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.

so much for glamorous returns... i have nothing to say about my day to day life. i've been sick on and off for the past month, i have insomnia but after Minh helped me shove the bookcase with its evil glass case away from the bed i've been sleeping better. i still refuse to acknowledge this feng-shui superstition as the force behind improvements in my sleeping pattern. after all, if you haven't really slept in 2 weeks and you're sick, you're bound to collapse earlier than usual at some point... if in a month's time i'm still sleeping well then maybe there's something to it... for now, 3 days hardly counts as sufficient testimony.

the basket of paints just fell off the table. groan. as if!

this whole health business is really pissing me off though. it's near impossible to be reasonably productive when you're constantly feeling ill. plus, runny nose is Not sexy.

back to the topic of work, which seems to be the only thing in my life at the moment, i have a lot of ideas i need to test and realize, but i'm making extremely slow progress. partly due to prolonged illness, and partly remnants of exhaustion after mino. then there's also excessive procrastination... i justify it by telling myself i'm studying when i read all those rubbish news on fr.yahoo. but seriously, pour quoi faire, la connaissance si le point G existe ou non. bof.

ahhh... internet. you're the downfall of discipline.

life in vietnam

travel tips

when you stay home all day and night....

animals

dance

dance away the day
on and on through the night

climbing up phanxipang

the teacher persona

thinking of starting a new blog for my stupid cartoons but wondering if it's worth the effort....

booked a ticket to hanoi for the first week of november. wheeeeee. hopefully the sore in my throat will go away.

just looked at Ben, Raphy, Ali and Z's websites. really inspired. need to be back on track too. yaaaaaa!!!

two and two is four. despite 2 of the four languages being poor, that still amounts to a decent number of words. what do you do with so many words if you don't write? and worse, what do you do if you do write, but badly?

i have perhaps 2 dozen tubes of oil paint, 30 or more color pencils, 2 boxes of pastels, a handful of charcoal, various other means of making marks on paper or canvas. and a mind state of absolute blankness.

is there a hole or a pit some place where the coherent streams of thoughts in your mind all tumble into and disappear?

am i practicing meditation? everything is nothing. nothing is everything.

bokono bokono bokono no no

cheers to boredom.