the light outside is dimming. my plants look dried and thirsty.
watered them. i wonder how long they'll survive the frequent drought to deluge condition. i, too, should stop starving and binging.

the last 2 years have been hazy. last week is foggy. the past is a mashed-up string of events, all blurry and strange. maybe it's just me who's becoming dull and dumb.

last night i had a stupid dream. i tricked Zhu Baije into gulping up a whole pond of water so we could find the medicinal rock... i don't even know what it cures but we were all searching frantically.

at breakfast i had the strange urge to burst into tears. for no reason. it's always for no reason. why is there always a hurricane inside me? chuong's like the weatherman. he picked up the wind and looked at me quizzically.

so what is it?

well, frankly, i'm tired. the waiting is destructive. waiting is sadder than rejection. this year was a long year of waiting on so many different emotional level.

haven't packed for the trip to hanoi tomorrow. haven't reread any of my notes, feeling completely unprepared... pondered now and then about what questions to ask, but between researching for my own work, finding my own thesis, writing and translating for others, and acting as liaison it is hard to focus.

the work for Lap Xuan's show lies unfinished on the desk. It is coming out well and I'm pleased but if I don't finish most of it tonight, it will end up looking incomplete (as indeed, it is at the moment). the nice thing about participating in small shows like this is that i can just let my sense of aesthetic take over, and not have to worry as much about concept.

concept. my god. as if this is philosophy. it's unimaginable how much research and reasoning i have to do for each project. and still, i haven't managed to get into the deeper layers. everything is still skin-deep - more or less surface skimming at the moment.

sigh.

dots

the show's coming to an end in a little more than a week and i'm still wondering what to do with the wall. the process itself was quite interesting though. things don't transfer that well from imagination to reality, but it's fascinating watching myself fumble through various processes trying to make it right again...

the show forces me to go out and interact with people, something i'd stopped doing since the beginning of the year. people are so interesting, they bring stories and energy and expand my imagination. but at the same time they sometimes fill me with insecurity and an inexplicable dread.

what is it? fear of being judged? fear of being reduced to nothing under their eyes? fear of being hurt?

what is it that make us vie so much for acceptance and acknowledgment?

i suppose in the end we are social creatures, each a mere dot on a canvas, dying to be connected with the other dots, to belong to the bigger picture.

audio books

painting and listening to audio books or various podcasts perfectly complements each other. i'm dismayed it took me so long to discover this - the beautiful combination of two of the things i love most: art and literature.

and the oral tradition. i'd forgotten how much i loved listening to stories, that it was altogether another form of enjoyment to reading the text yourself. this, perhaps, dates back to childhood when mom would read a chapter of Wu Cheng'en's epic novel Tay Du Ky (Journey to the West) to me each night until we'd covered the entire 100 chapters.

recently i listened to Kafka's The Metamorphosis and the story was so strange that it took me 2 days after the last sentence to make sense of my feelings. and boiling down to it, the prevalence being sadness.

there's a funeral somewhere in the alley. for some reason, here in vietnam, a funeral means unquestionable rights for the mourners to sing karaoke all night, and wake the whole neighborhood up at 6:30 with loud drumming...

i feel like a zombie.

maybe this is their way of making everyone in the proximity sorrowful and become reluctant indirect funeral partakers.