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."

incidentally

one of the huge advantages of living in philly is that if need be you can walk everywhere -- 20 minutes from campus and you're downtown. this would not have been the case in madison, wisconsin.

Currently reading:
The Road to Mars - Eric Idle

i have an apartment for the fall, a place that i suspect americans would call 'cute', that being the default euphemism for anything not obviously horrid yet too hard to describe. it's a studio in a quiet neighborhood three blocks west of where the frat houses are (a sufficient buffer, i hope). the first few apartments that we viewed were more suited for undergraduate living -- and those who have been to college in the states will know what i mean. the mother, however, was quite unprepared for the squalor, and quite mortified that human beings could live under such conditions. it's a cultural thing. there's a magic window somewhere in the transition from undergraduate to graduate life where students suddenly discover that possessions don't have to be kept in piles on the floor, and that vacuum cleaners, well, exist. most students, anyway.

discussion

me: so what shall we get [the brother] for his graduation?
mom: how about something that will be useful for him in NS?
me: like...a broken leg?

Philadelphia, PA

1. Baklava ice cream. How did no one think of it before?

2. It is different in the north-east. People are curt. Counter servers don't call you 'hon'. I don't care (yet), but this could take some getting used to.

3. We are staying in the top-floor, 2-bedroom suite of the Cornerstone B&B, a charming renovated brownstone with wine-and-cheese sessions on the patio, complimentary creme de menthe at night, teddy bears on the shelves and a fake elk skin rug on the master bed duvet. It is almost perfect, except that the Drexel chapter of AEPi is a block down the road. Fortunately, we missed Cinco de Mayo by a day.

3.1 Oh, and they don't have HBO, which means I'll miss The Sopranos

4. American budget hotels have free wi-fi now. It's incredible.

5. The mother and I went to see the Liberty Bell -- it's kind of ironic that to get into the building you have to go through metal detectors and be shouted at by the security guys for not taking your belt off. Kind of puts a dent in the whole, you know, freedom thing.

5.1. (Yes, I know the arguments, but I'm not a GP teacher)

requests

three requests for gifts from america: freedom (cp, jy) and a hard rock cafe t-shirt (m___ y___). i'm afraid i can only meet one of those.

back on the 18th.

remember what i said about richard powers' subject matter? now look at this: cognitive neurology!

On the Paten

On the paten with the Host
I offer up my lowly heart
All my life, my deeds, my thoughts
Thine shall be as mine Thou art

In the chalice let me be
A drop of water mingled there
Lost O Jesus in Thy Love
Thy great sacrifice I share

All today and ev'ry day
O Jesus let me live in thee
So that I no longer live
But that thou may'st live through me

itinerary/agenda

may 5th --> singapore to philly.
may 6th-7th --> recover from jet lag.
may 8th-10th --> hunt for housing. fight with landlords. meet with advisor, and probably be given reading list as long as a gibbon's arm.
may 11th --> philly to pittsburgh to WV.
may 12th-13th --> smile and talk to people who voted for bush. twice.
may 14th --> brother graduates. i go 'aw'. probability of vitamin c's pachelbel ripoff being played at least once: 94.7%
may 15th --> wv to singapore.

i will bring back krispy kreme donuts if su-lin has not had her fill.

to the brother

if by "the great singaporean writer" your professor was referring to the most well-known singaporean writer, then by virtue of the fact that everything is, unfortunately, relative, then yes, someone has to win, and that someone would probably be either catherine "i've never seen an '-ism' that i didn't like" lim or hwee hwee "hwee and ran all the way home" tan of mammon inc. [in]fam[e][y]. if he was asking whether there are any singaporean writers of actual merit, i would personally have been stymied and would have had to take the fifth, lest reader-response theorists descended upon me in belligerent droves claiming oppression and demanding their voice.

thursday: seah street deli with kc, m____ and his girlfriend, bertz (tm bertz, previously g____), and the chilipadi, in loving commemoration of the time we went instead to ma maison and had $20 hamburger. my love for ssd waxes and wanes, the waning part because they don't do hash browns, which very much detracts from its verisimilitude. i still miss waffle house.

afterwards: paulaner, where the drinks are diluted and the band sings u2 and cake. there was a lot of tension around the table. science does not grant one immunity from office politics. it doesn't help that our lab is set up so that the two teams within seldom get to mix -- we work out of two different rooms and get lunch at different times. prime for inciting guys to talk behind others' backs. at least the hating is pure, and mostly involves independent pairs of people, none of these chains of colleagues despising each other like in [the place i was working in before this one].

(time to get arrested)

i think it says something about mindef that they cannot create an eight word slogan without (a) misplacing a comma, (b) commiting gross catachresis, and (c) being completely incomprehensible. seriously, every time i see that advertisement on the NEL i want to set something on fire.

New Yorker article on Ivy League college admissions. And if you have no time to read the entire thing, you should at least see this quote from Jerome Karabel's book describing Yale admissions in the 50s:

The admissions committee viewed evidence of “manliness” with particular enthusiasm. One boy gained admission despite an academic prediction of 70 because “there was apparently something manly and distinctive about him that had won over both his alumni and staff interviewers.” Another candidate, admitted despite his schoolwork being “mediocre in comparison with many others,” was accepted over an applicant with a much better record and higher exam scores because, as Howe put it, “we just thought he was more of a guy.” So preoccupied was Yale with the appearance of its students that the form used by alumni interviewers actually had a physical characteristics checklist through 1965. Each year, Yale carefully measured the height of entering freshmen, noting with pride the proportion of the class at six feet or more.

and later in the article:

And the most important category? That mysterious index of “personal” qualities. According to Harvard’s own analysis, the personal rating was a better predictor of admission than the academic rating. Those with a rank of 4 or worse on the personal scale had, in the nineteen-sixties, a rejection rate of ninety-eight per cent. Those with a personal rating of 1 had a rejection rate of 2.5 per cent. When the Office of Civil Rights at the federal education department investigated Harvard in the nineteen-eighties, they found handwritten notes scribbled in the margins of various candidates’ files. “This young woman could be one of the brightest applicants in the pool but there are several references to shyness,” read one. Another comment reads, “Seems a tad frothy.” One application—and at this point you can almost hear it going to the bottom of the pile—was notated, “Short with big ears.”

