wonderment

Oweeee! It’s been a while since I last updated the blog.

Well, school has started and on my first day it was a REAL, REAL culture shock. I guess I’ve always prided myself on being in the loop, always the one who knows how things work, where everything is, and often am the one to keep it going. What a shocker to find that I

1) misread my timetable and ended up 45 minutes late for my first lecture
2) get the assignment sheet and read it 10 times because the first 9 times I thought I was reading greek.
3) get a fellow tute mate ask me if I’m in the right class
4) feel like I AM in Australia when my tutorial class is made up of vocal, opinionated, intelligent beings. And I feel like a silly quiet mouse.

Yea … misreading my timetable was probably the boo boo of the century. Don’t ask how it happened but I jolly well made sure that after suffering the utter shame of running in through the front of the lecture theatre, I wrote it down in a way I would NEVER misread it again.

That first class was called Production Project 1, which is followed by Production Project 2 next semester so you can pretty much guess what this subject’s all about. We got our course syllabus and assignment sheet at the lecture and because there was an hour between my lecture and the tutorial, I immediately found a place to read it all and try to remedy my missing class.

Greek. It was all greek to me. I guess I was too afraid of new things and my first assignment reminded me of DesKon’s “Honest Sense of Wonder” project …. which eerily enough was comforting …. and after 9 times of scaring myself silly …. the 10th time finally clicked ……

I paired up for that particular assignment with this Singaporean guy who’s a mat in every sense of the word - long black hair, black t-shirt (complete with skull and crossbones), black jeans, black leather shoes, black bag, black,black,black. Out of a class of 12, we were the only articulating students and 2 out of the 3 Asians there.

Zahid and I clicked immediately. Perhaps it was out of sheer necessity (everyone else knew each other) but when it comes to real work, I need somebody who knows their stuff - and he does.

We’re doing this creative assignment called “The Obstruction Project” - to produce a 2-3 minute video on mini DV. We can do anything, except for one limitation which the class decides on 6 different limitations and the lecturer hands one out to each group. Ours was simply “5 movie references”.

Movie references? Now I’m no movie freak and I don’t know any thing about movie references but Zahid just went on and on and on and he’s even lent me his Tarantino collection to go watch and get a feel of this movie references thing.

And whaddya know?

I spent last night watching Pulp Fiction, half absolutely hating the language and senseless gore, half admiring the brilliance of the fragmented storyline (which isn’t so fragmented after all). Ran a wikipedia check on the film and came away totally understanding my assignment and am actually quite excited to get down to filming next Monday!

TARANTINO IS THE KING OF MOVIE REFERENCES!

I am going to try to watch Kill Bill tonight - decided to skip Reservoir Dogs and Jackie Brown until I can handle another few hours of fs and uglier variants of the word.

Okie, I gotta skip now. Meeting Sihan for my next lecture and I wouldn’t want to be late now. Tata!