Apologies to all if i haven’t been around…..i have been lazing in the city and not blogging at all. i promise i will be back in xangaland as soon as i get back home, which is next week. thanks to all that came by!

oh…it does animate, just not in the weblog!

      testing emoticons modified by Alice….this cute one was supposed to be animated, but i got this scary little ghost figure instead! agghs!

To all who have been wondering where i have been – apologies if i haven’t been visiting blogs – gah….got murdered by one final exam and there is still one more exam to go. so  i will return in full force next week! love to all {v} and thanks for visiting

as promised, here is my updated blog on jap art with pictures!

dang. the cable modem connection at home is down…i can’t update stuff much until after it comes back on and my exams end! back in a week’s time

here’s the weblog that i really wanted to do – will add to it with my xanga premium when i can get to a computer with explorer!

i’m studying for the final exam for my japanese art class and i have these vivid images in my mind, vestigal visions of wonderful works of art that express japanese aesthetic sensibilities.

i love yamato-e or japanese style paintings for their rich decorative quality. The Lotus Sutra done by the Heike Clan as a means of gaining good karma during the time of Mappo (Decline of the buddhist law) is one of my particular favorites. the emphasis on the decorative elements, flatness of the picture and the arrangement of forms to yield a pleasing array of positive and negative spaces on the surface of the sutra is only the beginning of what makes this object a timeless piece of art. the rich colors and use of gold leaf contribute to a sense of lushness and beauty, so much that my eyes keep straying from what they are supposed to be reading and instead dwell on this dream made tangible.

on the other end of the spectrum, i love too the japanese aesthetics of sabi and wabi, respectively, the beauty of worn and rustic things and the worship of poverty, principles of appreciation developed by the 16th century artist Sen no Rikyu. He opposed blatant vulgarity of wealth and instead stressed simplicity of expression. His tea-room at Honen-in is the result of his teachings: the interior walls are dark, worn and burnished, and straw peeks through areas which were deliberately left unplastered to give a sense of rusticness. the entrance to the tea room is small and half the normal height of a door, forcing visitors to crawl through it, so as to make people show respect and modesty, and also to prevent people from bringing weapons into the room. although i have never been there, it is esay to see that it is a place of simple pleasures meant to free the mind from the constant preoccupation with material things.

i love the teabowls that exhibit this aesthetic too – it’s such as sensuous experience holding it in your hands, feeling the crevices and textures on the body of the bowl, appreciating the subtle play of colors that play below the surface of the tea, and taking in the bitter fresh smell of powdered tea. ahhh…..just thinking about this makes me very relaxed….
the top bowl is Moichimitsu which means ‘without a thing’, by Sasaki Chojiro. The lower image is of Fujisan, Mt Fuji, by Honami Koetsu. Can you see Mount Fuji’s snow-capped peak?

i promise to update this part later with pictures! lemme get my damned exams over with!!! gahhhh@!!!!!

so slope day passed with lotsa fun in the sun, no passing out, but i did gain a nice tan – i no longer look pale and sickly…! my friends came up and we spent some time enjoying glorious spring weather as the sun slowly set in a blaze of molten gold beyond the sleepy hills that lay stretched out along the shores of the lake.
for one glorious moment, we talked of silly things that mattered not in life, of moles, of bras and body shapes, and for a precious while, became ordinary kids enjoying the prime of our lives, drunk on the soft winds and jeweled laughter filling the air.

so few of these moments before i have to grow up and leave them behind….

OUT ON THE SLOPE

This friday marks the end of classes for the academic year. to celebrate this, my school has an annual ritual or rite called Slope Day, where everyone goes out on this big slope in the middle of campus and gets sloshed

yep.as you can imagine, this is not a pretty site :100s and 1000s of college students getting tipsy and then stone drunk on a hot spring day. there is streaking and lots of drunken hooking up involved……all rather amusing actually. if you are stone sober and come across this event, it is really a disgusting thing. my professor tells me this all the time, and i know that by the time i am his age, i’ll be of the same mindset. the trick to it all though, so i have discovered, is to not only get tipsy enough such that the smells and sights do not repulse you, but also to spend it in good company with good friends such that the tipsiness is confined, at least in your perspective, to your one little group. i didn’t do this in freshman year, so Slope Day was gaaaaahhhhhh.

But Slope Day is fun, otherwise why would we continue this inane tradition year after year? – you can make your fun out of anything, provided you know how to. Slope Day has to be done in a group. drinking is no fun by yourself – it is downright miserable. the main and original purpose of alcohol consumption is to relax oneself and therefore facilitate social interactions. getting stone drunk, whether to forget stuff or because you think it is cool really doesn’t work. you feel physically horrible after that. believe me….i was definitely not miss universe material the day after i got drunk.

Slope Day is about having good fun with friends - we go through a tonne of homework in the academic year and bitch about classes so much that it this last day of classes becomes the collective steam valve. not that it justifies this binge-drinking, but then, it is fun for having fun’s sake, something that we rarely get to do as this world becomes increasingly fast-paced. it is a sophomoric (sophomore, Greek: sophos = wise, moron = fool) event of epic proportions, and like its definition, it is a crazy thing to do while i am young and able to make mistakes, recover easily and learn from them. but even then, when i do go out to make mistakes, especially in this case, i am glad to have my friends with me – it’s so much better to trust your well-being to people who care for me , in the same way i do for them.

CHEERS!

ooooh! this new premium feature in xanga is cool

all this spellchecking and fonts and things….all this reminds me of things that have been on my mind after i had been studying econ.

i was thinking of how to break monopolies. Probably the idea has existed in theory for quite a while, but it’s just something at the top of my mind right now so i wanna blog about it for blogging’s sake, plus, i get to play with the new features!.

Using miKrowsoft just for discussion’s sake: let’s assume that it has a total monopoly in the market of operating systems. how on earth do you break that stranglehold in theory (this is all very basic and i haven’t really thought it through, so there is bound to be holes in my reasoning) ?

To achieve this, mebbe the following things could be done:

• find out the flaws in the OS
  
• find out the programming behind the OS etc and how software is programmed to be compatible with it
  
• come out with your own OS that improves on these flaws and is compatible with the majority of existing software
  
• enter the market with a niche group and market agressively – you must have very very generous seed and venture capitalists to compete with miKrowsoft

so anyway, those are the overly-simplistic seeds of my ramblings amid the overgrown tangle of my mind. maybe i’ll think about it a bit more and refine it one day.