Here am I yet, another twelvemonth spent,
One-third departed of the mortal span,
Carrying on the child into the man,
Nothing into reality. Sails rent,
And rudder broken,--reason impotent,--
Affections all unfixed; so forth I fare
On the mid seas unheedingly, so dare
To do and to be done by, well content.
So was it from the first, so is it yet;
Yea, the first kiss that by these lips was set
On any human lips, methinks was sin--
Sin, cowardice, and falsehood; for the will
Into a deed e'en then advanced, wherein
God, unidentified, was thought-of still.

                                          Arthur Hugh Clough

mirrormask

i wish that neil gaiman would either (a) start another series of graphic novels (no more stand-alones, please), or (b) concentrate on writing children's books, because he is, at present, wasting his considerable talent. coraline was encouraging -- didn't it make you think of margaret mahy/joan aiken? all the movie proved to me was that the man should stop futzing around with themes like "the tragedy of modern existence" and go back to actually telling stories.

book club - seriously

i think graham greene is a good compromise for everyone. jy: at least he's dead.

book club

ooh...can the first rule of book club be that you do not talk about book club? then we could read milton in somebody's basement with candles.

actually, could the second rule of book club be that we don't read milton?

duke party (ii)

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

                                       Edna St. Vincent Millay

duke party (i)

duke admissions held a welcoming party for incoming freshman yesterday. this was something the class of '04-'05 didn't have when it was on its way out, and while it's nice for p-frosh that such events have started happening, it's also one of the signs that our school is on its way to having a cornell-sized singaporean population. well, as my mom always says, at least i beat the crowds.

at least you only die once

got a very rude shock today when minz revealed the amount of income tax she has to pay to the u.s. government. i have always had the impression that deductions and being almost on the poverty line brought ones taxable income as a grad student down to a negligible amount, but apparently i was wrong. (either that or minz is the victim of a major swindle and needs to kill her tax advisor, like, now). how? already i've discovered that housing is going to cost me substantially more than i thought, and nowthis. go tax the billionaires more and leave us alone!

T.D.O.H.:

People returning from a journey carry the distances they have traveled with them like outspread wings - until they put the key in their front door. Then the wings fold up, and they are home again, as though in the center of an impassable steel ring on the horizon. The moment they close the door behind them, they can no longer imagine they have ever been away.

psalm 139

(this actually is the niv translation, so i must apologise for the misinformation given at dinner on thursday.)

O Lord, you have searched me and you know me
You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from arar.
You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O Lord.

You hem me in, behind and before;
you have laid your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to attain.

Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make mt bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.

If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,"
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.

For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place.
When I was woven together in the depths of the earth,
your eyes saw my unformed body.
All the days ordained for me
were written in your book
before one of them came to be.

How precious for me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
Were I to count them,
they would outnumber the grains of sand.
When I am awake, I am still with you.

If only you would slay the wicked, O God!
Away from me, you bloodthirsty men!
They speak of you with evil intent;
your adversaries misuse your name.
Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord
and abhor those who rise up against you?
I have nothing byt hatred for them;
I count them my enemies.

Search me, O God, and know my heart;
test me and know my anxious thoughts.
See if there is any offensive way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting.

happy easter!

-- and may your life be bunnies!

well, my reply to penn is winging its way across the ocean, and the die, as they say, has been cast. now for the thrilling adventures of Visa Application Part II: Electric Boogaloo.

Currently reading:
The Discovery of Heaven - Harry Mulisch (at long last - been meaning to get to this for forever)

stockholm syndrome

From Today, Friday, April 14th

Said undergraduate Lester Chiew, 24: "I don't think there will be any negative repercussion on me (sic.) if I vote against them [the PAP]. I live in Hougang. The only repercussion could be delayed funds for the upgrading of my estate, but I don't think I will get thrown in jail."

forgot to mention: received minz's aickman dispatch a couple of days ago. (thank you!) i'm done -- does anyone want to trade?

saturday

dinner with dukies - everyone from my batch except a- who excused herself because of a family thing. everyone's working for the government, everyone and their pet goat, and the conversation was all elections and the world bank meeting and oh i'm sorry i fell asleep.

i'm puzzled - am i supposed to care? does there come a point where you have no friends if you don't? you know, when it's just a couple of people at table, tactful direction of the conversation towards mutually acceptable topics is achievable, but five against one is not a very fair fight. and i've tried to care, i honestly have, but every time i open the newspapers to read the "election" "news" my eyes start pooling with blood and i can't see the words.

Currently reading:
Nobody Nowhere - Donna Williams

post-script:
on further reflection, i realise that it's not the subject of singaporean government in itself that bores me, it's the subject of singaporean government discussed by singaporeans from a singaporean perspective. also: the endless prattling on about people who are heads of this and whatnot department/minstry being posted in/posted out/promoted/publicly shamed etc. I DON'T CARE. I REALLY REALLY DON'T.

yesterday was the last day of the saturday neuropsych class, and all i could think about the entire three hours was how i'm going to sleep till noon next saturday.

i had intended to buy d-- y-- a copy of the horizontal instrument as a way of saying thank you - everyone else who audited the course had to pay for it - but was thwarted - it seems that the copy i bought from one of the expo book fairs was the last in the whole of singapore. i do think it is very appropriate for him - he specializes in treating dementia in its various forms - so i told him to hang in there while i ordered a copy from amazon. i hope he actually reads it when it arrives. i know that it's right up his street - but people are so resistant to reading even the skinniest of novels nowadays.

g.k. chesterton's dedication, in the man who was thursday, to edmund clerihew bentley:

A cloud was on the mind of men
And wailing went the weather,
Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul
When we were boys together.
Science announced nonentity
And art admired decay;
The world was old and ended:
But you and I were gay;
Round us in antic order
Crippled vices came -
Lust that had lost its laughter,
Fear that had lost its shame.
Like the white lock of Whistler,
That lit our aimless gloom,
Men showed their own white feather
As proudly as a plume.
Life was a fly that faded,
And death a drone that stung;
The world was very old indeed
When you and I were young.
They twisted even decent sin
To shapes not to be named:
Men were ashamed of honour;
But we were not ashamed.
Weak if we were and foolish,
Not thus we failed, not thus;
When that black Baal blocked the heavens
he had no hymns from us.
Children we were - our forts of sand
Were even as weak as we,
High as they went we piled them up
To break that bitter sea.
Fools as we were in motley
All jangling and absurd,
When all church bells were silent
Our cap and bells were heard.

