i feel a little guilty for not writing as much as i could, given that i'm the freest member of our little blog party here. my plea is that i've been busy. like today, i spent my third consecutive day not doing any work whatsoever on my portfolio. how busy is that, right?
the good news is, instead of spending today on my sleep-and-tv diet, i decided to step out of the house to accompany my friend, ms j, material-shopping for her jewellery. on our way home, i told her that i had to put my portfolio on hold so that i could tag along. at this point, j said something that resonated in ways she probably hadn't intended:
"you should really do your portfolio only when you're in the mood for it; otherwise, it's just work."for those of you who are acquainted with j (which most of you are), you'd know that she too is a designer who had only not too long ago put together her own portfolio (beside me, in DDS). so there's nothing about putting together a portfolio in general that she wouldn't know. back when she was doing hers, however, i nagged at her constantly to "just bloody get it over and done with"; now that i'm working on my own, i realise i'm not one to always practise what i preach.
i don't know what it was like for the rest of you (i.e. aaron, kelly, yaoks and sio) when you all worked on your respective portfolio, but i have a lot of catching up (with myself) to do when i go through my works one at a time. for one, a lot of them are infamously incomplete, so it's always quite a bit of a hassle to figure out what i was doing. then there's that strange pride that comes with the idea of submitting a portfolio for someone else's review: i must only show the best side of myself, even if it were progressive. -- and an even stranger pride: i will not allow the pressures of (yet again, infamous) late-submission threats pressure me into screwing up my one good chance of enjoying the moment of a proper retrospective. but just as you thought that these are already one too many pointless preoccupations to habour when making a portfolio, let me just say that it's but a mere tip of the iceberg.
the real bulk of the energy invested in this exercise is the replay of memories each project entails. there were the great times spent in Harold "streakhare" Hee's studio with Chez, Amelia, Dennis Cheok and Francis at the turn of Year 2 -- i remember us singing to Madonna like at 2am in the morning while we were cadding nonstop on those now defunct computers in DDS; the exhaustingly exuberant and exuberantly exhausting things we did for the early part of Qiao's studio, working on Da Vinc's Chair; the wicked neverending running "Mama! Mama!" joke about not-the-Sadako-girl falling into the well for tropical workshop, while the ba-bu-ya that we were tried very hard to learn korean from Su-Yong.
unfortunately, the worst and overly time-consuming part of these reruns comes in revisiting recurring images of some of the most nerve-wrecking times i had while working on other projects. amongst it all, the interpretive centre for st john island comes closest to reflecting the nadir of personal drama. until now, that is one project that i cannot review for more than five minutes without feeling a desperate urge to just crush everything up and have it set on fire. for my medicinal library, both the most inspiring and depressing words that Qiaos had delivered in the course of the project came ringing in my ears, like as if they were just uttered an hour ago -- it normally takes that long for me to register his jabs because they were never as explicit as they later became for Chez.
it's clear to me now that my works in nus show clear signs of troubled times, and to me, it's also most hateful to uncover the vested emotions and memories in these works i never knew existed. Counting Crows spells it out well when they sing that "the price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings". i'd always treasure the good days we all had together, but inescapably much of my time in aki@nus was marked by a certain tint of woefulness that had little to do with the school in general, but more so occurences in my personal life. so i cannot begin to even tell everyone how unimaginably happy i actually am for graduating from nus, hence finally relieved of a great deal of misery -- and the ensuing stress -- that would normally entail my every movement in school.
as a result, do excuse me if i cannot fully relate to how sio misses school so badly. not to say i don't miss the good times we had, or more so the process of erudition and design; this is why i'm really looking forward to further studies overseas, and to make this blog work for us! but aki@nus? that's certainly one thing i couldn't be happier leaving behind me.
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