WaitingAngel's Xanga

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 14:06:44 GMT

Last time on the swings

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 12:15:55 GMT

Did a test on Tickle and this is what I got!

"You are Ginny Weasley

You rarely need Polyjuice potion because you're usually happy just being you! While you might not make the biggest splash or cause drama, you slowly and steadily win over lots of people who think you're pretty darn wonderful. While you can be a little shy and self-conscious at times (especially around a crush), you're probably considered to be a BFF by more than just one person.

Luckily, your talents aren't just the magic kind. You're also kind and smart and just great to be around. Looks like you'll have a very charmed life indeed!"

I suppose I don't have to hate Ginny now since I get to be her.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Tue, 27 May 2008 09:20:59 GMT

My sensitivity to caffeine has been taken to a whole new level. I am not immune even to chocolate cake. Yes, chocolate cake has the power to limit me to four hours of sleep. Anyway, book talk:

Briar Rose by Jane Yolen

A retelling of Sleeping Beauty, only Beauty is a victim of the Holocaust, which I absolutely loved. It's one of those the-war-took-everything-from-me-and-all-I-have-left-is-my-fantasy-to-escape-to Pan's Labyrinth-ian stories, which I'm a sucker for.

Briar Rose here has red hair too. Figures. If I ever do finish a book, this is what my biography will say:

"Sharon grew up on endless re-runs of Peter Pan, Parent Trap and Free Willy. She lives and writes in Hong Kong, where she continues to do her part to decrease worldsuck, one piece of paper for recycling at a time. One of her missions in life is to collect a list of every red-haired fictional heroine there has ever been in the world."

Blue Bloods by Melissa de la Cruz

I only bought the book for two things - the New York City skyline etched across the cover, and the fact it's about beautiful, glamourous people... because beautiful, glamourous people fascinate me. Three, if you include its <$100 price - that's as inexpensive as a book can get in PageOne. These are all I had to expect from the book, really, and it did nothing more than that.

Hmm, I have no idea why beautiful, glamourous people fascinate me. It's like how my mum and I can watch The Devil Wears Prada over and over again, even though all I do is make snide comments about Miranda Priestly.

Note: it's fascinating how everything happens in New York City, isn't it? The two things I'm after in New York City are the food and anything related to books. Now, if I want to kill two birds with one stone, this is all I have to do: impersonate J.K. Rowling and climb into Maureen Johnson's flat by a water pipe and raid her fridge. As a bonus, she'll write about me on her blog, and I'll have my 1325 words of fame.

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

A mixture of Stephanie Plum and Philip Reeve. FUNNY. Yet to be finished.

Joan and I will be seeing We Will Rock You on 5th June. I can't wait! I have to start listening to Queen.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 12:58:57 GMT

Shhh, I'm hiding from my music assignment in the World Wide Web right now. It's really big, covered in black and white, and it can even breathe fire. (The music assignment, I mean, not the World Wide Web. even though it's also really big and can breathe fire, depending on whether you're technophobic or not.)(That said, it doesn't have to be covered in black and white.)(The World Wide Web, I mean, not the music assignment.) If you see it, tell it I'm off looking for my Irish Peacocks and Scarlet Marquess. That should put it off from sniffing me out for a while. Just... don't... tell it I'm here.

First thing: I'm probably one of the very few people to get their hands on the first batch of City of Ashes. I strode into PageOne one Sunday afternoon, feeling in my bones that something special was going to happen. I was wearing my jingle shoes. They jingle when I walk, and they make me feel cool and powerful and able to feel in my bones whether something special is going to happen or not.

Anyway, I strode into PageOne, and there they were, staring at me in the face.

You know that feeling when you walk into a room, your heart pounding because you know a crush of yours is there, and for some reason, time stands still, you can hardly breathe and it's like you're the only two people in the room?

That's me with City of Ashes. I stood there looking down at it with my hands on my hips for five minutes. Nothing else mattered. It was chanting a hynoptic tune, putting me under its spell. It was taunting me with its $161.20 price tag. Here it is with one of my jingle shoes rooted to the spot (not so powerful after all, were they?):

I iz lying @ ur feet, messin wif ur brane

Of course I bought the book in the end. Clary's red hair was just too much for me to take.

Second thing: I was disappointed when I heard Robert Pattison will be playing Edward in the Twilight movie. But then I did some more research and found this - a picture of the Cullens. Now I'm willing to give Twilight the benefit of the doubt. I've made a very important discovery this week - stick a bunch of people in front of a camera and have them walking towards it in attack formation. It suddenly makes them 10 times cooler.

