ramblings
POSTED AT 11:40 PM in thoughts

natanna

But I'm slowly losing focus as it has always been. Maybe there needs to be something stronger than this holding on, but I have nothing left to hold on to.

Nothing but the strength of a conviction and the hair's breadth of a grip.

I'm losing you and I'm losing me, in all I thought I was.

But am not.

And I'm holding on, holding on, barely holding on to you.

Yet I want to grip you with words, to make you think beyond all you've ever thought. I want to raise in you emotions that you never knew you had, and stir in you a nobility that comes from beyond. I want to give you ideas that you never thought you'd dream and make you yearn for better things. I want you to remember tomorrows that haven't come, so you'd work for greater yesterdays. I want to wrap you in a dream, from which you will awake and say, that is the hero I will be today.

Not the golden-haired hero that snaps a finger and makes things right in an instant.

But the calloused warrior who sleeps the final sleep with a peaceful heart saying, I have stared fear in the face and found courage to move on.

It isn't fair to write a song to this woman, because she takes all words and holds it in until all bursts in a flood of love and hate and peace and war and there is a melody beyond what you can comprehend, coming forth from the Lion's throat.

There is beauty yet in the words you haven't formed, in the thoughts you haven't comprehended, in the ideas barely hatched.

And yet it must centre. It has to centre.

And the centre is not yet holding.

And I can write no more.

Because I am chasing an Aslan I haven't found, I'm catching glimpses of a mane I thought I had come to know, but not deep enough yet. And this story is mine to tell, though I haven't found the words.

And when I've found the centre, it will hold.

When I've found Aslan.

.back.
POSTED AT 05:52 PM

natanna

...but i was caught up in the bright lights...
                            ...the sparks and the fanfare...
                                                             ...of a life not mine, a life i wished...
                                                                                    ...but will never be

because being there and being there, aren't the same things

so even if my wishes came through, it wouldn't be the same

and i know that

kayell / peejay awesomeness
POSTED AT 12:11 PM

natanna

I wanted to do a photoful post, but then I realised that I would have to grab photos from miscellaneous people. And then I'm also lazy.

So whilst the highlights in sequential order were:

Sun - Wen Ping, working in church & mango desserts
Mon - swedish meatballs + 2
Tues - Lunch with Sim! (the fiasco of the passenger door)
Wed - Wolverine and Rowen
Fri - YM & the washing machine (haha)
Sat - Sim, PG, Deb, etc etc... (err... that would be Leo, Daniel Yeoh, Aaron Oon, Jimmy, Abu, Samuel K, I think). Mango special @ Murni's!
Sun - SIB, Yarn, Star Trek & Carls Jr!
Mon - Jasmine
Tues - Bryan & Sheeda, Sim & Jimmy, consecutively, where PG deserted us for sleep.
Thurs - Solo & Bex, which expanded to plus Josie, PG, Chai Yee, James, Joseph, Aaron
Fri - Samuel Phang & beefballs, Ribena special @ William's! (usual suspects: Sim, PG, Jimmy + Leo, Joseph, Chai Yee)

(which is already plenty), we musn't forget the bigger conversation topics (lol) like this:

WE GOT DITCHED. LITERALLY.

(Thanks to Sim, Jimmy & Aaron for being there... Thanks to PG for coordinating the rest of the people!)

HOW TO BREAK IN (OR BREAK YOUR) HEELS. (Pahang road trip on Sat, pics courtesy of Keng Poo)

See slope? (there were more...)

See heels? (at the corner, yes, also see Jimmy Ultraman.)

Yeah.

Well.

=)

I'm looking forward to June & Sept. =)

of people i didn't get to meet:
POSTED AT 11:46 PM

natanna

juuuulian (didn't work out)

 

edwiiiinnnnnnn (didn't manage to get to tbr)

lex (busy meeting theatre peeps)

ziggie (don't know what happened)

elsen (didn't realise he was in kl)

rayz (don't know what happened)

chinpeiling (whatla, why are you in kajang)

davidgary! (haha didn't end up in Acts that weekend)

honyau (didn't work out either)

kimmi (the hermitage was too strong, though she emerged when we were ditched)

andyyeoh (nope, no Acts that weekend)

jijian (though I think I didn't tell him i was around)

jiawern (ditto)

Faaayyyyyyyy (hmm... i wonder why)

Okay, that's more people than I thought. Ok, more effort next time. Or maybe, more planning next time.

but sometimes it feels like i'm standing still
POSTED AT 11:33 PM

natanna

Now I'm alive
And my ghosts are gone
I've shed all the pain
I've been holding on
The cure for a heart
Is to move along, is to move along
So move along
So move along
So move along

[the end where i begin - the script]

whilst everyone else is moving on.

Flux is becoming the only constant. Definitive has gone out the window, and I'm tired of people trying to read church into culture. Whatever happened to 'this is merely a work of fiction'? Fiction doesn't need to be spiritualised. Fiction wraps itself to the readers' minds and allows them to take whatever they wish from it.

 

I may even be looping in rewind.

Listening to: the air-cond.
Feeling: amused

100 books
POSTED AT 10:46 PM

natanna

The BBC came up with this list of 100 books.
Apparently the average number of books from this list that people have read is 6.

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'X' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Tally your total at the bottom.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X+
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X+
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X+
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (In progress)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy X
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky X
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy X
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens X
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X+
34 Emma - Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen X
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X+
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hussein X
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery X+
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy X
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert X
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens X
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon X
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas X+
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville X
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X+
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom X
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton X
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams X
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas X
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X+
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Total X =47. (and one that I'm currently reading)

I've heard of most of them, though I don't think I've read all. Then again, there might be some of those that I have read, but can't remember that I have. I think I've read the little prince, but I'm not sure. And some of those that I picked up halfway at at book store and never completed. Then again, I don't think it's a good list. I mean, The Chronicles of Narnia (#33) has 7 books of which The Lion, The Witch & the Wardrobe (#36) is one. The complete works of Shakespeare (#14) already includes Hamlet (98).

Oh well.

story:
POSTED AT 06:01 PM

natanna

Phone rings.

Hello, Anna? This is XXX (a director at my company). Where are you?

Thought 1: DID I FORGET TO GO TO WORK?! Oh wait... It's Saturday.

Thought 2: Uh-oh... I blew a deadline... She's gonna want my file today...

 

I went in to the office to find out that she just wanted me to figure out why our controls listing in the file didn't match up to the full controls matrix.

Conclusion: I need to stop panicking.

leaning
POSTED AT 11:58 PM

natanna

 

 

So we'll fly to the moon
Take a waltz with the stars
And we'll sing in the rain
While we dodge all the cars

We'll put Christmas in September
We'll pull Easter down to June
We'll take dances on the rainbow
Whilst we sing a silly tune

And I wonder where I'm going
And I'm sure you wonder too
But my heart needs a place to lean on
So I'm leaning into you