HELLO WORLD!eeuw, don't know why i had to start off like that.reminds me of my c-programming days.so this is the start of my creative blogging. In honour of the fact that 1) this is the first ever creative blog i have kept and 2) i am going to come up with some absolutely kick-ass entries despite the fact that its 3am on a friday morning and i have only n amt of hours (too lazy to count) before i actually submit this blog for marking ,and 3) that i have committed the cardinal sin of *OMGOMGOMG* doing last-minute journal entries, i am going to give you...... a brillantly mundane but essentially thought-provoking account of my creative history! *yipee*
ok, you can stop rolling your eyes now.
how did it all begin. I think my parents started to recognise my artistic inclinations when decorated the walls in the house with my Crayolas. sounds unbelievable, but i have vague recollections of the drawings that i made. Stick figures (like hello, as if a 4 year old kid would draw people any other way), a kite, a sun, a house, a tree. I stretched the whole artwork to landscape proportions, such that it covered half the wall of my parent's bedroom. I remember my grandma raising a ruckus and giving my mother a lecture on how she shouldn't encourage the habit by buying me more drawing/painting materials. Oh, and as soon as i could wield a pen/pencil, i used my left hand.
Ah-ma (a typical Chinese expression for grandma) tried to train me out of it for reasons I only came to know of and experience long after she passed on (it sucks being a lefty during an exam - smudging the paper while you write?!?bumping people's arms while you and the privileged right-handed fellow lunge for food at the same time?). But i don't swallow the bullshit that lefthanders are more creative, artistic, etc.
But i digress. Back to recalling history...
Back in primary school, i had a reputation for being a bit of an oddball. I changed best friends every year, not out of my choice but of theirs, I had untidy hair and mismatched socks, I was overweight and ungraceful. I was also in an
elite girl's school, one of high repute in Singapore. it was a school that carried proudly its motto "knowledge begets success", and carried in its school songs lyrics that went "we shall strive to do our best, never stopping for a rest".
What a loony bin man. I wish i could travel back in a time machine to tell them who the real pyschos were. Never frigging stop for a rest my a**.
while classmates played cards and board games in the aftermath of exams, I read Roald Dahl, Jane Austen and drew. and i started writing poems and stories, inspired by nature and what i read.
(I think this was the point i started developing some form of journalistic skill. Even though til today i am loathe to keep regular journal entries as one can plainly tell.)
I excelled in two main subjects:English and Art&Craft. But as the wonderful education system would have it, A&C could not be counted as an examinable subject for the
PSLE (Primary School Leaving Examination) so nothing I did at that point really counted towards my final grade for qualifying for a secondary school of my choice.
Came secondary school, losing weight, pimples galore, teenhood and boys. I kept up the reading (which is probably the reason why I have never learnt how to play any form of card games except Uno and blackjack, because cards were what all the kids were playing post-exams) but slackened a bit on the drawing and writing except when it was neccessary.I hated Chinese calligraphy and im pretty sure Mr Tay hated me too. *grin* but art was alright as a subject because nobody really cared anyway. I really got into painting when it came to my N-level art examination because by that time I had chosen to specialise in the Arts stream. I joined the band, played the saxophone, became pretty good at it, joined competitions, became part of Christmas peformances, part of the jazz lineup, and loved every moment of it. So music (especially jazz) was established as a part of my being from that point of time; i will never, ever forget the fun i had in those days. Even though i was a miserable little shit at the piano because i hated my piano teacher. hurhur.
getting an overall good grade for the Ns were easy enough. And i got an A1 for my art project, which was a mural based on American-Indian ethnic figures. Lots of bold colours, eye-catching images. It was the kind of painting you would buy from some indy art gallery and hang on the wall in your hippy-styled home, i smugly thought at that point of time. Then came O-levels, I did really badly for Art there and that sorta crushed the artistic part of me for awhile..
oh, and how could i forget to mention: in sec 3 and 5, I won 2nd and 3rd prize for my English compositions in this lame English festival my school had every year! Boy oh boy if only my uni essays warranted the same type of prestige..;-) plus i excelled in Litereature in lower secondary (1 and 2). Lit would've been my choice of humanity, if not for the fact that I was in the
Normal (Academic)Stream, which means I spend 1 extra year in school instead of the usual 4 years (read MOE's policy:Express people make it. Normal people, well, are just,
stupid normal), and the school didn't allow me to take it as a subject simply because I wasn't in the express stream. (note: I topped the standard for Lit the year I applied to do Lit as a humanities subject). So I was stuck with History, which I intially did well for but found absolutely shit boring towards the end (sorry, Marianne no 'ffence!).
