of course island creamery has bandung ice cream, and it is v. good, though i must say that i do still prefer the version that walls used to make many years ago.

i really need to locate a church that says mass the pre vatican II way if not in latin, then at least using the gorgeous english translation on that page. i've mentioned some of my favourite lines, but look at how they used to read:

Into their [the saints'] company we implore You to admit us, not weighing our merits, but freely granting us pardon.

Let not the partaking of Thy Body, Lord Jesus Christ, which I, though unworthy, presume to receive, turn to my judgment and condemnation; but through Thy loving kindness, may it be to me a safeguard and a remedy for soul and body, Who with God the Father in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, forever and ever. Amen.

May Thy Body, Lord, which I have eaten, and Thy Blood which I have drunk, cleave to my very soul, and grant that no trace of sin be found in me, whom these pure and holy mysteries have renewed: Thou, Who livest and reignest, world without end. Amen.

and everything else. this is too good for me, i would die in ecstasy in church if words like that had to come out of my mouth, and yet i must find it.

mostly for the brother (you lucky sod)

was co-opted to take part in today's saf day parade, which meant (a) going spelunking to retrieve my number four from deep storage and (b) triggering ptsd-esque flashbacks of those 2.333 apocalyptic years. the ceremony consisted of, (in approximate chronological order), bullshit, propoganda, and the most atonal rendition of majulah singapura ever. it did, however, remind me that i had a bunch of passages about, or associated with, the military and my time in NS that i've wanted to share with everyone for a while, so here they are:

this one's from catch-22. You can see immediately why I liked it:

“Clevinger was a troublemaker and a wise guy. Lieutenant Scheisskopf knew that Clevinger might cause even more trouble if he wasn’t watched. Yesterday it was the cadet officers; tomorrow it might be the world. Clevinger had a mind, and Lieutenant Scheisskopf had noticed that people with minds tended to get pretty smart at times. Such men were dangerous, and even the new cadet officers whom Clevinger had helped into office were eager to give damning testimony against him. The case against Clevinger was open and shut. The only thing missing was something to charge him with.”

east of eden, steinbeck

“ You’ll go in soon now – you’ve come to the age”

“I don’t want to,” said Adam quickly.

“You’ll go in soon,” his father went on, not hearing. “And I want to tell you so you won’t be surprised. They’ll first strip off your clothes, but they’ll go deeper than that. They’ll shuck off any little dignity you have – you’ll lose what you think of as your decent right to live and to be let alone to live. They’ll make you live and eat and sleep and shit close to other men. And when they dress you up again you’ll not be able to tell yourself from the others. You can’t even wear a scrap or pin a note on your breast to say, “This is me – separate from the rest.”

“I don’t want to do it,” said Adam.

“After a while,” said Cyrus, “you’ll think no thought the others do not think. You’ll know no word the others can’t say. And you’ll do things because the others do them. You’ll feel the danger in any difference whatever – a danger to the whole crowd of like-thinking, like-acting men.”

“What if I don’t?” Adam demanded.

“Yes,” said Cyrus, “sometimes that happens. Once in a while there is a man who won’t do what is demanded of him, and do you know what happens? The whole machine devotes itself coldly to the destruction of this difference. They’ll beat your spirit and your nerves, your body and your mind, with iron rods until the dangerous difference goes out of you. And if you can’t finally give in, they’ll vomit you up and leave you stinking outside – neither part of themselves nor yet free. It’s better to fall in with them. They only do it to protect themselves. A thing so triumphantly illogical, so beautifully senseless as an army can’t allow a question to weaken it. Within itself, if you do not hold it up to other things for comparison and derision, you find slowly, surely, a reason and a logic and a kind of dreadful beauty. A man who cannot accept it is not a worse man always, and sometimes is a better man. Pay good heed to me for I have thought long about it. Some men there are who go down the dismal wrack of soldiering, surrender themselves, and become faceless. But these had not much face to start with. And maybe you’re like that. But there are others who go down, submerge in the common slough, and then rise more themselves than they were, because - because they have lost a littleness of vanity and have gained all the gold of the company and the regiment. If you can go down so low, you will be able to rise higher than you can conceive, and you will know a holy joy, a companionship almost like that of a heavenly company of angels. Then you will know the quality of men even if they are inarticulate. But until you have gone way down you can never know this.”

isaiah 2:4

Insofar as men are sinful, the threat of war hangs over them, and hang over them it will until the return of Christ. But insofar as men vanquish sin by a union of love, they will vanquish violence as well and make these words come true: “They shall turn their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into sickles. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war any more.”

