What TV show do you wish would go off the air for good?

Please let it be Glee. The show grates me on a very fundamental level.

Ask me anything

haze is bad for your heart

I'm back, and I've been back for 2 days now but I haven't left the house since. I left my heart in New York and I need to go back: I love the grime along the sidewalks, the sun in my eyes at 6 am and jogging past steaming dumpsters. Not that I'm enamored by all that is unhygienic, but the dirt makes everything real. It situates me in this urban landscape, or rather, situates the landscape in the realm of the City without letting it come across as artifice. Naturally, the unfamiliarity of this external landscape animates comparisons with Home, but places are never perfectly commensurable and such discussions are never very fruitful. Still, I miss New York. I partake in the act of image creation through Facebook albums to construct a pictorial narrative of the trip in order to retain its memory, but these are only nebulous shadows of experience. The images, then, only function as signs to represent (or trigger) memories that are visceral and perceptibly unique to the author of this narrative.

GAH CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY >:(

Anyway, I am in love with a book. "A Lover's Discourse: Fragments" was written by Roland Barthes, published in 1979. I picked it up at Columbia U's Barnes & Noble Lit Crit section, and I spent the entire afternoon yesterday reading it.

---

"I Love You"

The figure refers not to the declaration of love, to the avowal, but to the repeated utterance of the love cry.

1. Once the first avowal has been made, "I love you" has no meaning whatever; it merely repeats in enigmatic mode—so blank does it appear—the old message (which may not have been transmitted in these words). I repeat it exclusive of any pertinence; it comes out of the language, it divagates—where?

"Jealousy"

4. As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear that my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common.

"Why?"

Even as he obsessively asks himself why he is not loved, the amorous subject lives in the belief that the loved object does love him but does not tell him so.

---

It transcends Theory to reach the realm of the Sublime. (I will never be able to concentrate on Econs now!)

e.e.

Crystal Castles II!

OMG NYC

(I also loved
Warsaw&
Sopot
and s i
ngi
ng )

BUT NYC.
it's like a
dreamcometrue:















EXCITED. and too lazy
to do a proper post

!

au

re
vo
ir

!

freedom and its owner

Though there is a otherworldly calm on the exterior, the frantic beating of my heart betrays the internal sense of OMGZZZSHIZ I'M FLYING OFF TONIGHT TONIGHT TONIGHT NO FREAKING WAY THIS IS REAL NO WAY OH WAIT ACTUALLY IT IS YAY, and after packing my bags and saying goodbye to (jealous) friends and family, there is nothing to do but wait and relish every second of the knowledge that one is going to enjoy a temporary exit from the country. And cooler weather. And music. And food. And friends. And cooler weather.

Anyway, here's a list of things I plan to do on the 12 hour flight:
1. Watch a trashy movie (I have done my research and Sex and the City is playing on in-flight entertainment this month)
2. Read Dostoevsky's Demons.
3. Sleep with Demons covering my face.
4. Irritate my seat mate by laying down claims to territorial sovereignty over elbow room.
5. Reinforce Asian stereotypes by doing homework on the plane, and then practising my karate to fend off carpal tunnel syndrome.

Do widzenia!

fish underwater

I was reorganizing my room when I stumbled upon a diary I kept in P5 detailing the joys and sorrows of being a tween in 2003. Priceless!

I love this entry:
"Dear Diary, I feel very poorly today. And my head really hurts. I am now writing with my new Parker pen... and it's a fountain pen! I really < 3 the ink. My grandpa bought it for my (sic) because I got 3rd in class! And it came with a really stylish leather carrying case."

Here is another classic:
"Hi Di! The days r getting a little cooler, the clothes r a little more difficult to dry."

And as an echo of a familiar past:
"Today I cut my hair. Not really sensational news but I really miss having messy hair. My mum made me do it. As usual. IT WAS MY HAIR! So not fair! During the hair cut *rolls eyes* I nearly cried. Never have I been so emotional IN MY LIFE! But I didn't cry though. And nobody knew how much I was suffering! I'm NEVER going to let that happen to my child – who will be adopted."

There were some very sad things too, like the time my uncle passed away or my grandmother had an near-fatal existential crisis. These were, however, downplayed tremendously by my preoccupation with Neopet updates and how much life
"sux". I was such a prodigiously eloquent child.

create a font

So lately, people have been asking me: How are you? Are you coping well? Is everything still OK? And trust me, hearing these is a comfort enough for me and I am sincerely thankful for the concern.

