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.