and finally, my mom sent me this passage from the sacred romance (curtis and eldredge) some time in 2000 (I think). it was exactly what i needed (thanks mom!):

“Life, said Woody Allen, is divided between the horrible and the miserable. A cynical assessment, perhaps, but if we're honest we'll have to admit our journey is hardly along the primrose path. Pretending that life is easier or more blessed than it really is hinders our ability to walk with God and share him with others. Faith is not the same thing as denial. Blessings come, to be sure. But they tend to be infrequent, unpredictable, and transient. In the day-to-day pattern of things, our journey is shaped more often by dragons and nits - crises that shake us to the core and persistent troubles that threaten to nag us to death. Dragons and nits: Are they tragic events and random inconveniences, or are they part of the plot through which God redeems our heart in very personal ways?”

i vaguely remembered reading somewhere that von had started blogging again, but it was only today that i investigated the rumours and found them to be true. this is excellent -- not just because i now have a way to waste an entire afternoon, but also because it gives me ammunition to use to persuade other people who have left the blogosphere to return. (jy: you're the first -- the threat of incarceration is no excuse.)

submission of my manuscript has been set back a few days because the boss decided at the last minute he wanted to send it to journal x instead of y -- this necessitated reformatting the abstract and figures, renumbering the references so that they appear in chronological as opposed to alphabetical order, as well as correcting a bunch of other fiddly miscellaneous details (why do journal editors want to know the highest degree conferred on the various authors of submitted papers? shouldn't they be judging the paper on its own merits, as opposed to introducing an unnecessary element of bias? i'm sure it's not because they grant leniency points to lowly educated people such as myself.)

i think i have reached the stage where i'm just heartily sick of this paper. in college i never had the patience to revise my work more than a couple of times, and now that i have to do it i find that i lack the discipline to comb through the manuscript weeding out tiny details that i've missed. i hope this doesn't mean that i'm not of the temperament to do research, because this would be quite a bad time to discover that.

i apologize for the infrequent updates -- i have been out of sorts and short of time. my head is fuzzy and i've been saying weird things at random times -- all signs, i think, that my brain senses a big change coming and is putting itself into a cocoon to brace for impact.

***

i probably didn't think about this the last time because i wasn't the person paying for anything, but applying for a U.S. visa is expensive. ouch.

***

to cp, i reassert: the moral high ground has nothing to do with it.

***

we have a visitor from MGH giving a training course downstairs for a week - which means the sleep team has been relegated upstairs into the tundra-like frigidity of the morphometry room. this is actually not as bad as it sounds - we are, at least, out of sight of our boss, which means i get to put my visa documents together in peace. (kc: if you are reading this i trust you won't tell ;) )

Currently reading:
The Wild Geese - Ogai Mori

more bsg

title theme:
"OM bhur bhuvah svah tat savitur varenyam bhargo devasya dhimahi dhiyo yo nah pracodayat" (from a Hindu mantra, translated as: "May we attain that excellent glory of Savitri the Goddess / so May she stimulate our prayers.")

from Wiki

almost all the stuff that penn sends me is tailored for undergraduates. which is fair i suppose -- it doesn't make sense to make separate brochures when all the relevant information is in the undergraduate material -- the problem is that all the extras are indulgences and fun activities and nuggets of tlc. the message to grad students obviously being: now you are grown, time to put away childish things, get your ass into gear and do something useful for us, etc.

i have fallen madly in love with the battlestar galactica soundtrack, which now plays on itunes nonstop while i'm at work to shut out the voices of people i don't want to listen to. celtic and gaelic music has a special place in my heart, and pan pipes have been one of my favourite instruments since the days of pastime (with good company), which means that wander my friends (the lee-adama theme), is of course the track i like the most:

(original Gaelic)

Siulaigi a chairde, siulaidh liom
Mar cheo an tsleibhe uaine ag
imeacht go deo
D’ainneoin ar dtuirse leanfam an tsli
Thar chnoic is thar ghleannta
go deireadh na scrib’.

(English Translation)

Wander my friends, wander with me
Like the mist on the green mountain, moving eternally
Despite our weariness,
we’ll follow the road
Over hills and valleys
to the end of the journey

by the way

the new flavour is nutella, and it's amazing.

