I was 12, I went through the nightmare most people know as the PSLE exam and my parents set their heart on my going to a particular school that was not only decent( as in well ranked) but also very strong on chinese traditions. In short, they sent me to a chinese school, all because my chinese grades were poor and my father thought that it would be a good idea to improve my language abilities.

Please note that my spoken chinese was so poor at that point that I could barely string one or two sentences together. The four years there rank as possibly the lowest time in my life. Especially the first two years when I had to struggle with the fact that:

a) people thought I was a snob because I tended to speak english with a mild american accent( I had several speech lessons with an american)
b) Hokkien was literally a foreign language to me
c) Chinese was also a semi foreign language to me
d) they had seriously bitchy and dysfunctional chinese teachers who became my form teachers, hated my guts and picked on me in class.

To my mother's credit, she later realised the enormous disjunction between the way I operated and the way the school operated. Perhaps the clue that gave it away was the fact that I started flunking EVERYTHING and came home in tears all the time.

My not quite as observant dad still thinks it was a brilliant idea because it improved my chinese to no end.Which I have to admit it did. It was sink or swim and I learnt to swim only just in time. But the cost? Enormous hatred and scorn for all things chinese and asian.

I realised yesterday in a moment of unusual self reflexivity, that despite the fact that I'm a mostly mild and even tempered being, the thought of that school still makes my blood boil. I used to sit in class and think very hard about burning the school down or setting off a bomb in it.( I didn't because I sucked at science and couldn't figure out how to waste the whole place) And I pray that I might never run into some of those awful teachers again, because being the terribly irreverent and linguistically able person I am now, I will be able to curse them rather fluently in 4 languages in total, including Hokkien, our national curse language.

I got over the hatred of all things asian and chinese. I am chinese after all, and there is only so much self loathing one can take. But I never got over the hatred of that particular school and some particular teachers in it.

I'm posting this up as a blatant reminder to myself to grow a spine and not to take my parents' advice anymore except in their areas of technical expertise. Because I'm not 12 anymore and I don't have that many sets of four years to throw away being miserable and angry. That decision about secondary schools was not the only one to go awry, there were many other pieces of bad advice, including a well intentioned but misguided suggestion from my mother to study chemistry in university.

Some kids are lucky enough to follow in their parent's mould, in their ideology and spirit. So the general advice their parents dish out to them can be followed to the letter and it will usually work out.

I'm not one of those kids. And I cannot keep letting them run my life because the difference in expected and actual outcomes will kill me one day.

More Yeats

The Circus Animals' Desertion

I

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

II

What can I but enumerate old themes,
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride.

And then a counter-truth filled out its play,
'The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it;
She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away,
But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.
I thought my dear must her own soul destroy
So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough
This dream itself had all my thought and love.

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.

III

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.


By William Butler Yeats



So true. And probably the reason the "I'm the guy" meme took of so well.