ikea

1) my love affair with swedish meatballs continues.

2) bought: plastic wine rack (holds 6 bottes) and boxy bedside lamp (soft mood lighting)

3) to come: a new bed

correction

actually, no, we had to get it two weeks ago. and wear it everywhere. always missing the boat.

ok. so we all have to buy this, like, now.

spss

i always knew that taking that "experimental" statistics class back in college would come back to haunt me. i'm not sure if i thought at the time that r and its lovely non-gui interface would be marvellously useful for me in grad school or something, but obviously in the real world people use statistics programs where you don't actually have to tear all your hair out when doing an ancova. would someone like to give me lessons?

mysterious skin

went out with yi-sheng to see this -- one of the rare times it's just been the two of us and not the whole humans bunch. up to about a month ago, i was under the impression that he was still mad at me for ditching him on my last r+b fall tour, but that, apparently, was entirely in my imagination. he's happily unemployed: bumming, writing and winning money in poetry-reading competitions. par for the course, i would say.

anyway, mysterious skin. the plot: joseph gordon levitt and brady corbet play on the same little league team when they're young. coach has his way with them. jgl is his 'favorite', grows up to be a hustler, does drugs, fucks half the people in town, contracts vd, moves to new york, etc. cf angels in america minus him actually getting aids (thank god). bc develops retrograde amnesia, creates the false memory that he was abducted by aliens, investigates, remembers jgl from a dream, meets his best friend, finds out that jgl is in ny, spends about half an hour of the film forming an entirely inconsequential relationship with jgl's best friend, before finding out the truth (from jgl himself) in a tense and rather disgusting flashback at the very end of the film.

the movie did not live up to expectations created by its mostly-positive reviews. it was a little too blatantly anti-hollywood: too many weird editing choices and fade-to-blacks. lgbt films tend to do that - hide their cliches behind unusual cinematography and call it art. i don't buy it. i talked with cp about the movie at a later juncture, and it turns out he thinks the same thing: that it didn't really have any big point to make; it was just...disturbing. c'est la vie.

still, mary lynn rajskub is awesome, and there is, i suppose, still something left to be squeezed from the discussion of pedophilia in film, so if you want to, go for it -- it's worth the money.

butterfly - weezer

posting the lyrics here because i mentioned it to a couple of you recently:

yesterday i went outside
with my momma's mason jar
caught a lovely butterfly

when i woke up today
looked in on my fairy pet
she had withered all away
no more sighing in her breast
i'm sorry for what i did
i did what my body told me to
i didn't mean to do you harm
everytime i pin down what i think i want
it slips away - the ghost slips away

smell you on my hand for days
i can't wash away your scent
if i'm a dog then you're a bitch
i guess you're as real as me
maybe i can live with that
maybe i need fantasies
a life of chasing butterfly

i'm sorry for what i did
i did what my body told me to
i didn't mean to do you harm
everytime i pin down what i think i want
it slips away - the ghost slips away

i told you i would return
when the robin makes his nest
but i ain't never coming back
i'm sorry,
i'm sorry,
i'm sorry

so?

Currently reading:
Half a Life - V.S. Naipaul

while watching sin city last night with cp and jiahao, i was reminded of an essay i once tried to write on what i termed "constructed moralities" in film. (perhaps there is a real name for this that i will be informed of by the literature types). i originally conceived of the idea after watching the second part of kill bill and noticing that the moral and ethical codes followed by the characters in the film, while having little to do with normal, real-life behavioural strictures, are, nevertheless, internally consistent to a fault. (i.e. revenge is not only acceptable but expected; the special exemption of children from violence, etc.) the same has been true of a bunch of recent films i've liked, and this exchange from the sopranos also comes to mind (if you aren't a fan: tony is the mob boss, melfi is his psychiatrist. christopher has just been shot):


Melfi:
Do you think he[Christopher]’ll go to hell?

Tony:
No. He’s not the type that deserves hell.

Melfi:
So who does?

Tony:
The worst people. The twisted and demented psychos who kill people for pleasure. The degenerate bastards who molest and torture little kids and kill babies.The Hitlers. The Pol Pots. Those are the evil fucks who deserve to die. Not my nephew.

Melfi:
What about you?

Tony:
What? Hell? You been listening to me? No. For the same reasons. We’re soldiers…and soldiers don’t go to hell. It’s war. Soldiers…they kill other soldiers. We’re in a situation where…everybody involved knows the stakes, and if you’re going to accept those stakes…you’ve got to do certain things. It’s business. We’re soldiers. We follow codes. Orders.

Melfi:
So does that justify everything that you do?

Tony:
Excuse me, let me tell you something. When America opened the floodgates and let all us Italians in, what do you think they were doing it for, because they were trying to save us from poverty? No, they did it because they needed us. They needed us to build their cities and dig their subways and to make them richer. The Carnegies and the Rockefellers, they needed worker bees and there we were. But some of us didn’t want to swarm around their hive and lose who we were, we wanted to stay Italian and preserve the things that mean something to us: honor and family and loyalty. And some of us wanted a piece of the action. Now we weren’t educated like the Americans, but we had the balls to take what we wanted. And those other fucks, the J.P. Morgans, they were crooks and killers too, but that was the business, right? The American way.

*

also: elijah wood has the scariest eyes in tinseltown.

Currently reading:
Thousand Cranes - Yasunari Kawabata

hp6

i'm betting twenty galleons that the death was staged. anyone in?

we lunched today in the old tanjong pagar railway station, a place i never even knew existed. i want to say that it was quaint, but to be honest, it was just old and not very well looked after, all mangy stray cats and rainwater leaking through the roof into our mee siam. we had an assortment of curry, none very special, and though i was tempted by the ondeh ondeh, the none too sanitary way in which they were being handled made me think twice.

i don't know. railway stations and train journeys are always so much more charming in concept than reality. in redang, my mom mooted the idea of a trip on the orient express, a discussion that rapidly focused itself on motion sickness, claustrophia, and how bored we might be. like, whatever happened to agatha christie and chris van allsburg and the hogwarts express?

hp6 tomorrow

-- and by dint of some minor miracle i am almost completely unspoiled. happy reading! (and if lupin dies, please don't call me).

hmm

i googled my blog name for fun today and discovered that it has been linked here, in a database for sociology research. dr. butts' cv doesn't shed any light on why he's keeping this database, but if you download blogstuff.zip here (warning: it's large), you get statistical maps created on R that seem to be something to do with spheres of influence/degrees of separation in social networks. fascinating; i wonder how he found/chose my page. i feel like e-mailing him to find out more.

update

when i take a leave of absence from blogging it's usually because i'm shell-shocked and curled up in a fetal position in the metaphorical trenches. i don't understand how people can put emotion into their blogs. i'll never be that secure.

6/7: met yen for neil gaiman's talk cum book-signing, which, unfortunately was all book-signing and no talk, at least by the time we got there. present: two-and-a-half million rafflesians bearing divers volumes of the sandman. beat a hasty retreat to modesto's for very decent pasta and conversation.

stuff happened the rest of the time, but it's not really worth speaking of.

Currently reading:
We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver

the central problem in all research is this

in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice
in practice, there is

Someone has murdered the neighbour's cat, the one that used to pop over mewling and hunting for attention. It was found dumped in the drain beneath our balcony, still alive, with its back broken. The owner has put up an appeal for information, and I'm almost tempted to do a Veronica Mars and poke around. Cruelty to animals is not cool.

every time i come out of a break i immediately feel myself chalking up a sleep deficit. it has to be borderline narcolepsy or OSA or something; i should go and get tests done.

Currently reading:
Franny and Zooey - J.D. Salinger