!!! OMG NEW FAVORITE BAND !!!

 EVERYTHING'S IN JAPANESE. I WILL PRETEND TO KNOW WHAT THEY MEAN, BUT I'M SURE IT'S MOSTLY ABOUT WONDERFUL HAPPY THINGS.

there is a happiness to be found in yellow squash

Today, I made three hyperexotic wholemeal pizzas. I woke up and the sun was up and I was like, Shit, I've got the entire day to myself. What can I ever do to occupy myself all day? I've forgotten how it's like to wake up without needing to meet anyone or do anything for someone other than Me Me Me, so I was of course thrilled and happy. 

As always, my grandparents quickly found things for me to do. I had to buy slippers, a mobile phone, bank in a cheque and get afternoon tea by the time I flipped open The Straits Times. 

To cut to the chase, I wound up in Orchard and took a stroll from Far East Plaza to Plaza Singapura. I went to Carrefour and spent 50 bucks on three bags of exotic produce. No cai xin and kai lan for me! I zoned in on yellow squash, fennel, wild rocket, baby spinach and grape tomatoes (which aren't exactly that exotic either, but at least they don't use hanyu pinyin in their names.) I also procured buffalo mozzarella and parmigiano reggiano, and my hand hovered over some mould-covered goat cheese but I managed to contain similar Urges. 

Anyway, I spent the entire afternoon in the kitchen having some Me Time (in a parodically Sensitive New Age Guy manner, of course) and kneading pizza dough, while mournfully recapitulating all that went wrong in my Literature Paper 5 Drama P5. Lifts and bangs. I had a hard time with the dough, because it turned out shaggy, sticky and very hostile to my kneading. The kitchen became gluten hell. However, I added more wholemeal flour and tamed the dough somewhat. This type of satisfaction is difficult to attain in everyday situations. Lifts and bangs. 

I was not about to add pineapples and ham because I'd rather scrape my teeth on a smoking pizza stone than make a dumb old Hawaiian pizza with homemade dough. For the first pizza, I drizzled olive oil, fresh rosemary and freshly minced garlic all over slivers of yellow squash. I stupidly forgot to take a picture of the pizza after it came out of the oven, but this is pretty enough. (I love yellow squash.)

The next pizza was a slightly more experimental. I caramelized onions and fennel together and spread them over the dough. Next I sautéed asparagus and weaved them into strips of smoked salmon, casually and effortlessly scattering them over the dough much like they do in Iron Chef. Or Top Chef. I don't know my cooking shows very well. Anyhow, I finished it off with wild rocket and chopped walnuts, though I think it could have done with more caramelized onions. 

The last pizza had tomatoes and very pricey buffalo mozzarella, which I adored, so it wasn't so hard on the pocket. It came out of the oven and I remembered to take a picture.

There was also soup. I made a cold soup of yoghurt, dill and cucumber. It was surprisingly well-received; in actuality, I was expecting Asian-style Cultural Alienation And Familial Abjection when I offered everyone chilled soup. Perhaps the humidity of the afternoon had radically changed tastes and preferences. In any case, I hope to introduce gazpacho in days to come.

Phew! Who knew that procrastination could be so exhausting?

friday

Urrp! Bestie x Bestie Episode 2 is out! This is a pretty good week! Yay! In other news, I managed to consult the elusive and enigmatic Mr H for the first/last time in my life. Also, I did not eat bibimbap today, and will have it for lunch tomorrow. Definitely. (Also hankering for something breakfasty and oniony and maple syrupy tomorrow.)

Dinner Menu For Stressed People With Nevertheless Adventurous Tastes

soup

cucumber, yoghurt and dill soup

salad

lightly curried roasted grape tomatoes, arugula, mint, lime

starter

apple and smoked mozzarella mini-calzones

mains

kefta and zucchini kebabs

bulgar and spinach pilaf

dessert

chocolate caramel tart

why I ruled out teaching as viable career choice

Reason #1:

A 57-page lesson plan revolving around the children's picture-book, The Enormous Turnip.

YO IMMA DEFENDING MY NATION BITCHES

Actually, I'm dead exhausted now after administering a Kick to myself in my dream earlier. It had two levels:

Level 2: I am at a Velocity-type shopping mall with ABA looking at sports apparel and engaged in a very trivial conspiracy. As I pick up an orange dri-fit t-shirt from the rack, something explodes somewhere, and a large aluminum water bottle falls on me from a shelf high up on the ceiling. 

