haunted

by cameras

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indeed i am. i have run into about 5 people using canon s5 is cameras over the past month. canon is taunting me and my 2 megapixel camera with a zoom that doesnt work. not to mention all the Canon EOS dslrs that my friends were using at the track meet, just cos they joined photog. now why didnt i join it.

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yls was. a mixture of emotions. for one, it made me miss fiesta AND funorama, or even if i hadnt gone for those, i could have slacked at home. but, it did give me a chance to talk to people, make new friends (all guys, i must note), and get a picture with jeanette aw. whose camerawoman happened to be using a canon s5 is. darnit. oh yes, and the highlight of the afternoon, playing rugby 08 during the presentations. hopefully im marginally better at it now.

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centrestage was a blast. congratulations to luke, henry, isaac, ronald, rene, ariel, ada, job, eka, sheryl and alex. a coffeeshop incident was a seriously awesome play, and it sure deserved the win. kudos also to bingei and sam lee for some surprisingly good acting. well the jokes were mostly level and acsi jokes, which the average observer probably wouldnt get. but thats the nature of things, and thats how we like it, so for those of you who watched centrestage and didnt understand a single one of the jokes, well thats just too bad (: oh how things like these can give you sudden bursts of school loyalty.

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i have realised that ive avoided thinking too much this year by obsessing about various things. be it laptops, ipods, cameras. maybe its time to shift my focus onto the only real thing truly worth an obsession. God.

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the circle game

level 1

intuition

——————

my ipod speakers have finally run out of battery. its not bad for a month of use, for 4 AAA batteries. time to get new ones.

on a separate note, i finally managed to install the anti-virus on my computer. only after disabling vista’s security feature. now i get what the mac ads mean.

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so what if the term began badly. theres always the chance to change things. and that i shall. from now onwards, the term shall be as wonderfully fun as term 1. despite the heavier workload, i shall not get crushed by the pressure.

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i started this post with the intent of commenting on our wonderful ToK lecture today, hence the title. unfortunately, my train of thought seems to have derailed, with the repair crew rushing off in the opposite direction home. and so, while waiting for this mess to be sorted out, i shall remind myself of what i need to do

1) fix the guitar mess (admin, scores, attendance, room)

2) find teams for inspire

3) start a fund raising project for inspire

4) train my fps teams

5) get a camera

6) actually do my work and study.

good luck to me.

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does anyone else realise

that im not making sense

returns

economics

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the results of a week, well more like 2 days of studying.

literature: tied 2nd (silver)

math: tied 2nd (silver)

science: tied 3rd (bronze)

team: top team essay

team: 2nd overall

not bad for last minute preparations. too bad for them, we’re not going for the internationals.

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so now that the past 2 days have been totally used up by wsc, its time to do some homework. we only ended at 1140 yesterday, having spent 15 hours in school. although the food was good, and the debates were fun and ego-boosting. still, im tired.

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after those lectures and reading on the stream of consciousness. i think that i think the way that i blog. this is how i think, in sentences. and only in english, even if im writing a chinese essay. and here we reach a contradiction. how could it be possible, through thinking, to evaluate how you yourself think. but then again, it is nigh impossible for anyone else to tell what you are thinking. so there we have it.

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motivating forces

update

completed: history. astronomy. literature part 1 and 2.

dilemna: art or econs.

given up on: math

10.41 pm

i just cant

take it all

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so its good friday. and i shall keep telling myself its gonna be a good weekend, no matter how impossible that may seem. especially with the stack of wsc materials i have yet to touch.

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we ate korean food for lunch. and i must say, kimchi does not go well with my tastebuds. but well at least now i can say ive tried it, although i think i shouldnt have eaten the whole piece at one shot. maybe i wouldnt have needed a whole cup of water if i had eaten it slower. other than that, i think the bbq meat was just awesome. and the tang hoon as well. but what can i say, i just dont have the taste for sour things.

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anyone want to help out with inspire? all you have to do is form a team in your school and do fundraising in your school for the straits times pocket money fund. we will provide the liasing and the certification. http://inspire.sg

call me.

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off to tackle the next 6 books. wish me luck. and hope i dont get owned tomorrow.

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all i wanna do

is find a way back into love

we mourn

but no one hears

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so the term didnt start of too well. spending 3 days on a math portfolio that wasnt collected at all. having a really lousy first guitar practice of the term, with everyone being slack and not caring during practice. not to mention the fact that it was messy. realising on monday that world scholar’s cup is on saturday, and i havent touched a single one of the 9 textbooks.

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so sometimes things happen. good things, bad things, mundane things. everything. a part of life, a part of joy, a part of sadness. all we can do is trust that they happened for a reason, one beyond our understanding, especially at the present moment. a few measurements of time down the winding road, maybe we’ll see why. although its more likely that by then we would have forgotten the intensity of the moment, having moved on just as life pushes us along.

and every so often, we bump into something that makes us whip our heads around and survey the chaos we have left behind us. it is then that we either come to the conclusion that it was not as horrible as it seemed, or that we had not the wisdom to enjoy it while it lasted. eitherway, there’s a word we have for it. the past. its gone.

what is it truly, to reflect. is it merely a redirection of all the things thrown at you by the world? or is it something new that comes from within. in the spirit of TOK. can knowledge be borne out of reflection and thought. or are we capable only of remembering.

