After painting the room, I put up a blue Ikea clock. It’s one of those cheap Ikea products that cost $2 and looked like a bargain until I started using it.
(note pinkness of walls–the colour is more-or-less how the entire room is coloured)
It might sound strange, but the clock TICKS VERY LOUDLY. In the quietness of my room the only sound I hear is its ticking.
tick . tick . tick .
It really gets to me, possibly because I’ve watched too many horror movies where ticking clocks portent impending death. I’m sure I’ve also read a few books where the main characters go mad listening to clocks ticking.
… I think I need a little more drama in my life. This drab and dreary existence leaves me clutching at straws.
Also went to watch The Magic Gourd with HS, because she had free tickets. Perhaps I should have asked what the movie was about before I agreed to go, because it became apparent within the first 30 seconds of the movie that it was for very little children, possibly between the ages of 4-8. The animation (the titular character was animated) was rather poor by today’s standards, and according to the ending credits was done by some Chinese studio. I find it unbelievable that Disney would lend its name to something so sub-par (the animation was done by Hong Kong studio Centro Digital Pictures), but even more unbelievable is the fact that it managed to make a whole million within two weeks, proof that Chinese kids can’t possibly have access to that much pirated content.
Still, I was rather fascinated by it purely because it was a movie localised for the Chinese (clarify: China-Chinese) market. The children in the movie looked to be no more than 10 years of age, but when in school were solving mathematical problems involving radii calculation that were, even for me, a little tricky. Long division involving non-integer numbers were calculated in their heads and it seemed to be the norm that the answer to 36.098 / 0.17 could be provided within seconds.
Even more fascinating were the communist undertones throughout the movie–the little children had to work in teams of 5 in school, their individual scores for every subject contributing to the performance of the team. The main character’s team, staring forlornly at the pitiful numbers of stars awarded to them on the class scoreboard, berated him for being lazy and “pulling us all behind”. There were scenes of children bent over models of bridges in what was ostensibly a craft class, industriously toiling to produce the infrastructure of the future despite the lack of any authority figure, which in itself is almost surreal, because we know what would REALLY happen if children were left unsupervised in a room with any amount of glue, straws and mounting-board.
I couldn’t stop thinking of Mulan, because it was so disparate.