monoceros blogsThis week's free download on Itunes is a laidback acoustic ditty called "Put Your Records On" by Briton, Corinne Bailey Rae. A song for the summer; a song for the girls; a song to keep me company as I work tonight. This world isn't going to let us off easy; we should all put our records on sometime.
"Three little birds, sat on my window.
And they told me I don't need to worry.
Summer came like cinnamon
So sweet,
Little girls double-dutch on the concrete.
Maybe sometimes, we got it wrong, but it's alright
The more things seem to change, the more they stay the same
Oh, don't you hesitate.
Girl, put your records on, tell me your favourite song
You go ahead, let your hair down
Sapphire and faded jeans, I hope you get your dreams,
Just go ahead, let your hair down.
You're gonna find yourself somewhere, somehow.
Blue as the sky, sombre and lonely,
Sipping tea in the bar by the road side,
(just relax, just relax)
Don't you let those other boys fool you,
Gotta love that afro hairdo.
Maybe sometimes, we feel afraid, but it's alright
The more you stay the same, the more they seem to change.
Don't you think it's strange?
Girl, put your records on, tell me your favourite song
You go ahead, let your hair down
Sapphire and faded jeans, I hope you get your dreams,
Just go ahead, let your hair down.
You're gonna find yourself somewhere, somehow.
Just more than I could take, pity for pity's sake
Some nights kept me awake, I thought that I was stronger
When you gonna realise, that you don't even have to try any longer.
Do what you want to.
Girl, put your records on, tell me your favourite song
You go ahead, let your hair down
Sapphire and faded jeans, I hope you get your dreams,
Just go ahead, let your hair down.
Girl, put your records on, tell me your favourite song
You go ahead, let your hair down
Sapphire and faded jeans, I hope you get your dreams,
Just go ahead, let your hair down.
Oh, You're gonna find yourself somewhere, somehow"
1. With my godsister's Nokia phone, you can type "brunch" in the calendar feature (with the "dictionary" function on) and get "crotch" instead.
2. Maybe if I picked up a hairbrush once in a while, I'd stop waking up mornings looking like a Gorgon.
3. I've seen girls who artfully line their eyes so they look like little Cleopatra darlings - more subtle but still regal - and wish I could make up my peeps like that too, but I'm too lazy to spend that kind of time on drawing. As it is, any eye makeup that I own is used only when I attend weddings, and how many of those do I go to anyway? It's about time I throw that stuff out before it transforms into something biologically active.
4. My new bag is too heavy. The handles leave red welts on my shoulders.
5. All my loved ones are thousands of miles away from me.
6. I am presently the sole caretaker of Snowy, which means she gives me more attention now.
7. I finally know what emo hair looks like now.
8. My other respite from work: tango on Tuesday nights at Xenbar and the biweekly milongas. I'm done with two beginner's courses now (which makes it three beginner's courses that I've taken in 11 months) but I'm still waiting for my tango shoes to get here. At least two people have asked me to get into performance tango, but I don't think I want to dance on stage. It's nice that the instructors think I'm actually good enough, but tango as social dancing is more my thing. No one cares how I dance except whoever I'm dancing with.
9. Borders actually brings in copies of the Best American series, and also the The O. Henry Awards series, which impresses me to no end. The store has been particularly frustrating when I'm looking for the kind of books I want.
10. For years now, I've noticed that prices of books and DVDs on Amazon.com fluctuate (even the ones on Amazon.fr), at times within a period of three days. Who decides the price changes, and why change them at all?
Yes, enough already with the pictures of perfect-looking movie stars. If they want us to gaze at their mugs, let's have them entertain us too. Time magazine has an excerpt from Howard Schatz's photo book of actors acting. Every actor is given a situation and then photographed as he acts the part. Some are moving, some hilarious (I like both of Christohper Lloyd's), and some encompass whole stories.
1. Still editing. Still working on a project that makes me feel like I'm going through a wringer (you know, the old-fashioned kind that you don't want your fingers to get caught in). May begin doing something new later this year.
2. Finally got a new phone. Only the second I've ever purchased in Singapore (last one was a Nokia 8210 bought in early 2001). It's the sleek new slider, the D820, by Samsung. I've made my own wallpapers (snapped them off the PC's screen with the camera phone) and ringtones (cut and edited MP3s). Random selection of ringtones - It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta, Hooch, Superman (by Lazlo Bane), Darth Vadar's theme. Current wallpaper - Emily the Strange.
3. Found a cheaper site to purchase tango shoes from. Returned the ones ordered earlier (which didn't fit well anyway, and the heel was too low) from the N. American site and am now waiting very impatiently for new ones to arrive (direct from Buenos Aires, from the very workshop that makes the shoes for said N. American company - same design, just much cheaper).
4. Big brother has left for US again. Grad school, but not at Michigan. Illinois, at Urbana-Champaign. Two hours south of Chicago, one of my favorite cities. Residence to one of my favorite public libraries, wonderful parks, great cheesecake, deep-dish pizza, a huge aquarium. I'll stop here.