In other news, I'll be Nerdfighting this Saturday! Yippee!

Wednesday, April 02, 2008

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 13:04:50 GMT

I've always known NYC is home to possibly the hugest bookstore in history, I just never knew it's called the Strand, and that it's 18 miles long.

18 beautiful, beautiful miles of books...

Why did I not appreciate NYC more when I was there?

Okay, not all those miles are beautiful. Unless you don't count the books on the occult, new age therapy, Eastern philosophy... and Gossip Girl.

Friday, March 21, 2008

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 02:51:18 GMT

I was surfing through the Facebook Visual Bookshelf database when I came across these editions of Enid Blyton's Malory Towers books. I found them very amusing:

Gosh, I survived through DGS on these books! I practically treated them as guides to my behaviour! I was taught to like ribbons because of them! (Okay, we never played tricks on our teachers, which I regret. Pretty much every day.) I have the whole set in hardcovers. They sit on my bookshelf all prim and exactly perpendicular (Monk would be over the moon), like academic journals. Now, they all look like copies of the Princess Diaries in disguise.

Why, oh why, oh why?

This is severely displacing.

Monday, March 03, 2008

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 05:12:47 GMT

I always try to be a minimalist. I always prefer diner food. I don't shop at places like Charcoal any more¹. I don't buy fancy shoes because I don't even like fancy shoes. I may splurge on an iced chocolate from Starbucks or buy a book from time to time², but that's really about it.

But I have to admit that I can still be tempted by the T-Mobile Sidekick 3.

Why? Because there's something about the horizontal way of holding it when it needs some fiddling with, which would make me look like I'm gaming on an NDS. Because it makes texting easier if I don't have to scrunch up my thumb close to my palm. Because Veronica Mars uses it, and Rory Gilmore uses it, and I'm still a very big TV geek. I almost asked my mum for a trench coat once because I said I looked like Carmen Sandiego in it. She laughed and laughed and finally managed to say, "You still think like a little kid sometimes."

Well, I still like thinking like a little kid.

It has a camera and Bluetooth, which are the two basic things I really need in a phone. Okay, so its camera is a 1.3 megapixel one compared to my 3.2, but even now, the pictures don't look that good anyway³, so what would being downgraded to a meagre 1.3 megapixels matter?

And now, all that's left is to wait till I've finished refilling up the big, big hole I'll be making in my bank account for an iMac two years later when I graduate before I can start thinking about getting the T-Mobile Sidekick 3. Oh, and to wait for a T-Mobile retail store and a T-Mobile service provider to open up in Hong Kong, if I'm planning to get a discount.

That... or there's always moving to the US.

¹Come to think of it, I don't even shop (much) any more.
²I haven't even bought a book in ages. I've been living out of our city's beloved public libraries for the past few months.
³The darker colours always get a little bleached out.

Thursday, February 28, 2008

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 12:50:37 GMT

Whoo! So in this past month, I got converted to liking the Lord of the Rings.

I'd never liked LOTR that much. All you do is plough through page after page of topographic descriptions of all these places that are, oh... not real anyway. Where's the appeal in that? Plus, there aren't enough girls.

That was until Hank Green proved to me that LOTR can be fun. And how does one get a kick out of LOTR? By remixing it into a rap, of course!

Then it went from there to watching the trilogy twice and the DVD bonus materials in a matter of days. I know all my LOTR characters now - Frodo, Sam who's his gardener, Pippin, Merry, Aragorn, who loves Arwen whose father is Elrond the lord of Rivendell, Legolas, Gimli, Boromir, Gandalf, Gollum who used to be Smeagol whose best friend was Deagol and Theoden who's the king of Rohan, Eomer's his nephew and Eowyn's his niece and Boromir's father is Denethor who's the steward of Gondor whose other son is Faramir who is Boromir's brother.

I also went as far as doing a quiz to see how elf-ish I am¹. They told me I'm more like a dwarf instead. So basically, I'm this guy right here:

"Aye laddie! I have my 'arx'! And you have my 'arx'!
(But it's mine, so actually, you don't! Stay away from my 'arx'.)"

So I get an 'arx'. Cool!

