Cheesecake Day
2005-07-30 @ 10:41 p.m.

I bought a new hairspray today, which hopefully works as well as the stuff I normally use with less hassle. My mum's quite funny sometimes. She told me to buy lozenges on my way home. The particular ones she wanted are marketed as Dequalinium, which became Deguobing (rendered phonetically). I asked her if it was some Chinese brand, and she said yes. Terribly amusing! The Straits Times Scholars Choice Preview 2005 was quite a waste of my time, so it's just as well I didn't have to pay $15 for the seminar. I never realised until today that Suntec City was so huge. Met up with the guys for lunch, then split to meet up with Liling and Yumun. The seminar was not very useful, for me at least. The UK guy was funny though. There is something about the American accent that irritates me. Like I told Chernise yesterday, I don't particularly like American culture, even if I am influenced by it to a fair degree. Anyway, the band which performed at the start of the seminar was not bad. They had a violinist too, if I'm not wrong. It's just that the lead singer sounded awful singing Accidentally In Love. Haha, that brings back funny memories of trying me trying to sound like the original singer for PoP!

Liling was talking to me about Mr Purvis, and it just occurred to me that the oddest things shape his impression of us, which as she pointed out, is very difficult to change. Like her mother. (He thinks she's nice.) Like my handwriting. (He thinks it's nice too!) That in turn brings me back to something I read in Principles Of Literary Criticism on my way to the useless seminar, about beauty. When we read or see something and ascribe to it the quality of beauty, what we are in effect doing is creating an association for our emotional response. Then we play a cognitive trick on ourselves, and decide something causes a particular emotional response because it possesses beauty, whatever that is. The concept replaces the object as the origin of our feelings. Something to that effect. I doubt I've actually communicated that very effectively, which is another thing addressed in the book. An artist communicates most effectively when he actively disregards communication as one of his goals, choosing instead to focus on creating something which satisfies himself. Note to self: It is easy to feel stupid. Read a Routledge book. The next one I'm going to read is by Sartre, with the confoundedly stimulating title, What Is Literature?