5. I have a new daily tote. My mom's been threatening to throw out my old bag (a grey tote I've been using since 2000 and refusing to relinquish) ever since the fraying threads got longer and the grey fabric started beading up a lot. Since we were buying luggage at Robinsons the other day, I thought I'd check out what was on sale at the handbags section. Found a spacious black faux leather bag for $30. It's big enough to put all my usual crap in (wallet, phone, keys, notebook, pens, vouchers/coupons stash, miniature toiletries - including six different lip products, of which I use only one; why I retain the rest is a mystery - tissue, iPod, gum, Altoids, assorted papers and receipts) as well as an umbrella, a water bottle, and a book (probably a hardback if I wanted).
6. An old mentor from JC has been pushing me to write again and get something finished. She found out who my agent is and thinks I need to drop everything and write. Well, I just received a gift from my godsister who recently visited Iran and it sparked an idea. So I got started on something new, which is good, but not so good because I haven't finished up with the old yet. More research this summer.
7. I've developed a penchant for baked snacks from Sun Moulin bakery. Sure it's been around for a long time, but this past Thursday was when I really got round to checking out the tasty pastries and little cakes - flaky kaya fingers, dainty seasme puffs, banana-and-cream omelette rolls, small cheesecakes shaped like soap (I wanted to hold one plastic-wrapped cake below my nose and inhale deeply, but didn't think the folks around me would be too pleased).
8. Note on big brother again - I nearly forgot to mention that DSD and I successfully set him up with her friend, and it's taken off more splendidly than we expected. Drinks all around.
9. Playing tennis again. DSD is my trusty partner. We won't play with anyone else yet because we know of no others who would be big-hearted enough to tolerate our poorly returned - and at times hazardous - balls.
10. I'm looking forward to Ed Norton's new movies this year. If they ever reach our shores, that is. Down in the Valley and The Illusionist are small indie movies, so small they might not even get a wide distribution in the US. At least there'll be The Painted Veil with the lovely Naomi Watts. Can't wait. I'll just read this article a few more times before getting on with other things like oh, breathing.
In the news recently - a man who supposedly made a suicide pact with his much younger mistress. He managed to kill her but failed to kill himself, not being able to handle her dying in front of him. He did succeed in clearing out her savings (obviously taking money's far easier than taking lives). However, he probably and unwittingly accomplished also the emotional deaths of his wife and children, who had no idea that the most important man in their lives was carrying on with another woman. While the papers go on about the trial and the truth, I wonder about the story of his family, the one that's left by the wayside, so easily looked over.
I mention this piece of news because I'm reading a book called Kinshu: Autumn Brocade, by Teru Miyamoto (translation by Roger K. Thomas). It's an epistolary novel, something we don't get too often these days. From the letters we learn of a failed double suicide (the lover dies, but the man survives) and a swift, quiet divorce with few words said between the couple. 10 years after, Aki meets her ex-husband as she takes her handicapped son up a mountain in a gondola. The son is a product of her second marriage (another sad one, it appears), and the chance meeting with her ex-husband makes her remember her earlier anger; surely his infidelity and their subsequent divorce resulted in her lot in life - caring for a mentally and physically handicapped child. Their letters reveal what they failed to say to each other 10 years before, and what their lives have become after the divorce and what they might be after this exchange of letters. Much of the emotion is tender and very real, seldom if at all histrionical - there's an elegance and dignity to the pathos in the novel.
I haven't got deeper but I'm interested to learn more about the novel's suggestion "that men's work may be less consequential than women's" (from Publisher's Weekly). I'm guessing that Aki's devotion and patience with her son ultimately is of greater significance than what her ex-husband, Yasuaki, has made of his life, never mind that both Aki and Yasuaki are not as happy as they wish to be. Aki, though, is at a better and calmer place in life than Yasuaki who - when Aki first sees him in the gondola - seems depressed, weary and unmoved by everything around him.
It's painful for the two of them to revisit the feelings they bore a decade before, but the letters help them, help him more than they do her, actually. The tone of his writing gradually eases into a semblance of acceptance and gratitude. He writes "And perhaps several years from now I'll get off at Koroen Station on the Hanshin Line, walk through the familiar residential area, and come to your house, right next to the tennis club. Maybe I'll look up at your house, at the big old mimosa tree, and quietly go home. Please keep well."
Boy, an update is long overdue. I'll get to that in time (which may mean never), since I wrote this post mainly to rave about today's offering on NPR's Song of the Day. Rose Melberg sounds decidedly folksy; her voice makes me think of the long branches of willow trees and the smallest and softest of dandelions. But no matter how light or mellow her music sounds, there's a palpable sadness to it. "Take some time" has the sort of softly lilting melody that's best heard on a slow day on the porch or a leisurely drive in the back lanes, but the words are something else. I like what Stephen Thomson had to say about the song - "It surveys miles of emotional wreckage, yet the scene it sets seems oddly sweet."