I'm close to finishing The Mysteries of Udolpho, which, by the way, is very entertaining. The heroine spends the first half of the book crying three or four times within every chapter. Sometimes she cries three or four times within two pages. Then she spends the second half of the book discovering either one apparition or one corpse or one mystery of Udolpho after another, none of which are explained until the point where you're already tearing out your hair yelling, "Just how many anonymous lute-players are there in this book???" I have no idea how many times I've read the words "countenance", "repose" and "wept".

Jane Austen was actually a fan of books like this.

Okay, I'll admit it. I've been reading this book till after midnight every night for a week. I still found the apparitions spine-chilling. When I was a kid, I had this Usborne book on ghosts, and there was this one particular photo of a man in a car. Rumour had it that you can actually see an impression of his mother, who'd just died a fortnight before, sitting in the back. I tried and tried to make it out - "There are three luminous blobs that might just make up the eyebrows and nose of a clown. Are those it? Is that his mother? She looks like Michael Crawford in his Phantom of the Opera make-up."

But really, ghosts are just the enemy's way of tricking us into being superstitious. Don't fall for it.

Anyway, the book is 672 pages along, I've read up to page 640, and guess what? She faints from what she sees in the picture frame behind a black veil, and I still haven't discovered what it is! My guess is either it's a corpse (or an incarnation of it) OR the picture frame is actually a portal to the future through which she sees her future self, making her faint from shock a la Back to the Future²! Dun-dun-DUN!

Oh, well. I'll get to it soon. All in good time!

This entry is getting too long. It's time to go back to Steppenwolf and Jethro Tull and the 'Me' generation.

¹Think whatever you will, but this is not because I want to look pretty. All right, I'm giving it up - I want to be an elf because I want their superior sense of sight. You never know, it might come in handy! I could see the whales around New Zealand from all the way over here!
²That'd make Ann Radcliffe the Jules Verne of the 18th century. Um, wow.

Friday, February 08, 2008

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 09:06:17 GMT

It's increasingly popular for fictional heroines to have red hair.

Don't believe me?

Anne Shirley
Ginny Weasley (Though she isn't really a heroine. But hey, she gets the guy!)
Princess Fiona
Sam from All-American Girl (I can't believe I remember this! Meg Cabot isn't such a bad sport if you read her blog, really. Still, I wouldn't watch Friday Night Lights just for a cute guy.)
Satine from Moulin Rouge
Gemma Doyle
Edward (And he is - oops - not a heroine. Oh, well. Given his 'angelic' features, he might as well be one.)
Clary Fray
Giselle from Enchanted

Bowie himself sported red hair in the 70's. Gah! I'm under red-hair attack!

(And yes, the subliminal message is that I'm coming to love red hair.)

Friday, February 01, 2008

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 05:17:08 GMT

The temperature's as low as 9°C today, I'm staying cooped up at home swathed in furry blankets and am generally feeling rather morose. Anyway, book-talk:

I discovered just last night that Susan Hill, the author of I'm the King of the Castle, which was prescribed as one of our A-level English literature texts, also happens to be the author of Mrs. de Winter, a companion novel to Rebecca, which was prescribed as one of our CE English literature texts. Was the Examinations Authority swept off its feet by gothic fiction during 2004-2006, I wonder?
Gothic fiction, which happens to be one of the most profound genres I've ever read, tend to grate on my nerves from the beginning and have me quivering on the edge of my seat by the end. Take the following examples:

Twilight and New Moon by Stephenie Meyer
Beginning: I don't really need to know what Bella cooks for Charlie every night.
Twist(s): Always end(s) with Bella's race against time to keep either herself or Edward alive. Also prove(s) that Edward isn't exactly invincible.
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
Beginning: So what if you lost a twin before / at birth? I did and I don't feel like I've lost half of myself. I know she's been well taken care of all these years in Heaven. And I'm really sure she doesn't blame me for being alive.
Twist: So instead of a story just about twins, it's a story about twins and a cousin who looks eerily like them and whose identity is kept a secret for 60 years.
I'm the King of the Castle by Susan Hill
Beginning: Suck it up, Kingshaw.
Twist: Kingshaw commits suicide.
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Beginning: Suck it up, *insert name, because the young Mrs. de Winter's name is never mentioned*.
Twist: Maxim hated Rebecca.

Prospective books:

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe
A Wrinkle in Time (the series) by Madeleine L'Engle
Obernewtyn (the series) by Isobelle Carmody
Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve
A House Called Awful End by Philip Ardagh
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
The Sweet Far Thing by Libba Bray (It's here! It's arrived! It's a miracle! It's also unaffordable!)