I just found out that Prince Tamino from The Magic Flute animated adaptation that I loved to tiny pieces was voiced by MARK FUCKING HAMILL.
Geez, the fella can sing worth a damn. Sometimes I think that Luke Skywalker was the only role he took on that showed off hardly any of his talent.
And now I know that my childhood crushes were (technically) Han Solo and Luke Skywalker.
“I like how it feels not to feel.”
“I know the feeling.”
Still one of my favorite movies, I have loved it for so long.
Of course, it’s all relative.
My diet (I would like to lose three kilos) has been shot to hell tonight, but it’s all right because the people who read this blog don’t know I’m on a diet, and if they do, they think it’s one of the stupidest things they’ve heard from me (and that is saying something).
At 56kg, am the biggest I’ve ever been – and having Indian roots, it’s all gone to my thighs, effectively spoiling the line of pencil skirts.
But oh, I had the best dinner. Comfort food – rice and fish curry and two scrambled eggs, my absolute favorite since the good old days when I didn’t need to salt my food because I was crying into my plate.
Wow, that sounds pathetic.
But comfort food at its very best, so wholesome and round and fierce, like eating spiced clouds.
And I had a Ribena – I love Ribena, something I couldn’t drink in excess as a child because of my asthma – and a pecan cinnamon bun.
I know in theory Cinnabon isn’t that great – I could probably bake a better cinnamon-and-bread-based confection in my sleep – but I had a sudden craving. All day Ax the Andalite (whose name I can still remember, Aximili-Esgarouth-Istil) and his obsession with the sweet sticky rolls was playing in my head.
It was a brilliant idea, getting that pecan cinnamon bun. I had my doubts when I saw what was no doubt some plastic-based caramel that looked like Cheez Whip being ladled onto it, but I was wrong. I heated it up after dinner in the microwave, and it was wonderful. The caramel was slightly salty thanks to the dollop of butter that had been plopped onto the bun, and as I unrolled the bread it was warmer and softer and more luscious. The pecans were perfectly toasted and almost too nutty when I had them without some chewy bread. The cinnamon was dark and rich and got under my fingernails as I pulled the loaf apart, too engrossed in Hellblazer and the flavors that should have repulsed my gut but didn’t to bother with getting a fork.
That said, Hellblazer should have repulsed me as well. Garth, you’re a madman.
It’s been a very nostalgic week – for some reason all I’ve been thinking about are the books I used to love and still love and will always love.
I have many, many favorites; but whenever someone asks me to list a few, A Wizard of Earthsea is always the first title on my lips. I first bought it – or did my father pick it out for me? – at a jumble sale. The cover had a boy who was half-bird, half-green tights.
But I didn’t like it when I first tried to read it – hated it, in fact. I found it exceedingly dull. I can’t remember how old I was – not into double figures yet I think, but I can’t be sure.
And then a few years later, when I was in my early teens, I happened upon the book again and fell in love almost instantly. Dizzyingly. I kept the book by my bed, read it into near-oblivion. To this day I’m amazed at how it’s endured – the spine is brown and flaking, David Smee’s color illustration is fading. I kept it on my nightstand in Brunei, I brought it with me in a bag to Malaysia, when I moved out of my mother’s house it came with me to three different apartments until I stopped moving and now it sits in my bookcase like quiet nobility.
I’ve been planning an Earthsea tattoo for months now, and still I do not know what the perfect one will be. I guess it will come to me.
It’s seventeen minutes past midnight.
Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it. One of the first idioms I learned, and I never quite understood it (read: at all). And then I grew out of trying to understand and progressed from Goosebumps to the more ghostly, and then from the ghostly to teen witches. I wonder sometimes if I ever wished so hard that a spell was done, whether I ever unintentionally put some magic into motion.
To lay out the elements – a candle, some earth, some water, a fan – has been so often parodied and copied in film and literature. But even with my heavy skepticism for most things unseen (most, not all) I must say, sometimes things work out strangely. Maybe magic is just serendipity without rationality.
But I do, finally, after nearly twenty-two years, now know what it means to be careful what you wish for – because you just might get it.