Not all unhelped we held the fort,
Our tiny flags unfurled;
Some giants laboured in that cloud
To lift it from the world.
I find again the book we found,
I feel the hour that flings
Far out of fish-shaped Paumanok
Some cry of cleaner things;
And the Green Carnation withered,
As in forest fires that pass,
Roared in the wind of all the world
Ten million leaves of grass;
Or sane and sweet and sudden as
A bird sings in the rain -
Truth out of Tusitala spoke
And pleasure out of pain.
Yes, cool and clear and sudden as
A bird sings in the grey,
Dunedin to Samoa spoke,
And darkness unto day.
But we were young, we lived to see
God break their bitter charms,
God and the good Republic
Come riding back in arms:
We have seen the city of Mansoul,
Even as it rocked, relieved -
Blessed are they who did not see,
But, being blind, believed.

This is a tale of those old fears,
Even of those emptied hells,
And none but you shall understand
The true thing that it tells -
Of what colossal gods of shame
Could cow men and yet crash
Of what huge devils hid the stars
Yet fell at a pistol flash
The doubts that were so plain to chase,
So dreadful to withstand -
Oh, who shall understand but you;
Yes, who shall understand?
The doubts that drove us through the night
As we two talked amain
And day had broken on the streets
Ere it broke on the brain.
Between us, by the peace of God,
Such truth can now be told:
Yes, there is strength in striking root,
And good in growing old.
We have found common things at last,
And marriage and a creed,
And I may safely write it now,
And you may safely read.

News on the Duke lacrosse team rape allegations, and President Brodhead's response

for my own edification more than anyone else's, and only because the subject of taboo in cambodia was brought up

Batter my heart, three person'd God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow mee,'and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to'another due,
Labour to'admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weake or untrue.
Yet dearely'I love you,'and would be loved faine,
But am betroth'd unto your enemie:
Divorce mee,'untie, or breake that knot againe;
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you'enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.
  
                                                    John Donne

re; you are not what you do

von:
if you're not what you do, what else is there to be? i think about this all the time, as i'm sure you must have too. work takes up so much of life that there isn't much room for anything else; if you're not doing work that is self-identifying, then things tend to get pretty damn dismal i think. got nothing to do with the powers that be.

grar.

---

me:
you just are what you...are. i know that's not a very good answer, -- but if i thought it through i'd probably come up with something about abstractions and essences and transcendence, and it would sound very zen, and it wouldn't help you very much either.

and it does involve tptb. making meaningless employment seem meaningful is one of the main aims of government. they're just more subtle about it nowadays.

---

von:
that's a terrible answer. it is non-descriptive in the worst way. this is the kind of thing that gives false hope. you know, in the way myth does.


he's right, and i will make a better go of it as soon as i'm not drowning in work. (though i cannot guarantee that thinking about it for a couple of hours will allow me to write a better answer than the one i threw off in 30 seconds).

speaking of akvavit,, being foiled not once but twice has only hardened my resolve to actually eat at the place. (corollary: i now know that when we finally do get to sit down at the restaurant the food will be several shades beyond inedible). nevertheless, i am stubborn and perverse, and anyone who wishes to join me in self-destruction may let me know after their (purported) opening on the 24th.

Currently reading:
Black Swan Green - David Mitchell

first of all, i'm not taking sides.

this is how i feel about things:

(i) it's so obvious that it's almost trite, but you are not what you do. the powers-that-be will try and tell you otherwise, but please don't sell yourself that short, even if you don't have a religion.

(ii) "becoming everything you can be" is a bullshit, pie-in-the-sky notion that's been drilled into us through a combination of our education and mutual reinforcement. particularly when we apply this to The Choice (capitalised because of what it's become for us). i've said this. if you have found your oasis of happiness, and you can live wth yourself (as su-lin says she has), for goodness sake, sit down and drink. there is only one variable in the equation.

(iii) confession: i do feel in some ways apart from the teachers and the other civil servants, even though i've been here with them through the entirety of their careers so far. and i'm not blaming anyone for anything -- for instance, i understand why you would want to talk about work when we get together, because that's how it is: personalizing, consolidation, etc. i remember booking out from ns and meeting (guy) friends and having nothing to do around the dinner table except tell endless stories about field camps and platoon sergeants -- and i'm sure that bmt sucked 10,000 times worse than anything people are going through now (apologies if i'm wrong). but su-lin has cp, and jy and yen and addy can commiserate about -- well, whatever, i don't really know what they commiserate about because it's all acronyms and abbreviations -- but i don't have that. and in that way, i do understand where minz's sentiments are coming from, particularly when you add physical distance into the mix, and i can't say that i might not feel the same way a year from now.

(iv) and though i've never said this explicitly, i would like to be connected to the people who are most important to me in that way. (also, unlike what anybody may think i haven't "betrayed" myself, reason being in (i), above). just because i'm doing something different doesn't mean i have any less need to want to talk about it. but since deisderata and reality will never meet - i have no illusions about that - there's no point in either smacking my head against the brick wall or bitching about it in vain. being at peace with that notion has helped, and i guess i need that tranquility now more than ever.

today i learned that "nosology" is the "branch of medical science dealing with the classification of diseases". surprisingly, i did not learn this from an episode of house

cambodia photos (postscript)

* von tells me that using photobucket (as opposed to flickr) is demonstrably un-l33t. i had not a clue.

cambodia photos

it's been long enough

thanksgiving

because of the company i choose to keep, because of the circles i travel in, i forget that out there in the world - and closer, much closer to home than terrorists and dictators - are people who are truly, incorrigibly horrid (and i use the word very intentionally -- because we're not even talking about evil, a concept far more alien and difficult to diagnose.) the kind of people who fundamentally do not care. the takers. and because i don't often encounter them, my inner spectrum of good and bad is shortened, warped, and peccadilloes and foibles get blown up and become suddenly enormous and grotesque.

thus, thanksgiving is in order. first, for days like today, when things get put into perspective. second, that these days are few and far between. and third, that God gave us the capacity to forgive -- both idiosyncrasies and hurts far more grievous.

request

can someone else please write about siem reap? the mere thought of doing that exhausts me.

edited because i can't spell

because you asked

"Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, trust also in me. In my Father's house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going"

John 14:1-4

that's why.

dinner with nl, who's headed out to nyu in the fall for a phd in computational whatchacajigummy somethingoranother. we entertained, very briefly, the idea of sharing an apartment in princeton or some such place midway between us, but mapquest very quickly shot that down in flames.

