How do I suddenly come to despise the one subject that I’ve been looking forward to since last year? It was as though I was kid eagerly waiting for Christmas to come only to find that Christmas is nothing more that a day at the gas chambers in a POW camp (which is not, I apologise, and Christmas is still the best celebration ever Christmas is good Christmas is cool deck the halls with boroughs of holly mistletoe nice jingle bells please don’t hate me…).

This is the deal here; photojournalism. Sounds cool? Heck it sounds cool. It sounds like Linkin Park bashing it up at the KLCC Park, and if things don’t sound cooler than that, Eminem decidedly joined in the party with Snow Patrol and Sum 41 bringing up the ante. So here I was expecting things to be cool, and I mean COOL baby, and yeah is it COOL. In the other sense, that is.

Because I was freezing off my buttocks as I sit waist-high in utter boredom while trying to fend off the bloody swarm of exhaustion and starvation, all while the lecturer thought it was a great time to tell us his daring(!) and amazing(!) tales of his as he tried to survive his campus days with crappy meals and antique cameras.

And that’s what we need, don’t we? We need grandmother stories to further fortify our knowledge and talents as we brace the cruel harsh world of journalism, and the boredom of listening to it is only the easy part my son, for when you face the reality of the cold barren lands of adulthood you will be a man for all to see…

One word: Fuck you. (Oh wait, sorry, there were 2 words).

No, I’m not exactly glad to sit myself under the insane cold of the damn air-cond (who in the right mind would blast it to full? It’s the rainy season for sakes of sakes) while the lecturer thought it would be cool to share a ‘little’ experience of his own. Oh well, I shouldn’t really mind too much, well, one can’t normally help but to tell a story, no? I mean, yeah sure, numb our minds with a tale as long as The Long Walk itself and wow us with the intense(!) and insurmountable(!) adventures(!) you had when you were young, and by all means help yourself thank you very much, because we really care oh we do we do we love it I want to know what happens next yay joy someone ask him to freaking shut the fuck up before I ram the damn keyboard down his throat…

Sigh, I’m not saying that he’s bad, because he’s not, really. Still, I’m not glad to have to put myself at risk of hypothermia (first of its case involving an air-conditioner) and having to listen to stories that I don’t think is very relevant, and especially after having to sit through a gruelling 8 hours of class before. I love the pics, and sometimes stories are good but I don’t really need to know what happened when you went to Indonesia and saw a natural monument that tells the tale of Si Tenggang the Dastardly Asshole and having to listen to you to tell us the whole Tenggang folklore yourself…

Honestly, if I take any more of this, I’ll pull a Di Caprio and shout “Give me a bottle of scotch and a freaking handgun to blow my fucking head off,” at the local psychiatrist so that I can get a prescription of anti-depressant drugs.

Things can often feel like a painting, sometimes. I would usually stare at one trying to understand its complexity (as well as things I only to know), wondering what’s within…

What’s it trying to tell? What does it mean? What’s that thing that dwells beyond the confines of the colour and strokes, that thing that keeps hovering in your mind waiting to be deciphered?

I didn’t realise that sometimes simplicity is the answer.

Sometimes the answer is just so simple, almost as simple as answering yes or no. The complexity and befuddling thoughts of the human mind has ways to make things intricate. We often think that the hardest, most profound answer is the best, but just as powerful (in all of its simplicity) are answers that are, well, simple.

Last Friday, during PR tutorials, the tutor gave the class a question; “Why does the source need not pay the media?” (Perhaps not the actual question, but it went like this). The class went into a state of confusion, browsing notes and leafing through the text book. My poor friend Derwoei was tense as he was clueless, uttering answers that were neither wrong nor right. Sometime later the tutor leant close to Amanda, and she said “The media need not be paid because it is free.”

Oohs and Aahs left the mouths of my fellow classmates, and I was stumped by it in a way. Free. It was simple… why didn’t I think of it earlier? Plunging through and through into confusing definitions and lacklustre descriptions hoping the find the answer, only to discover that it is merely free. Simple. And when you think of it properly, yeah, it IS free. Everything opened up, and the light from the doors poured seamlessly into the mind. It is free because the source merely needs to announce, and media will gather by itself. One simple answer would open up into the proper more definitive one.

The trouble is that we, just as often as we can, tend to complicate things.

Like falling in love… love, simply, is just a strong feeling of affection for one another (ie; I like you, you like me. We happy). And yet we just complicate it. I shan’t go into details regarding it… I’m sure you know the complications we seem to create when it comes to love.

Now I sit here with a strangely gentle regret… for not seeing things as something simple. If I had forsaken the complexity that I had slowly built around me, perhaps things would be different from now. For better or worse, I wouldn’t know, but one can’t help but to wonder. Wonder about that question that is always there, that question can both spawn bliss and lament. What if?

What if?

But had it actually happened, perhaps, I wouldn’t be able to see things as it is now. Had I departed myself from the course that I had chosen now, what I feel now never would’ve been stronger and heartfelt. I never would have realised what I’m feeling now, and I never would’ve known the magic of it. The realisation, the discovery… the understanding. Things that had happened, and are happening, were in a way forming into something amazing.

My decisions from the past had formed something powerful here. And I don’t think I should hesitate on this one. I hadn’t seen it as it is before, but now I see it in all its beauty and grace.

My apologies if the above are beyond comprehension, for I have not the ability to makes thing comprehensible. But if you see it, or understand it somehow, then I must applaud you.

For you may see what I see. And boy is it beautiful.

Bla bla...

I beg pardon for somewhat abandoning this blog, and also from ignoring a few well-meant messages from friends asking if I’ll update soon enough. The past week had been rather eventful, though I believe I shall blog about it when I feel that I should.

I haven’t been purposely ignoring my blog entirely, because I had been somewhat occupied by typing down my Nanowrimo novel; something which I had neglected to inform due to a few circumstances (mostly involving the thing we call laziness). There’s supposedly a participant icon at my sidebar symbolising my, well, participation, but apparently the HTML is screwed. Perhaps I should consider putting it in place of my picture instead.

Progress is extremely slow, in case you’re wondering. I’ve only done 3000 words in 5 days, which I blame it on a strew of things that somehow got in the way (like cleaning out my room… geez, leave me in peace), and there’s also that time when I discovered that I was typing without direction + care and thus causing the damn thing to sound idiotic (it still sounds so, only severely less). So I retyped the whole thing, and now i'm twice slower than the average participant.

Still, I am glad to say that I’ve been having a great deal of fun with it. Nothing beats a good run of uninterrupted, inspired typing/writing (that is if I don’t count in eating, and also a great sleep after a long long day). The novel’s pretty rough, and I am doing it impromptu with barely some planning… only the basic plot’s fleshed out, and no other characters planned apart from my lead and his mother. I read back a few lines earlier and it gave me shudders. No time for editing, by the way.

I’m ‘bout one of 102 people in Malaysia participating in it, and most of them already have great progress. 24 more days and 47000 words left… my future seem doubtful.

I guess I’ll crash in earlier tonight, probably waking up to see if I can make some progress. And I don’t want brother to occupy the whole mattress… our new double-decked bed is coming on Tuesday, so on the meantime we’ll be sleeping on the floor. And we’ll have to share a mattress. Shit.

Goodnight people.