"You cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time."
-Sylvia plath

Good day everyone!

This weekend has been potentially exhilarating and emotional, like a big Rubik's cube of bulky emotions that one just couldn't be bothered to persist in solving, and the worst part is I feel like I've gone through the most part of assimilating and dealing with these emotions half-sedated. I'm exhausted from work most of the time and I find myself emerging from murky waters, a shadowy alter-ego, dealing cunningly with these emotions. I say things (or rather I don't say anything) completely contrary to how I usually would. And it's scary, this change. It's like I can't even trust myself.

My parents bid adieu on a high and extremely melancholic note, the note that doesn't exist on a music score. But you know that note: people call it sadness, or punctuate it as being on the verge of tears, but I mostly feel it like this large storm and waves crashing against the chamber of my heart. My sister started crying first, then my mother. I realized I've never seen my mother being so reluctant to leave us. Usually she comes across as annoyed, but that morning she was so delusional with anxiety that she couldn't find her way to the departure hall.

My application essay is coming down quite nicely. I have to do another essay on my favourite art/media/etc, it's like asking me to describe my favourite colour: it's an experience or a preference that really transcends my own consciousness. We like certain things just because we do right?

Remember how I spoke about being excited to visit Expo zero? It was basically this project that a dramatic production group spearheaded on a very modest yet magnanimous mental budget, to come up with a dance "museum". But it was more like a walking research paper on a "dance museum" than it was an attempt to be one. They divided the parts of this "museum" according to its different organizers, and each of them organized a live exhibit. The word "museum" in no way justifies the place, seeing that we were all dancing along with the organizers, and having them each tell us different stories about different things, but hey that's social conditioning for you!

My favourite segment was this space in the dark where the choreographer/??(let's not offend his occupational nobility) made us all close our eyes, and made us move around in character as he told us a story about Japanese comfort women during wartime. It was unnerving and I couldn't shake off how alien I felt in such an environment, but I think that's precisely what was so great about that segment. He kind of involved us in a process of dance without having to describe it (thanks to a gazillion people who suddenly lifted your arms and hips while you were unknowingly moving about in the dark. It was quite close to a criminal act but very enjoyable).

-Christian Wulff

Le tenir grande

I feel like a lava lamp now.

People like to justify the basest things with their human nature. When they commit themselves to doing something crude or decidedly brutish, they waiver off the awkwardness by saying "What's wrong? It's human nature isn't it?"

Let's not define human nature as the basic human instincts. The nature in this sense doesn't refer to the all natural landscape of flora and fauna that sprouted single-handedly. It doesn't equate to something that happens without effort. When you fart and don't excuse yourself, it's not an act of human nature. When someone spites you and you defend yourself with an equally sardonic blow as an act of defense, it isn't human nature just because it's a natural response from us.

It's not that it's inexcusable, but I would like to imagine that I don't want to consign myself to a nature that's so helplessly impulsive. I mean, what keeps us striving to be something beyond what our impulses or neurones tell us to do? It's perfectly normal to have in our heads the image of decapitating someone, but something, maybe nurture, or anxiety, or Pavlovian conditioning, tells us not to.

Of course you can argue that people are maybe born innocent, and commit themselves to doing crude things even after putting more thought to it. Maybe that is the case sometimes, but perhaps it's an observation made after centuries of cultural and societal tectonic movements have sort of skewed different ideas of what human nature is and shouldn't be? Evil is a sort of commitment sometimes too.

I think bad fashion is part of human nature, and I find it quite charming. We all have bad fashion sometimes (or most times), and it's only an endearing result from mismatching your favourite colours, or an impulse buy. I think love is part of human nature, both trashy love, failed loves, non-existent love, the love that you imagine but turns out was something else like love but wasn't love. It's all part of a growth, part of something we commit to a long-term, something that changes, which could be human nature too.

I learnt this phrase off someone's blog.

Si vous croyez seulement.

If only you believe

Salut!

Je suis l'etudiante francais depuis huit jour :D

I'm sorry if you're french and had to submit yourself for an ambush of bad French. I've been learning french! So I've a handful of bad jokes now to cheer myself up since my pronunciation of the language, let alone my grammar, sounds like a bad accident.

I'm also working at Queenstown NPC, as a policeman no less, although synonyms for my occupation come by in the dozens, one notably being "gahmen dog". Colloquial and succinct, just the way I like it, j'aime!

Above that, my life feels like it's disintegrated into a hot mess. I've been so lazy the past month, and have hardly been working towards anything, except for visits to exhibitions and galleries as an excuse that I'm doing my homework, which counts for naught. Seeing everyone having so much on their agenda doesn't help my cause, which is no cause at all really.

SO! My very first to-do list to accomplish:

1. Complete uni application essays WHICH I MUST LOVE I MUST LOVE
2. French grammar exercises.
3. Finish Gombrich and Chekhov!
4. Watch Hiroshima Mon Amour!
5. Master basic oil painting, I hate oils, I produce shit with them and I can't be bothered to clean them up after.

Tomorrow I'm going to Expo Zero and there's going to be an exhibition at SAM next couple of weeks with Frida Kahlo's work! Excited!

http://benjaminphillips.co.uk

So... the only thing that could succinctly describe my mood today is that minute of waking up to a morning which persists because I so very badly wanted to go back to sleep. I feel languorous, fluid, totally relinquished like a lost sampan. Not that I don't feel like doing anything. On the contrary, I feel like painting, reading, swimming, with all the inconsequential assurance that when I go back to sleep only then will time resume to normal.