From C. S. Lewis' The Four Loves:

"There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of kepping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell."

It's the age-old dilemma. Pain, or hell.

Just out in the news: no known cure for SARS. New travel advisory: don't fly in and out of S.E. Asia and China unless absolutely necessary. And you're telling me not to worry? Who's kidding who here anyway?

Duke lost to Kansas in the NCAAs. I guess it was to be expected, but there's always the sting. I'm feeling rather gassy at the moment, things backing up in my esophagus. It's all such a mess. Such an awful mess. I really should go to bed, but then again, I don't feel like I can. I want to sleep. I don't want to sleep. I want to work, but I can't. I want to relax but I can't. Maybe I should lay off the caffeine, not that I really drink that much of it. I'm good with soda, but discipline is easy when you don't really like something. Not enough hours in a day. Not enough days in the week. 48 hours with 10 hours of sleep. Not a good thing. Not a good thing.

2000 words on melatonin. Bleah. Could I really care less?

I have relinquished control of the pigeons, so it's all mice for a while. I tried playing with one a bit today and it ran onto my shoulder and planted itself there and I couldn't pull it off. That was rather troublesome because I was afraid that it might panic and jump to its death at any moment, which would have been rather inconvenient to explain to Dr. Buhusi. I'm awfully glad there was no one around to see me because I must have looked like quite a clown standing there trying to coax the thing back onto my hand. Anyway, it cooperated in the end, and from now on I'll remember that they're not as docile as Hamstee used to be. Lesson learned.

The war is all that's on the television. Those American POWs really look like they don't want to be where they are. They have those expressions reserved for army guys who know a SNAFU when they see one. I know that look.

Have you ever noticed that those toilets that flush by themselves never work like how they're supposed to? When you sit down on them they flush and when you stand down and want them to flush they don't. What's up with that? They ought to have prizes for the world's worst inventions. Automatic flushes are up there with CD shrink wrap and those OJ cartons on airplanes that can't open.

We recorded another 2 tracks of our CD yesterday bringing our total to 8. Everything sounds amazing so far. I'm glad that my directorship hasn't caused the collapse of the group.

From C.S. Lewis' A Grief Observed:
"What would H. herself think of this little notebook to which I come back and back? Are these jottings morbid? I once read the sentence 'I lay awake all night with toothache, thinking about toothache and about lying awake.' That's true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief...I must have some drug, and reading isn't a strong enough drug now. By writing it all down...I believe I get a little outside it."

The Actors From The London Stage put up The Tempest for us last night, a performance I might have enjoyed a lot more had I been a little less familiar with the text. Having studied it for the 'A' levels and seen at least four different versions of it over the years, I tend to be a little fussy over the details. It was one of those performances where five actors play all the characters, and while that worked with Macbeth (which they brought to Duke lasst year), it felt a little gimmicky and forced here. In a 180 degree trunaround, I went to see "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" with another group of friends. It's a very bizarre movie directed by Terry Gilliam, and I'm not sure if I quite appreciated its subtler points, especially since the sound and picture kept flicking off every twenty minutes or so. Griffith is quite a lousy little theater.

From The Chronicle, 3.21.2003

"A wave of shouts sliced through the gentle drumming of rain Thursday morning as almost 400 protesters gathered on the Chapel Quadrangle, raising their voices against the war in Iraq and the reverberations of the bombs in Baghdad.

While the war officially unfolded half a world away, the antiwar response at Duke slowly materialized around noon in a stream of students, staff and faculty who walked out of class, work and daily life to congregate at the Chapel under a sea of umbrellas. Braving the unseasonable cold and rain, many came to express their own moral conscience, and others to speak out vehemently against what they saw as an unjust war."

I was on the East-West bus yesterday going to rehearsal in Biddle and these three silly girls were sitting behind me talking about the situation with the war and everything. I don't think they were drunk, which is sort of sad, because that would have redeemed them slightly. Anyway, they started their discussion by noting how disgusted they were with people who (a) have no opinions about US policy and the war, and (b) people who have opinions that are not based on a carefully considered review of all the available facts and information (read: everyone except themselves, and maybe a few of their close friends). They then went on to proclaim their anti-war sentiments (in extremely condescending tones, I might add) and reproduced a laundry list of Reasons George Bush Has No Prerogative To Attack Iraq. No evidence of ties to terrorism. Nuclear proliferation a result of U.S. Cold War maneuvers in the first place. Ulterior motives to gain control of oil reserves and political levity in the Middle East. All the stuff we've heard a million times on a zillion Internet sites.

