Tuesday, 17 December 2013

forays into the great outdoors

Today T and I went on an adventure into nature. Despite the claims of 26 degree weather, the morning started off pretty cool. It did warm up later though, which was great. The trip to the park was pretty uneventful, apart from us ending up having to ask directions, and complaining about the amount of walking that we had to do to get there. If we didn't already know we were unfit, then that walk just proved it to us.

Once we got there, we proceeded on what was apparently a 3k, 1.5 hour walk. Maybe it's 1.5 hours if you exercise on a regular basis, but we managed to walk for about five minutes before stumbling to a stop for a break. Which, of course, became a regular occurrence throughout the rest of the walk. Still, we made it through, and then settled down at one of the tables for the picnic that we'd prepared to have. T brought popcorn, nectarines and sandwiches while I brought an array of other snacks. We got about halfway through lunch before we were ever so rudely interrupted by a bird flying right across the middle of our table, literally centimetres away from my face. Despite our valiant attempts to ignore it, it just kept interrupting us by flying close but then banking away at the last moment. Plus it kept eyeing us off. Ugh, birds. Then, of course, just as we'd almost finished packing up to relocate elsewhere it swooped over, snatched up a bit of the corn thin that I'd been snacking on and then landed on the wall. I abandoned the corn thin and as we walked away, the bird flew back to the table and continued eating. Clearly, this was not the first time it'd done so. BIRDS ARE THE SPAWN OF THE DEVIL.

We ended up relocating to the playground and pretty much just continued snacking and lazing around in the sun and being side-eyed by other people for another hour or so before leaving. If you discount the bird thing and the walking, it was a pretty good day. Definitely I wouldn't do the walking part again, laughs. Not unless I actually took up some form of exercise between now and the next time that I'd be going there.

Monday, 16 December 2013

and the cracks began to show

I've been sadly unexcited about a lot of things this year. Top of the list of things that I'm unenthused about would be Christmas. I have hardly listened to my Christmas playlist at all. Possibly this has to do with the fact that I've been feeling not so great this past week - even bordering on unhappiness, I suppose - which is hard to get over when you are so distanced from the people that make you feel better, in whatever little ways those may be.

Sometimes I think I need to sleep more, but I also think that I sleep too much. I used to be better than this, I feel. Better at pushing through, better at forcing things out of mind, better at dealing with life. I suspect I am a lot of things that I did not used to (want to) be. I'm not sure when, but somewhere along the way, I've been sapped of joy, creativity, energy, etc.

(Why am I so afraid?)

Sunday, 15 December 2013

the years chase me and accelerate

My sister came home the other day to have dinner, catch up with us all, talk a little bit more about birthday plans. She asked me what I wanted her to get me, which was a little odd because she's never asked this question before. In the past, she's always chosen gifts that I can appreciate. I suppose it's harder this year, when she's been away so often and we've grown apart in so many ways. It will always be easy to fall back into those patterns together though.

I've always considered myself an easy person to buy for, when people have bothered. Perhaps it helps that I do believe in the thought counting. Unless your birthday gift happens to be Christmas themed. Then you're just going on my shitlist. Still, this year I've gotten closer to people that I wouldn't have thought myself to be really friends with before, which made me realise that perhaps it would be a good idea to make a sort of wishlist.

1. Books! I love reading. I'm not an e-book person, though I will succumb to it for the convenience. There's not a lot that's better than opening a new book and just breathing it in, having the covers, the pages underneath your fingertips.
Books I'm after in particular include: Veronica Roth's Divergent trilogy (preferably without anything relating to the upcoming movie on the cover of Divergent). Melissa Marr's Wicked Lovely series. D.J MacHale's The Pendragon Adventure series and Morpheus Road series. Alexandra Bracken's The Darkest Minds series would be great too, even though the third book isn't slated to be released until next year. A copy of Ela's Gravity (if she still has some printed) would also be super fabulous.

2. Perfume. Specifically, Thierry Mugler's Angel and Yves Saint Laurent's Paris. I received these as samples long ago and liked them both, but somehow never got around to purchasing them for myself.