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it just occured to me, especially after reading 1984, that one doesnt need to travel back in time to change history. by changing the present, by changing people’s minds, by convincing them that what they remember is wrong. thats how you truly change the past. slowly certainty blurs into faith and belief, falling into a hunch, breaking apart into vague notions, finally resting at imagination.

but life goes on. and we will hold on to the faith.

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we could change the world

if only.

freezing hot

its killing me

—————————–

i watched 10,000 BC yesterday. and despite what some people said about it being boring, and the cinema being totally empty except for a bunch of noisy kids and a lonely guy, i found the movie rather nice. as with all epic shows, there were parts in the story where you can just tell what is going to happen next. and it does. but still, its nice to actually see it happening on the screen, instead of just in your imagination.

so here’s the advantage of doing movies about civilisations long gone. you can accuse them of being retarded and delusional, with no one sending a crack team to kill you. well at least thats how i see it. and its fun, because theres a lot of things which depend on how you interpret them. whos to say whos the good guy and whos bad. it all depends on the perspective that the event is shown to you in. most often, its the rebels who are shown as the good guys. maybe it has something to do with the bravado and risk you get out of fighting the people in command. but what if it were shown from the opposite point of view? in that case, the rebels would be disrupters of the peace, heretical dissidents, “counter-revolutionaries”. i guess you’ll never know who’s really right then.

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so i look around me and see all my friends running for council, well except for a few like russell, sam and henry. and then i wonder if i made the right choice not running, but i decide i wont think about it. because no one should argue with themselves, let alone try to convince themselves that they are making the right decisions. thats something i find myself trying to do more and more often these days.

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everyone hates portfolios. i hate it when you arent sure of what to do in the first place. i hate being scared. but then again, who doesnt

—————————————

think happy thoughts

surreal

eons apart

————————-

and im back from guitar camp. in fact, i was back by 3, but i slept till 7. i suppose thats what you get from sleeping 3 hours each night and having a full day of activities. so anyways. this camp really showed me a lot. see, having spent the entire last year planning camps with council, i got used to the prefect way of doing things. where you can tell someone to do something and he’ll do it “to the best of his ability”. i used to think that was all nonsense, but now i know the vast difference between prefects who need to do their best to stay in the board, and just students who dont feel like doing anything.

although im not saying its anyone’s fault. in fact, i think its probably my fault that the camp was somewhat slack and messy. hopefully ill do better next time, since now i know i cant just sit back and expect things to happen. that not everyone is passionate about camps and such.

but on the whole, i think it went passably well. after all we wanted this camp to be for the purposes of bonding and practice. of which, i think the bonding worked out better, although i cant really tell. its amazing how hard it is for an organiser to tell how the participants feel. i have no idea if they actually bonded, but im just assuming that they did. as for practices, i managed to work out some problems i had with some of the pieces, therefore i shall generalise and assume the rest did too.

on a separate note. guitar camp is the time when i play the most computer, watch the most movies, and play the most piano. well at least compared to term time. ive discovered that for lazy people like me, music is the most fun and enjoyable when youre playing for no purpose other than that of your own entertainment. without having to actually learn a song, but just playing nonsense and chords, whether it be on the piano or guitar.

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music and lyrics was a really nice show. especially the songs. although since i stayed up till 5 am watching it in the dark on my computer, i have a stupid headache now. and cant think, nor process. there goes my holiday homework. of which there is an abundance.

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is it better to be yourself, or get convinced?

—————————————–

nothing but principles

words

mean everything and nothing

at the same time

—————————-

so begin the holidays. the first in our lives as jc or ib students. and what do we have to enjoy it with? lots and lots of work. and camps. ah. it never changes does it.

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so ill be at guitar camp for the next 3 days. which means i wont be online, unless i find a way to hack the internet. other than that, itll just be me and a rather disorganised guitar camp. we’ll see how it turns out.

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after staring at cameras for so long, i decided to try out my current one. and discovered that the buttons are messed up, so now at least theres a legitimate reason to get a new one, although my dad says he wants a compact. so unless i can convince him to get the s5 despite its size, we’ll probably end up with a lumix or canon compact. oh well. so much for dreams.

first attempt at bokeh: http://picasaweb.google.com/danielyeews/RandomStuff/photo#5175676145421314866

2nd attempt (which worked, somewhat): http://picasaweb.google.com/danielyeews/RandomStuff/photo#5175676209845824322

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time to get started on some work.

i am going to

kill someone

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everything is so freaking pissing. first some people are wonderfully indecisive as to if they need me. then someone has to be asleep when i need to settle things for camp. and no one seems to be serious enough to care. and the stupid interview had to involve current affairs. and not only just current affairs, but ministers. i mean like, come on cant you ask me some question about policies? like pay rise, standards of living, global warming? instead i get asked about something i know nuts about. i really hope the rest of my answers were satisfactory, because in the words of one of the interviewers, “that question really floored you”.

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just burn.