Level 1: I wake up and find myself sitting on the carpeted floor of a medium-sized padded room with other choir members who have already graduated. It appears to be a large hotel, because there are gaudy gold swirls all over the room. Ms T bursts in wearing a large flowy gown and tells me to come into another room to give a pep talk, and I am extremely apprehensive about it. I walk out of the room, realising I am in fact also wearing a suit. On the way out, I meet Ms Th, WE and J in their choir gowns, and we start running really quickly along the corridor, with the white paneled walls blurring past. After a while, I realise I am in a dream, and WE tries to give me a kick (i.e. kill me) by hitting me repeatedly with a blunt object.

Reality: I wake up with the sun in my eyes and groan slightly, with my sister fretting about after the A Maths paper.

And then during dinner, my dad casually informed me that I'm enlisting on the 9th of February 2011. FUN TIMES LIE AHEAD FOR ME, SHOWERS OF GRATITUDE FOR LIFE CROWDED WITH INCIDENT. + LOVED ONES WHO PROMISED TO SEND ME OFF, PLS REMEMBER THANKS. NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS, IMAGINED COMMUNITIES, YAY.

!!! THINGS ABOUT BIBIMBAP !!!

BIBIMBAP

BIBIMBAP

BIBIMBAP

BIBIMBAP

cribs

My recent and disgusting gentrification fantasy, conceived while walking around Toa Payoh Industrial Estate with a cutesy Diana Mini and wearing American Apparel:

The leases for industrial spaces finally expire, and people can now buy old factory and warehouse units as homes. The corridor on the fourth floor is sooty with oil stains and no amount of wallpaper or lavender-and-clove parfums can ever cover up the smell of turpentine and sawdust, but it's all OK and cool, because I can strip off the old chipped tiles to expose the smooth concrete and call it Post-Industrial Deconstructionism. I suppose it could complement the sleek lines on the Miele induction range in the microkitchen. (Who can, of course, leave out the mandatory Kitchen Aid in the corner? In blood orange, no less.) The entryway can squeeze only three (extremely waif, Nordic-looking, portfolio-toting) people with space left for maybe a large wooden easel for my keys, and maybe three vintage recycled-paper gift tags hanging from cream-painted walls. A garden gnome dressed as a pink flamingo stands at the gate, because it is ironic. 

Upon entry, my footsteps create loud echoes because the ceiling is so high, and because I have stripped off all the plaster and installed steel beams to suspend the rice paper mobiles that a performance-artist friend from Belorussia created for my birthday. Come in, I motion to you, and you leave your (comme des garcons knitted) shawl hanging on a chrome hook next to the easel. The sitting room (no one does living rooms like they used to anymore, you demur while spritzing your face with an evian atomizer) opens up to large windows with the bamboo blinds drawn up. It is also cool to reuse old milk crates, and I have covered the entire height and length of one wall with crates-as-shelves, filled with first edition Nabokovs, maybe some Walser (they are so hard to come by these days, I explain) and old Super 8 film cameras. I play a recording of Arvo Pärt's Summa for string orchestra, and you recline on a Le Corbusier chaise lounge. (So ubiquitous, you condescend.)

While you ask me about my work in the Susan Sontag Foundation and my thoughts on Jung's Synchronicity, I stare into the depths of my glass of 1999 Château-Chalon, feeling screwed existentially within this nightmare. 

halloween

Domestic Worker is expected to arrive sometime at the end of this week. It sounds like we're waiting for the delivery of a new refrigerator. No.

I hung out with the A, MX and S after KI today. We went to Aston's, where I had a sirloin steak for the first time in a very long while. I ate the charred fat. Loved it. We sat under a broken Tiffany's pendant lamp, listening to bad country music, discussing Why It Would Be Totally Awesome To Live In Serangoon Gardens, and observing (with a mixture of horror and amusement) A take a short after-meal nap.

I'm not sure of my feelings for steak. I'm not sure of my feelings for chicken. I'm not sure of my feelings for the onion rings that were included in my sides. I am, however, sure of my feelings for the bitchin' good chocolate ice cream from Awfully Chocolate. ("I AM SO HAPPY NOW. I AM SO HAPPY RIGHT NOW," thrilled MX.) There I sat, shell-shocked, confident, that I had just experienced something life-changing. Sunlight streamed through the full-length glass windows. Nearby, kahlua chocolate truffles sat inside a glass case, watching the lazy traffic of a mid-afternoon amble past.