3. Shoesssss. Wedges, in particular, though I always want new shoes. My parents always tell me I have too many pairs of shoes, but the problem is that most of mine are not suited towards casual everyday wear.

4. Anything from Snack Heroes ! Except the ice cream maker. We already have one. Not that we use it that often since there's never room in the freezer.

5. Jewelry. I like rings. A lot. A nice watch wouldn't go amiss either.

6. Tickets to Wicked, The Musical next year. Or tickets for The Visitors or In The Kingdom of Cha by MTC. I miss going to see plays and these two look super interesting.

7. New flavours of tea. Fruit teas will probably always be my love but I've recently acquired a taste for nutty flavoured tea.

Hmm, I can't think of anything else at the moment, though I'm sure there's more that I would love to receive. I'd be pretty well pleased with just about anything since normally I don't really get anything at all.

Friday, 13 December 2013

[x] writings; three

he breaks her heart when they're eight. he doesn't do it on purpose, but it happens all the same. his little boy hands aren't enough when she asks him to hold on to her heart for her. he doesn't do it on purpose. her heart slips and falls through his fingers and her eyes go wide. she scrambles to catch it, but gets tangled up in all her feathers. the air shudders with the impact of a silent boom of thunder, and then everything cracks. when she collects herself enough to look, her heart lies broken on the floor. he babbles apologies, but she just smiles, small and detached, and tells him it's not his fault. she kneels down and carefully picks up the broken pieces of her heart. she tries as best as she can to mend it, but nothing works.

in the end, she's left with two halves of a beating heart that she doesn't know what to do with.

--

he thinks about splashing, smearing, clogging up dirty alley walls with vivid, sharp paint. he thinks about swirling leaves and gang leader faces, petty, childish flirtations, and deeper, lasting, bonding friendships. he thinks about fires and ambulances, newspapers and life support; breaking, crying over his girl looking fragile and drowning in white cotton and hearing that she might make it. she might. he thinks about how he clung to that hope that she'd survive, and hearing that a clumsy doctor tripped the cord.

he thinks about suffocating funerals and dying in the dirt, and future promises that changed from i will to we will that broke.

--

her hair is this impossible shade of red. it's this shaded, jaded, glorious amaranth that makes him want to rip the petals out of the flowers that she's carrying. it's a colour that is so achingly familiar that, for a moment, he forgets how to breathe. it's morbidly fascinating, watching this girl frisk along in dark ribbons and lace and silk that she has no right to be wearing. the leaves flutter up around her as she totters down the sidewalk, kicking at the piles. her feet aren't broken in for these clunky heels and he locks his eyes on her ankles, brittle and wobbling and threatening to snap and collapse under her. he can't look her in the eyes, because her eyes are just as wide and just as artificial candy blue as he remembers, but the difference is that the last time he remembers seeing her, her eyes had learned how to hold back the burn of tears. these eyes look like they're always crying.

do you remember? he wants to ask but doesn't because if he does, she'll look at him and ask, who are you? 

Saturday, 7 December 2013

we're multiplying, there might be one here

Tonight I went to see 俺俺 at ACMI for the Japanese Film Festival. I've been looking forward to this movie ever since it was first announced because really, what could be better than a movie with Kame playing 33 characters? (A movie with Jin playing all the characters, tbh. Is my bias showing?) Even without the allure of seeing Kame onscreen, the plot itself is delicious. It's not a movie that I could watch regularly, but I'd still definitely put it on my favourites list. T and the older couple sitting beside her cracked up at me though for freaking out before the movie had properly started :( I'm sorry I have a lot of feelings. Subs for the movie are already out online, but mostly I wanted to go for the Q&A session that was hosted with the director afterwards.

