momento

Had wanted to catch 'momento' for quite some time already, and only managed to do so last week, when they showed it on ch5. Had previously only been recommended the movie so many times and know it as a confusing but interesting show.

Confusing and interesting it indeed was. It's gripping simply cos missing any scene will make the plot meaningless and strange. The flashbacks make little sense at first, but which allow the viewer to make so many exasperated guesses as the plot unfolds. So I guess the thing in the end was about memories. It's kinda funny the viewer must tug back onto his own memories of earlier parts of the show to make sense of the story.

So I was thinking the man was leading a life lost in his own memories (of lackof). He sees the world based on his memories. And his memories become a tool for him to find meaning in his doings.

Seriously, I was thinking that could be anybody, including myself.

nms

By a stroke of luck, I got this short exhibition assignment at the National Museum. So I was there yesterday for this training session, as well as the media walk-through and launch of the exhibition. Some design thing lah.

Me and friends didn't exactly have a reason to be at the media walk-through, much less the official launch. It was somewhat a tie-and-gown affair, and I was happily out of place in my jeans and sneakers.

Anw at 6 we decided to walk the museum's permanent galleries. The previous time I was there with ch and ky, we were told we could only enter after 6. We thought it was cos some politician was there. Apparently what was meant was that after 6, the galleries allow free admission.

I thought the exhibits were pretty neat. The 'fashion' and 'movie' galleries were pretty impressive. I particularly liked this 3-screen showcase of past Malay Pontianak-ish movies. I guess they were local stuff. They edited the scenes to be shown separately yet coherently across 3 screens, to a backdrop of scary music and sound effects. Of course I didn't know what they were talking about, but I guess that didn't matter.

I was also zealously testing out my hp camera in the dark galleries. The photos turned out pretty ok, considering it is like a peripheral function to the hp. And while I was zapping the photos into my laptop via infrared, I was thinking how effortless all these digital things have become.

one day

Because the semester will not start till after CNY at Tsinghua, I am awkwardly left with an empty window of about a month before I fly there. Awkward simply because a starting new year is otherwise usually associated with new projects, and also because almost everybody else around is either busy starting school or industrial attachments.

So it's still the holidays for me, albeit it doesn't quite feel like so. Days are blurring away and filled with 琐碎 things. The things that have to be done, fill up the entire day, and yet make me feel like I'd done nothing.

Because my handsome new walkman phone doesn't read wmas, I had to download programs to convert the wmas in my laptop into mp3s. And because I had previously thought wmas were smaller and easier, and I had used windows media player all these while, all my cds were ripped into wmas.

The first program I d/led didn't allow me to convert files with mandarin file names. The 2nd program I tried didn't convert to mp3s, much to my bewilderment. The third program thankfully did the job fairly well. So now I've got to clear 2 useless freewares and their accompanying ads and peripheral exes. And then get started on converting the wmas.

And that pretty much ate my morning away. I will have to go to school to collect something later. I hope to slot in a jog before dinner because it is not raining today. And then hopefully settle some more 琐碎 things before I sleep.

And then it's tomorrow again.