Came my post O-level years. The
Polytechnic years.
those were dark days indeed. Nothing beats choosing do to a diploma in something you thought you would be good at, but ended up sucking BIG-TIME at it despite efforts. Absolutely nothing. I was terrible at programming: i failed 2 modules in the time i was there but by God's grace I cleared them in time to graduate within the standard three years; Some lecturers were outwardly biased because i was bad at their subjects;I had to endure 2 years of Engineering math and do 3-4 page long Laplace transformations; i was absolutely and unmercifully crucified by a supervisor during my final year project who didn't know the bloody project he made me take on
couldn't actually be done to begin with because we didn't have the neccessary technology to do it....
there was one leetle light in the midst of darkness that kept me going but got me burnt pretty bad as well. Oh well experiences really do shape us, yes? I joined a CLUB. in other words, the editorial board.
That was my first taste of writing real articles to be published, not compositions for lame English festivals, and eventually I succeeded the club as Editor in chief (once again, not by choice but through vote. Yeh yeh i couldve turned it down but...). So I got to work with real bitches of people (the officer in charge of teh club) and students who wanted to belong to the club (because you know, its like, cool being in an editorial board!) but refused to commit to do serious work. thankfully I had a really supportive committee and I also became close friends with the previous Editor and with these in tow, I survived The Nanyang Times. I could say lots more but in a nutshell, I came to realise that 1) i had shit administration skills 2) there is no such thing as i'm the Editor therefore nobody edits my work because im in charge, because there were people above me in terms of editorial jurisdiction and 3) sometimes we don't always get to push our ideas through, and thus we have to compromise with what the institution wants. The most vivid and disastrous example of having the slant and perspective of my article totally changed. I wrote an article on pain and suffering from a humanistic perspective, and cited 9/11 as an example. THEY felt it was too controversial and likely to offend, so THEY *shudder* rewrote my article to turn it into one that talked about natural disasters an how pain and suffering results because of that. Oh.My.God. I wish I could find the link to that issue and place a link to the original here so you can have a clear idea of what i mean. I saw red and wanted to murder but decided that I didn't want to go to jail for that sort of reason. So.
are you still here? still reading? *Clap Clap*. Good on ya! Read on!
Graduation, diploma in hand, i wanted to venture out to the hard, cruel working world. Had absolutely no intention of getting a degree at that point. But it was with a resigned spirit that I had when i took to job-hunting. So i went through the whole shebang of sending resumes, going for interviews. The first job offer i had had a fat salary of 2k, but required me to be, well, boobful, brainless, pretty and wiling to be ogled at. (read:receptionist at some fancy office building). Thanks to the common sense and foresight of my sister, I turned it down. *phew*.
after much fruitless jobhunting, i decided to go to Perth to study. In the meantime, i freelanced with an
online Christian magazine and some other online webbies which unfortunately have shut down. More recently, I submitted an article for Lighthouse, the International Student Society's bi-annual mag that gets sent out to everyone but gets read by almost no one.hahaha.
my hands are tired but i have to keep typing my other entries. but in a huge pistachio nutshell, all of the above is basically my personal and creative history.
The rest of the blog entries will be dedicated to my personal experiences and delves/dabblings with bits of creative experiences, as well as some opinions here and there. All in all, yep..what i've pretty much experienced as a result of Comms 301 thorughout the entire semester but have been too lazy to journal down.
I hope your astigmatism hasn't worsened, whoever who is reading this.;-)
