everything in it's right place

morbid imaginings

31 May 2005

He calls the mansion not a house but a tomb
He's always choking from the stench and the fume.
The wedding party all collapsed in the room.
So send my resignation to the bride and the groom.
Let's go down!
This elevator only goes up to ten.
He's not around.
He's always looking at men
Down by the pool.
He doesn't have many friends.
As they are
Face down and bloated snap a shot with the lens.

If you marry me,
Would you bury me?
Would you carry me to the end?

(So say goodbye) to the vows you take
(And say goodbye) to the life you make
(And say goodbye) to the heart you break
And all the cyanide you drank.

She keeps a picture of the body she lends.
Got nasty blisters from the money she spends.
She's got a life of her own and it shows by the Benz
She drives at 90 by the Barbies and Kens.
If you ever say never too late.
I'll forget all the diamonds you ate.
Lost in coma and covered in cake.
Increase the medication.
Share the vows at the wake.
(Kiss the bride)

If you marry me,
Would you bury me?
Would you carry me to the end?

(So say goodbye) to the vows you take
(And say goodbye) to the life you make
(And say goodbye) to the heart you break
And all the cyanide you drank.

(And say goodbye) to the last parade
(And walk away) from the choice you made
(And say goodbye) to the hearts you break
And all the cyanide you drank.

random things that never got posted on time

anxiety
but you are my refuge, my portion in the land of the living

undone 060505
so it seems, there's really no love in the time of cholera. not for me, at least. the perpetual stream of information, description after description overflows out of my insignificantly small brain. my brother says it only gets interesting a thing of the way into the book, but i barely got past the first chapter!

- it's probably shifted over to yann martel's life of pi. just got it, to keep me company during tomorrow's guard duty (guard duty).

i miss you yet i don't want to say it. i want to talk to you about the world and more, everything in and out of it, yet i don't. sometimes i don't understand why i do the things i do.

head over heals for her 280305
that's what he's telling me. and it's funny how i just posted the lyrics to a song about parallel lines.

parallel lines.

sad news from a sickly boy

28 May 2005

it's been a long week. or perhaps it just seems like it's been a really long week due to recent circumstances, but how one feels is really more important than reality when you're talking to yourself (like now).

been sick on/off the past two weeks, but i eventually got the fever bug this week. somehow everyone hopes to fall sick, so that they'd be able to escape work, but when they eventually do fall sick, all they long for is to get well (like me). my case is probably due to a combination of too much running/swimming (unlikely, really) and excessive dota (the most senselessly addictive game).

fortunately i am getting better, because the coming week is going to be really busy. hope everything goes well though.

i'm in charge of games on wednesday - the first day of the youth camp - and i haven't really bought :any: of the equipment yet. so much for last minute work. but this weekend is really crap, so i think i'll get it the day before and hope everything goes well.

sometimes you see the days roll past so quickly, you can't help to stop and think about what you're missing

reminiscent of: banner advertising

22 May 2005

it's one of those business propositions again. a while ago (albeit a long time ago) i used to have two websites, one about a game titled 'rainbow 6' and another about the most retarded group of homemade toys named 'matchstick rockets'. since they had a huge influx of visitors daily (each about 20,000 a month) i decided to see if i could supplement my pocket money with banner adverts.

blame it on ignorance, pure laziness to do it right or just the downfall of banner advertising, but after 2 years i managed to earn a grand total of $33.60 (not much for half a million visits and many many clickthrus). with bank charges at $30 (they mailed me the check) it was quite exciting to receive my first 60 cents for my hard earned effort.

enter the world of stock photography. realised that some of the photos are pretty retarded, so why not try entering my own random photos. going to take a handful of photos for istockphoto and see if they accept me. need some money to fund my next guitar, a line6 variax 500 (which i really want after my podxt live which still hasn't arrived). ah, the joys of frustration and vivacious anticipation!

procrastinations

i forgot to thaw the steak. this always happens. so now i have no dinner and i'm not going to bother cooking it; it takes an hour at least to defrost and an half hour to marinate the meat, not counting cooking eating washing, i'd end up spending 3 hours on a meal. nahhh, i'm just lazy.