Currently reading:
Leviathan - Paul Auster

imposter syndrome

i'm positive that this is many of us. join the line for therapy.

just like old times

russell poldrack just published a paper in trends in cognitive sciences on reverse inference (a.k.a "abductive reasoning") in neuroimaging work, the chain of logic for this being:

a) in the experiment, we observe that brain region x is active
b) from previous work, we know that cognitive process z engages brain region x
c) therefore, in this experiment, cognitve process z (unobservable) is being engaged

(this in contrast with the typical inductive chain:

a) cogntive process z (observable) is being engaged
b) during this time, brain region x is active
c) therefore, cognitive process z engages brain region x)

because i had to do a presentation on the paper, i called cp to check on my general understanding of inductive/abductive reasoning, only to find that he was not familiar with abductive reasoning, and that he thought the example i gave him was logically flawed (this bit came up later over profiteroles in bakerzin).

the simplified examples:

inductive:
a) this is a cow
b) it is black
c) all cows are black

abductive
a) all cows are black
b) this is black
c) it is a cow

this last argument seems, on the surface, to be quite wrong -- but only (as i pointed out) because the set of cows is only a small subset of the set of all animals -- if you started exterminating all animal life forms other than cows, the strength of the argument would increase, and approach the soundness of deduction as the difference between the set of animals and the subset of cows approached zero. nonsense! say cp and su-lin in unison, there are no infinitesimals involved here, statement (c) is either true or untrue, depending on whether or not there is at least one non-cow animal on earth.

(note: i'm still not satisfied on the point that induction (see example above) does not work in quite the same way. (c) is either true or untrue, depending on whether or not there is one non-black cow -- yet there is a scale of strength for how strong an inductive inference is anyway.)

so i counterargue that the argument doesn't hold only because cows are discrete and countable, and that if you replaced (a) with a set that has a subset that can meaningfully have an infinitesimal difference from it, then the whole house of cards may stand up. to which cp says "what about 'all jello is red'?" and su-lin points out that just because jello is wobbly doesn't mean that it's different from a cow and we crack up.

(and cp says that instead of him teaching gp we should all of us just troop into his class and sit down and converse with each other in front of his students, which i think is a splendid idea.)

(you can check out the real story of abductive reasoning here. technically, the cow thing is right; it just sounds really strange because it's not a real world causal relationship. it is not fallacious however, merely dependent on two things: how likely it is that a object is a cow given that it is black, and our prior belief that any given object is a cow. but to prove that you need bayes' theorem and math, which will make most of you break out in a rash. scroll down the wikipedia page to the "grass is wet" example for something a bit more sensible)

Currently reading:
A Skin Diary - John Fuller
And all the Pratchetts. Again and again and again.

From the Penn psychology graduate handbook:

A thesis, being unaffected by the cost of printing, may be redundant when redundancy is an aid to clarity. It may indulge in speculations that are interesting but that would be deleted by an editor who is unable to find room even for all the truths that are submitted to the journal. But the writer of a thesis should remember that it is only its pages that are unlimited, not the reader's time.

ooh...i get to choose a colour scheme? that's something new. i thought we all had schemes allotted to us already.

what about penn colours?

grad school, finally

because i’ve spared you about fifty entries on the matter of grad school applications over the last 3 months, i feel that I’m entitled to one uber-long self-indulgent post telling the entire story from start to finish. over the past couple of weeks, especially, i’ve not felt like blogging much because every time i’ve sat down that’s pretty much all i could think of, and we all know how boring i get when i start on a subject and refuse to let it go. at least now you’re getting it all in one shot.

(though by the time you finish reading all of this, i hope you’ll have come to agree with me that the concatenation of events that got me here is pretty damn remarkable.)

so everyone remembers how I applied to nine schools to do a phd in clinical psychology in fall 2003 and how i was accepted by the university of minnesota. how I visited the place and then spent a month in agony trying to make a decision about whether or not to go. not all of you know that I was also accepted by the university of wisconsin the following year, an offer that I turned down for pretty much the same reasons that i did the first school. they were good programs – among the best – but I just couldn’t see myself living in minneapolis/madison for six, seven years. during some of the harder bits of the last couple of years, i sometimes regretted turning down those two offers (in much the same way that I occasionally regret not having tried for a government scholarship), but I’ve long since learned that regret is not to be trusted.

(i also felt a little bit guilty – i’m sure those two schools are dream programs for many people. please don’t murder me for trying to be happy.)

now for the extraordinary bit. over the next few years, a number of things happened to manoeuver me into a rather happy situation – the kicker being that none of these events seemed particularly felicitous at the time. you’ll recall that I started out looking for psychologist positions, and that I was turned down by the ppu and gsk. I dare say that had I got either of those jobs I would have worked for them for a good number of years, but in both cases something went wrong after the very last interview, at the stage where I was 99% sure i had been hired. jh’s aunt strongarmed me into applying to [that place], an organization I knew I was going to leave as soon as I found something else.

now recall the brief period that I spent in nie. because i was there, I was introduced to this man’s lab, and first entertained the idea of going back to work on fmri research (which I did not think even existed in singapore). when a place actually opened up in that lab in march last year, i applied, and would have got the job but for the fact that one of my referees (one of my profs from duke, bless her soul) didn’t manage to get a letter written for me on time. he gave the position to someone else.