Plagued by the guilt of having recently consumed rich and divine foods, S and I decided to walk to Paya Lebar MRT station. I like covering great distances — when I go back to NYC again, I'm going to walk the entire length of Broadway, from Lower Manhattan to the Bronx. (OK, maybe with a group of friends.) Am thinking: if J and N go to NYU and I do get to Columbia, I swear I'm going to drag them on This Great NY Expedition, armed with coffee cups, trudging through grey wintery sludge and swearing profusely + profoundly. 

notes

1. This is supposedly the last day of school, but here I am, finding myself packing my school bag for lessons tomorrow. It makes the farewell concert a very elaborate farce, but in a good way, because it was so campy to begin with. (K-pop parodies and photomontages of the same people over and over again, anyone?) It was all very showy good fun. I especially loved the lit department's item, in which Ms W rekindled old wounds wrought from the "zen koan" form, Ms C and T went clubbing and sang songs, while Ms N emerged resplendent in green uniform as Lit Ingenue Most Annoying and proceeded to make frantic and panicked phone calls to her tutors. Sigh, literature pride — now to get my grubby, ink-stained hands on a certain 100 pounds + work on brilliance of expression because every essay is now a delicate performance that straddles a very bohemian sort of impetuousness with the controlled persuasion of the rational mind.

2. Also, the Importance of Being Earnest themed party was sort-of-a-success. Ms C and N came in with cucumber sandwiches and muffins from Cedele, and I brought in carrot cake cupcakes, having worked my ass off grating three damn cups of carrots by hand for the whole of yesterday afternoon. (For the record, I only do this for people I truly love.) For tea, we had bottled ice lemon tea and green tea from Pokka, which can, I guess, in theory, be still considered "tea" if standards and expectations were to be lowered. However, movements were not delicate, and dainty pinky action was painfully forced. Wilde continues to roll in his grave.

3. A brief moment of quiet introspection: do I really want to spend 8 years of my life in the public service? Or do I just want to want?

4. The medication I'm taking for my leprosy — I mean, the zit from hell — has weight-gain as a side-effect.  (Source: Wikipedia.) It's all about trade-offs: one can either be slim and covered in acne, or of impeccable complexion but morbidly obese. Life sucks inasmuch as appearances concern you the most.

5. Sister is bemoaning the loss of a mark because of one mistake in the vocabulary section of the English Paper. National examination fever has now descended upon the Lee household, but my grandparents' mobile phone ferment continues to exist unrivaled. 

What I Would Talk About When I Talk About Running, Not That I'm Insane Enough To Think In Prose While Crossing The Finish Line

This Nike 10k T-shirt is really bright.

Oh, look, I'm only at the 3 km mark.

I can't run and drink from a paper cup at the same time, stupid.

I wish I didn't eat those Sweet Onion Kettle Chips for breakfast.

I wish it was a Saturday.

I wish the ground would open up and spew lava, forcing the run to be cancelled. Now.

Hey, I've been here before.

I wish a massive brown cloud would come our way, bringing the PSI to 2000 and forcing the run to be cancelled. At once.

I wish I ignored the last kilometre-marker and had a pleasant surprise upon discovering a 2 km advancement.

I wish I fell into a warp in the space-time fabric to find myself at crossing the finish line.

Oh, look, 3 km left.

Damn, I see my juniors. Avoid avoid avoid.

Do I have mini cupcake liners at home?

I don't appreciate the victory gestures you made while overtaking.

Look who's laughing now, dumbasses.


The finishing line. About time, too. The clock says 30:20. Seriously? Clock, do you mock me? Meh I'll just check my D-Tag timing online.

SHITE I FORGOT TO THINK OF S AND A but I'll think of them as I collect my bag. They'll be forgiving.

I feel weak and fragile.

The finishers' item this year looks like the Ribena blackcurrant on crystal meth, seriously.

I FLIP MY HAIR BACK AND FORTH

AM: Woke up. First conversation I had was with my grandmother who wanted me to get her a mobile phone. I'm thinking, what's new. While eating a roasted soya bean and pumpkin seed mix (delicious, by the way), I contemplated ways to work around the Mobile Phone Issue. I thought of feigning death, and having seen how she handled my grandfather's stroke, I would most likely be left alone on the floor. Alternatively, I could also burst out crying, ripping off my t-shirt and smearing Greek yoghurt violently and agitatedly all over my hair to scare her out of the kitchen. 