(via sms, re: Island Creamery)
me: every time i come here there's a new flavour
su-lin: stop gloating
me: su-lin, you can walk here from your house
su-lin: i could, but 33 doughnuts would be jealous

welcome home :)

nowhere to hide

i have discovered, to my immense horror, that

(a) in penn, students are asked to evaluate their TAs
(b) these ratings go up, not just in printed form, but on a website,
(c) with comments, and
(d) students are encouraged to select their classes based on these.

i don't think my ego can handle being crushed so badly.

food list (cont'd)

- margaret drive guo tie and suan la tang (of course)
- circular road lor mee
- haig road market oyster omelette
- maxwell market for the egg custard douhua thing (don't know what it's called) and superlative zha yu pian mi fen

england vs. paraguay with dukegabe and one of his friends, a Distinguished Stanford Alumnus. i've concluded that everyone who graduates from stanford shares a part of the same consciousness, so that at least a portion of all their actions is governed by the Mother Brain, or something. this particular DSA won some favour by having heard of bandura and zimbardo, and their work, unlike one other current student (who shall remain unnamed) who couldn't even point me to the psychology department.

as you know, the match was dull, and by the second half we found ourselves whipping out the rulers -- aka talking about our lives to date (it's so hard to disentangle the two things nowadays, isn't it? i need to meet more people who don't collect prizes like panini stickers. either that or we need a standardised way of scoring these things. +10 points for a psc scholarship, +2 points for graduating from rjc, +6 points for being under-14 windsurfing champion, +457 points for saving a village in a small african nation from the clutches of tyranny, etc. then we can paste the scores on our foreheads save simply barrels of time. how beauteous mankind is!) i know this all reeks of cynicism and jealousy, but that's exactly what this is not -- what i'm trying to say is that in our circle, all this generic stuff gets in the way of getting to actually know people. i hate all this mental adding-up of points, and even if neither person is doing it, there's always the secret fear that the other person is. you are not what you do!

anyway, this is why, privacy issues aside, DSA was DSA -- because he was, ironically, nearly indistinguishable in 2 hours from every other DSA i've ever met.

a letter arrived for me in the mail today from mindef: i've been posted to with all the attendant responsibilities of ict and mob manning and what have you. this is, of course, a cause for mourning, except...hang on a minute...oh yeah, SEEYA SUCKERS, YOU'RE TWO YEARS TOO LATE!!! MWAHAHAHAHAHAH -- [gets escorted away by men in uniform]

i have been fussing over the figures in my paper for the better part of a week now - and this is after spending simply ages just getting everything in alignment and making sure the fonts aren't wonky and cursing microsoft powerpoint for being so bloody awful when it comes to rendering straight lines. i know that there comes a point where you just have to say that enough is enough and throw yourself at the mercy of the peer review process, but there is no doubt now that i'm trying to delay the inevitable moment. editing is a form of escapism - as long as you're still judging it yourself, other people have no right to judge you, because, well, i just hadn't caught that mistake yet. but time is running short, and this simply has to go out within the next week -- so i will work on it today, and maybe through the weekend, and then call it quits. and then someone will have to pick up my bullet-riddled body after people with phds and tenure have looked it through and informed me of what an absolutely stupid twit i am and how could i have even thought.

wasn't it only yesterday that i died?

for the overseas types who may not have seen this yet: the ad that's causing all the fuss. you know, considering the media restrictions we have in this country, nus really should not be allowed to masturbate on my television.

in tomorrow's news: a rain of frogs, and the rivers turn to blood.

1001 posts!

hmm.

other notes

in another notebook:

11/11/2000

Hosp. attachment
-> civ. to hops., then change. No boots!
-> report 5 minutes b4 time to A+E dept
-> Bring lunch

(c. Feb 2001)

Visiting hours: 12-2, 5-7
P-cases: no forks!
Pts. going out for lunch
-> only with parents, collect IC

(c. March 2001)

[a sketch of Maslow's hierarchy of needs]

i said a long time ago that i wasn't going to post about europe, and there was a very good reason for that, but i do want to say this one thing. i was clearing out some of my stuff just now, and i found the notebook i was keeping at the time, (sidebar: yen, i notice you did the same in cambodia -- i saw those pages unintentionally while i was doing the accounts. did not read anything, i swear), and on the 5th of June, 2004, in Beauvais airport, i had this to say:

...Feeling bloated and v. thirsty despite earlier rehydration efforts. $ talk - beware what set heart on. Airport - sketch. Waiting room = tent. Boarding soon

i wish i remembered that conversation more clearly.

i have transferred a chunk of money into my american bank account -- the psychological equivalent at present of making it vanish, since i have no online banking (yet), or printed statements. three months rent i have to pay in advance, and the cost of having documents fed-exed to me from penn (duke paid for all of that; what's up with ivy league?) all the little pricks are quickly adding up to a lot of hurt.

From Black Swan Green, David Mitchell

"It'll be all right," Julia's gentleness makes it worse, "in the end, Jace."
"It doesn't feel very all right."
"That's because it's not the end."