what this accomplished, though, was to put me in a place where I was prepared to take on any psychology-related research job. (the horror of spending nearly 2 hours getting to work every morning was also taking its toll). things then started happening very fast. minz and her cousin helped me take a good hard look at imh, where i discovered a department that was hiring RAs. at almost the same time, i stumbled across the ad on the singapore psychological society’s website for my current position, and applied to that too. of the two, i was more inclined towards imh (you know, with there being actual sick people there and all).

i went through both interviews, and got both jobs. the call from the cnl came first. i told them i was interested, and signed the papers with the full intention of backing out if the imh deal happened (6 months in hr had taught me that people do bastard things like that all the time. all the time. no guilt, no qualms, and i'm not listening to anything anyone has to say. lalalalala) imh got back to me with an offer – of a really low salary. i told them that i was very interested in the position, but that something more befitting a graduate with 2:1 honours would be nice. I began negotiating for something better – and after a whole lot of backing and forthing and miscommunication and bureaucratic bullshit on their part, they managed to give the job to someone else, despite the fact that i had already verbally accepted it. screaming, ranting and a strongly-worded letter of complaint brought me no joy, and that’s how i ended up where i am now.

so everyone knows that i started on the sleep deprivation research. i actually did not like the lab in my first couple of weeks on the job (for reasons I shall not write about here), but i got used to the unpleasant things and made a few good friends and before you knew it i was actually rather glad that i had taken this job and not any other. for one thing, the work-related discussions we had were surprisingly intelligent; for another, the people around me weren’t idiots, and i wasn’t being treated like one myself (never take this for granted).

and it was through the lab that i got to know this man, one of our collaborators, and learned that he advises clinical psychology students, and also that the university of pennsylvania allows candidates to reactivate their applications with little fuss (well, US$70 and a new personal statement worth of fuss). and i was like: why the hell not? i told my boss what my intentions were, and he was extremely supportive, and packed me off to penn after the conference we went to in november, and put in a good word. and dinges, for whatever reason, really liked the idea of me working for him, and he helped to grease the wheels. all sorts of other strange and wonderful things happened too – connections turning up between my recommenders and people on the graduate committee, having been a medic counting as “previous clinical exposure”, the fact that the graduate group just so happened to need someone with experience in mri this year. and everything sort of slotted itself into place like a soma cube and before you knew it, i was in.

so there you have it, i’m headed off to philadelphia in the fall to trade the real world for thirty-page papers, 16-hour days in the lab, cheap facsimiles of home cooking, and endless whining about my stipend not being large enough. and all you guys back here doing ot and reservist and reverting to emails will write to me and tell me to shut up, and in reply i’ll pen million-word blog entries explaining my problems in excruciating detail. and cp has already told me that unless i send him regular and expensive presents leaving his umvelt will mean departing from his consciousness. and despite all of that, or perhaps partly because of it, it will be good. i can’t wait.

plug

hey guys...go and watch big love -- it's quite something (vm fans especially: amanda seyfried's in it).

12/3, 1229h - killing fields

there are all the usual ways of thinking about it.

maybe you choose the easiest to swallow and the most impoverished -- numbers: 20,000 dead bodies in dozens of mass graves, 25% of the population of the country killed in all, 16-hour work days in the rice fields for those spared, as many landmines as cambodian citizens.

or perhaps your mind drifts to considering the human capacity for evil, zimbardo's totipotentiality, that believing in the tabula rasa necessarily means that for every saint, there will be a sinner. cosmic balance -- evil complements rather than negates good. a fair consolation.

or anger -- except that getting stirred up over something that is so far beyond anything you've experienced or understood seems terribly inappropriate as well -- you cannot rage 2 million times as fiercely as you would against a single unjust death.

so maybe you stay silent and placid and consider, impassively, the stupa with its impossibility of skulls, the leg irons and manacles, the crunch of brittle bone underfoot. you consider how the cambodian sun whitewashes the landscape, and you allow that, too, to relieve you from feeling. you take the guide's words and parse emotion from meaning and absorb only the latter because it really is too much to think that he had friends and relatives who were brought to places like this and systematically, brutally, offed. you walk amidst the mass graves filtering words through your head and pictures through a camera lens, and maybe that makes it ok.

and what else? seeping through: deep revulsion, superstition, all the stupid baseless cultural fears of mortality, interfering with what little sympathy and sadness you can muster. hating the gift shop because you think it's exploitative and then hating the system because that exploitation is the only thing that puts food on the table of those who survived, and then maybe even hating yourself because you can't bring yourself to buy anything. all rolled up in the general feeling that you should never have come here in the first place because the killing fields should not be commemorated or memorialised, that there are certain episodes in history so ugly that, although we cannot as resposible human beings forget them, there is no acceptable way of remembering them either.

15/3, 1123h

one to add to minz's collection

15/3, 1312h

the other thing we regretted

12/3, 1522h

Phnom Chisor

this was one of two things we sort of regretted. as we discovered, unhappy-su-lin = su-lin + x, where x = 412 steps.

unhappy su-lin

16 kids trailing behind us looking for handouts didn't help matters. at least there was the view.

we finished data collection for our experiment today - our marathon five-month-long experiment - and were so relieved that we just had to go for beer (well, the boss was away too, but, you know, details). brewerkz with wc and m_____ and g_____ (this is getting tiring), where there was blueberry beer (gross) and proper beer and nachos as stiff as polystyrene.

wc, a md who's worked in the lab on and off for about 5 years now, is moving into the "off" part of the cycle and starting his own business. house calls he's selling (a.k.a. pills on wheels). i'm not sure if i would ever personally pay x times more money to have a doctor see me at home, but he seems to think he'll do a roaring trade, so yay. i hope it works for him. all of us will miss him rather terribly, not just because he's kind of funny, but also 'cos he's the only person who can really do stats (and m_____ is pissing his pants because once i leave he's going to be big kahuna of the sleep team. well, only kahuna. i know, nice timing.)