Now, I was really turned off by listening to them, and I had a good mind to turn around and tell them to Shut The Hell Up. I don't know whether I was right or wrong not to. Everyone has a right to express opinions, and I guess it's a good thing for people to debate the war and its implications. But look. It's not as if they had inside information from the Capitol, or had talked to many political leaders and top-ranking members of the Army, or been to the Middle East and witnessed the situation there for themselves. They were three silly girls, regurgitating stuff they'd read off the internet or talked about in their political science classes, and acting all high and mighty about it, as if they could do a better job of running the country than the people in charge of it now.

I hate it when people do that. I think I might have done it myself on more than one occasion in the past (albeit not in public where I would have made a real fool of myself), and I wish that someone would have given me a good swift kick in the pants when I did. Because it's just silly. It accomplishes nothing. It artificially inflates the ego. Besides, in a matter of such political complexity as terrorism, the United States and its relations with the Middle East, I'm pretty sure that only 5 people in Duke know anything more than 1% of the real truth about anything that's going on.

I don't know if I was right or wrong, but I felt very irate and bothered by the whole thing. Good, healthy men and women of the U.S. Army have already gone to fight and bleed and die. Silly girls on the bus blabbing as if they were Beings Omniscient just makes the whole experience that much more unpalatable.

Brace yourselves. Here comes War.

I've moved on from thw world of pigeons to taking care of Dr. Buhusi's mice: little black things that stink and run around a lot and resist capture. The only improvement is that they don't peck (or nibble) at me. That, and I guess they're kind of cute. I'm really afraid that I'm going to squash them or something because they're sort of tiny and fragile as well.

My roommate is back from Uruguay. Back to sharing the room and putting up with his rambling incoherence and cookie-stealing. It's a small wonder that I'm such a sociopath.

Music:
Misunderstood - Better than Ezra

More news on Florida will be forthcoming in a full presentation once I get my act together, meaning getting my laundry done, finishing the two papers that are due next week, and sifting through the 1,362,905 e-mails that arrived for me while I was gone.

Meanwhile, real fortunes pulled from fortune cookies:

You will do yourself proud this time.

Not every spark is meant to become a fire.

Books:
A Girl In Winter - Philip Larkin
The Ground Beneath Her Feet - Salman Rushdie

Music:
Isobel - Dido

Food:
Subway (eat fresh)...the only thing open on campus.

I will send e-mail. Later.

My personal statement:

Since I visited the Marine Lab during my freshman year at Duke, I have been waiting anxiously for an opportunity to experience a summer session in Beaufort. The natural beauty of the coast and the enthusiasm of the professors convinced me that I was not going to complete my undergraduate career without taking at least one course there.

As a biology minor, I feel that I am lacking first-hand exposure to the natural world in an academic setting. While it is all well and good to discuss physiology within the confines of a classroom, it is another thing to be able to collect specimens and study them first-hand. A student of biology who possesses only textbook knowledge, excellent though that knowledge may be, is like a student of music who has memorized chord progressions and cadences but has never reveled in the uplifting joy of a symphony. In this way, I feel that taking Marine Zoology in Beaufort will fill the final gap in my undergraduate biology education.

My reasons for applying for a tuition scholarship are purely financial. As an international student, I do not qualify for financial aid during the fall and spring semesters; neither am I receiving scholarship money from any other external organization. It will be extremely hard for me to fund myself for this course should I not receive aid from the institution.

Thus, I feel that this coincidence of qualification, exuberance and need are the reasons I deserve aid for this upcoming summer session.

I swear to you...That Hideous Strength is sixty squillion pages long. I've been reading it forever. And ever. I have no idea why theological writers feel compelled to use works of fiction to convey their ideas, because the books usually come out terrible. M Scott Peck is another case in point. The Road Less Travelled: good. A Bed By The Window, not so much. Not only does That Hideous Strength express its ideas badly, it takes ten times as long to do that as is really necessary. Plus: Merlin?? WTF? Come on C.S. Lewis, get it together.

I've finished filling in my tax forms! Ho-yay!

I've embarked on a project to learn six new words in sign language every day. I figure that to be 42 words a week, 180 words a month, 2070 new words a year and 6552 words by my 25th birthday. That's about the vocabulary of a kindergarten student, so I'll be well on my way.

Suffice it to say, I will not be writing in here while I'm away in Florida, so don't burn out your brain cells wondering why nothing's being updated from the 7th onwards.

Department of fiction, fabrication, and half-truth:
Po Chin, one of the Singaporean seniors, has a cat. Its name is Muffin. It's not supposed to be living in Po Chin's apartment because that's Against The Rules, but it is anyway. A neighbor tried to unmask the illicit concealment, but he failed because all was circumstantial evidence. Po Chin is an English major who's writing a thesis on contemporary female authors, including Penelope Lively, which I'm sure makes her happy because Penelope Lively tends to make people feel like that, albeit in a wistful, nostalgic kind of a way.