Anyway. I figured I’d start posting here again, since, you know, I bothered to renew my domains and shit. Might as well use them. I am aware I kinda stopped posting late last year. I blame uni/NaNoWriMo and a general lack of intellectual thought process with which to write entries with.

I figured I’d loosen the format (wait, I have a format?) a little. Maybe not bother with trying to make super-epic formal intelekshual entries and just write something. Anything. Even if it’s me bitching about assignments. Any entry is better than none, I suppose.

Summer so far as been slow. I survived Christmas, my birthday, and the New Year, and have come out the other side slightly tired but ready for other things. Uni starts again in three weeks as well. That’ll keep me out of trouble. I have afternoon classes this semester to, which will be lovely.

This also means it’s time for stationery shopping, which, it has to be said, is one of my favourite past-times. I will take myself shopping next week and purchase some books and pencils and shit. Things will be good.

My current music playlist has somewhat diversified lately, as well. I don’t know, I seem to have a knack for knowing when I’ll like a particular band/album/artist/etc. This has not let me down very often. Current obsessions are The Darkness, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Daft Punk, Depeche Mode, and Cyndi Lauper. Why, yes, I am awesome. Thanks for noticing.

I have been writing this month though, which has been nice. Got a few ideas for original fiction I’m developing, amongst other things. One involves space pixies and terrestrial fairies and is apparently going to be a trilogy. More on this when it’s more than just a list of what I’d like it to include.

Apart from that, not much else has been happening. I like that January is somewhat slow. I feel like I need it, after the chaos that was November and December. Kinda took a lot out of me. But at least I’m still here, and in one piece, so yes. Might leave this here or I’ll end up rambling for another three hundred words.

As much as I adore music, it’s written in a totally different language and my brain can’t interpret it or understand it. Now, music with lyrics, on the other hand, because there are words, written words, I can cling to them and understand them as if they’re a translation of the music. This is why instrumental music is often boring to me. There’s nothing to hold my interest and nothing to tell me what’s going on.

So while for some, music with lyrics is distracting because the lyrics distrupt their writing, for me it’s the opposite. Music with lyrics I find far easier to write to than instrumental music because it’s music I can understand. It’s like the difference between me watching a film in Cantonese (which I don’t speak), without subtitles, to watching the same film with subtitles. One I can understand, the other I can’t. Visuals aren’t enough for me to interpret what’s going on; I need the words to translate those visuals into something I can understand.
I always have a frustratingly awesome time writing musicians though, because in some ways, I can understand them and their relationship to music, but in other ways it’s an utterly foreign way of thinking and being. I am not a musician, I am a writer. I live, breathe and think in words. Not music, not pictures, not poetry. Straight prose. Words. Wordswordswords. That is how I understand the world. It’s difficult for me to grasp how a non-writer experiences the world. All I have to draw on are my own experiences, and that isn’t always helpful.

I often wonder if other creative people are like this too, that they can’t quite ‘get’ other ways of thinking/creating and in some way require a translator.

Apologies if I’m not being clear. I’m doing my best to explain something that’s not easy to explain. It’s like… writing, words, the urge to write, it’s instinctive, like breathing, living, everything. .It’s in every fibre of my being. I can’t comprehend not writing, or not being able to write. I’m somewhat more scared of losing my ability to write than of dying. Everyone dies. But if I lost the ability to write… It scares me. I need to be able to write. I think I would die if I didn’t or couldn’t write. It’s not something I can just switch on and off, some sort of hobby. It’s an impulsive urge that is difficult to ignore. When the muses strike, nothing else matters, just getting the stor down before the muses go away again.

Okay. I would like to admit to a little clandestine drawing on the side, which I indulge in occasionally. I don’t see myself as an artist, and most of the art I do is to complement my own writing. I do my own fanart, basically. XD So there are some areas of visual art I understand, and I’m good with abstract symbols, but it’s mostly an art form I do not understand and tend to have little interest in.

But I think I’ve written enough for the moment. I appear to have hit a dead end. I’ll probably write more on this later when I get a chance to think on it some more. I’m all out of thoughts now.

I think this is wrong. If anything, the internet only increases the incidents of running into morons. The anonymity the Internet offers makes morons even more intolerable because they have less inhibitions about what they say and many more places to say it without censure.

Also, the article seems to assume that finding groups of people that like the same things you like automatically eliminates idiots. It most certainly does not, and anyone with any Internet experience at all will be able to tell you this firsthand.

And, okay, to be fair, I should probably also stop calling them idiots. I should probably refer to them as people who give you the shits, idiots or otherwise. You are going to run into these people on the Internet. I guarantee it. Just because you share an interest doesn’t mean you’re actually going to like them. I know there are people online in communites I’m a part of who annoy the crap out of me. But that’s part of life. You have to deal with idiots and people who annoy you.

Actually, the trigger for this rant wasn’t the article, it was witnessing the horror of some published work in a rant about the poor state of the English language. That got me ranting about morons. XD

Classes start again tomorrow. The only thing I am dreading is having to deal with people with lower literacy levels than me. These are invariably school leavers, and it makes me cry for the standard of education we’re giving our kids. These kids are our future. What kind of future are we going to have when we have all this wealth and opportunity and they can’t read or write very well? What kind of future is that?

Call me old-fashioned, but I firmly believe in a decent education. You should be able to use the English language in a good manner, be able to express yourself well and not freak out when told to read something. Seriously, if you are at university and it takes you a whole day to read a 14 page short story, I dread to think how you are going to cope with the rest of your tertiary studies with such a reading ability. Especially if you’re a science student.

I really hate this lazy attitude to English, especially online. That it doesn’t matter because it’s the Internet, as if using proper English spelling and grammar is opional unless it’s for some sort of formal occasion. I think this is a dangerous thing to have because it teaches bad habits. It teaches poor communication skills. Is that really what we want to encourage in our children? Have we been reduced to seeing Gen Y as some sort of slave labour, there to work with a basic education and nothing more? I think we’re short-changing them and not tapping into their true potential, and society will be worse off because of it. They are the ones that will be teaching their children. Surely we should care about the knowledge they pass on and how they raise their kids. If we can’t get it right, what hope have they got?