glibberish.

More details later, but for now… I’M HERE!

…but Sador said to him: ‘Hey now! Where is Húrin’s son? For I heard him say, not long ago: I shall go as soldier with an Elf-king, as soon as I am able.‘

Then Túrin stayed his tears, and he said: ‘Very well: if those were the words of the son of Húrin, he must keep them, and go. But whenever I say that I will do this or that, it looks very different when the time comes. Now I am unwilling. I must take care not to say such things again.’

‘It would be best indeed,’ said Sador. ‘So most men teach, and few men learn. Let the unseen days be. Today is more than enough.’

excerpt from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Children of Húrin

Tomorrow is my last day at work.

Today, from the moment I walked out the glass office door to the time I drove out the building premises, I found myself taking in every visual and aural sensory inputs, all familiar by now, as if I had to memorize every nuance of it. Underneath this is a voice telling me, “you will experience this routine exactly one more time, and then probably never again.”

Of course I will miss my work, my officemates and friends, my girlfriend. I have always felt that. But this is when I acknowledge all that, and start to fall into sentimentality – and so the perfect time to write about it.

In about a week’s time I will have left everything behind, all that I grew up to know and took comfort in. I will move to Hong Kong, to take up my master’s degree for a year’s time. The future is bright and promising – but therein is a threatening void of loneliness and uncertainty.

Which are all false anxieties, only amplified by the depressing thought of departure. This is my dream! (As my girlfriend points out.) It will soon be real to me! I am sure I’ll be fine – Hong Kong is a great place, with residential broadband Internet subscriptions going for as high as 8 Mbps (in here you are lucky to have 1 Mbps). As always, I will be perpetually “jacked in”, as if I never left. And indeed, from an Internet perspective the only thing that will have changed is my IP address. And I think I will still yet make new friends there – in the physical sense of course.

All I need is some time to adjust and adapt. That is why I needed this blog entry: I might still be some ways away, but it’s a good start.

There! I feel better now.

This has been long overdue, and I sort of cannot contain my excitement anymore. I am a proud owner of a Creative Zen Vision: M portable media player. Bought it sometime last week, and have just gotten to the point of filling it with, oh, just my entire lifetime’s worth of music. Yes, I have just summarized myself inside this 60GB storage. Did I just say 60GB? You bet. All those, PLUS about five full-length movies AND the entire Seasons 3, 4 and 5 of Futurama – and it’s just nearing half-capacity! Talk about feeling insignificant.

I started this song around two years ago. It was finished last weekend. It took two years not because of any creative or artistic hindrances, but simply because I consistently put it off. Indeed, if one listens to it one can hardly think it took that long to make such a mundane piece of drivel.

Okay, enough self-deprecation and more about the song. This song is classic unrequited love fare, and actually has a backstory (which I will not recount, you gossips!). I tried to put into the song – as much in the arrangement as in the words – the two sides of a one-sided love affair. Here is the fool in love, who finds every little gesture, every word said as a Great Sign and feels like the world will explode. On the other hand, the loved gives no love in return, and “goes about with her ways”, even unaware of the damage she deals with that one hapless fool. I also remember here Aimee Mann’s “Deathly”, with the memorable opening line:

Now that I’ve met you, would you object to never seeing each other again?

But we’re getting too serious. This song is intended to be fun, a parody of that feeling of the past (although at the time I wrote it, parody was the last of my intentions). And really, that feeling of being unloved, of self-pity even, seems very distant now that I look back. It feels… juvenile. Well, until the next time that happens, which hopefully won’t be very soon.

And now back to self-deprecation. The song I would say isn’t my favorite, but I think it has its moments, even if it was very lousily executed. It was recorded at the time when I used to think it isn’t important to play along the metronome. The result is fluctuating tempos, and little stumbles within the song’s rhythm. But I think it is redeemed by many mes singing the chorus in unison – I wouldn’t be that amused by it if not for the thought of having created a Sufjan Stevens-like song. (But honestly, I don’t remember if I have already listened to his works when I wrote and recorded it.)

Finally, the obligatory disclaimer: I am not a good singer.

THE DREARY PLAINS OF NEVER (right-click, then Save As)

“An intellectual is someone who has found something more interesting than sex.” – Aldus Huxley