Some questions cannot be answered

Her pockets are bulging, her shoulders sagging from the weight as she slowly turns to look at me. Such desolation in her eyes, such volumes they speak of how her curiosity turned into an unimaginable burden. Such deadened eyes.

They become familiar weights in hand

She reaches out to me, and it's all I can do to stop from cringing. She can barely lift her arms, that poor lady. All those stones, almost spilling out of her pocket, yet still she labours on, carrying their weight with her, careful not to lose any of them.

Round stones pulled from the pocket

But a stone finds its way out, rolling out of a gaping pocket. A tiny exclamation escapes her lips, and as she reaches down her pockets empty and the stones roll out. They seem to have a life of their own, rolling away with abandon as she wrings her hands in dismay.

Unyielding and cool

I don't know why she does this - why she collects these inscrutable rocks only to be held back by their weight. Her dismay turns to anger, and inexplicably she wheels around and slaps me. I can see the effort she puts into this, but her clammy hands dissolve as soon as they touch my cheek.

She crumbles - literally crumbles - into dust, carried away by the wind, while the stones lie on the ground, silently taunting. But the red coat is still intact. I pick it up, reveling in its soft fabric, and as - for some reason - I put it on, I start to gather all the stones that have fallen. They call out to me, yet as I touch them they become mute again, and I know that I'm destined to hold them till I too fade away one day in the breeze. Until then I'll be haunted by her memory, while the stones quietly eat away at my soul. I can see my eyes now - changing in the light, little cataracts of a life lost.

 Name your favourite books, authors, films and/or musical artists.

This comes straight out of the Stanford supplement I'm staring at right now, and the more I think about my (truthful) answers, the more dubious my character seems, since the instructions are "Please respond to the following questions so we can get to know you better". But what if I really put this down:

We Need To Talk About Kevin (Lionel Shriver) - about the eternal question of nature vs. nurture: letters from a mother who narrates her son's sociopathic tendencies, culminating in the revelation that these letters are actually to her dead husband - murdered, together with her daughter, by her son. Not for the faint hearted.

The Wasp Factory (Iain Banks) - one of the most celebrated and controversial contemporary novels. Violent, gruesome, sexually deviant and yet fascinating.

Carrie (Stephen King) - oh, even my mother knows this, and still shudders at the memory of it. A cautionary tale of the proverbial last straw if there ever was one - bullied girl fights back. Big time.

The Virgin Suicides (Jeffery Eugenides) - I think by this time I've already established myself to be a veritable connoisseur of twisted fiction, no? Besides, when I go on to list Fight Club under favourite movies, I'm just making things worse.

Ah well, maybe the decidedly non-deviant music of Rachael Yamagata and Jason Mraz can make up for this? I don't really think that I should care too much anyway - this is the real me. Just that I realised that my book choices are a little.. erm, disturbing heh.

I'm not gonna live for you
Or die for you
Or do anything anymore for you
Because you leave me here on the other side...


simple words, yet repeated again and again to such effect. Rachael Yamagata is love.. :) 

 Just wondering... do people (as in, like, non-Japanese people) eat Japanese food because it's really so darn tasty...

...or rather because it's trendy?

This is coming from a guy who can't see how raw fish can possibly taste better than grilled/fried/baked/steamed/however-you-want-to-do-it fish, and I suspect some people don't too, but eating sashimi is cool, is it not?

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the occasional tako-yaki or unagi or teppanyaki (I don't really mean to rhyme, but most Jap food names end with the same freakin vowel) but I am baffled by the way people gush about the food. Maybe it's just me, but sometimes it does seem that people are overdoing it.

Anyway this is just me taking a break from my essay. The 30-min attention span is returning to haunt me again.

I can't concentrate on writing my university application essays when the music is on, but I can't function in front of a silent computer.

I feel the debilitating boredom while staring into the screen, but I can't pull myself together to actually do something.

And I can't wait for my driving test to commence because I'm almost done with the course and still have to wait for more than 2 weeks.

And I can't wait to get my dear pink IC back and just bloody be done with the whole affair.