(which brings us back round again in a perpetual circle leading to events similar to forgetting to thaw the steak)

today chris did many things

21 May 2005

woke up at 6.50am at home today and realised that i was going to be late for camp. turns out that i reached my bunk at 7.40am, which is really quite a record time. had to go back for a standby area conducted by the unit, another of their ridiculous ineffecient crap ideas.

went around with bryan chan after that, first in a cab to queensway shopping center (we overshot out budget of $12.80 by 10c) then to the substation for TAGS, or rather The Art of Guitar Stompboxes which was pretty screwed up save for a handful of pleasent sounds. it sounded more like our jamming sessions: there were a few displays by various people just testing effects simultaneously, and each'd turn the volume up whenever they couldn't hear themselves. resulting in people raising their voices REALLY loudly and in the audience(s) not hearing anything at all but a gobbled mess.

hobbled down to far east, bought a pair of shoes and a tshirt and finally boarded 171 back home. started raining terribly, so decided to take a cab home when some piece of shit f'ing ang mohs didn't see my queueing for a cab and jumped in before i could give him a piece of my mind and screw his ass of at the same time. just before that another fat ass ah mah came by and hijacked my position too. but it has reassured me: there is a god, because soon after he realised that i was gonna start a killing rampage and sent me a taxi before i could say 'FUCK'

i'm just moody

designed a bit of diana's blog. kinda destroyed some of it's functionality, but heck lah hahaha (i'm sorry). but she took a nice photo and i ripped it off (!! haha) and edited it a bit. but a flickr pro member who was browsing thought that it certainly was a rather nice photo and bookmarked it along with my water lily picture. oh well.

playing eguitar for service tomorrow. the songs are really nice (sans the first one where i play nonsense [purely because i don't know how to play it]) and one of the songs has a really nice delay-ish, space-ish feel to it. never knew a guitar could sound so nice, let alone mine. thank god, he must've been playing through my fingers. also happen to be leading cell group tomorrow (disaster die!) hope it'll be all ok (especially since sarahlai who is supposed to be helping me didn't really at all. but it's ok)

today is one of those days that i shouldn't forget. it's just special. myself special.

bad throat

coughing so hard i could die

dinner one hour after lunch

18 May 2005

anyway it's gonna be a lonely weekend ahead. parents are going to hongkong, brother is going to bangkok (hmm?) and i'll be home alone with vangie (sounds vampiric, but is actually short for 'evangeline', who provides a helpful hand around the house).

heh going for rehsesal now. colin's leading, but i hope it'll be all ok. the songs are quite guitar-ish, should be quite fun to play. still waiting and waiting and waiting for my podxt live.

i spy: a familiar face

hmm?

camera idiosyncrasies

realized that the chance of my dad getting a digital slr for me is incredibly slim, so decided to conduct my own crash course on the olympus c5050. as i have frustratedly found out, it is a lot harder to use and less intuitive than the nikon d70. everything is digital (this is the main reason) instead of knobs and dials, and anyone'd get really pissed when you have to dig a user manual to figure out how to manual focus or adjust shutter speeds/aperture settings.

i also took ages to figure out if the camera actually took the picture (there's no click or shutter sound). ended up checking the lcd all the time, and eventually using the lcd to aim (hate lcd screens).

however, the c5050 is actually really a very good camera and i'd accredit all its perceived pitfalls and seemingly inadequacies to my ignorance and myself being a dumbass.

as city lights pave their way through the darkest night

16 May 2005

went walking around with the camera again today. it's funny when i shoot pictures of people - they turn around and try to look at what i'm taking a picture of. don't they ever realise 'duh it's me'. so almost every single picture i have of people is with their faces turned away in desperation/ kaypoh-ness to scan around for what i'm looking at. and i saw jingyi's mom along the way! she called out my name from really far away - i couldn't really recognise who she was. until it dawned on me 'hey, that really looks like jing...'. kinda embaressing but after seeing her, it brought back memories of (long lost) australian friends and the (very much) unusual experiences we all shared.

(back to the topic) haven't really figured out getting the exposures right yet. was trying some of those long shutter speed exposures to get funny car lights, blurry people etc but most of them got overexposed. thank god for digital technology.

spent pretty much the whole day playing guitar today. coltrane's giant steps (covered as well by many other jazz artists) is a blast to play. it sounds so bebop jazzish, however i did take about half an hour just to play it smoothly on the piano. the changes are really fast (it's a lot easier on the guitar).

thinking. there're issues running through my head but i don't think anybody'd understand. nobody really does.

desperately need a shower

oh no, here comes the sun again

was making a new template for diana's blog, because her blog is quite unreadable at times. almosttt decided to go crazy and by painting tools, after being inspired by my oldest brother's ancient artwort scraps. he can paint really well. but i think i'll hold that off for later, once i've gotten a bit (a lot) better with photography.

gonna buy a new notebook for my qt. more like a jotterbook, as in the size is slightly bigger that those in-your-pocket notebooks.

mom kindly sold my hand-me-down-from-my-brother stereo set to the garang guni man. not bad, made twenty bucks out of the two minutes work of bringing it down.

