A sense of usefulness

February 19th, 2003 Uncategorized

I woke up in anxiety at 5.30am and wrote 500 words. It felt like constipation. I sweated with the exertion in the first few paragraphs, but finally at 7.40am I finished my 500 word quota. I felt good as though I had done something useful to someone for once

Mad Pheonix

February 12th, 2003 theatre

Nelson Chia is a good actor and an extraordinarily good looking one. (I’ve forgotten how, in The Island, my eyes never left him.) His potrayal of Jiang Yu Qiu, while believeable, however, lacked the forcefullness of Xie Jun Hao’s Jiang. In the latter’s version, I was impressed and saddened by his idealism – it came through strongly in the film. Perhaps I was younger then and wished to assert my identity through anger. In the stage version, I am saddened by the general tragedy of his life. At the heart of it is an artist’s bewilderment. An artist lives wholly in his mind. If he cannot find the perfection that exists in his mind in reality, he becomes lost and imposes his ideals on reality. The most radical will reject reality. To say that he became mad because he was too idealistic is inaccurate; he became mad from disappointment.

Side note: A reviewer wrote in inkpot to describe a flat script as ‘featureless as a desert’. The writer must have seen few Discovery Channel programs: deserts have some vegetation and unusual landforms.

Bliss of Social Isolation

February 3rd, 2003 Uncategorized

A colleague put on my table a stack of printouts on relationship and one that caught my attention is on Loneliness. The writer quotes Wordsworth:

…flash upon that inward eye

which is the bliss of solitude…

When I was at uni, I had three wonderful years of limited social interaction. Prolongue periods of solitude is fertile ground for work and personal growth. Additionally, it makes me nicer to people. I learnt to smile when I was uni. (Younger, I did not know how to smile when I did not feel especially happy to see another person.) I didn’t like returning to Singapore because it meant coming back to ‘noise’ – the neccessary interaction to keep up relationships.

Chatting with C one night during CNY I confided in him my wish to volunteer in Peace Corps. He misunderstood my wish for solitute and physical work for auteurism and suggested Red Cross. Today I learnt that there might be shuffle of work. I am thinking of asking to be put into midnight shift. My life can return to the order I had been used to: work, theatre, writing, study. Ahhhhhh……