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."

lunch with jy and yish: we conclude once again that we are all of us un-adventurous people who do not, and will never have the cojones to dump our current way of life and wander off to make a difference in war-torn nations.

*

june. three more months. not a jot of progress towards being ready for leaving. it's a double whammy, really, because we will be moving house in a few months, which means i need to make sure all my stuff is in order, not just the things i need to bring with me back to the states. and i am certain that the magnitude of that task is far greater that what i envisage when i glance around my room. stuff hides. wardrobes are larger on the inside than the outside, and god only knows how much time i will need to spend deciding which books are staying and which are coming with me.

*

and the penn administration is fretting me by steadfastly refusing to reply to my email. i've received so little information from them since my acceptance letter that i'm beginning to wonder if they sent that to me by accident. shouldn't i have my visa documents by now? have some sort of first-year syllabus or manual? anything? i feel very unwanted.

what makes you think that i'm ever going to answer that question? and if i had to answer, wouldn't i just choose the person i thought would more likely be offended if (s)he were less dear?

i have started a list of the myriad things that i need to accomplish before i leave in fall. a lot of the actual important stuff has gone on there, but what i need right now is a column for Things to Eat (don't be bored. it was inescapable). for a start:

* joo chiat tau kwa pau; the famous one at the corner
* as much island creamery as i can manage without excessive guilt
* ditto with spring rolls from teck kee (this is totally fs's fault for getting me addicted to them all those years ago)
* ghim moh raw fish porridge, and chwee kway.
* beer and chili dogs at charlie's in changi village. (i know this is a bit ridiculous but it's a nostalgia thing and i can get nasi lemak and goreng pisang while i'm there as well)
* kway chap at lau pa sat
* east coast road satay bee hoon, and satay, and milo dinosaurs
* chomp chomp, of course, for everything (this one can wait for minz)
* that brilliant dum chicken briyani in little india (i may have to ask the father to show it to me again, because i can't remember its name)
* bencoolen street prata
* cheesecake parfait in cafe rosso in holland v
* en, and the sake bar

(definitely tbc)

Currently reading:
Three Farmers On Their Way to a Dance - Richard Powers

From A Concise History of the Catholic Church, Thomas Bokenkotter:

In one of his pamphlets, Against Jovinian, Jerome got so carried away and dwelt on the disagreeable aspects of marriage in such crude and excessive terms that even his friends were embarrassed and felt it necessary to remonstrate with him. Jerome's response was characteristic:

In order to make my meaning quite clear, let me state that I should definitely like to see every man take a wife -- the kind of man, that is, who perhaps is frightened of the dark and just cannot quite manage to lie down in his bed all alone

thought

the coolness of having ones own place, no matter how humble, extends to having to pay the rent check, but only the very first time.

at nevezhda

[on how memorable our respective birthdays are, given that half of us had forgotten yen's]

su-lin: but my birthday is so easy to remember! 22-4-80. 2 + 2 + 4 is 8!
cp: (disparaging) but you can read significance into any set of numbers if you try hard enough. like those people who find 4, 1, 3 and pi in the same place and go shouting about the coincidence.
su-lin: well, yes, if my birthday were the 31st of april, pi, i would be have remarked on it as well.

tftd

"Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive." -- Howard Thurman

trans-pacific

1. no matter how you cut it or try to sugarcoat it, it's still 30 sickening hours door to door.

2. there was a guy sitting behind us who had never been on a plane before, ever, in his whole life, and was just bursting with childlike exuberance about going to another country and being served actual food while 30,000 feet above sea-level. it was nice for a while, and then it got tiring, and then i started looking for the emergency exit.

3. it got indifferent reviews, but i do like hoodwinked.

4. krispy kremes!

Currently reading:
The Poison Arrow Frog - Christopher Wilkins

various felicitations

Congratualations to The Brother, who is now apparently qualified to teach and solve differential equations at the same time while standing on his head, or something. And also: Happy Mother's Day. In the interest of not celebrating it at Super Buffet, you'll have to take a rain check on the dinner.

Wheeling, WV

I have a schema for small-town American culled from movies and television that activates whenever I come to places like this. You know it: think Fargo, or Stephen King. And...it's unfair, in the way that overgeneralization is always unfair, but it's also powerful: powerful because the stereotype is everything i most hate and fear -- bigotry, parochialism, ignorance. And by association, I don't feel 100% comfortable here*, for no rational reason apart from not being able to see the place in the particular: one town is Every Town. On the surface, it is -- the one-road deal, not quite one traffic light, but not too far off. Kroger's the most impressive building on the street. A clinic run by an Arab M.D. - with a four-foot American flag hanging in the window, and a smaller one above his nameplate on the door.

And the corollary to my discomfort is, I suppose, that I admire people -- foreigners -- who can assimilate into such communities, who can see the particular, because in my experience it's hard enough to deal with Americans' preconceptions of you. Start to destination: tough; meeting halfway: sometimes well-nigh impossible. The specific example of which is -- hats off to the brother for doing that. I certainly couldn't have.

* And not just here: cf. Saluda, SC, and Nowheresville, VA, the name of the town which I no longer even recall.

From TWoP:

"Meanwhile, Charmaine is the Rush PM because, as she puts it, she knows "a little bit about salons," and "the three guys" on her team don't. I don't know if she's ever met the guys on her team, but...that is disingenuous at best. The only reason Tarek would miss a trip to the salon would be if it cut into his busy preening schedule, and Michael...I don't even want to think about what kind of regimens Michael puts his body through. Even Lee takes care of himself. I think, given the overall tone of this episode, that it was a three-way masculinity détente where none of them could admit they'd ever been to a salon, or had their hair cut, or even heard of haircuts, or even that hair existed, because that would make them gay, so it was up to Charmaine to jump on the big gay grenade and admit that hair salons do exist."