It was actually a little awkward (which I expected, because of the disconnect between translations, but also because interviews are almost always a bit awkward) but most of the questions that were asked were great. (Except for that one woman who had a comment and a question and was talking for literally like 5 minutes. I wanted to punch because she would not shut up and I'm not even sure her comment made complete sense because that's what happens when you say things on the fly, ugh.) Satoshi Miki was really nice about it all though, and his answers were all really interesting to hear. I managed to get down most of the Q&A; at some point I'll probably transcribe that for KTL or KTWW or something. He was super nice afterwards too, hanging around outside the cinema to take photos and shake hands and sign autographs :(

I also managed to make new JE friends! Mostly because they were hanging around afterwards too and talking about things and I sort of slyly inserted myself into their conversation, haha. I think B and I will get along great. C and A seem really nice and fun too, as well as the rest of the group whose names I didn't manage to catch. We hung around outside ACMI for a while just talking and flailing about things, and eventually got told off by other people who were standing around in Fed Sq for being too loud. (What else is new though?) We swapped u/ns, and have tentative plans for karaoke in a few weeks, so I think we're going to be, well, pretty good friends. They all headed back to Flinders while A and I walked down Swanston since A lives on LaTrobe and I was meeting my sister at Rooftop in Curtin House since it was her actual birthday.

I ended up walking all seven flights of stairs because there was a group of people lingering outside the lift and I don't have the patience for that. It was probably good for me, anyway, considering that T and I lived the fat life today. It took me a while to work out where my sister and her friends were, I am not good at recognising people from the back, and even less so when it is dark, but I found them in the end. I don't really know many of her friends well plus I was pretty tired from being out most of the day, but I talked to D, M, and A for a while. Right before I left I ended up spotting L, who I haven't seen in months! This was pretty much the last place that I expected to run into her. So I chatted to her for a bit before I left and collapsed at home, about life and her plans and her scooter accident and shitty internet. We'll make proper plans for a real catch up, probably with the whole group, some time soon so that'll be the best.

Tomorrow I'm checking out the RDH function room for my joint birthday with my younger sister, and then on Sunday O is coming to stay over before he leaves me (again) for other, sunnier places, so the next few days will be fun too, at least.

Thursday, 5 December 2013

light it up

Semi-short post just to say that today I saw O for the first time in roughly a week and a half, yay. I brought Toblerone cheesecake as a semi-belated gift-thing since yesterday was his birthday, and then we just sat around for a few hours. (What do normal people do? Whenever I go anywhere with anyone all I ever do is just sit around because I'm a lazy fuck.)

I also had dinner at Laksa King as an early celebration for my older sister's birthday. We were late for our booking, not to mention my parents were late, which caused the head waiter to glare at us for a bit. Whatever. Dinner ended up being a shorter affair than usual, which was in part due to the fact that there's always a line waiting and also in part because there was a bit of a wait in between the arrival of all the dishes that we ordered. (Beef rendang, sweet and sour pork, gado gado, Ipoh fried noodles, Laksa King fried rice, plus coconut rice.) We still ended up ordering too much though, and ended up taking the remainders home to my brother, who couldn't make it since he was working overtime.

After that, we drove back to D's house. Mostly we investigated their house, since it's been a good like, 6 months at least since we last saw it. Their fish are super creepy though, but they've decorated pretty well. I guess it's pretty safe to say that my sister's officially moved in there (even though all her mail still comes here) since all her things are everywhere, cluttering up space. We also had birthday cake. The cake was actually super cute and tasty, even though it was quite small.

Tuesday, 3 December 2013

what's cooler than being cool

Since T leaves in almost exactly a month, I'm trying to spend as much time with her as possible. She's one of the few people that I genuinely like seeing and talking to on a regular basis so next year's going to be pretty hard, considering the time difference and how exhausted she'll be from working all the time. I think the distance will most likely change some things, but I have confidence that we'll make it through without any serious problems. We are, after all, fated to be friends in a multitude of ways.

We met up in the city around lunch time yesterday to have a cafe date. We ended up with a platter to share and individual drinks (milk for T and dark for me), which looked absolutely amazing. I think out of the entire platter, the only thing that we were less than impressed with was the cake. It was incredibly dense and while the topping was great, the cake itself paled in comparison to everything else on the platter. We were there for maybe an hour, an hour and a half, though we definitely should have dragged it out for longer considering how hot it was outside. It was pretty funny because our table looked a thousand times more romantic than the tables of the legitimate couples that were in there.

