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