However, I feel worse when I discover that I don't feel as troubled or deeply distressed as others seem to assume I am. True, I am definitely aware that this is a grave situation that I am in right now, but c'mon guys, it's not the end of the world. Life on earth is just a passage to encounter God and experience his tremendous love for us, and illnesses, no matter whether they sentence you to disaster and misery, enable us to realise how fragile we are and how the hubris of a comfortable existence has removed our zeal for Life as it is, devoid of ambition and the complications of modern society.

Anyway, in the past weeks, my aunt was diagnosed with cancer in its latest stage, my mum started losing hair after chemotherapy and my grandfather had to be hospitalized after coughing blood. I say this without shame, because this really is Life As It Is, and I have accepted this reality that God has allowed to happen that is beyond my locus of control. I have no idea what to expect in the future – will I still be able to tell my mum about my day while we wash dishes after dinner? Will I still be able to wake up to breakfast that I cannot stomach? Will I become increasingly familiar with the route to the hospital? - but I still can find joy in uncertainty because it's God's will taking place before my eyes. The thought of absence, departures and loss can still invoke sadness, but there is no such thing as an invalid emotion, only inappropriate expressions of that emotion.

If emotion can be inappropriately expressed, then I'm getting tired of dramatic people and their irksome absorption with The Self and how everyone else is merely peripheral to The Self. I want to remind them to be socially responsible when venting online, but suppressing these outlets for catharsis can open up possibly more harmful ways of manifesting emotion into action. Therein lies a grey area that I also have to stoically live with.

Speaking of inappropriate expressions of emotion, I am marveling, with ironic distance, at how my life is starting to read like a bad telenovela. In a week's time, my extended family will gather to celebrate my grandmother's birthday at a far-away chalet by the beach. With three members down with debilitating illnesses, no one can say for sure that we will see each other again during Chinese New Year. Amidst the rolling waves (a metaphor for the ebb and flow of time and other Woolfian ideas yadda yadda) and the setting sun (an image suggesting an end, yet withholding any certain finality), will the family continue to hold on together throughout this arduous journey? (To be frank, however, my sister and I are preparing to bring along materials for revision and self-study.)

But you know what? I'm happy. It's not a happiness stemming from a resignation to what is real, but joy that is active and without irony or sneering cynicism. Yesterday's duathlon (in which Andrea and I came in 20th - yay us!) and today's ice-cream pig-out session with CTITW made me see God's grace in my life. Still, I'm a marginally materialistic individual with a tendency to judge on impulse, but ya gotta have some flaws anyway. (Kidding)

So, thanks for reading this. You may not feel it, but I sure am glad to share this with you.

swim with dolphins

My head is filled with things that make me happy and things that make me sad and things that make me angry and things that make me mad.

What a jaunty little rhyme!

I don't know if I will be in Poland in a month's time.
I'll trust in God's plan.

Inner states are in flux again.

The CCL is disappointing.
The MRT is disappointing.
Disappointments are part of life.

Today we forayed into pure mathematics and non-euclidean geometry during KI. I sat mesmerized.

Inner states are in flux again.

Inner states are in flux again.

InNeR sTaTeS aRe In F L u X again.

flirt on the train

Things to do:
1) Buy a bag of chips. Or popcorn. Whatever.
2) Go to www.imheremovie.com.
3) Watch the film.
4) Die inside.
5) Repeat.

stage-dive

So tired. But things are starting to look up (albeit a *teensy* bit, but it's better than stagnation). 26 days left to the big day!

I really want to go to NYC this June. I've been aching to step into MoMA, visit Bloomingdale's, check out Columbia and NYU, have a picnic in Central Park and endure the Plane Ride Of My Life, and suddenly this all becomes available to me, and I'm dying to go on this trip that it's almost having a numbing effect on me, like this is a dream and I'll wake up after finding myself in an airport the size of my primary school, carrying a Jurassic Park backpack with wheels and unable wipe ketchup off my passport. If I do go on this trip, I'm going to have religious experiences all over the place - already I couldn't contain the tide of Overwhelming that gushed out from the shinkansen as I stepped into Tokyo - and my spontaneous breakdowns will surely make me the most annoying 18-year-old in the state. I'll cry when I see the UN headquarters, kiss the grounds of Columbia U (origin of the East Coast Beats e.g. Ginsberg) and bring myself to a state of hysterical rapture in the middle of the Guggenheim.

I just want to buy into this mythologizing of NYC's allure. It's like a fairy tale.

see the northern lights

The audio in this video cracks me up.