After that we headed over to Boost so T could grab a watermelon crush, and then we wandered over to JB Hi-Fi so that I could make a vague attempt at finding an OST for L's birthday since she collects like a crazy person who has too much money to spare. I'm not entirely sure why it is exactly that every time I go out somewhere with T, we end up sitting on the floor. It was actually a little bit awkward because every time a store assistant would walk into the aisle we'd hurriedly make it seem as if we were looking at DVD titles on the shelves. I have to say though that we did find some pretty great things lingering in the boxes under the shelves. At some point I'll have to go back to get those. We also checked out Cotton On Body and Daiso for a while before heading down to meet her mother after work so we could get a lift from the station to T's house.

The trip was pretty non-eventful, apart from the idiot who was playing his music through his phone speakers loud enough for basically the entire carriage to hear it. T's mum decided to take a walk after we reached the house, so T and I changed our clothes and sort of just lounged around various parts of the house until she got back and we decided to have our pasta and meatballs for dinner. Post-dinner we rolled back into T's room, just talking and then looking up easy recipes for baking. I was super tired and so I napped for about an hour while she did laptop/internet things before getting up for baking.

We'd decided on vanilla cupcakes with frosting, except the recipe made 24 cupcakes and considering T's mum is on a Lite n Easy diet so we decided to half it. Which caused a bit of confusion when we tried to figure out half of thirds. But we got there in the end and I got to watch while T wrestled out, and with, the Kenwood kitchen aid they'd bought for her mum's 50th a few weeks back. Making the cupcakes themselves went fine, and we ended up putting some chocolate and macarons into the middle of half of them; the real problem started when we started trying to make the frosting because it turned out that T didn't have any icing sugar left in the house. Utilising the wonders of technology, we Googled a substitute recipe and were informed by the internet that we could just blend normal, granulated sugar down and use that instead. So we did. And it did not go so well. The frosting recipe called for a stupid amount of sugar, to begin with, and then we couldn't blend the sugar down fine enough, and then we may have added too much liquid. It's also possible that the oils from the butter began to separate as well. Eventually we tried fixing it like we did the last time that we messed up frosting - by melting it down, except that didn't work either because as soon as we took it off the stove the sugar started granulating again. In the end we just ditched it all down the sink. All up, baking and cleaning up took a ridiculous 3 hours. Never trust the preparation/cooking times on recipes - they're never right.

We Youtubed a bit, rolled around in bed and talked before finally falling asleep around 2.30-3-ish. Originally, we set the alarm for about 9am; in reality, we ended up getting up around 11. I showered while T had breakfast, and then we swapped over. It's funny how I've stayed at S's house a lot more than I've stayed at T's, yet T's house is where I feel a thousand times more at home. I packed up all my things, including my Christmas gift from T (a hilarious cross-stitch) and we headed over to uni for AXPP. Not that I particularly care about Pokemon - I just wanted to see/touch a few people and eat free food. I am all about free things, don't you know?

90% of the people there were people that I either didn't know or didn't really like, and those I did like were pretty occupied with Pokemon (obviously) or other people, so T and I ended up hiding out in corners/in TLS/the bathroom for most of the time. T mostly just laughed or fondled her Pokemon while I selca'd and snapchatted in all locations we were in. Whatever. After lunch, we hung around for the first round of the tournament, and then ran away to get McFlurry's. I turned mine into a spider using one of the eight cans of soft drink that I walked away from AXPP with, ha. Because everything in Australia is a goddamn spider. Fun times.

Sunday, 1 December 2013

metrics #4

This is the final metrics post for NaNo 2013 ! Exciting, I suppose, and yet, disappointing. I'll probably keep doing these metrics posts whenever I work on what I started for NaNo, whose title is tentatively being abbreviated to RTN. Quite apt, considering, if you are one of the few who a) know what it stands for and b) know the gist of my plotline.

Anyway, metrics for week 4 (and a bit): 8401. So, I have a grand total of 33291 for the month of November.