backtracking, went for jamming last saturday. wasn't as bad as usual (not to say that it was good, but it didn't suck donkey balls of donkey balls. at least we got a few songs halfway up to par (we have low standards). huang ming was complaining how we were terrible. how we sucked. how we terribly sucked. jon, you really really really should learn how to use your effects.

can't wait for the line6 podxt live to come. should be within the next week. it better be within the next week or i'll just die.

going back to camp tonight. gonna waste sevendollarsfifty tomorrow watching a movie with the company. but before that we'll be having a 5km run. and after that we might be having an alert red inspection (which'll waste the whole day).

was lookng at the lomography website and it's cameras. considering of buying a hogla just because it's pretty cool. but kinda unessecery, and after all medium format film isn't the easiest to get at convenience stores.

songs to consider for next jamming session:
aerosmith - walk this way
aerosmith - i don't wanna miss a thing
alien ant farm - movies
the strokes - last night

nerdified, part3

just played a game of dota, yup right here in my room. installed frozen throne off my brother's battle chest whatever cd set, and after about 2 hours figured out how to start a match. unlike other games, for dota all you have to do is download the map. d'oh.

got pretty bored around 5 mins after playing it. finally at the end of the game when i won, i realised it was because i don't think you can play dota alone on skirmish mode thingy. the computers don't really react and so it was a walk in the park. first time i won a dota game (says a lot, huh)

day off for the whole batallion tomorrow. but i'm sickkk so it's still quite crappy. and a couple of other stuff as well.

i am certain, visa cards and online shopping is a combination that would lead to mankinds' downfall.

huh

15 May 2005

had such a crap dream last night. that i was late and still took forever to style my hair. and that it felt like a tangled mess of wire, then i thought to myself in the dream 'dang, i should have bought that tube of wax that the hairstylist kept recommending'.

fell asleep last night while multitasking (or rather failing to), forgot to read my computer, didn't install warcraftiii-frozenthrone-dota (i was supposed to install it out of sheer boredom[i stole it from my brother(he's away in bangkok hong kong haha)]).

i waited 'til i saw the sun
i don't know why i didn't come
i left you by the house of fun
i don't know why i didn't come

when i saw the break of day
i wished that i could fly away
instead of kneeling in the sand
catching teardrops in my hand

my heart is drenched in wine
but you'll be on my mind
forever

out across the endless sea
i would die in ecstasy
but i'll be a bag of bones
driving down the road along

something has to make you run
i don't know why i didn't come
i feel as empty as a drum
i don't know why i didn't come

on a bed of nails awake

14 May 2005

got back from a field camp yesterday. battalion profiency test exercise, which was apparently succesful so my unit is now so called qualified to do certain operations. running around in 3 days of rain isn't exactly very fun or satisfying, but perhaps the past week was more reminescent of the month in taiwan last year (sans the hilarious r&r).

sort of sick now. from walking in the rain, the sudden increase in training intensity (i'm one lazy piece of shit) and from smoking one too many strawberry cigerettes.

plugged in my v-amp2 which i recovered from church last week (it's been in the music cage rotting for the past 6 months) and realised that it isn't as bad as i made it out to be. but definitely still no where near as good as a podxt - that's just a different league altogether. hoobastank's guitar lines are also a lot easier than i initially thought, and pantera heavy metal is fun to play (but very boring to listen to).

reading up some photography books which i found in my brother's room. i hope my dad (with his penchant for aquiring the latest gadgets) gets a new digital slr before the end of the year. because i reallllly want a digital slr (even though i barely qualify the user requirements).

my hair's gone mad. deciding between soda hairdressing or the shop across soda hairdressing. sore throat's killing me; need more salt-saturated ginseng tea.

