fast car

listening to the boyce avenue ft. kina grannis cover of tracy chapman's fast car. again. the boyce avenue cover of any song is generally preferable.

this is me with a lipstick moustache :{ this is what happens when i get bored and start messing about with black lipstick.

nautical nails.

models own true blue

revlon vixen 570


what i wore a few days ago.

LK Bennett nautical striped cardigan

AA u-neck short sleeved black dress

H&M braided belt

ASOS chevron knitted burgundy tights

URBAN OUTFITTERS 8-hole black dr martens


i've been in falmouth over the weekend; went to my open day at exeter's cornwall campus on saturday. i love the campus, i love the area, i love the seaside. i pretty much love everything about it. it's everything i wanted. and more, really, because everything is so beautiful. and i feel really content there. i feel like i could spend a very long time there. and i never really thought i would get homesick, but i feel like i'd never get homesick there. i suppose i'm not typical, having left home - hong kong, of course - when i was so young, but i suppose that can only help me. i can almost guarantee that my cholesterol level will go through the roof because falmouth is pretty much ALL seafood restaurants.

IT'S A QUARTER AFTER ONE, I'M A LITTLE DRUNK AND I NEED YOU NOW

SAID I WOULDN'T CALL BUT I LOST ALL CONTROL AND I NEED YOU NOW

AND I DON'T KNOW HOW I CAN'T DO WITHOUT I JUST NEED YOU NOW

adrift and at peace

i can't wait to leave. i've realized that everything i've posted lately seems to be on a rather downcast note. i'm rather downcast in general. perhaps once i get out i'll be more jolly. i think i'm coming to the end of my time here, and i need to move away so i can concentrate on being me again. perhaps i'm destined to be a nomad, of sorts. i can't ever settle. i don't think i should have to.

annoyances.

the past week hasn't been particularly good for me. i didn't get into king's, my results were relatively disastrous, and try as i might i seem to be stuck on 135 pounds. which is bad, because that's a bad weight for me. it's not like it's 135 pounds of muscle, either. i'm trying to build up my abdominal strength as well as lose fat, so i'm combining a bucketload of cardio with an ab workout from findingthinagain. i know that sounds incredibly dodgy but it's not a ED site. and i'm doing the two hundred squats challenge which is rather nice, actually. i've done about 80 in total today, with reps of around 20 each time. i'll pay for it tomorrow though.

my docs arrived but they are curiously big for me, which is baffling as nadia's fit me perfectly. regardless, i'm going to kensington on wednesday to try on the size 4 pair they have in the shop, and then i'll exchange them. i was so very excited for them and now i'm a little sad because they're not right. like so much in my life. as always, i understand that i don't have it as bad as a lot of people. i'm not abused or neglected, i have a roof over my head, clothes and food, i have family and friends who love me, i'm not being subjected to the reign of an evil tyrant, nor is my country being destroyed by a tsunami. i get that. but it doesn't mean i'm happy. my discontent is not really with my life at all, because that, by itself, is rather nice. i have a macbook and nice clothes and i go on holiday every summer. i have friends and i go to a nice college and live in a relatively nice area. it's not this at all. it's me. i am deeply, deeply unhappy with myself. i am discontent with how i've turned out as a human being. and that is not due to my environment. it is a product of my own mind, i suppose. and i suppose with all the good about my life comes all the bad. i've had a lot of shit thrown my way. and YES, for the last time, it's not the worst kind of shit. but shit is still shit. and perhaps if i was a stronger person i would learn from the shittiness, but i'm not, and i haven't. perhaps if i wasn't so angry then i would be able to see the good side. but i am, and i can't.

i keep imagining myself ten years from now in several delightful ways. the first, of course, is where everything never happens, my world wasn't torn apart, and i didn't have my capacity for emotion ripped out of me. i got married and i had kids and i had my career as a writer and everything was just fucking dandy. and i would be a grandmother some day. and that my husband and i would go for strolls on the beach - because we'd live in hong kong - and every night we would walk the same way home, loving each other until the end of time.

