Endless

My eyes flew open at the usual 7 a.m chatter from the dining room, and I instinctively did the most 'adult thing' — check my email. In bed, in the dark. My point I'm driving home is not so much the fact that I had exciting mail to check, but it intrigued me that the human psych can differ so vastly from a mere short period of time. I don't think I'm making sense. But the mechanics of our minds interests me with increasing intensity everyday. How our nuts and bolts lock together to create a beautiful synchronisation of actions. Behaviour of a rebellious adolescent vs an almost-adult waiting to enter university. Pragmatism for Accounting and Finance aside, I think I've found my answer to my long developed interest in psychology and law/politics. Mind games are up in the notch for fun and arduousness, two characteristics that I expect of games.

Ignore my morning blabber post two batches of granola baking, truffle rolling and tea brewing.

Last Thursday I speeded through as much of TFIOS as I could before going for the 11:30 a.m show with Qianying the next morning.

As per the usual rigour of reading-before-watching, I went in with 0 expectations to tear and full-on eye makeup. I still did tear in the end, but my mascara experiment worked out anyway. We both agreed that the actors didn't suit their roles, especially the female lead, and the movie spoiled my perception of the story. And so I conclude that the book's raving attention wasn't particularly impressive, though I did enjoy some nice/poignant phrases, here they are:

p. 30 "All at once, I couldn't figure out why I was methodically tossing a spherical object through  toroidal object. It seemed like the stupidest thing I could possibly be doing."

p.63 "'Feel better?' he asked.
         "No," Issac mumbled, his chest heaving.
         "That's the thing about pain," Augustus said, and then glanced back at me. "It demands to be felt."

p.111 "Were she better or you sicker, then the stars would not be so terribly crossed, but it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he had Cassius note, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves." Easy enough to say when you're a Roman nobleman (or Shakespeare!), but there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars.

          While we're on the topic of old Will's insufficiencies, your writing about young Hazel reminds me of the Bard's Fifty-fifth sonnet, which of course begins, "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme; / But you shall shine more bright in these contents / Than unswept stone, besmear'd with sluttish time." ... It's a fine poem but a deceitful one: We do indeed remember Shakespeare's powerful rhyme, but what do we remember about the person it commemorates? Nothing. We're pretty sure he was male; everything else is guesswork. Shakespeare told us precious little of the man whom he entombed in his linguistic sarcophagus. (Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.) You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect."

p.145 "...breakfastization gives the scrambled egg a certain sacrality, right? You can get yourself some bacon or Cheddar cheese anywhere anytime, from tacos to breakfast sandwiches to grilled cheese, but scrambled eggs - they're important." [I just had to talk about eggs, I mean, come on, EGGS.]

p.153 "Let us go, through restless nights in one-night cheap hotels / And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: / Streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent / To lead you to an overwhelming questioin... / Oh, do not ask, "What is it?" / Let us go and make our visit."

p. 153 "He was staring at me, and I could see the corner of his eyes crinkling. "I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is a just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you." [A well-written confession deserves due credit.]

p. 156 "...gets older as you get closer to the center."

          "Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin."

p. 167 "I think forever is an incorrect concept."

p. 178 ""But it is a pipe." "No, it's not," I said. "It's a drawing of a pipe. Get it? All representations of a thing are inherently abstract. It's very clever."

p. 262 "It was unbearable. The whole thing. Every second worse than the last. I just kept thinking about calling him, wondering what would happen, if anyone would answer. In the last weeks, we'd been reduced to spending our time together in recollection, but that was not nothing: The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we'd done were less real and important than they had been hours before." [Very relatable and thus poignant, especially after going through the January saga]

p. 266 "We live in a universe devoted to the creation, and eradication, of awareness. Augustus Waters did not die after a lengthy battle with cancer. He died after a lengthy battle with human consciousness, a victim- as you will be- of the universe's need to make and unmake all that is possible."

p. 276 "Omnis cellula e cellula...all cells come from cells. Every cell is born of a previous cell, which was born of a previous cell. Life comes from life. Life begets life begets life begets life begets life." [#deep]

p. 311 "My thoughts are stars I can't fathom into constellations."

I'm going to try re-starting on The Great Gatsby later on tonight. I have set up this glorious plan to finish all my new books by September so that I have reason to buy the new titles I want while over there. And while shining in all it's glory, that plan is even more magnified that I plan to finish at least another 5 titles over there. I will seize the remaining of my book junkie days while I still can.

Saturday was a whirl; I went to the hospital in the morning and the results came back still unbalanced and still out of sync and it is all so frustrating but the popiah/seafood dinner later on in the evening made up for that. And also! More concrete UK plans!

I met Karee and Sarah on Sunday for the most productive 2+ hrs catch up while we tucked ourselves into the corner of Sarah's workplace. This is what I'm going to miss the most I think, just being physically there. I really want to just pack them all in my suitcase. I have 90kg worth of baggage afterall. I guess I'm just going to have to wait till 2016 before Mr Will Tan ships himself over, or hopefully if Miss Lim Qian Ying decides to pop over in 2015. Meanwhile let us just put our hands together in hopes that I would not have frozen myself to death by then.

I keep glossing over the surface of things. It's becoming recurrent and habitual in my behaviour and that makes me very unsatisfied. You make me very unsatisfied. But I will not crumble. I'm good, I've learnt to be a strong girl.