Run #1 ended, and I happily kicked my subjects out. Once they were gone, Hengyi and I started talking analysis strategies and getting excited in a geeky Chinese sort of way, and proposing about 5 additional projects that we want to start planning next week. This is why Asians are going to take over the world.

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Also: V-Day. I was desperate to not stay at home, but everyone else was going to The Vagina Monologues, so it was a tough call. The first time I went to TVM being performed it was at Duke to support Grace and her coming out as a feminist, and I think that was entertaining more because of people in the audience desperately trying to screw themselves into their chairs during the "cunt" monologue than than the performance itself. I miss the American South. (Jared was telling me during intermission that some people in Arkansas have probably never even heard the word "vagina" emerging from someone's mouth. I advised him to buy a bumper sticker.)

You may recall my feelings about feminist poets in singapore; here, I think it's a different story altogether. The problem with Ivy League college students performing TVM to other Ivy League college students is that the audience knows about the problem on an intellectual level, and the players know that the audience knows about the problem on an intellectual level, but everyone has to pretend that no one does. Which means, essentially, that the performance is reduced to ranting and cheap laughs as everyone, especially the men, struggle desperately to feel the pain of women on a level that's at least somewhat real. It's very hard to both fully understand the problem of sexual inequality, while treating women as women, much the same way that it's very hard to understand economics and be a good businessman. Theory gets in the way of reality, and then everyone has to fight extra hard to relate to things emotionally and practically, and really, it's all downhill from there.