me. me me me mememe

8 May 2005

this is a post all about me

i like blue on happy things and black on pretty things. crimson maroon red on sexy things. i hate pink, dislike violet purple and certain greens. i play the guitar and piano, although i hate classical piano with a burning passion. i like jazz though it sometimes gets on my nerves. i like to do things that i don't like and i don't like to do things that i like. i think ipods are the coolest thing in the world since the internet guitars and women, but that's also after my sony earbud phones. i like to think that i have no friends although i have tons and i think that lifehouse, hoobastank, dave matthews band, u2 and john mayer compose great music. i'll be going to australia and prefer to think that i'm really going there to study biomedical science when what i really think i'll do is play guitar walk around alone and smoke pot all day. i write in a blog that nobody reads (but i'm dreadfully mistaken) and wish that nobody would ever read it. people think that i'm lazy; in actual fact i only do the necessary. i have only really liked 4 people in my life outside family and feel that ear studs are not only for girls. i have 5 guitars in my house and 4 amplifiers, when in actual fact i only play 2 guitars and use neither of the amplifiers. i do nothing on weekends except sleep play guitar and surf the net, because i'm trying to save money for what seems to have been ages. i am disgusted by my reliance on technology like the internet and mobile phones. i wear contacts as i hate the feeling of my sideburns between my cheeks and a pair of spectacles. i like company but i am always alone because i want to be alone. i try to read my bible every night, treasure every minute of my weekends and waste as much of army time as i can. to assist in wasting my army time i read as many books as i can. i do this in an attempt to improve my english (but in actual fact it is for me to seek refuge in my imagination and dreams). i like the word 'undone' because it's how i think i am (lifehouse's rendition takes top spot in my itunes most played). i admire people who are honest to themselves. i like to buy clothes and having a proper couture gives me confidence even thought i prefer not to think of it that way. i like the way a fender strat gives a compressed tone and have accepted that my epiphone les paul would never be able to sound like that, no matter how many hundreds of dollars of effects i put on top of it. my goal of buying an american deluxe strat assisted me in accepting this fact greatly. i would die without music, and think that being lonely is worst that living a nightmare. i think what i'm writing now is quite nonsense even though i try to think that all of it is true. i think that the number of repetitions of 'i' and 'think' in this entry is also and absurdly ridiculous.

i could continue forever but i really couldn't be more bothered.

sitting waiting wishing

took some pictures. i like browsing at past photos; they remind you of things. happy things, sad things, maybe. but they remind you. because to forget is to never have experienced, not having lived.

some events are better off not being (re)lived.

jack johnson's gone off on automatic mode, along with lifehouse's undone (still).

well if i was in your position
i'd put down all my amuntintion
i'd wonder why it had taken me so long

but the lord knows that i'm not you
and if i was i wouldn't be so cruel
cause waitin' on love ain't so easy to do

must i always be waiting, waiting on you
must i always be playing, playing your fool

tough decisions

7 May 2005

first it was a line6 podxt (which i already placed my order for this afternoon at city music). soon, it might be this :

basically it's a guitar that's digitalised. there are no magnetic pickups at all, and how it actually works is still a mystery to me. however, i do know that it sounds terribly bad ass, and is slowly creeping up my wishlist for this year. i even persuaded my dad to provide me with a thousand dollar loan (which would be my birthday present? a zero interest loan? strange but not bad, nonetheless) so that i could get it. might wait for paul to get it first though (he said the church might be getting one, as we need our own electric). so i'll just freeload off them and be satisfied with my podxt live in the mean time.

(just to re-emphasise that i put a $125 deposit on it. so no worries anymore!)

perhaps this is the reason my army allowance seems to flow so quickly out of my wallet/bank account...

i'm finally, back home

guard duty

doing guard duty on a friday evening.

could've been home

but now i'm stoning in camp at 12mn

fortunately i bought a book yesterday from borders to keep me company. yann martel's (i think?) life of pi. made a cover for it just because i was so bored.

going jamming tomorrow, i hope it doesn't screw up.

can't wait to book out; will be going for timsum at raffles hotel (!!!) and i'll probably go to sweelee after that to entertain myself. maybe shopping? pay day's around the corner but i'm kinda out of cash anyway.

missing you

sort of

just tired.

embracing a new life

4 May 2005

because a new (new old oldnew) novel is like another lifetime to be lived to be experienced to be immersed in enjoyed. just as the end of the previous one, heartwrenching, disappointed yet satisfied that a life has passed on but a new one stands ready to be lived.

***

still. waiting for tonight. for tomorrow, the weekend and the next. leaving me deracintated, longing for your voice, pinning me down like love unreciprocated. o podxt live, where are you?!

longing

3 May 2005

i just realised everytime i reply to the church music team mailing list, it sends out an email to 60 people.

going back to camp.

looking forward to the next weekend. even though it's still the weekend (albeit currently a long one).

beautiful lights

2 May 2005

finally got sick of using my handphone's mini camera. sneaked a nikon d70 out of the study, fiddled with it for a while. it's quite a delight to be able to see such clear pictures (they look just like, real life!) compared to my crappy phone. maybe i should change phone; one of the newer nokia phones are looking quite nifty. no, i should just get my own camera...

digital slrs are really quite a bit out of the budget, though.

i really love my room at night :) look at the guitars. i really love my guitars too. mmm a little spring cleaning, rearranging the wires is needed though. looks way too messy for my liking.

random: 911 pentagon attack conspiracy?

everything in
it's right place