needles

Hey guys, this is why I look tired all the time:

Quasi-autobiographical account of an evening; some elements are fictive but the general spirit is left intact

1710: Everyone but the duty crew leaves the medical centre.

1730: Dinner arrives in microwavable white boxes. People enter the pantry, open the boxes and their mood level is all JOHN DOE HAS ENCOUNTERED A BAD MEAL, MINUS TEN MOOD POINTS. This is because they open the boxes and discover that dinner is staring back at them through the charred, gelatinous flesh of their bulbous eyes and eye-stems. I make instant ramen from meidi-ya (butter salt broth and dehydrated potatoes!! Dehydrated potatoes!!) and hide in a corner to use the internet and weep into the deeply aromatic broth with the dehydrated potatoes. I gaze at the dehydrated potatoes swelling up to their full potential. This is somewhat moving.

1800: In preparation for my upcoming vacation, I am browsing Frommer's for "best pho in Hanoi", but I realize I am using the wrong language to do this. Meanwhile I notice the butter salt broth congealing.

1900: Chats with colleague about traveling to Vietnam. "Samuel I suggest you go to China," he says repeatedly in-between my indignant protests. "I was in Beijing and I had a total culture shock," he continues, valiantly confronting his memories of the harrowing plumbing in 1990s China, "they don't close the doors when they poop. The plateaus were amazing." I inform him the plateaus might have, on a subconscious level, inspired his new haircut. Little of my humour is appreciated by others.

2000: Someone else enters the room looking for people to play bridge with. None of us know how to play bridge.

2030: Filled with self-loathing, I throw away what's left of dinner.

2130: After almost completing my Google map of places to visit in Hanoi, a patient arrives. Ignoring the general rule that reporting sick at night should be for urgent cases, he arrives with a runny nose, smelling vaguely of damp rags and suet.

2200: A unit screws up administration for some medical certification and announce their arrival while the doctor tries to call McDelivery. Everyone is irked.

2230: Someone else arrives. "Doctor I can't take it anymore," he weeps. I leave the room to complete the last pin on my beautiful map representing the temporary and symptomatic relief of (romanticized) Florence Nightingale duties. When I soar through the clouds on the wonderful Boeing representing my hopes and dreams, I am going to point back at everyone on the ground with a sort of misplaced sense of schadenfreude.

0000: Someone from outfield is sent here for insect bites. I give him diclofenac and promethazine shots ("one on the arm, another on the bum!"). A lot of screaming and swearing ensues. "Let it all out," I say as calmly as I can, "just let it all out." This session of treatment ends with the both of us shaking hands.

0130: "Should we sleep?" we collectively wonder. Something in the air tells me otherwise, but I fall asleep anyway.

0300: The phone rings. Or was it a dream? It rings again. I answer the call. "We're sending one guy over for physical exhaustion" says the voice. Once again, I am filled with self-loathing. I eat an apple pie.

0328: I am using a rectal probe to measure his temperature.

0332: I am removing his mud-caked boots to do an ECG on him. Mud falls onto my pristine floor in clumps. This makes me very unhappy.

0343: A few of us are transferring him to the sickbay.

0400: I collapse on the bed, but is there anyone around to make sure my airway is clear and that I am breathing? Noooooo...

0530: One of the damn phones wakes me up.

0730: I flee to another room to get some sleep. PEOPLE KEEP ENTERING AND LEAVING THE ROOM. I chant in my head, Don't go to sleep with a frown in your pocket, take it to the yard and tie it to a rocket, shoot it to the moon you'll feel better soon, don't go to bed with a frown (repeat). 

1000: I wake up cussing.

23

Because I'm not comfortable with posting this on Facebook and making this so amenable to Likes:

Dear Mrs Yeap,

If only you could remember the 13 year old who grovelled to you about being forced into the choir... Look at me now. I love singing, I love choir, I love the music that you taught me about from the very beginning. It's so hard to shed any tears - I can't shed a tear at all - because I don't regret any second of doing what I did in school and am even planning to do now and in the future. I'm so incredibly blessed you refused to let me go, kept me in with your strong-headedness, saying how much fun I'd have in Perth, playing candlelight soccer, performing on stage, so many things we've done in four terribly short years.

I will also now say that you were an inspiration to us all, and even saying that you motivated us all the way would be grossly shortchanging you of your amazing dedication, one that I used to be skeptical about but am now utterly, and humbly, convinced of. You were as knitted to the choir as much as the music we sang ,and for that I thank you. You've taught me the mysterious beauty of chords (I will always remember Happy Chords, Sad Chords and Diminished Chords because I do this in jest, and now with a somewhat burdening saudade) and the gorgeous aesthetics of sounds and harmonies and resonances. I love that these things are going to stick with me for life, and in these wonderful moments you do live on.

