considering how difficult it usually is for the neutral me to really like something, it must be somewhat telling if i start and continue raving about Howl's Moving Castle in the next 2 min or so? =P the movie reminded me why i love Studio Ghibli so much more than Disney or Pixar; what a brilliant art/animation genius Miyazaki is, how you definitely don't have to understand certain things to really love them, how a lovely music score really makes the movie so enjoyable... i definitely liked it better than Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, The Cat Returns and possibly even Laputa Castle in the Sky, which i quite liked... dunno if it's my favorite, but definitely one of my favorites! the creativity and talent of these animation folks just puts me to shame. aiyah of course it would be hypocritical to not admit that i was from time to time blown away by the male protagonist, Howl... no harm indulging in fantasies when watching something as magical as this right? =)

Of John Stuart Mill and nude women in Renaissance paintings

Mill's one of the favorite thinkers i have read thus far, just cos some of his arguments in "On Liberty' are just so well put... shall share some snippets i like.. =)
On following customs..
"He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice. He gains no practice either in discerning or in desiring what is best. The mental and moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used"
then, "he who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation"
On individuality...
"even despotism does not produce its worse effects, so long as Individuality exists under it; and whatever crushes individuality is despotism...."
And lastly, one of my favorite parts in this piece,
"We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our unfavorable opinion of any one, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours. We are not bound, for example, to seek his society; we have a right to avoid it (though not to parade the avoidance), for we have a right to choose the society most acceptable to us. We have a right, and it may be our duty to caution others against him, if we think his example or conversation likely to have a pernicious effect on those with whom he associates.... a person may suffer very severe penalties at the hands of others, for faults which directly concern only himself; but he suffers these penalties only in so far as they are the natural, and, as it were, the spontaneous consequences of the faults themselves, not because they are purposely inflicted on him for the sake of punishment.....he who pursues animal pleasures at the expense of those of feeling and intellect- must expect to be lowered in the opinion of others, and to have a less share of their favorable sentiments, but of this he has no right to complain...."
so dead right, but not something i can claim to dare to live by...

hmm ok this has been a really long post, but i really want to add something on a video i saw in my Art class today... the art expert was saying how in Renaissance paintings, nude women were painted in such a way to appeal to their male spectators... and so according to him, these women were often looking out of the pictures, even if they were engaged in some scandalous poses with the men in the paintings ; that they were in languid poses, lying around...i guess in a way to boost the male ego subconsciously... and of the thousands of painters who painted nude women, perhaps only a handful depicted women and their bodies as they were... others manipulated their images in some way... i never really thought of these paintings in this manner and i wonder how true it is? but then i guess cos i am not particularly enthusiastic about Renaissance paintings... it's something to ponder over... if i go Italy and visit musuems again... =P

My chio, silver, look-in-Sim-Lim-for-one-whole-afternoon optical mouse has malfunctioned and i'm very upset cos i dun think i can find anything like it again... =( but i guess it's my fault cos i dropped it once recently...
sigh but i've also come to realize that things may be irreplaceable but we can often work our way round things...i guess for the time being i'll just end up using my touchpad all the time instead of anyhow getting some ugly mouse... haha i'm so picky =P and i guess when a lot of things fail or disappear we get upset for some time but we wun die without them...moaning all day over your loss perhaps isn't the most constructive thing to do...

and so plans for my parents to visit have been shelved and i guess i'll go back to sg after summer sch... wonder if i'll have the time to visit my DC roommate in LA and go to (a) Disneyland for the FIRST time?? haha. Japan travel plans have been put away too and now i'm planning to just go to China... i really do look forward to going there, to experience it for myself, and after reading so much and hearing so much about it... i really want to see it again for myself... my most vivid childhood memories of China were of the stinky no-door toilets, esp the one on the way to the Great Wall, when my mum had to put 'feng1you2' on a piece of tissue to cover up my nose in order to make me go in... hmm not something i want to remb China by... and of course, it would be cool to visit Jing in Beijing and DC friend in Shanghai... and my Prof once told me to tell her when i go visit, such that she can give me contacts and let me see some of the migrant schs/ schs for the poor..... though i doubt that's going to happen lah. i wonder what i'll get out of a short touristy visit? anyway, i'm excited! but in the meantime, it's sch and more sch... and figuring out how to make tank tops for new Art project =P

