If Life Was a Movie

If Life Was a Movie, parody of If This Was a Movie by Taylor Swift

I'm just a geek, your typical nerd
Wasn't born with the cutest face
Shy and dorky; slightly awkward
Socially weird, and lacking grace

You're the beautiful and popular girl, baby
Sociable, innocent, pretty smart
Wouldn't spare a second glance at me, maybe
So how am I to win your heart?

I could bump into you, accidentally
Pick up your stuff, and, flustered, say sorry
Watch as your train departs into the night

Stand at the prow of ships, say we're flyin'
Cryin' over your corpse if you're dyin'
Guest star in a real famous show somehow
And if life was a movie, you'd be mine by now

I can't breathe; it's like I'm suffocatin'
How did you find out that you're my crush?
Playing the montage of our perfect dating
And something I said kinda makes you blush

So, I'm hoping that it's true, I don't have a clue
I'm stuttering now, out on your front road
Grab my collar and pull me close to you
Kiss me on the lips and the soundtrack explodes

Chase after you past airport secur'ty
Dance with you on both sides of a palm tree
Stand in the rain outside 'till you came out

Show you that your boyfriend is a huge jerk
Turn up unplanned at the place that you work
Holding you close after you've had a fright
And if life was a movie, you'd be mine tonight

If you like me, if you love me, if you really care
You would toss your head and let the wind blow through your hair
When we run we're gonna know our fate is sealed:
Together in slow motion in an open field

I'd try to
Fall onto you in a game of tag, an'
Brandish my sword to vanquish that dragon
Stare at the sky, and wish upon a star
You'd know wherever you are

Propose to you with thousands of flowers
Kiss you upside down with spider powers
Random pedestrians burst into a song

Confess to you with a bunch of placards
Save you from the villain and his dumb guards
Seranade you from your bedroom window
And if life was a movie, you'd be mine I know

You'd be mine somehow
It's not the kind of ending you wanna see now
Baby, where's the happy ending?
Oh, I thought you'd be mine by now

-----

How many romantic movie clichés can you recognise?

I don't think I did a extremely good job with this one, mainly because country music has an incomprehensible meter and stupid stressed syllables in all the wrong places. Also, while I am relatively in tune with romantic movie clichés, describing them in ten syllables is really quite difficult.

Aww man, life, this is why we can't have good things,
The Edna man

The World According to People with Colourblindness

They crawled out of the twisted, auburning wreckage and tumbled behind a dune. "Dammit," John swore, "I can’t believe that son of a beige got us."

"We got creamed," coughed Rachel. "His bomb must have sapphire to the cargo bay and when he pearled the trigger it blue us white out of the sky."

John looked around at the desert, stretching away into the sunset. "Well, unless we can salvage some coins and convince a passing Bedouin to celadonkey to us, or a camel, or something; it looks like we’re marooned here."

Rachel sat down beside him with a deep cyan wrapped her arms around him. "What a cerise of unfortunate events this was," she murmured. "Maybe if I knew then, black when I was younger, that money isn’t everything, that I don’t really need to be vermilionaire… maybe I wouldn’t have ecru-ed all that debt, and maybe we wouldn’t be on the run from the law and the coppers."

John laughed. "Damn, Rachel, you sound so jaded! I can azure you, everything is going to be just peachy." He stroked her hair gently. "We’ll get the cash out of here, and next thing you know, we’ll be cinnabar somewhere having a long, cool drink; or indigolf course on our private island, kicking back and getting a tan."

John sat up. "Remember I told you how I red many books about survival when I was an ultramarine in the navy?"

Now it was Rachel’s turn to laugh. "I know how fawned you are of repeating that," she greened, her teeth gleaming as she put on her best mocking voice: "'But the taupe brass thought I had violet tendencies and kicked me out,' etcetera, etcetera."

John grabbed her by the waist and lifted her off her feet as she squealed with delight. "You know I’m magenta-lman," John said. "And no matter what, whether we die olive tonight, or whether we grow together to a ripe gold age, I will give you the lavender affection and the luxury that you deserve."

"You are such a j-ochre, John!" Rachel cried happily. "Put me down and get your ebony fingers off me!"

John put her down but pulled her in close. "You carmine, Rachel. And you always will be."