Once I laughed when you told us you believed that everyone has a guardian angel in heaven watching over us. I still don't quite believe that, but in a metaphorical way that just completely makes sense now, because you will always be with XM Chorale, in every song we sing, moving quietly through the bars and the notes, there in every breath, every final bow.

hello

blinis n shrooms

This rain has been so kind, complementing my inner landscapes with the pathetic fallacy of constant and frigid drizzling and a Hallmark Channel sunset, the combination of which behooves me crawl into bed and emerge periodically for the profound joy of hot oatmeal porridge and lentil stew + blowing my nose into a kleenex, because I guess you can't have it all. 

Tomorrow's power breakfast is:

guacamole 

Swedish cardamom toast (courtesy of my favorite Scandinavian store, PrisXtra, just kidding, Ikea.)

miso soup

I have no thoughts or opinions about anything at the moment, but I am now planning for my happy fantasy getaway to New York in time for Spring 2013! I hope my dreams and wishes will ALL COME TRUE (this includes a certain poetic justice dealt out to a certain problem patient but I will not deign to discuss this further here.)

beautiful debris of time

-------------

From BODY, SPACE, IMAGE: notes towards improvisation and performance:

YAWNING

LET THE SOFT PALATE OPEN UPWARDS

INTO THE DOME OF THE HEAD

LET THE YAWNS OPEN THE INTERIOR SPACES OF THE BODY

THE BREATH IS THE MEANS BY WHICH THE INSIDE OF THE BODY KNOWS THE OUTSIDE

LET THE AIR SUPPORT YOU LIKE WATER

LET THE BREATH TRAVEL DOWN

OPENING THE GATEWAYS

OF SHOULDERS

ELBOWS

WRISTS

KNEES

ANKLES

LET THE BREATH FILL YOU TO YOUR FULL SIZE

ON THE OUT BREATH

LET GO

OF TIREDNESS

PAIN

WAITING

LET THE BREATH GIVE THE BODY

T I M E

YAWNING    LENGTHENING   STRETCHING   FOLDING   ROLLING

EACH BREATH A DIFFERENT STORY

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Samuel Palmer, Self-portrait (?1828)

I love this painting because his distracted gaze appears vaguely defiant, resigned, lonely even. The sadness is quiet but simultaneously confrontational. It's fascinating and super-poignant. It's also interesting that it evokes similar feelings one might get from a Francis Bacon or a Jenny Saville portrait, as if Palmer's sensibilities were reborn in new forms of style and technique. I love art that is sad.

-------------

My grandparents' celebrated their 60th anniversary today. When I'm 80, will I be surrounded with people I love, and who love me? How will my world look like through lenses tinted slightly rosier by cataracts and presbyopia, wisdom and experience, knowledge and heartache? I hate speaking in future tense.

hangnails

This is my life thus far: I am googling "ingrown toenail home remedy", an hour ago I felt like hiding under my new duvet and crying because for a few minutes I became acutely aware of the temporality everything (my eyes kept searching, desperately, for something immutable but all I saw was the tragedy of decay), I am filled with this incredible sense of remorse after doing some facebook stalking because there are some pictures that just cannot be unseen (everyone is embarrassed by these) and this is all my doing and I only have myself to blame, and I had a double McSpicy for dinner. 

I think I can't identify exhaustion even if it hits me repeatedly in the face with a nebulizer.

Is this post just another way of saying the same thing? "I am tired, and how so:"

random stuff I have read and thought interesting

Concepts of Modern Art: from Fauvism to Postmodernism:

This is a book about modern art. It contains phrases such as ritual accepted as referring to a transcendent realm and In spite of an initial concern with the architectonics of stained glass, Bart van der Leck was opposed to the premature union of architecture and painting. These are things that I read and enjoy. Therefore, I will always be lonely.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides:

Firstly, I will admit that I enjoyed the first hundred pages or so before falling into a deeply troubling indifference towards the characters and the entire novel. Madeleine is a privileged white girl studying English in Brown. I'm like, Sure, this is an OK premise, why not? Then she discovers semiotics. Then, she discovers boys while, at the same time, discovering semiotics. Apparently when a character is interested in semiotics he/she will also spout lines from A Lover's Discourse, which is a fine text both romanticized and de-romanticized when read and imagined, but to me it's annoying as a plot device. (Side note: dreading the day when tumblr and/or hipsters discover this book and being Goethe-depressed like they totally epitomized unrequited love) Oh, her boyfriend throws this book at her too. Also he descends into madness, but because he's brilliant, he strives valiantly to understand his mania and even adjusts his medication experimentally. This is because he is brilliant. (The novel does not stop alluding to his brilliance because SPOILER ALERT this is his tragic downfall.) Here is a representative line: Leonard lay his head back, sighing. "They don't even understand the mechanism of manic depression yet. Our knowledge about the brain is vanishingly tiny."

