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I am irate, pissed off, and certain muses always get the bulk of the burden. I just spent the past two and a half hours unravelling and coiling back two small ball's worth of pre-knitted yarn. Ribbing no less. Two knit two purl.

It was meant as a Christmas present and I finished 15cm of it and there is seriously not enough yarn to be knitting two strand at a time. It is also a discontinued type of yarn in possibly the only shop in my district selling it.

Now I've got to start again and finish it with using the horrendous exercise of using 98 stitches per row for about 32 inches or 81.5 cm.

If only the yarn was still available. Anyway, I'm in a foul mood and feel like snapping at the slightest thing. I suppose there are fouler moods than this to get through. Problem is for the past few days I've been having drastic highs and lows in a single span of 24 hours. This tops it.

I wish I had bought Dracula. I could use some blood and gore and murder to satisfy my hunger. Both physically and emotionally.

Spunky Grandmas

Most wouldn't agree but that elderly lady selling malt candy at Holland Village outside the Crystal Jade Restaurant has spunk n' attitude.

Mother passed me two dollars for her and I had to give it because apparently, people get shy when they reach their mid-life crisis. The malt candy costs one dollar.

I gave her the money after greeting her "po-po" (grandma in chinese) and she just squatted down to get the malt candy from the old steel pot. The candy looks like burnt caramel. Really sticky, she just got some of it on a small stick about three inches with the help of a flat wooden spatula.

She handed it to me and just waved me impatiently away. Without the change of one dollar which was intended to be given to her. Mind reading or just acknowleging charity?

Contradiction and Unproductiveness

Contrary to what I have mentioned in the previous post, the nails turned out horrible. Or more like the comments I received about them were. They looked alright and I managed to apply the french manicure look on four fingers but my mother came in and said that the quality was not good enough. Just because we were going on a stressful vacation in the midst of my dad's colleagues and my first meeting with his new boss. It's the boss who's new, not my dad.

It's the trip to Port Dickson in Malaysia. And the meeting of our relatives, just a friendly couple, which makes my mother a whole conservative 19th century woman. Not that I can blame her. I blame the exuberant manicure and pedicure prices about US$50 for both. Excluding the french nails.

What's to blame? The bad economy and the whole thing about people looking down on the others. Please, as long as the nail polish is not on my hair it is fine. I mean you see people walking and working with a streak of red nail polish on each nail. Who cares if I couldn't be bothered with the expense of a wanted "luxury"? Paying a bomb for paint and service is not pleasurable.

I'm in an exceedingly foul mood. I am expected to do so many things to be presentable. Such as eat properly and give intelligent answers and dress with style since it's to reflect on our lifestyle. I suppose it is the same as every other type of world there is but I'm quite sure most people say live and let live when they see teenagers.

All the nail polish is gone now and I have gastric.

The Artist who Can't Paint Nails

My morale is at an all-time low. I have concluded that no matter how nice your drawing may look or how nicely done your mediocre watercolours may look, your nail painting skills will quite suck. Nevermind I shall keep them on and leave them as so.

For the Want of Company

I had a wonderfully insightful chat with a friend of my mother who also considers me a friend. Despite our obvious age difference we hit on quite well on some topics. She's Ellen and lives in New York City, just dropping by into the humble streets of Singapore after 3 glorious weeks in New Zealand.

It's amazing how the three of us (Ellen, my mother and me), can talk for three hours straight in a little cafe with just three drinks and a slice of cake. That woman is seriously engaging and has no qualms talking to someone who could nearly pass of as her grandchild by a couple of years.

Oh I do envy some youngsters in America, how surrounded they are by engaging people. I haven't yet found a westerner boring. I suppose many would beg to differ.

Ellen has got such a splendidly horrific idea in my head. To spend about ten thousand on a trip to New Zealand and get into a nearly full transparent helicopter and view the snow-peaked mountains from a height of 8000 feet and a dangerously driving pilot. A pilot who has every intention of landing on a lake hanging off the solid rock of a mountain. Yet for a woman in her late fifties that was quite a daring act. Telling her children to get ready for an early inheritance no less and telling them to wait a couple more decades after surviving the ordeal.

Of course we women are strong hearted. Her husband, who was quite game and to whom she consented, didn't dare take photographs of the panoramic view which plunges you straight into the ravines of death in peaceful New Zealand.

It's strange how much I crave a proper conversation with people. I have few friends to talk to in great detail on moral issues like abortion or capital punishment. Or even listen to someone talking in an interesting tone about the current economic and social status of America, though briefly. These days, such things are rare and far between. It's hard to keep up with long distance contacts and hard to bear with the longing to meet up with them soon. I miss her already and she'll be leaving tomorrow for the plane flight back to New York presumably.

Here's to the Holidays. Holidays with the capital "H", it deserves the title.

Starting a Lucrative Business

Hello bubs! I feel like I want to start a small side-line. During the holidays I'll write stories and sell them to people who want to have their plots written by me. Like that's going to happen. It's worth a shot. I am trying to start a good storyline but it is only average. Not that sort of killer book which has a plot you can't really resist not taking a glance at.

Holidays start in two days so I shall be experiencing the flush of being free from the boredom of school.

Tell me how to do something nonconstructive... please. Something nonconstructive but fun and engaging. Like playing a random word game. We played that today while suffering heat-stroke. You say a word and the next person says a completely random word in comparison to what you said. So a word like "jelly" can bring about "Paris Hilton" or say... great I forgot that really interesting scenario. My tree begetting a word like "Sarah Palin". So it's quite entertaining for about 15 minutes so long as no one is that boring in the group.

Signing off with no proper care of paragraphing.