I am not a mean grandson — it's just that vision and hearing-impaired octogenarians and near-microscopic devices do not a happy partnership make. I found a company that designs mobile phones for "seniors", but the emergency SOS button at the back of every handset is more likely to invite countless false alarms than give us a peace of mind. 

LATER: Met J and C at AMK library. C, being smaller and more agile, sprinted into the library as the glass doors slid open and the crowd of studious and desperate teenagers diffused sullenly inside. My slipper fell off while I politely elbowed and shoved my way up the stairs. Also: met SY, LM, MX (who seemed genuinely shocked to encounter me) and C (on the bus, telling me about her new house in Bishan). Tried to complete a brilliant essay on Duffy; heartbreak ensued. Brushed up case study knowledge for SEA history; dozed off. Bibimbap lunch = new favourite meal.

PM: Went to NTUC to purchase baking supplies for carrot cake cupcakes. I remembered to get everything but the carrots.

TOMORROW: Nike 10k Run — may I magically develop streamlined features on my body and slice through the haze like a hot knife through butter. May I also have a life-altering Forrest Gump moment as I dash past the Nigerian/Tanzanian/Jamaican/etc. guest runners at the last 500 metres. May I not pass out 5  minutes into the race. May I wake up on time. 

surreal cheese

Omg I'm totally loving this simultaneous depreciation of the USD + appreciation of the SGD + discovery of awesome online shopping + FREE SHIPPING DAMMIT + financial hubris + slightly pompous feeling one gets from saving a tonne of cash + the impending arrival of seriously inordinate amounts of free time + the impending arrival of a life with an income (no matter how meagre) + flux of life, 'play' of the text, genius in art + other aesthetic shit + contemplating moving to williamsburg, growing a beard and writing for pitchfork in new life as hipster-aesthete + the phrase "thumb drives vanish like summer bubbles" + addition signs + the fact that the Lit Tees are only 10 bucks apiece! + quality tea + edgy interview-wear + et merda et merda et merda

Also see:

Umbilical Cord iPhone Charger

notes

1. I will be very dramatic if the Nike 10k marathon is cancelled due to astronomically high PSI levels. 

2. Everyone is suddenly in a relationship (almost). A revival of the Temasek Lonely Hearts Club is in order.

3. Ambitions for the coming week: write a brilliant 24/25 mark lit essay, bake magnificent desserts, run 10 km in choking haze, re-read novels by Robert Walser, actually decide on something concrete to study in college.

4. My favourite Radio Dept. song went mysteriously missing early this week, and I have found it again. I am overjoyed to have it restored to me. It is most propitious. 

5. My family's hiring a domestic worker to take care of my grandparents. I'm not sure how I feel about it at the moment.

6. Purchased: The Collected Dorothy Parker (Penguin, 2001) Whore of Kinokuniya, me.

7. I NEED TO GET AN A FOR ECONS, IT'S VERY BAD VERY BAD + KNOWLEDGE OF CASE STUDIES FOR SEA HISTORY SUDDENLY— RAPIDLY— SUCKING. 

dismantling the bullshit of self-deception

Recently, a zit has appeared on my right cheek conveniently right smack in graduation photo-taking season. On a black-and-white recording of my practice interview this afternoon, it showed up as a dark mole almost engulfing my entire cheek. Coupled with the sense of the Uncanny, after viewing myself from the outside and experiencing the dissonant juxtaposition of the familiar and the unfamiliar, I am left with bad psychological scars that will haunt me in recurring nightmares, forever. (Additionally, in the style of Hollywood genre conventions, I will jolt upright in bed and my eyes will immediately widen in terror.)

Loving this:

There should be something about you

in the poem. But

there is just me

being stupid. 