Rod of Asclepius
baffled by the snake and pole (it's actually a staff) on the WHO logo while researching for my art that day, i finally looked it up on Wikipedia and apparently it's an ancient Greek symbol associated with medicine. Without knowing the story behind this, i guess most ppl, like me, would associate the serpent with something bad...the shedding of its skin as a symbol of rebirth and fertility didn't even come to mind...
i got my first parking citation today!! aargh. cos i forgot all about street sweeping and forgot to move my car to the opposite side of the road... =( my PEIS instructor is really quite brilliant.... but the GSI for this class, in contrast, is really quite disappointing.... can compete with my pretty boy PEIS 101 GSI already.

After! i decided symbols of international organizations, NGOs etc made it too explicit... so i left them all out... 

Before (gesso transfer image in raw form) 

hmm... kinda finished my art assignment in class today and am somewhat pleased with it so am being egoistic and posting it on my blog... mixed comments though. i wonder if ppl get my message? =P

today i learnt a gesso transfer technique in class which allows u to transfer mag images onto canvas or other suitable surfaces.... and i was really excited to see my Economist pages on canvas! cool =P cos i decided to have a political edge to my piece... but it struck me how little i knew about poverty... i shall resolve to read up more after summer sch ends. but in meantime, quite excited about my project, though it's just a small in-class assignment... it's just cool u can 'combine your passions'... i mean i don't think i'm good at doing such stuff... but i realized i just love doing it... even though class is 4 hours everyday, i dun even fall asleep like i do in some haha. and i rediscovered the power of images...

was trying very hard to do my readings today again cos wasn't very successful yest.. and it was such a clear sunny day i decided for the first time to make use of the little table in my backyard.. and it felt really cool using wireless in the garden haha. and my landlord was really nice and brought out a hammock for me.. and so for the first time in my life (i think) i climbed onto a hammock and lay suspended in the middle of two sturdy hooks on walls reading my Rousseau... u know... nice ppl sometimes really make your day, no matter how small the gesture.

i finally sat down to do my overdue readings today and while reading through the first few chapters of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, i was just very pleasantly surprised... things that you learn in JC, that came in a very 'processed' form- in the form of JC notes or textbooks was suddenly presented to me in its raw form... i mean when i first started taking Econ, i knew who Adam Smith was... but i guess it wasn't till this week that i finally sat down to read about his ideas... and it's just so amazing how some thinker centuries ago sets down all these fundamental ideas for modern economics...
in the spirit of cheapo-ness, i scouted around for parking meters with remaining minutes... and while hopping around from meter to meter, i guess this lady driver slotting coins into her meter knew what i was looking for and informed me that the lot that she pulled out from earlier had a failed meter.... highly embarrassed but secretly delighted i immediately pulled out and drove to my new lot... and from today onwards i formally begin my whole semester or even year of perfecting my unhoned 'look-for-failed-meters' skills...

nothing can be worse than feeling pent-up and =( yet hav lotsa hw to do and 5 hours of class ahead of you...
while doing my art proj i was reminded of the quote i put on my blog.. "grant me the serenity to accept the things i cannot change, the courage to change the things i can, and the wisdom to know the difference"... sigh. i guess i have been able to discern...but where is my 'serenity to accept' and 'courage to change'.....?

i'm such a silly girl.

art materials are so expensive i'm going broke buying stuff for my art project, though mine's a really simple one...eg. a piece of letter-size reflective PVC costs nearly $6...must learn how to make use of scrap material next time round... and once again i'm spending a lot of time fretting over how the thing will end up looking...