(full story, as promised, coming very soon)

i think i've said it before, but i'm really glad that i have some colleagues whom i can get along with. in a large department, odds are you're going to find at least a couple of people to talk to, but in a small lab you really are taking your chances. it doesn't even really matter how much of a people person you are - without numbers there's still the risk that -- through no fault of your own -- you may just not hit it off with anyone. i suppose that's one of the strategies of the civil service. pack enough people into a building and odds are no single person can either (a) hate everyone, or (b) be universally despised. instant team morale! very clever, now that i come to think about it. (sociologists: please don't email me to tell me that this was discovered 167 years ago.)

actually

-- don't click on that link. i'm almost ashamed that i put it up. also, i'm probably headed in the direction of severe chastisement.

11/3, 0900h

posting this feels very much like something cp's students would do on their blog (link taken down because i was right about the chastisement)(go and search for their entry on him, btw), but i am weak, and give in easily to temptation.

so, the horror movie still:

no place like home, etc.

pictures to follow. i've suggested tag-team blogging to avoid needless repetition, but i'm sure we'll eventually just have a free-for-all, as is our wont.

indeed. but you're going to have to wait till we get back from cambodia for all the details. it's been a very bad time for blogging what with first being on tenterhooks and not wanting to say anything about it, and then being at work every other night, but i think we're finally good to go now. this holiday will be fantastic.

apropos of what i just wrote, i can't believe that our cambodia trip is next week. just yesterday i was telling my sgh psychologist that i could see him next saturday, and it was only after i had got on the train fifteen minutes later that i was like, oh, not really. i feel in dreadful disarray. have been trying to hunt down guidebooks in the nlb except that they are either (a) borrowed out or (b) published in 1972. still no idea what kind of clothes to bring - i seem to have heard somewhere that they are fussy about tourists being dressed properly around angkor wat - and the only other information i seem to have obtained is that we do not need vaccinations.

if this is going to be a bear-went-over-the-mountain kind of trip, that's ok, but i do at least feel like i need to be physically prepared. you know, like, the always-have-a-towel-with-you kind of preparations? maybe we should have lists. i find that those little boxes of cheerios often come in handy.

Currently reading:
A Lesson Before Dying - Ernest J. Gaines

whatever happened to february? it seems that a whole bunch of days that should have been there just kind of vanished while i was worrying myself to a thread.

drama feste - notes

1. his name was vincent

2. flight a bildungsroman?? that's stretching it just a little, don't you think? i mean, as someone acknowledged himself just the other day, it was mostly an excuse for said someone to get people to take their clothes off. on stage

3. as for bloodshed, probably.

4. interesting sidebars about five people sitting round a table arguing (whole title spelled out so that industrious people googling this name in the future when i'm rich and famous will be rewarded) --

a) my memory may be failing me, but i actually do think we wrote and edited the entire play in a matter of days. however, i do also quite vividly recall von's copy of the script which was so thick with cancellations and notes in the margin that you could barely see the printed lines, which means that what you saw on stage in '95 may have little or no similarity to anything that gets printed in the future.

b) the play-within-a-play does exist. it was, in fact, my original submission for drama feste script, a piece of writing that sucked so hard that i nearly left school immediately after producing it to go look for work as a writer for daytime soaps.

c) it was not autobiographical. i think it was called the dying of the light. god, it sucked. excuse me while i go and throw up.

d) we actually did have numerous discussions about how the original play should end, some of them not dissimilar to the ones that ended up in five people. i must thank ms. low, by the way, for being nurturing and kind through all of that ridiculousness and allowing us to come to the conclusion that our original script should be trashed on our own. now that's education, folks. vygotsky would have been proud.

5. and yes, it is just like old times. ah, old times, how we have missed thee.

so...remember when i saw miss quah a couple of years ago and she was all excited about publishing a drama feste anthology? yeah, guess what? as yidong put it: "this thing, like bela lugosi, seems to keep coming back from the grave."

island creamery

-- now has horlicks and kung pao cashew. if you can't imagine what the latter tastes like, you're apparently in very good company.

go bears!

i would have murdered someone

thanks

boarded bus 960 today on my way home and sat right down on a sodden seat cushion (sodden thanks to the air-conditioning, which was leaking terribly). i suppose i should have wondered why there were 2 empty seats when a bunch of people were standing, but today was a long day and i was exhausted. the seats certainly looked dry -- the dark colours hide the dampness -- and naturally no one around had the decency to warn me about them. anyway, i (foolishly) decided to be civic-minded and do the job myself by standing in front of the unusable chairs, only to discover that people do not understand the phrase "THEY'RE WET" unless one pantomimes deluges, hurricanes, tsunamis, etc. i did earn a lot of scowls, and i must give particular commendation to one malay girl who trod on my toes while trying to barge past me to claim one of the seats. this, of course, put me in a simply splendid mood for the rest of the evening.

(and then my mom went out and i had to eat at waffletown.)

yesterday: dinner with jy, cp, yen, fay and, er, steve (can he just be er-steve from now on? i have no idea if it's even appropriate to mention his name here. will the relevant people send assassins if it's not? thank you.) at big fish in siglap. (yes, just like the tim burton film. but without siamese twins and matthew mcgrory.) full credit to jy for finding out about it - the food was really good, and the owner ridiculously patient in putting up with our shenanigans. we had antipasto - smoked salmon, lobster salad, octopus, the works - and then just about every other dish on the menu among us. mussels, garlic-and-butter-drenched, and so much better than the ones i had at oosters once (ugh). seafood cioppino with a gorgeous tomato-based broth. several varieties of fish (rainbow trout, was it?) poached and grilled and what-have-you, and er-steve had squid-ink linguine, which is a dish neither my mom and i have ever dared to try, but which looked, i suppose, as good as squid-ink linguine can. the food was too good for us not to have dessert, so we ordered, among us, banana fritters, creme brulee, tiramisu, and chocolate souffle, by which time we were so stuffed that we ended up staggering home instead of hanging out at fay's house as planned. oh, and cp told a story about his favourite colleague that was so funny i nearly wet my pants, but you're going to have to ask him for that yourself.

i wasn't being entirely facetious with the second molecule. i spent most of my time in the office last week wading through the literature on caffeine and its effects on mood, behaviour, electrophysiology and BOLD imaging. there are a lot of papers, and very little consensus among them. surprising, considering that caffeine is the most commonly used psychostimulant in the world.