It's by Tao Lin.

to bake

1. Beet cupcakes
2. Chocolate stout cake
3. Nutella cream cheese swirl brownies
4. Carrot cake with maple cream cheese frosting (for graduation day!)
5. Deep chocolate sour cream pound cake
6. Buttermilk red velvet cupcakes with brown sugar cream cheese frosting
7. Chewy molasses chocolate chip cookies

oriental chicken

I don't know why I'm so sleepy. Lately, I have been taking long afternoon naps. This is most uncharacteristic of me, because I detested these siestas as a child. Either (1) muji sheets are so darn inviting or (2) I have a sleeping disorder and have 2 months left to live. Anyway, chocolate at Max Brenner's was a little disappointing for me, only because I ordered the hot white chocolate drink which tasted most uncannily like Anlene. I'm glad I caught up with friends, though! We had soup after that, so it wasn't too bad. (I'm sleepy so this post will be brief, by my standards.)

notes

1. I want to write about one of the two important things that happened today involving a life jet-setting around the world being BFFs to leaders everywhere and living in a manhattan loft while writing brilliant research papers (this is, of course a grossly over-romanticised view), but bearing in mind the lack of privacy this blog affords, I'd rather not blurt. You can ask me in person. It was so nice talking to everyone, though! Also: thank you, J for supporting me at the starbucks base camp!* While waiting, I wished A and S were present too, but oh well, such is the way the cookie crumbles. (I think: I wonder what flavour this metaphorical cookie is. I also recall: Quiznos has mind-blowing, life-changing cookies that you must eat.) 
2. The other important thing: MY GRAMPS IS BACK, I MISSED/LOVE HIM SO. Thank God he recovered well, but now he's more frail and doesn't speak much. I want my father to get a new TV for him. I would forgo my iPhone 4 (as if that has crossed my parents' minds!) for that. Once, a very long time ago, I wept at a silly memory of him bringing me to kindergarten and entertaining my classmate. 
3. I'm going to bake a carrot cake with my DG on Saturday! I hope it turns out edible. I also hope it will be a good-looker.
4. NYT - The Frisbee of Art — ellipses are everywhere. This is worth a read.
5. I HAS STARBUCKS CARD!
6. Now reading: Rilke, Tagore, Sontag. Will move on to Kafka by next week. 
7. My sister's reading Off Centre by Haresh Sharma for Lit. It's a play that is tremendous and overwhelming, while speaking in the language and vocabularies of the underclass and the marginalised. I hope they stage it again!

*I shall refer to my friends by their initials because it's so classy, like in espionage movies. I love it!

sites of identification

Being Sontag-whore, I purchased Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, a selection of journal and notebook entries by Susan Sontag edited by her son, David Rieff. Naturally, this sparked off a series of comparisons in which I trawled the pages for glimpses of myself in the person of Sontag. I am taking the cultural phenomenon of fan-boying to creepier and more shameless levels. 

Susan, age 15:

... And what is it to be young in years and suddenly wakened to the anguish, the urgency of life?

It is then to be blind to the faults of the rebellious, to yearn painfully, wholly, after all opposites of childhood's existence. It is impetuousness, wild enthusiasm, immediately submerged in a flood of self-deprecation. It is the cruel awareness of one's own presumption...

Me, age 15:

I look at my report book as if it was a bad smell. I type and get more frustrated because language is such a limiting way of expressing oneself, despite the supposed vastness of vocabulary and diction available. As if we pick up stock words and phrases from a supermarket shelf and arrange them nicely in the cart. I am infuriated when caught in the whole pretence of cultural constructs and expectations, and the roles, and the expectations, and the responsibilities, and the expectations.

(Well sure, she obviously articulates teenage angst with greater elegance than I do.)

Susan, age 15:

Wasted the evening with Nat [Nathan Sontag, SS's stepfather]. He gave me a driving lesson and then I accompanied him and pretended to enjoy a Technicolor blood-and-thunder movie.

After writing this last sentence, I read it again and consider[ed] erasing it. I should let it stand, though.—It is useless for me to record only the satisfying parts of my existence—(There are too few of them anyway!) Let me note all the sickening waste of today, that I shall not be easy with myself and compromise my tomorrows.

Me, age 15:

And my father is complaining about the teachers who have started to call in sick already. (Before I had to fix the "My Gmail's all in Hebrew!" problem.) I asked Esther where the postcard box was, and she said Isn't it that G&H thing? and I said No I think we've changed it now, so she got up and found the old biscotti box that we transferred the postcards to and I said Oh I remember now! And we were happy. [...]

Am I so bored? Do I have to resort to mentioning such insignificant bits of information henceforth? I'm just tired of learning things that I don't feel much for. 

(Hey! We had share the same experience of futility and embarrassment in our writing and recording of our lives! We could have been besties. Intellectual Besties, of course.)