I'm a little upset that I didn't make it to the 50k mark on RTN. (I can feel the rest of you staring at me like holy shit, 33291 words in 30 days is fucking amazing; shh, you don't know what it's like.) Considering the monster that this is going to turn out to be, I probably should have made more of an effort to bash out as much as possible. Still, it's a nice number to look at in retrospect, and definitely more than the combined total of everything else I'd written in the rest of the year.

In case anyone was curious, here's some music that I've been listening to pretty frequently while writing during November!
Bridge Attack//Bill Whelan
Phoenix//Daft Punk
Mighty Micro People//Amon Tobin
Concorde//Glen Check

Drifting//Lucid Fall
Easy To Crash//Cake

Also, hello December ! Isn't it hard to believe that we're so close to 2014 already? Where have all the days gone?

Friday, 29 November 2013

don't stop sexy boyz

Yesterday I finally met up with my 妹妹 L for the first time in a few months! She was late in meeting me, which was fine - I went for a latte at Starbucks while I waited for her. The weather was not great, but that wasn't such a problem since we'd made plans to go back to her apartment anyway.

After she showed up, we walked a few blocks to this delightful French restaurant/cafe place for lunch that L had been to before. Since both of us are not particularly large eaters, we chose a few things to share. We ended up with French style pizza and crepes, as well as a bowl of fries because, well, who doesn't love fries, let's be real here. L also got an iced chocolate while I stuck with water. Even though the portions looked quite small, they were really filling ! We also got raspberry mousse slice and a strawberry tart to take away so that we could have dessert a little later, once we were done digesting a little.

Both of us have the habit of forgetting that we're actually meant to be dieting so we opted to walk back to L's apartment, stopping by at this super fancy supermarket on the way for juice. For some bizarre reason, strangers always talk to us when we're out together; it's more than a little creepy. This time, it happened to be the guy re-stocking the shelves. After making small talk and giving us advice on juice, he proceeded to comment on how we both had really good English, at which L and I both exchanged a look and told him that well, yeah, we'd been here for a while. (I was born here; L migrated from China when she was 3, iirc.) So that was not all that fun, but we managed to get back to her apartment without any other mishaps.

L cleaned up her room a bit while I sat around on her bed, and then we set up for what she dubbed our JE fangirling date. I gave her pretty much everything that I'd been able to fit onto my harddrive and we spent the next five or so hours alternating between past and present videos. She also tried to introduce me to some of the juniors! This probably would have worked better if she wasn't trying to point them out through video because no matter how HD a video is, when someone is not the focus it's pretty hard to make them out properly and make judgments on whether you find them qtp or not. We watched some of this year's Shokura's, as well as part of the SZ concert, some AnS, pv's and a bunch of other assorted things. I've never understood why people watch reaction videos, because I honestly find them not that funny unless you actually know the person? Also because it's 1028488934902x better if you're there with them in person. I'm pretty sure L cries some real tears during the afternoon at some point. The Star Rider video was pretty much her breaking point though, since she saw U's hair and was actually just lost for words.

I ended up staying until about 7.30-ish? which was a lot later than I'd originally planned, since I was meant to be meeting up with people for P's birthday, oops. So I trammed back into the city (and got caught for apparently not touching on even though I swear I did, ugh, going to have to appeal that when I get sent the letter) and met up with them only for cake. Not that I really minded, because I was actually still full from lunch. Terrible weather aside, it was a really good day. Which was made even better by getting home and watching L sob over Twitter as she made her way through a bunch of things that she'd never seen before.

L: "I REALLY CANT STOP CRYING MY HEART IS SPLITTING INTO LITTLE PIECES...I am literally going to die". Best moments of the day.

Wednesday, 27 November 2013

because you've had it too good recently

Sometimes, people are assholes. Sometimes, people are idiots. I fall into one, but more often and more likely both of these categories because things that I'm not good at seem to include being a decent person. I know there's a lot that needs work in who I am, I know that I'm lacking and there is so much I need to improve on, but I've never actually wanted to be a bad person. (Then again, who really does?) I've never thought that I would be one.

This is not the kind of person that I'd respect. This is not the kind of person that I'd like to be.

So...I'm sorry. And I'll say it again.