currently i am reading The Iliad by Homer... the next book i will move on to would be The Aeneid by Virgil, a text that had inspired Dante Aligheri, John Milton and numerous other authors. hopefully i would also be able to find a text translation of the Kalevala, a Finnish oral history of it's peoples. it's a long ballad passed from one generation to another by mouth and fully committed to memory. hopefully i can get a recording of it as well. heard it once during a documentary about Tolkien and his inspirations to write the Lord of the Rings. apparently the Kalevala was one of his sources of inspiration as well. it is a very nice ballad actually, an epic in it's own right.

strange huh to find a 21 year old singaporean with such interests as literature, classical music and opera, when his peers are listening to techno, going out clubbing, partying, studying or even training (for competitive sports). my girlfriend remarked that i am living in the wrong era, that i read more, know more (general knowledge) and have widely divergent interests from her peers. our peers. to the point that i find it difficult to find someone who shares similar interests in school/class currently. is it just me, or that i am just different? or trying to hard to be an individual? too many angles to look at things make it complicated, much like crystallographic planes in material science (ok now i'm starting to crap, which allows me to more or less helps me to communicate with most of my peers so far).

are we reaching the limits on our creativity? to the point that now much of what we do is centered on improving currently existing products, or writing using existing established literary structures, instead of making wholly new creations that spark a revolution, or start a new trend? what we do, make, write, it is either a modified original or repackaged. even when i write it is based on my own modifications or experience added inside to make it seem original, or my own experiences streamlined into a literary structure to create my expression. is there actually a critical mass, or a limit for creativity, beyond which there is nothing new we can create anymore? or rather we just keep discarding or disregarding the illogical, insensible or impractical?

now i am moving into a period where i have to juggle academics along with my interest in physical sports. how i am going to do that is a big question mark, but i hope to go through this and mayhaps be a successful athlete. who knows?

sidenote: currently listening to Why Can't I by Liz Phair, a lady with a very interesting discography. this song was in the movie 13 going on 30. i love that movie, and i want to watch it again. sweet, touching and is about growing up, to learn about life in an accelerated way, to learn how to go beyond conformity to see what has been there all the while.


Bertram awoke @ 8:47 PM with