Susan, age 16:

I was very moved by Goethe, although I think I'm far from understanding it—the Marlowe is just about mine though — for I put in a good deal of time into it, re-reading it several time, and declaiming many of the passages aloud again and again. 

Me, age 16:

I've just returned home from watching wall-e with elizabeth! It is exponentially more appealing than the clone wars. Ha. 

On a sliding scale of Pixar movies, it's in the same league as The Incredibles, and better than last year's Ratatouille. At least, I've never gone misty-eyed as a result of watching robots holding hands to tunes that seem to come from a crackly old transistor radio (in actuality, it was a grimy iPod nano. I guess in years to come, that could translate to a kind of romanticism for people like us).

(I am not exceedingly insightful when comparing works of art, am I? Still, I don't say things like the Harper Lee is just about mine though, etc.)

Susan, age 16:

I HAVE BEEN ACCEPTED TO CHICAGO WITH A SCHOLARSHIP OF $765

Me, age 16:

I've returned home, and I noticed that I had an email from Them.

It redirected me to the ISP where I was informed by an electronically-generated message that I did not get in. But it came with best wishes! I am so deeply touched. 

Shall invest my time somewhere more worthwhile then.

(Clearly, you can see the juxtaposition between our various fates. Well here I am, and I haven't looked back since.) 

fragmentation

to eat

1. Veganburg
2. wild rocket at mount emily
3. Fou de Fafa
4. Awfully Chocolate (I know right? I HAVE NOT EATEN ANYTHING FROM THERE STILL. ASHAMED.)
5. Naive
6. PS Cafe
7. The newly-renovated Canele at Raffles City

what did you have for dinner today?

In the same Google Image search, these pictures turned up on the same page:

sudden organ

Beardsley claimed, somewhat heroically, that aesthetic experience is distinguished by its unity, intensity and complexity. Dickie argued, in reply, that such characeristics were either not plausibly necessary conditions of aesthetic experience, or else that Beardsley's description of them was inadequate. Part of Dickie's attack was completely beside the point, since he confused aesthetic experiences with the experiences of works of art; the fact that some experiences of works of art are not as Beardsley describes is, or should be, irrelevant. But it cannot be denied that Dickie was right that even if the problems of characterizing the three features were resolved, it would still not be remotely plausible that the three Beardsleyian features are necessary (or sufficient) conditions of aesthetic experience. Nevertheless, all that would show would be that Beardsley's account of the aesthetic is inadequate. That Beardsley's extraordinary and heroic Trinitarian doctrine cannot be maintained does not mean that the notion of the aesthetic should be abandoned. That would be a flawed induction from a single instance. 

(from SEP, by Nick Zangwill)

the selby is not in my place (2)

From top to bottom:
i. Entrance to The Lair
ii. I miss my math teacher and his adorkable ways
iii. FEMALE cookbook 1979
iv. CAN YOU SAY FLAN PARTY>>???>
v. Dioramic scene from the Cupboard of Kitsch. Note: plastic cockatoo, teachers' day quote, Nineties-era McDonalds porcelain figure and miniature tangerine tree.
vi. An old book I found lying around detailing the short lives of other people. Published by Picador.
vii. For example, Billie Holiday had a short life.

150 years of photojournalism

Whee so I'm blogging from the KI library when I should really be doing notes for East-West philosophy. PRIORITIES, WHAT PRIORITIES?

Anyway, prelim results have come screaming back today. Woe is me! Melancholia, ambivalence, etc. etc.

I'm trying to convince myself that one day, I'll look back at these times and feel as sense of longing and nostalgia. But that would only remind me of the Duffy question, the memory of which only brings me heartache and palpitations.

Gonna go for KOI. Question of the hour: should I reward myself with new books? Pragmatist says no, but (rogue) economist says yes. Sigh @ vulgar ubiquity of middle-class dilemma.

notes

1. Seven days left to my monthly allowance... I am excited. 
2. I cannot study in a group environment. People are so distracting!
3. Today, I visited the Istana for the first time in my life. I did not emerge more patriotic, but did learn new phrases to describe movements in and out of palatial grounds. Also, was interviewed by local Chinese newspaper. Charmed.
4. Excerpt from Sontag's On Photography: "While photographs fill out our mental image of the past, the photographs being taken now transform what is present into a mental image, like the past." 
5. Fake money saves Brazil from hyperinflation – this is interesting: through the manipulation of people's attitudes towards an unstable currency, brilliant economists save the day. 
6. I dreamt about being in a Broadway retrospective, and was cast as a gollum in a variant of the musical Wicked. I didn't rehearse with the cast at all, I missed all the cues for my song-and-dance numbers, and Ian McKellen was backstage. It was humiliating.