Rachel squeezed him tightly. "I love you too, John." She sighed as she pulled away. She knew her lilac-ed conviction but John was too capricious and blond-ed to notice. "But I pink we should see what we can rescue from the jet. The fire’s dying down but ivory that the smoke will give away our position."

The thick pillar of smoke rose into the air as they picked their way gingerly across the hard limestone and the glowing ambers. "Let’s see if we can mauve that wing out of the way," said Rachel.

"That looks like a Cerulean feat," said John, folding up his sleeves. "This is a job for bronze over brains." Rachel a-gray-ed.

The crumpled piece of metal was fuchsia-side to reveal a large trunk. "What do we got?" asked John.

Rachel rummaged through the luggage. "There’s a couple of umberellas, but it’s not like it’s going to rain anytime soon," she said. "There’s a ring of khakis for, I think, a Porsche, and – yellow? What do we have here?"

Rachel pulled out a sheaf of papers, slightly charred but mostly intact. "They’re maps!" she exclaimed. "This one’s a celeste-ial star chart… this a map of England! They’re all mixed up!" Rachel cried in frustration. "This is so purplexing. And they’re not oranged in any kind of order!"

John scuffed around in the wreckage while Rachel rifled through the maps. "You could give a pewter me," he offered, but Rachel just shook her head and said, "I’m puce-d to doing this myself."

“So what chartreuse-ing?” John asked, eventually.

"I think this one shows the surrounding area," Rachel said, spreading the map out across the trunk. "There’s an aqua-ifer in that direction," she pointed. "If we make our way there, we can follow this road jasper our normal walking speed, un-teal we get to this town here by midnight!"

John saw that there was a silver of hope left. "Let’s go, ma cherry, and maybe turquoise and girls of this little mining brown can russet us up some grub."

-----

I tinct, beyond a shade of doubt, everything pales in comparison to colours. We take it lightly and know it cannot be im-prism-ed, but hue knows what the dark, secret in-gradient is? If you are at achromatic, candlelit dinner and you ex-spectrum, not wine, what pigment of imagination is saturating your thoughts?



Or, you know, synesthetes.
The Edna Man

Imagination and the Multiverse

We know that the capacity for human imagination is limitless. It is one of the few things that sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. It is such an amazing ability to be able to surpass your perception of the current reality and look through time, to see the past, or to dream the future. We can see things that do not yet exist, or that cannot exist.

We all have this talent, this capability of imagination. Some people use it more frequently, some people focus their inner sights only on certain things. But it is usually employed to fathom the unfathomable, to see that which does not exist in one's perception of the here and now.


There are many different versions of the multiverse theory. I don't know whether it's a higher dimensional plane, or a bunch of parallel timelines, or something which might not hold based on quantum physics or mathematics. But I do believe that the multiverse exists, and this is how I think it works.

Every choice we make in our life splits time into multiple possible futures. From the large, conscious, life-changing choices like who you choose to fall in love with; or the small, arbitrary, subconscious decisions like which foot you step on first when you leave your house. The choice you ultimately make shunts you to the reality you currently exist in; but the other one could have easily existed as well, couldn't it? And I believe that it does, in some form of parallel universe.

(There are some who would argue that I have not gone deep enough, that even the random location of each electron and the vibration of each subatomic particle in each point of time and space would vary across infinite permutations, creating a "plane" or "volume" of existences. To which I say, true, but these are choices which we have little to no control of, and the chances that they will affect us are infinitesimally small.)

So, assuming the existence of parallel universes, here's my theory: our imagination lets us "see" the events in these parallel universes. It it not a mental process in which we "create" images and ideas from nothing; it is a "sense" and a means of perceiving the events which don't exist in our here and now. We look through the windows of our imagination into another world.

That's a vaguely heartening thought, isn't it? That somewhere in this crazy, mixed up multiverse of ours, there are worlds where magic is a real and everyday society hidden from plain sight by illusions and memory charms. Worlds where giant sentient androids disguise themselves as common vehicles and wage a secret war for our planet. Worlds in which cities are mobile, leaving large tank tracks in their wake; where genetically-modified beasts roam the landscape and turned the tide of a world war; where death is merely a second chance at love and life; where the greatest of kings is a tsundere and her knights are all girls.