Am actually looking for opportunities to get out of the house.. no matter how much the cost. Just spent $20 on a burger and $7 on an iced cappucino yesterday. Food is bliss, but the hole in my wallet is just getting bigger. What the heck, I need this. Screw the cash.

Progress on the Cornell Supplement? Half a paragraph more than the last post where I talked about it. bahhhhhh

Just finished with my Cambridge interview (finally) and my, what an experience it was! I walked out of the interview room smiling, seriously. Not that I think I aced it or anything but talking with my interviewer was just, well, quite enjoyable.

The questions were interesting, to say the least. I sketched y=x2 + x3 wrongly (well, half wrongly) but got it right fairly easily with a little hint. Then came the question about the "meaning" about the sign that replaces the full arrow in an equilibrium. You know, that half arrow both ways thing, and somehow I meandered for like 5 mins or so before coming to the answer (forward rate of reaction=backward rate). Phew! Not that I didn't know, but somehow that concept slipped my mind and I was rambling about dissociation energies and whatnot.

Then, to my utter horror I was asked to draw a protein - the one thing I didn't look through before the interview, what are the odds?! Thank God he wasn't looking for helixes and pleated sheets (oh the horror) but instead just the amide linkages. Again I think I took a little too long to draw it but at least I answered the questions that followed quite easily. Then we talked about carbon and silicon and about why silicon didn't replace carbon in organic chemistry and biology (given that both are group IV elements with similar chemistry). I sorta liked that question, really. To elaborate on it and my answer would be too tedious, but suffice to say that my answer seemed to be on the right track and was probably satisfactory enough.

The beauty of the interview, really, is that I was engaged in an intellectual discussion which by no means resembled a serious assessment of my academic knowledge. I was intrigued rather than flustered by challenging questions and didn't really feel any pressure to think fast. You could say I walked out of the interview room feeling good, but then it's the interviewer's intention to make everyone feel good, regardless of whether they screwed it up or not, so I can't say for sure that I did well. All I can hope for is that my answers stood out from the pool of applicants - which is really hard for me to judge; and thinking of it all the time doesn't help at all.

It's not over yet, however. I've still got to do the TSA (thinking skills assessment) this Saturday, so hopefully that one will go well. I've done the sample test and really hope that's the standard because I thought it was quite manageable.

By the way, (500) days of summer was fairly awesome, and now I'm listening to Regina Spektor because her songs caught my attention during the show. Thanks people, all the hype was worth it. I thoroughly enjoyed myself in the theatre.

I shouldn't be doing this, really. I've got an interview to study for, essays to write and here I am - ignoring the Cornell Supplement essay that's been banished to my taskbar. A writer's block, I try to convince myself but I know deep down that it's no excuse.

Anyway I've recently acquired Muse's new album, The Resistance and true to my expectations it's nothing short of epic. They really occupy a unique position where mainstream listeners and indie freaks alike can enjoy. One can either choose to rock together with the infectious riffs of Uprising (the first single) and Unnatural Selection or appreciate the alternative side of I Belong To You and Exogenesis - the latter being a mammoth piece that spans the last 3 tracks. 

True to nature, also, Muse continues with their "musical-snob" reputation. This is sort of a mystery really because I can't actually pinpoint what exactly gives the band that edge. Is it the merely the sort of people who listen to them or is it something more subliminal? I've personally heard comments like "oh they think they're so smart because they listen to Muse". Or maybe it's the whole "alternative" genre that makes a listener seem cooler than the mainstream crowd. 

I don't have time to think about looking good (though I do take a little pride in being able to appreciate alternative music heh) but seriously this is not a conventional rock album. From an excerpt from the aria Mon coeur sóuvre à ta voix by Saint Saëns to Chopin's famous Nocturne in E-flat Major, the classical influences of this album merges seamlessly with, well, rock instruments to create an epic sound that I've found stuck in my head (in a good way) even after listening to the album. Exogenesis (I cannot stop talking about this song) is a great example of this and a totally awesome way to end the album.

All in all, 7.5/10. If you're not a fan of rock you'll probably won't appreciate all of this but Exogenesis should appeal to most people with decent taste. (Oops, just joking - not) So at least get the last 3 tracks of the album.

In the meantime, it's back to staring at the word document - something that I've been doing increasingly often. Damn.