number two is a little less dreamy and a little less unbelievable. i have a few boyfriends, some serious, some not. i earn £22,000 a year doing something that i don't love, but i stay because i won't get a job anywhere else with a 2:2. i go home every night and watch shitty television and occasionally, if i can afford it, get drunk on a bottle of whisky in my living room/bedroom/shitty accomodation.

number three, is that i'll be dead.

the hills are aliveeeeee

watching the sound of music again. i love this film.

also, my mama gave me money for my docs, so i've ordered them. they'll hopefully be here on monday, or tuesday.

i'm feeling rather...peculiar, i suppose. i'm definitely unhappy, but i'm not really sure what's happening in my head. i never am anymore.

personal statement

I was brought up in Hong Kong from the age of two, and although English was my primary language, Chinese quickly became my second. Cantonese was the chatter in the playground and the calls of street vendors; Mandarin the solemn tone during class and amongst the elderly in the local parks, and I loved them both, especially when I passed the entrance exam to go to an international high school. I discovered then that being Chinese didn't mean you could write it, or even speak it; many of my classmates didn't even know the meaning of their names. Mine may have been a slight misnomer wisdom and elegance weren't my strong suit but I knew it was mine. Still, it was seen as strange that I preferred English to Chinese at school, both as a subject and as a language. The English language is wonderful and intricate and it's amazing to me that meanings can change with the slightest changes in syntax, and how logical rules are often interrupted by exceptions. It's the odd words I love, along with the smell of old books, and the contentment of finishing a piece of writing. Books that bridge the two halves of my life range from Chinese classics such as 'The Water Margin' and also those by Chinese authors about Western society; Amy Tan's 'The Hundred Secret Senses' was an superb read: the past and present, the Chinese-Americans and those who fled the Manchu coming together to produce a story that doesn't have to end happily ever after. I'm also drawn to crime fiction, especially when the criminal is within a closed circle of suspects, as in James' 'Original Sin'. What I love about James is that she doesn't try to avoid the 'guilty pleasure' of the genre; she renews its conventions from within. Emily Dickinson's 'I'm nobody'was the first poem that made me laugh - I'd never thought of poetry as something humourous before this. Simon Armitage is another poet I love; coming across 'Kid' at GCSE led me to search for his work. 'A Book of Matches' is one of my favourite poetry collections - the 'Becoming of Age' section is so relatable and the flashes of insight he divulges are fascinating. The catharsis of writing poetry is always exhilarating; putting pen to paper and pushing my emotions through onto a clean page has been how I deal with life for as long as I can remember. When I was younger, and less aware of what life would bring, I would pen neat little stories about morals and living happily ever after.Things changed. For three or four years after moving back to the UK, I found myself unable to write anything that wasn't an angry rant at the world, because those years of my life were hellish. It wasn't until I left high school behind that I finally found myself able to write stories again. My college held a gothic writing competition, and it was then that I remembered how hard it was to write a short story, particularly when I was so new to the Gothic genre. However, writing isn't a chore for me it's simply what I love to do. I'm interested in pursuing a teaching career - both my paternal grandparents and my father have been head teachers - my grandmother was the first Chinese headmistress in a then colonial Hong Kong. I work part-time waitressing in my local Chinese restaurant, and although not an ideal job, it has taught me that hard work pays off. I have volunteered regularly during summers since '06 at a local school in Hong Kong as a teacher's aide for English summer camps. Working with local students helped me to realize the difficulty of learning English. To go from a logical, almost rigid, language such as Chinese to English, a language full of irregularities and exceptions, is difficult, and I'm indebted to my parents for instilling bilingualism in me. Had I not learned to speak English from a young age, my life would be drastically different. All in all, I want to further pursue English as it has always been my passion and I feel that it would take me to a new level of understanding in terms of English as a language and as a subject.