It is also, perhaps, a very sobering thought. That the extents of human creativity and the marvels of human invention that we know of today are nothing more than copies of another world who has already made them; replicated in ours by a man who peeped across realities and copied their ideas.That we are not the gods we think we are, the creators and sculptors and engineers of divine inspiration or inexplicable intuition, but pale imitators of other worlds.

But that is not to say we should stop dreaming, for it is the best thing we have right now.

I see,
The Edna Man

An Open Letter to the Saviours of the West

Dear Saviours of the West,

Help. Please, you must help us. We are trapped. We are caged, we are tormented, by our oppressive legal system and totalitarian government. We are, how you say, being put down by the Man. You must save us, please.

I am sure you cannot even begin to imagine how subjugated we are under our autocratic government. Our media is heavily controlled by the hegemonic authorities; newspapers, television, everything. The fact that I was able to obtain an Internet connection to type this letter, by smuggling into the country an illegal wireless router, is already a miracle of which I might not be able to replicate. They broadcast only what they want us to hear, their  brainwashing and propaganda and lies.

There is constant fear. Our homes are raided randomly every week, for evidence of creativity and self-awareness and critical thinking. Arrests are a regular part of everyday life, and executions are held daily in the public square; the heads of the worst offenders are mounted on stakes, as an example to the rest of us. We live in perpetual terror, because anyone on the street might be a member of the despotic secret police, who have orders to shoot anyone suspected of being a traitor on sight.

But I have heard that in the West, you are Free. Free to speak out against your government, and protest and riot and cause destruction in your streets. Free to choose your own leaders, to decide which one of your own will control the rest of you. Free to own firearms and kill whoever you want to kill, not just who the tyrannical government wants dead. In the West, it is said, all are equal; though some are more equal than others, of course.

So, please, I beg you; I bid you stand, Men of the West. Come and liberate us. Bring your armies, and your soldiers, and your bombs; bring your guns and swords and explosions, and free us from the authoritarian bootheel of our fascistic police state. Because heaven knows that we cannot do it ourselves.

Respectfully,
[[REDACTED]]

-----

The sad part is that I didn't really have to exaggerate that much.

Why is there so much ignorance in the world?
The Edna Man

Forever Alone Singapore

I've recently seen this post making its rounds on Facebook. In it, the twenty-year-old girl (I am pretty sure it's a girl) writes that she has "fallen in love" with London and is "breaking up" with Singapore. It's beautiful, flowing, emotional prose, believe me; and if you don't, you should take some time to read it.

My first thought, admittedly, was: "This is the kind of girl you don't want to fall in love with." The kind of girl who doesn't accept you for who you are, tries to change you, fails, and moves on. The kind of girl who will walk out of the marriage twenty years from now because you're still the man she married. That was my first impression.

Don't get me wrong; hell yes Singapore is way too conservative and traditional and focused way too much on surviving and not living. We're not perfect, not yet. But it's not going to get any better if we turn our tails and leave the country. Who's going to replace the leaky pipe, when all the plumbers say they rather go to where the pipes are already fixed?

I love being jaded. I love being cynical, I love being misanthropic. I love seeing the world for what it really is; but that doesn't blind me to what the world can be. People think that you can't be idealist and pessimistic at the same time. You can. You hope the world is going to get better, but you doubt that it will. But that doesn't mean you stop hoping. You've lost, then. Lost everything.

And this is my second thought. The sad, inevitable future. The realisation that even if we changed this country, if we turned it around, if we managed to have a cultural revolution, throw out all the old ideas, usher in all the new ones, we'll have the exact same country, but now with the opposite minority. Can you imagine it? People leaving Singapore because it's not conservative enough?

Most of our cities and major civilisations were founded on geographic and historical bases. They have each generated and engendered a culture unique to themselves, and some people, some minority, is going to be unhappy in that culture. It is inevitable. They just don't fit in, or they prefer another culture, which, with the rise of long-distance travel, communications and globalisation, can be advertised around the world.

So here's what I propose we do. We take every single person on the planet and ship them off to the moon. There, we categorize people according to their personalities and outlooks and which city they would fit best in. We'll send the open, liberal types to London, New York, Paris, and the conservative bunch to Singapore. We'll send the rugged, adventurous group to Kathmandu, and the faithful, religious people to Vatican City, Mecca, Jerusalem, Varanasi, Lhasa.

Then we'll stay on the moon, and watch as the world slowly burns back to normal.
The Edna Man