*peeks out from behind curtain*

Um, hi.

I, er, don't really have a sufficient excuse for not posting for two years. So I'm very sorry. Please forgive me. And I wonder if this bunch of hologram roses and box of cyber chocolates is enough to placate you.

So I'm in a totally different place, geographically and otherwise, from the last time I posted.

1. I graduated. God knows how I managed to do that.
2. I moved to London.
3. I am finishing grad school.
4. I am writing this to procrastinate from writing the thing that would finish grad school.
5. And soon, I will cease to be a student and begin to be classified on the census as "unemployed."
6. I continued playing rugby, and learned how to say "I'm a hooker" with a straight face.
7. I also began training as a First Aider, which involves a lot of paperwork. And vomit bags. And cautionary tales.
8. I gave online dating a go, and I'm still alive. As a plus, he's a musician who makes beer. As a minus, I am constantly competing with Professor Brian Cox for his affections.
9. I am now a slave to BBC iPlayer.
10. I miss USC and the people there, but I intend on making London my new base for the near future.

This post does not really signal a return to Blogspot just yet, because I do want to give Wordpress a go. Partly out of curiosity, and also partly because a lot of jobs I've been looking at would like candidates to have some working knowledge of Wordpress for communication purposes. As you all know, I'm rubbish at keeping up with posts, and when I look back on the stuff I used to write (especially my Afghanistan blog) I sometimes wish that I could write with that same flair born of idealism one possesses in their undergrad years.

So we'll see.

Hiatus

I rarely update this blog anyway, but I'm just announcing that I'm going to be ignoring it completely at least for this semester.

In the meantime, keep an eye out for my WRIT 340 blog, and I may be setting up another one tracking news events of a particular country to help my journal for an IR class.

Far from the madding crowd

Haven't had a proper relaxing summer for years now. The last one was probably my graduation trip to Phuket, where it was basically 5 days of sunbathing, drinking happy hour cocktails, and eating potato salad every day. And treating sunburns the size of the Sahara with copious amounts of blessed aloe vera.

This summer has probably the closest I've come to it, with about a month's worth of chilling in Hong Kong, punctuated with the bouts of community service and followed by xuexi hanyu. And now it's gone. And what looms ahead is a semester of what may be many sleepless nights. Noses against the grindstone now!

A one man Babel

So, um, yeah. It's been a while hasn't it?

For those who don't know, I've spent the last few weeks in Zhuhai trying to improve my Mandarin. It definitely helped my speaking skills, but the whole thing was more of an interesting sociological and cultural study. It was like Real World-Survivor-Big Brother-Discovery Channel: Zhuhai.

On the subject of language, I seem to be incapable of holding on to a language once I stop using it regularly. As my Mandarin improved, my English became increasingly grammatically incorrect, and Cantonese kind of...stopped happening since I was mixing up the tones. And I did speak some French, but it was mainly limited to curses.

So who knows, maybe one day everyone will be talking like the characters in Firefly.

On that note, I should stop looking at pictures of shuai guys and go shuijiao, because I have to meet my friend at 11 tomorrow for wufan.

Rattling away on the keys

Some of you out there will know that I have a habit of humming incessantly, a habit that flourished particularly in high school during rather boring classes. Not enough for the teacher to notice, but definitely enough to annoy some of my friends. That has since extrapolated into playing random tunes on whatever instrument is available (yes, even Bonnie Blue Flag on the horn). Now it's playing on invisible pianos whenever I get the chance.

I really miss my piano now. I learned the piano all the way up to and barely passing Grade 8, but I definitely hated it more as the years went by. I was reluctant to go to lessons, and never practiced anything beyond the actual songs, and I told my mum that I would stop learning once I'd passed, because the drive wasn't there. It was way worse than practicing violin and clarinet; although I never actually practiced my clarinet, I could still master it fairly well during lessons and I was totally okay with the exercises, I was just kind of lazy about it.

The good thing was that passing Grade 8 coincided with my last year of school in Hong Kong, so it wasn't particularly difficult to go down the road and tell my teacher that I would no longer be studying with her after 10 years of doing so.

It is so much more fun now just sitting there and playing whatever I have on hand. Even the mushiest pop tunes were fun; my old music book contains stuff from Faith Hill to Il Divo to achy-breaky Cantopop. (I will still take an AK-47 to anyone who makes me play Miley Cyrus however.) I can forgo the TV if I could purchase a nice well-equipped keyboard. Alas for living in a studio where most of my wall space is already taken up.

For the second night in a row, I'm spending the evening in my room after hanging out briefly with the flatmates in the living room. Alone again. They did invite me out, but I am genuinely tired and would probably pass out after the first couple of drinks.

I can't remember who it was whom said there was a difference between being alone and feeling alone. (Or something like that.) Being an anti-social (and very shy) only kid, I didn't mind being alone most of the time, with a good book or an iPod to keep me company. But now that I'm in an environment where I really should enjoy the benefits of socialising and company, I often become the wallflower. Not even that. The flower painted on the wall. At the same time, I get antsy about turning up to events alone and usually try and find someone to go with me.

Which leads to an additional question: Have I spent so much time (we're talking from the age I learned to talk to about mid-puberty when I started going out without the parents) learning how to interact with those older than I am (we're talking about 10+ years) that I never fully worked out how to interact with those of my own age?

I'll work that out later. In the meantime, I'll continue to sit here and be serenaded by the dulcet tones of Brian Stokes Mitchell.

Curse you, Cassandra

I most likely have bastardised Greek mythology with the title, but I was looking back at blog posts I'd made over the summer. In particular, my last post of the summer referred to the last week of the internship and how crazy it was because of all the stuff that was going on. I finished with a wishful statement that band would be more drama-free.

Yeah fucking right.