Change of Tune

I shall not lie to myself, the truth that I have received 63.5 upon 100 for my English papers is a fact. If any nuisance people dare post anything about their own marks or any in-between-the-line comments I shall hunt them down. The school campus is not large enough to hide someone on the verge of crying really.

Only I did not break down after those dismal marks. You can't really do that sort of thing when your other subjects are better than a friend who really puts her self down. Sometimes all of us have exceedingly low self-esteem especially when most of us depend on the way others view us to rank ourselves.

She views herself through her parent's expectations and perhaps her own want to prove herself better than me in a way. I presume the above since I had one small consolation; I had top marks for Geography, a tie with another girl. Then again she has such a better outlook in life despite some of her family conditions and the better English score between the both of us.

I suppose it would be a lie for me to say I did my best for the essay. It turned out horribly. A catastrophe. My language just does not turn itself to the right pitch for the exams. I have such whimsical ideas about life and what could happen. Next time I shall play the honest fool and lead myself by the noose to something seemingly more practical.

Milan Kundera's Laughable Loves is getting partially into my head. I wonder if I will ever accomplish such a literary achievement in my life. I quote," One doesn't live for oneself. One always lives for something." I bet I always lived on the hope of being a writer since 11. Such crumbling hopes.

One thing I forgot to add about the story (I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith), the story is written in three journals with increasing monetary value. One about sixpence, then a shilling, then two guineas. It is quite an amount in those simpler and poorer regions of England at that time I suppose.

I wonder if I should get a moleskin or a nice leather-bound notebook of reasonable size as my drafting book. I suppose I own quite an expensive model. This computer but it does get a bit monotone. No changes in font or writing style purely determined by mood. My other journals have no such significance to me. I think I may need a new pen to go along with it. a blue rather than a grieving black. I have been using that blasted colour for the entire examinations.

At least there is a short weekend stay by the beach along the Straits of Melaka at Port Dickson soon. Just a short weekend but nonetheless the waves and a book will soothe me. Just about two weeks from now on the first of November till the third.

I should like a good cry but since there are no tears to let out I might as well save myself the trouble. Tomorrow is Friday, I think I will head to town and sit at a hopefully quiet cafe. There will be hardly any with the crowd that patrons the few places possible to go to. I feel like a caged bird now. Four more papers to receive the verdict from tomorrow.

Ah, dear tomorrow.

Writer's Wager: I Capture the Castle

Otiose wagers win no gold for me. For such a "satirical writer" I found Dodie Smith's book too much of a cliffhanger. I have had experiences with the best books I have read thus far, The Tea Rose and the sequel The Winter Rose. Seriously I hope and pray that Jennifer Donnelly will finish the last to wrap up the family.

I doubt I'll get a word out of Dodie Smith's clamped mouth. Hope I can find the chance to batter her with questions once both of us are admitted to heaven. Her vocabulary was quite extensive only it makes me feel quite inferior to that awfully mature 17 year-old Cassandra. I relate uncannily with her and it quite scares me. It is nearly the story of my feelings save the fact that the only romances I've waltzed into are those of those dear handsome men in books female writers think up.

So yes, the story ends with him possibly going back to America and her in her dear little village at the end page of her journal. Never to tell us again in that sort-of pact she made with herself not to write journals.

The wager was placed and lost. I was expecting something spectacular. I am way to fussy with the endings. The middles are the best. The thing I hate was that I could not half-guess the ending. I kept getting it mixed up. I can mostly feel content with some endings but some are just either too deflated or too filled with suspense.

Actually, I've only wanted to know the ending so much when I read this book. The only other time was when I read the Winter Rose.

Thank Heavens I've got some nice novels up my way. First up is Milan Kundela's Laughable Loves and I shall attempt to get a copy of the still unread The Unbearable Lightness of Being once some money shores up.

Then to the Classics again with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I heard it is quite a good novel. i am very taken by it's fine print. Finer but clear prints make me find books more profound. Not the squashed look of the Penguin Classics print (the cheap green paperback type) but something remotely elegant like Arial or Verdana in a small font. What am I doing now? Comparing fonts and styles when all I want to do is see the original manuscript which the writers worked on. That Jennifer Donnelly refuses to send a page to me.

All for now, please visit my fan fiction.

Going Insane

Forgive me, I am feeling absolutely insane. I am mistaking people for my close friends left right and center. I just made someone think I was officially insane on the phone 20 minutes ago.

What I have done since Friday (End of Exams)
1) Finished 1 side of the fingerless gloves for my friend
2) Started reading a new novel, I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
3) Started my mother's christmas knittted gift
4) Walked up to the summit of Bukit Timah hill which is a miserable 163 m
5) Getting off writing my church sermon entries (i am due to write 2)
6) Realising how awful I find myself sometimes
7) Met up with Tragedia, the new muse of the block
8) Found out that Butterscotch isn't doing too well
9) Ending a short post to explain my absence
10) Going to finish that chapter on my fiction press

Reminder my fictionpress webpage is http://www.fictionpress.com/~musemneme

I'll try posting awfully soon on some issues only I want to kick myself out of the writer's block!

Apology Letters and Tests

Aw...I feel so touched. My friend sent me a sms to apologize and i felt quite bad about screaming at her on the windows live messenger scream and repetitively winking and nudging. childish huh?

I couldn't take it, she was playing her virtual online dancing game in the midst of our end-of-years. yeah, i do envy her carefree life. who wouldn't only she goes freak out during the exam like today during our general science paper.

i need to do a commentary on yesterday's sermon only i have no time

tell you bubs the rest soon (i understand i am not typing with capitals)