"painterly"

I love this acoustic version of 100,000 fireflies.

I'm inordinately nervous about tomorrow. It's going to be KI, Lit and SEA history all at once like grenades being thrown while you're chained to some hideous chair. But what can I do, really? I'll just pick up the pieces and continue walking, only this time a stronger person with the wind in my hair and chocolate all over my face. 

PMSL

WATCH THIS



AND THIS



YOU'LL THANK ME.

mmm linen

I am very, very excited about trying out my silky-soft Muji bedspread tonight. Seersucker. Am inveterate Muji whore. But IKEA works for me too.

(Spent the whole of 4 minutes trying to announce this in non-skanky, value-neutral way.)

I like italics

Urgh woke up today to an empty house and my grandmother's slow walk to the kitchen. I'm bringing her to visit my grandfather again. I hope it rains forever. Cathedrals in the water.

teeth

susan and friends, or, things I did today

So, feeling slightly bored after school, I went down to Kinokuniya (surprise, surprise) intending to wither away my life savings on books that I need to read. There is always a grating discomfort, like a knot in my chest, when I discover a book that I NEED to read but fail to appropriate. It's like a little blonde pixie braids my alveoli together whenever that happens, and when I finally choke to death, it will flit out of my half-open, frothing mouth to deliver a friendship bracelet that will somehow land the story of my life in Chicken Soup for the Book Lover's Soul or Paranormal Activity. 

Anyway, my hand hovered around the S section and snatched Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963 independent of my conscious, rational mind. After floating around the Literature, Sleazy Romance Novel and Game Fiction shelves, my hand snatched Camera Lucida and Poem of the Deep Song. Realizing the folly of my ways, (and my forgetting to bring the membership card that would have entitled me to fabulous and dazzling offers beyond my wildest bookslut fantasies,) I placed the books back, making impassioned, if not unrealistic, vows to return someday.

That day exists only beyond the horizon of my knowledge.

Overcome with despair, I ordered a plate of roast pork when I had lunch with my family at Zhou's Kitchen. It's a nice place with impossibly uncomfortable seats and stiff-lipped waitresses. It's the furthest my family can go with my grandparents, but my grandmother still takes half an hour to walk from one end of Novena Square to the other. The roast pork arrived in neat cubes that were accompanied with a lacing of mustard. The mustard was dry. About 748 other dishes arrived shortly after that, including Salted Crab with Salty Beehoon and Salt (tossed with a handful of spring onions as a sort of defeatist afterthought,) and a noxious stew of fermented soybean paste with vegetables (that necessitated a comparison to Japanese natto to reassure ourselves of the bourgeoise value of its near-formidable pungency.) Not every dish tested our thresholds of taste and adventure though; the spring roll (singular, because it was enormous) with wasabi mayo fascinated us, and the coffee pork ribs with toasted almonds were, for lack of a more suitable description, freaking nice. The ribs were meaty and the portions were generous. We were stuffed and faintly disgusted with ourselves.

After lunch, my parents (with granny in tow) went to the hospital to visit my grandfather, while Esther and I went for pre-examinations retail therapy because we would only visit my gramps in the evening slot, and because we needed to. She bought herself new TOMS! Good for her! People light up when they first slip their feet into the soft hugging fabric, and immediately forget about the exorbitant prices at the hipster-shoe monopoly that is rockstar. They rationalize that a poor child, likely to be really ethnic, like African or Asian, would receive a pair of shoes in their thatched-hut villages, and then fantasize about their philanthropy for the rest of the week. But amidst the several levels of exploitation, the Feel Good that comes with the purchase of a pair lasts as long as the shoes last. I love TOMS. I also love rockstar for bringing them in. The capitalization of the brand name is just a little annoying. 

In the evening we visited my grandfather, who has been asking every visitor to give him ten dollars so that he might take a taxi back home. We are like, No but you can't be discharged yet, and he's like The hospital already sent us the bill, and I can go home, mostly vocalized in rough growls. It breaks my heart to see him disheveled in blue pajamas in this blue ward with clashing green curtains and the heaving, moist jowls beneath oxygen masks wherever I turn; no amount of store-hopping could ever complete me.