(by the way, trawling journal databases is probably the part of my job that i like the least, and there's been a lot of it lately. will call it quits on wednesday.)

the week, in brief

and just because i need more frenzy and panic in my life right now, i go and unearth things like this

Currently reading:
Glass Mountain - Cynthia Voigt

su-lin pointed out to me last night that when i stop blogging it could be one of two tihngs - either i've gone into a depression, or i can't talk about anything because circumstances have gagged me. in case anyone cares, this time it's not the first thing.

backsliding, sort of

i've been working two jobs since last week - someone from nie asked if i would help out on a project for a few months and the money was hard to resist. i think this is the first time in my life that i've done something purely for the sake of money - i feel no love whatsoever for the job (and the-place-that-cannot-be-named doesn't count because at least 2.8% of the reason i was there was to keep nagging parents off my case).

anyway, i think that with this endeavour i have at last crossed back over the line that marks out three standard deviations from center - seriously, how many people in singapore aren't motivated by money when searching for work? when i'm working on this project, all that's on my mind is what the extra dough is going to buy me next month (clothes. it's been a long time.), and i'm pleased, pleased as a puppy in a beanbag, that after all these years of high-falutin ideals i'm getting to indulge in just a tiny bit of normal greed.

Currently reading:
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clarke (Sorry JY. It was in the library, and I couldn't wait for your scheme to come to fruition.)

Drinking is something else. Drinking for me means only wine, and I did not need any Australian to persuade me of its pleasures. I like to brag that I have drunk a glass of wine every day since the second world war, and though this is not true in the fact, since I have spent much time in places where there is no wine, it is true in the principle - the chance of war introduced me to wine, and I never turned away. I believe in wine as I believe in Nature. I cherish its sacramental and legendary meanings, not to mention its power to intoxicate, and just as Nature can be both kind and hostile, so I believe that if bad wine is bad for you, good wine in moderation does nothing but good. If I am ever challenged, I refer people to that seminal work, Wine is the Best Medicine, in which the great Dr. E. A. Maury, pictured on its jacket looking terrifically healthy with a glass of champagne in his hand, prescribes a suitable wine for almost every ailment - Entre-Deux-Mers for rickets, young Beaujolais for diarrhea, two glasses of Sancerre daily to lower the blood pressure...

When I was very young I drank, like most of us, with a lack of discrimination and an unvarying enjoyment that I now envy. Thinking of myself then, I am reminded of the great Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay, who I witnessed drinking, I rather think, his very first glass of wine of any kind. It was at an official banquet in London. I sat next to the very old-school and gentlemanly funcionary who had arranged the occasion, and early in the evening he remarked to me that he hoped I would enjoy the claret, not just the last of its vintage in the official cellars, but perhaps the last in London. I was much impressed, and looked across at Tenzing, who was most certainly enjoying it very much indeed, having as a standard of comparison only the species of alcoholic porridge the Sherpas call tsang. His was a princely figure, and as the lackeys filled and refilled his glass his face shone with pride and pleasure. It was a delight to see him. After a while the old boy on my left turned to me again. "Oh, how good it is to see," he said with the true warmth of approval, "that Mr. Tenzing knows a decent claret when he has one!"

Patricia Volk, When I Became A Gastronome

announcement

i think i've forsaken capital letters. in the past, i used to use small caps when i was being flippant and write properly the rest of the time. laziness, unfortunately, has trumped all, so i'll just make it official, shall i?

wow. a week since my last post. i've been most remiss.

chinese new year was a giant ball of suck, and i don't want to talk about it so don't ask. i will let you know that my boss invited us over to his place -- but only to make a separate point. he lives in one of those condos overlooking ri/rjc, which meant that for the first time in my life i got an aerial view of the campus. what immediately struck me was how everything i disliked about the new school when i first walked through it became irrelevant when looking at it from afar. the sterility and stern colours and general unpleasantness give way when you can see the shape of things. more than the sum of its parts, etc. typical raffles i would say, always about how things look from the outside. the boss pointed out that you can tell what the school's priorities are from how the place is laid out - with the track and tennis courts near the dusty roads and the classrooms tucked away round back (some of us i think probably can't imagine it any other way.)

it also transpires that no one in the lab knew i was a rafflesian, which shows you that all those days really are gone. to think that once upon a time that was how our lives were defined. time passes - but it's things like that that alert you to the fact, that scare you suddenly into the insidious present.

the west wing has been cancelled. i know that a lot of people who liked it back in its salad days gave up on the show once it started becoming crappy (circa the tail end of season 4). you've missed out - the last year or so has been really good, what with alan alda and jimmy smits and janeane garofalo and stephen root(!) joining the cast and debra cahn churning out masterpieces of writing. nevertheless, i'm glad that it's ending this year, and thankfully, the news of cancellation came early enough that the writers will be able to flesh out a proper denouement. it's a good time to wrap up - with bartlet leaving office and the administration moving on to other things - in fact, it's the time i always envisaged the producers would call it quits.

the only bad news: aaron sorkin isn't come back to write the last episode. i can't imagine how someone could create a show and not want to write the finale. my suspicion is that he's still bitter about all the criticism that was levelled at him while he was still writing/producing; if that's the case then he's being awfully childish, and i will not look kindly on studio 7 on the sunset strip when it comes out later this year. (though i will still watch it because i'm weak that way)

memoirs of a geisha

it's watchable, but i've seen spaghetti westerns that are more japanese.

ever since starting my saturday lessons i've found myself proudly telling people that i have "class". to anyone who's been subjected to this and thought i was being a pompous ass, i do apologise. i guess i feel like shouting about it not because the experience is fantastic or anything but because it feels like i'm segueing back onto the right path (i want to say a transition back to being in school full-time, but there's no wood around me to knock on right now).

spent most of saturday manufacturing what felt like a billion pineapple tarts with n. & co. in an oven i doubt i could have fit my head into. this was, i think, my first experience of semi-industrial baking, and from now on i shall remember it whenever i start getting funny business ideas like this one. inertia is definitely not the only thing. the first tray is enjoyable; after that only cussing dulls the pain.

