What a roller coaster
week.
I spent practically all
my weekdays panicking over HMP compositions, spending every single afternoon
composing. In the past month, I have composed like, 5 pieces of music?! What a
personal record.
On top of that, there
were so many other things, big and small, to care about. The weekend is a time
I always look forward to, because it feels like a time for rest, and a time to
take a breather and reorganize myself, recompose and recollect. It’s like no
matter how much time I’ve wasted during the week, I hope the weekend can recoup
all those losses.
Sometimes it works that
way, sometimes it doesn’t.
After doing all those
compositions, my brain has really gone a little haywire. Suddenly thrusting
yourself to compose so many different things at once, when you’ve never ever
finished a whole composition in your life, takes a lot of discipline. You learn
to condition your brain to extract whatever ideas you have and seize them
quickly before they evaporate into nothingness like all fleeting thoughts
usually do. You learn to make do with whatever you have in desperation. Instead
of striving to be a perfectionist and coming up with a dozen new, complicated
ideas, you work with whatever surfaces first and develop from there. Command+C
and Command+V becomes your best friends as you learn how half of each piece of music
is made up of repeats, or similar ideas put together. (It seems quite cheater
but seriously, imagine a whole song/piece of music with no repeated ideas at
all; it’s so hard to remember, or make any impression at all! It’s like a song
with no chorus…) Wheehee, even though composing under time constraints drive me
and my friends a little crazy, I’m sure we all admit it is still a fun process.
And we admire all great composers ever more than before.
Today is Mid-Autumn
festival; I really miss those times I’d go out to the park right outside my
house and play with fire. It’s like, the goal of the night is just not to let the fire die. Who cares about
that math worksheet you still have or that Chinese test you have next week? Now
is now and just throw more leaves into the flame!! It’s the only time of the
year I don’t mind walking into a huge haze of smoke, and am brave enough to
venture around despite the sparklers that people throw and could just land on
your head if you’re not careful. It was like some adventure, making your way
through the park at night; it isn’t something you do on a daily basis right. The
limited visibility caused by the smoke and the darkness, makes the atmosphere
exciting. It is ever-interesting to just roam around and see all the varieties
of lanterns the little kids are carrying around; even through lanterns and
their designs you can see what’s the ‘in’ thing; in my time (am I that old?)
there weren’t any Angry Bird ones, for sure. And the so-called kampong spirit
is relived as you meet awkward neighbours and kind-hearted people who offer you
a lighter, or random flame left out for you to use if you need. I remember
spending that one night every year with a friend or two or more, and every year
the situation was a little different. We pray so hard it wouldn’t rain but 70%
of the time it does, right before night falls. I don’t remember the last dry
mid-autumn night, really, but we are happy even in the void deck, if anything.
We always beg to stay out longer as we are attempted to be shoo-ed back in soon
after 9pm. We drag our time as the night only warms up to us after a while. We
light up anything from leaves to newspapers to sparklers (all thrown in
together, oh what a lovely boomz) to the empty boxes remaining. We dump in
candles, we poke at the pile with twigs…
All too soon, it is
past 10 and we have no choice but to return home. Mid-autumn is seldom on a
weekend night and we still have school the next day. Sticky and smelling of
smoke, we are satisfied and leave… Hoping to the tradition will continue for as
long as we can. Each year, I look forward to the next. But that anticipation
dims slightly every year, until, I don’t know when the last one will be until
the year after.
Yeah, it seems like we’ve
really grown older, we never have time to do this kind of stuff anymore. Just
last year, I was still harbouring some hope of us doing it again, yet I was
disappointed. This year, I didn’t even hope. I resigned myself to sitting in my
room smelling the smoke, hearing the whistles, seeing the sparks… One day,
though, can we do it all over again?