hollaback_
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
ok this is such a bad time to update. right smack in the middle of commons with absolutely no hope of doing well. good luck to me. the countdown on my desktop shows 74 days, 19hours 44min to the first day of prelims. and the seconds just keep counting down. they don't stop. and in this weird fashion i somehow understand the tale of the water droplets eroding away a rock over time. i thought it was some rubbishy geog/science thing, but really it isn't.
anyway, never thought i'd say this but shakira's really good, especially her native tongue stuff. spicy! on a whim, i downloaded la tortura, and this
review of the video's pretty funny as well. or maybe it's because the song's just not english. there's something very rigid about the english language. if one were to consider the imponderable bloom, the english language's the closest thing to the machine in EM Forster's
The Machine Stops, where only
nuances of our expression and feeling get through.
meaning just filters out.but what do you expect, english comes from britain, the land of prudes and anal-retentive farts. i feel like english is so standardized. in the chinese language for example, there are at least three different terms each for "uncle" and "auntie". they can all be further permutated into other forms as well, with a tweak here or there.
(taken from
Shakira's official website)
"Sometimes songs come to me in English and sometimes in Spanish. Most of the time I let the melody suggest to me the language the song should be. The albums are totally different from one another. Each has unique songs, melodies, lyrics and music styles."yup, and all the better stuff would be in the spanish album. [ever wonder why
Fijacion Oral is vol.1 (actually i doubt anyone actually cares) of a 2 part series and
Oral Fixation is vol.2 ?] it's more fun to play around with a non-english language. it's either more fluid-sounding, like french, or hard, like german. or sexy(/silly depending on how you look at it), like japanese. spanish is now the first language i must learn after As, even though it's quite useless in my life haha. perhaps i feel this way because i come into contact with english so much in my daily life now, especially after i dropped chinese last year, that it's lost its effect to me. couple that with the constant obsession with the meaning of words (in Practical Criticism, in Lit, in everything) that ironically they begin to lose them.
"I have always been fixated on words, words play a key role in my life, the communication itself... I sing everything I say, and I always end up saying everything I think about."this reminds me so much of maxine hong-kingston's
The Woman Warrior, yielding her "chink words and gook words" as weapons. however shakira pwns hong-kingston cos she didn't need to have her frenum cut, neither does she hold back whatever she has to say and hide behind countless vivid metaphors and imageries in a book that are so entangled like the "ancient Chinese knots" that they no longer make sense. shakira isn't confused about her identity either (so lebanese colombian is less confusing than chinese american? hmm. i wonder.) i guess even though they're both using words words, singing's not something that everyone can do. it doesn't hurt if you're hot too. i mean compare this
with this
no competition, there. back to the frumpy books and writing for you, if you can't look sexy in greasepaint (most of us'd just look stupid actually)!
---
rounding off, today brought a new low to the status of mooning. i mean, besides having a papparazzi video of a drunk britney mooning out of a limo and hearing a number of people insist that matthias did so as well last year (although i never saw it myself) i've never really had any up-close-and-personal experience with it. so imagine the shock and horror i experienced when i was exiting from a toilet cubible at toa payoh central today (was at the post office sending some stuff on the way home) from the sight of a fat indian man at the urinal directly opposite pulling his pants all the way down such that his HUGE bum (which is probably bigger than three times my head) was TOTALLY exposed. the worst thing was, it happened JUST simultaneously as i was opening my door. oooh, my eyes. that's probably the most disgusting thing i've ever seen in my life. i don't think anything could compare, really. though i wonder if he knew i was coming out of the cubicle. now if he were cruising, someone should sink that mothership before it attacks anymore other innocent people.
mike just took up your time at
7:19 pm
th time!