You're probably wondering why this annoys me. The characters respond to and are affected by each other in ways that are not unexpected. The characters are constructed in ways that foreground a singular aspect about them which is frustratingly clichéd. There are two men competing for the love of a woman. One of them flies to India because he's, like, spiritual, and stuff?

The other reason Calcutta felt real was that he was here for a purpose. Until now he'd been merely sightseeing. The best he could say about his travels so far was that they described the route of a pilgrimage that had led him to his present location.

This is just one of the many lines that successfully demonstrate how annoying, if not enraging, contemporary orientalism can be: Asia is still a landscape framed by the language used by the West. It is a place of spirituality and pilgrimage (see: Eat, Pray, Love), and also a landscape lousy with chaos and squalor; the antithesis of the West in its urbane, disinterested hedonism and materialism, a land of rational order that provides a calm, placating sort of education which is now making the kids restless and radical. I want to believe that Eugenides is being deliberately ironic about the statements his characters say, perhaps as a means of ridiculing eighties "spirituality", but the condescension here is too subtle to be farce. Take, for instance, this scene in Calcutta:

The vendor explained what was in each, pointing, "Salt lassi. Sweet lassi. Bhang lassi." 

"We're here for the Bhang lassi," Mike said.  

This provoked merriment from the two men loafing against the wall, the vendor's friends, presumably.

Of course they choose the lassi laced with weed. You can only get three flavours of lassi in India apparently: salty, sweet and weed. I wouldn't be surprised, since this is the India of a more exotic flavour, of a mystic brand of religion and spirituality. But usual tropes about college and post-college kids aside, the presentation of the non-White is embarrassingly one-dimensional. The now-postcolonial Other (or should I say, "once-colonized Other" since this is a thing constantly alluded to) is the product of the tropical, stifling climate: they are lazy, they "loaf" around leading simpleton lifestyles, etc. etc. Either that, or they are weakened invalids whose basic needs are met by the "charity" of these Brown grads,

Wrapped in his sheet he looked as ancient and brown-skinned as an Egyptian mummy... [the old man] sagged between them like an animal carcass.

These are the few glimpses of Asian life that Eugenide's characters experience — their lives are shaped by the apparent horror of what they keenly observe in the lives of other people. Generally the text is at once trite, condescending and anachronistic in its undertone of a latent manifest destiny, steeped in the concerns associated with the powerful and the privileged. This is surprising, considering that the recurrent ideas Mr Eugenides' previous work are informed by experiences from the margins: the skewed narrative perspectives in The Virgin Suicides and unconventional sexual experiences and identities in Middlesex. 

Still, there are parts of the novel that are arresting and moving, if in an understated and muted way. The text is readable but not dumbed-down. There are passing references to many other texts. I am somewhat disappointed with my experience of reading The Marriage Plot. 

The Stories of Ray Bradbury

This tome is interesting to me because I have always associated science fiction with pulp novellas, Asimov's Science Fiction magazine and terrible cover art. These short stories are deeply psychological. I would read a story, take a nap and then feel a terrible sense of dread that I can't really locate.

The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion

This is useful to the person who wants to memorize esoteric pieces of information to throw around at a sit-down dinner party, over the potpourri and the vases of orchids. This one way to end a conversation you never wanted to be in. Here are some shorter entries:

Goy: a term used in the Bible for any nation including Israel

Sandalfon: an angel who figures prominently in the ancient divine-chariot mysticism

Kalischer, Tsevi Hirsch (1795-1874): rabbinic forefunner of modern Zionism who flourished in the western Polish province of Posen annexed by Prussia. 

Etc. etc.

the power of ethical reasoning

the most callous, stupid things were done

just because regulations required them

and no one thought to change the regulations

there are many human beings locked away

in special wards throughout the country

some of them abandoned by their parents

and sometimes unloved by anyone else

just as a hamster can be conditioned to press a lever for food

a human being can be conditioned by professional rewards

to ignore intellectual contradictions and the suffering of others

professional prestige, a vague sense of progress, cash money

all-stars, and the opportunity to travel

were the maintaining factors

in our society the mildly obese are respected

for their stability, fortitude, and excuses

they make a tiny difference by voting

but a big difference by spending $10,000 on things

and the voting and spending are for opposite things

the out-of-control behavior of meat-eating human beings

is actually admirable, because it's comforting to mothers

articulating intellectual convictions, isolating irrational behaviors

in emails and poems, and shoving the pultizer prize in your mom’s face

saying, 'i won the pultizer prize bitch'

to humble her into being a better person

are a few of the tasks that now control my life

alone at night i turned away from the computer

hit my face on the bed, made a noise

and turned back toward the computer

with a neutral facial expression, thinking

i knew how it felt not to be in control of one's life

the next day i said, 'if you really wanted to change

you would have changed by now'

— Tao Lin