was browsing the Straits Times and stumbled upon this story on some popular blogs in sg.. apparently some girl appealed to her fans/readers on her blog to buy her a camera and she got her wish... being nosey and feeling slightly accomplished after finishing perhaps 3/4 of my prob set, i decided to check out her blog but was pretty horrified after reading through some of her more recent entries that i can almost predict who those donors to her camera fund were... on the other hand, i also recently discovered a very cool food blog, thanks to redpolkadot; the splash of well-taken pics of jap food on her blog are just amazing and very mouth-watering... and it's plain how eating can really be a luxury =)

while making my way to the bathroom this morning i was greeted by the aroma of fried bacon and my earlybird 'housemates' who were having a wholesome Sat breakfast... i wonder when i last had a properly prepared breakfast... despite not being able to have bacon (good lah, else make me fat too) i was offered some leftover coffee... which was a mini blessing given the horribly cold weather these few days. and while sorting out her books, my landlord dug out an old copy of Machiavelli's 'The Prince' and lent it to me.. cos i casually mentioned some days before that i was reading that for my class... small little gesture, but so awfully nice. i did feel a little =( that i seem to have fallen out of the little fellow's favor... guess cos the novelty of having someone new in the house is gone! but good lah, since i have so much work piling up anyways.. took a long time putting up some photoframes last night.. dug out the cute Monet magnets i got from the National Art Gallery in DC. keep getting distracted from work by frivolous little things i want to do to my surroundings.. have to do some serious research for my first art project and rack my brains over my tough PEIS prob set this weekend. =(

i am suddenly confronted by deadlines every single day... am suddenly so tired that i wished i had a day off! fortunately classes are still worth looking forward to. i think my PEIS instructor is pretty cool, cos not everyone can make Machiavelli or Hobbes actually interesting to study... and he tries to analyze how these thinkers think, to show us how we should think and analyze... then today i somehow had slight disrespect for my art instructor.... cos i think it's the most zuobo job around! (maybe just for today) cos she just left us to our own projects half the time while walking around talking to us about our ideas... haha i guess i'm so used to GSIs teaching some really hard-core material that merely giving 'creative' suggestions suddenly seem odd to me....haha and i'm biased now cos she wanted me to redraw this whole thing i did in class (an assignment due tmr) and i have absolutely no time and i'm debating what i should do.... sigh. foresee a night of more readings, finishing up assignment and thinking up art proposal due tmr as well...

day one of summer sch was really long but despite a seemingly ultra-busy and intensive 6 weeks ahead of me, i feel pretty upbeat. my PEIS instructor is this puny boyish-looking Indian guy who seems really passionate about what he's going to teach and seems bent on convincing us that this will be one of the best though toughest classes we will take at Berkeley. i'm a little doubtful, but am pretty inspired to work hard for it. Art 8 didn't disappoint me either... it really seems intensive.. 3 major art projects in a short span of 6 weeks and 4-hour classes 4 days in a row every week... but 2 hours just flew past this afternoon without me feeling any drag or boredom... so... hopefully it will be fun =) it seems pretty promising and definitely refreshing... i'm pretty excited. =)

while uploading my commencement pics i somehow stumbled upon the numerous pics i took over the past 3 years... pictures that have gradually accumulated but have always been overlooked whenever new ones are uploaded. somehow today i paused and looked through quite a few of them again and i was really struck how different we all looked 3 years ago... how happy, enthusiastic and innocent we all seemed to be... amused by how in the first few months i took so many pics with the most random ppl around.. though i know that some things never did really change, a lot of things DID change and i can truly say that i think i've grown up quite a bit... attitudes towards certain things have definitely changed... feel a bit old and jaded now that i'm going to be a senior at Berkeley... even though i don't think i've accomplished much in the past 3 years, it really feels like i've been through so much (but of course i didn't...) Witnessing zai fellow singaporeans getting dept citations, ppl going on to grad sch etc... i cannot but feel how some of us have really come so far...

my dear girl friends at Berkeley 

i'm happy, yet really upset at the same time. some things will never ever be the same again and i don't think i want to accept that. and when everyone's moving on, i choose to cling on. i know it's stupid cos it only makes me sad. i think my carebear really suits me. the sit quietly at one corner and cry by myself type.