general pastry tips:
1) air-conditioning is your friend
2) what the customer doesn't know can't hurt him
3) carrickfergus is not a baking song

(mostly) for chris

so that we can finally put this argument to rest. (i blame tolkien and company for even making me think about such things.)

as my computer script is running

working overnight. the lab always seems to be a different colour when it's dark outside. yellow-tinted. there's too much light. proper sleep labs keep the illumination constantly below 50 lux, which i would much prefer. it's distressing to be in light for 24 hours, and that's not something people understand unless they've tried it.

it's quiet - until you concentrate and realise that the xserve drives are humming, and the air-conditioning is singing e below middle c.

the lobster in the aquarium has gone into hiding - do they sleep at night? they never talked about that in bermuda. our lobster has several appendages missing; there used to be 2 lobsters but they fought, and as the remaining one would probably say if it could speak: you should have seen the other guy.

the water in that aquarium gets changed about once a year, by the way, and it's been a funny shade of ochre for several months now.

on my desk: an elephantine coffee mug that says "GO AHEAD, I"M ALL EARS", springfresh "azure breeze" air freshener, a siemens calendar, a demotivators desktopper (PROCRASTINATION: Hard work often pays off after time, but laziness always pays off now), a multi-purpose magnetom device, a stack of unmarked neuropsych tests, a permanent marker, several moldy rubber bands, CD-Rs.

and...it's done.

had three lunches today. the first: leftover beehoon from a gathering of general practitioners at the auditorium upstairs. half an hour later, jh called me up to say that he was free to get some food, not something that happens often. this was the first time, however, that we actually succeeded in getting together for anything other than (ugh) delifrance. then there were leftovers from some party or another going begging that looked awfully appetising, and so it was vegetarian thingummies and walnut brownies and very plump, flaky curry puffs. i'm obviously out of control.

i missed the sun.

i have extirpated all traces of my name from this blog. bwahaha.

(i'm currently at one of the peaks of my sinusoidal paranoia function, by the way)

haji

we made pineapple tarts and filled every available airtight container in the house.

the naming of things

so way back in sec 3, when von and yidong and i were working on five people sitting round a table arguing, we had this lengthy discussion on what the play should be called. five people... was the working title or something like that, and i my argument was that you can't call a play five people sitting around a table arguing because it's just not done. von, of course, was all "why ever not, that's what the play's about isn't it?", and "look at shakespeare, most of his plays have titles that tell you exactly what they're about" (facile, yes, but we were young). and so the play was named five people sitting around a table arguing and it won a bunch of stuff -- but that's not the point of the story. The point is: tell me that this isn't funny -

Simply Budget Terminal, Today 10/1/2006

Singapore's first budget terminal has been named - what else? - the Budget Terminal

Transport Minister Yeo Cheow Tong presented the winner of the "Low Cost Terminal Naming Competition" - 15-year-old Jonathan Sng of St Andrew's Secondary School - with a Starhub-sponsored cash prize of $2,000 and a 3G mobile phone, during a site inspection of the completed airport yesterday.

While 44 of the 12,000 or so entries had suggested "Budget Terminal", it was Jonathan's justification for the name - "short, easy to remember, and representative of what the terminal is" - that clinched him the award, said the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore (CAAS).

Other suggestions submitted during the three-month contest period included "Funport", "Seabreeze Terminal", "Oasis Terminal" and "Orchid Air Terminal".

Naming the no-frills airport was a no-brainer for Jonathan, who told Today he thought of it over a few minutes in recess.

Currently reading:
A Fire Upon The Deep - Vernor Vinge

(1/17/06) edited to fix the title because I'm an idiot

pictures mean less reading

as some of you know, i recently acquired a new digital camera (8.5 billion years after the rest of the world, admittedly, but perhaps this is one of those better late than never things?) i was going to post some nice photos up here to commemorate the 900th lot of drivel that you fools have had to read; unfortunately, i haven't actually taken any nice photos yet, so all you're going to get is a close-up of a dog.

here:

From Today, 7/1/2006

(on Donald Trump's repeated casting of female models on The Apprentice)

Beauty queens? You're hired!

...

Trump's preference for beautiful female participants has, understandably, drawn flak

Fortunately, viewers who don't share Trump's predilections can look forward to cameos by Microsoft's Bill Gates and Hollywood's George Lucas.

heart of darkness

i bought a copy, and read it, proving that even when i'm not in school i can somehow manage to be a teacher's pet. permission granted for su-lin's students to hate me. seriously though, as i was telling cp in mph, i felt awfully left out of the measure for measure in-jokes (and bitching) last year and thought that i shouldn't miss out this time round. rjc lit students: i can now understand the true measure of your ignorance!

and of course you know what my favourite bit was:

However, as you see, I did not go to join Kurtz there and then. I did not. I remained to dream the nightmare out to the end, and to show my loyalty to Kurtz once more. Destiny. My destiny! Droll thing life is-- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself--that comes too late--a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be. I was within a hair's breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say. This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it. Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness. He had summed up--he had judged. `The horror!' He was a remarkable man. After all, this was the expression of some sort of belief; it had candour, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth--the strange commingling of desire and hate. And it is not my own extremity I remember best-- a vision of greyness without form filled with physical pain, and a careless contempt for the evanescence of all things--even of this pain itself. No! It is his extremity that I seem to have lived through. True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot. And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible. Perhaps! I like to think my summing-up would not have been a word of careless contempt. Better his cry--much better. It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was a victory! That is why I have remained loyal to Kurtz to the last, and even beyond, when a long time after I heard once more, not his own voice, but the echo of his magnificent eloquence thrown to me from a soul as translucently pure as a cliff of crystal.

my stomach has been a little queasy for the past couple of days, but it was only today that i managed to end up lying on a maincot unable to move for about half an hour. mostly squeezing pain and sweating and giddiness -- all very dramatic symptoms, unfortunately, and there was no way not to involve the boss, who wanted blood amylase tests and all the rest done before he sent me home. (everything came back negative.) blogging from bed and feeling slightly miserable. i think i'll sleep.

no more '05

and...2006. maybe this will be the year. stay happy, everyone!