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Hell Is Other Lawyers

Snippets from the professional course I've been spending my days at:

• A girl talks throughout a lecture, not softly, but in chatty conversational tones with her friend beside her. Everyone around her is struggling to concentrate on what is already a very dull lecture, looking at her, looking at each other, rolling their eyes, but somehow no one says anything to her. I want to, but while I keep thinking of a polite way to phrase it, the only words that come to mind are "Shut the fuck up!" and some sort of inner reserve prevents me from saying that to a stranger. I keep thinking she must have a clue, she must realize this is disturbing everyone around her, she can't be that much of a self-absorbed rude cow, surely she'll stop soon? And of course she doesn't. (She's from your uni, Tamara!)
• I mention this to another girl later. "Oh, actually I did that before too," she twitters, "but I decided I shouldn't do it any more lah, because then I don't get anything out of the lectures."
• A girl sitting next to me has such overwhelming perfume that I have to change seats. Note that my sense of smell is so bad that a very real concern for me in chemistry QA practicals was that ammonia gas would be released and I wouldn't smell it.

Three Poems For Edmund, Who I Do Not Know

He asked, and just to prove poetry and Prince don't jostle on the same territory, at least where this blog is concerned, here are three. (Excerpts, with links to full versions.) I hope you like them, Edmund, but even if you don't, thanks for reminding me. :)

* * *

My bad cello! I love it
too much, my note to almost note,
my almost Bach, my almost Haydn, two who
heard things falling off a shelf —
they never thought that
was music.

- Bad Cello (Marianne Boruch)

* * *

I cherish my wounds and their cures
and the sweet enervations of bliss
My book is an open life

I wave goodbye to the absolutes
and send my regards to infinity
I'd rather be blithe than correct

Until something transcendent turns up
I plash in my poetry puddle
and try to keep God amused

- Having Come This Far (James Broughton)

* * *

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven't they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

- Wait (Galway Kinnell)

Everyone Get In The Shaguar!

Yeah, baby!

Nabeya!

I thought Tamade was a one-off occurrence of a Japanese restaurant here with a name which is a swear word in another language (Mandarin), but today my family had dinner at Nabeya.¹ It appeared that I was either the only one who knew which swear word it sounded like, or the only one puerile enough to be secretly amused by it.

Sample conversation in the run-up to dinner, and I am so not kidding:
My mum: So, where are we going for dinner?
My sister: Nabeya.
My mum: Nabeya?! No, I don't feel like it. Let's go somewhere else.
My sister: But I only feel like Nabeya.
Me: Yah, mum, why not? Nothing wrong with Nabeya what.
My mum: Okay, fine then. Nabeya.

¹ Tips as to meaning can be found here and here.

Extroversion Is Exhausting

Meeting up with newly-returned friends like Yuping and Kelly. Meeting up with long-time-no-see friends like the twins and my old classmates. Meeting up with regular partners in vileness the Orgers. Hip-hopping at Phuture. Lindy-hopping at Jitterbugs. Lindy-hopping at Harry's Bar. Helping the RJC debate team. Attending driving lessons. Attending lectures. The list goes on.

There is an imbalance in the Force. I'm spending too much time out of the house, out of my bed, away from my computer and away from my CD player. The more social life I have, the less inner life I have, because I'm just too beat when I get home to get started on projects like redesigning this site, retouching my digital photos, planning for Alec's visit in October, and generally keeping up on thinking, reading and listening to music. I haven't even watched Oprah with my mum for days. :(

I need a doppelganger. Then one of us could be out having a whale of a time with my friends, and the other could be in having a whale of a time tweaking my stylesheets and site code. I could never explain my strongly extroverted Myers-Briggs test result, and still can't.

Kick The Old School Joint For The True Funk Soldiers

I've been neglecting my MTV lately, which is why I only saw Prince's Musicology video last Friday, by chance. I'd been wondering if the reason I loved it so much was purely due to the atmosphere at the time - cool night, big screen, good friends, apricot hookah - but I just watched it again today and it's just as great even when viewed by a sweaty tired me on a laptop screen.

It isn't actually all that profound or groundbreaking as music videos go, but it just takes me to such happy places. Kid with afro dancing in his bedroom using vacuum cleaner as mike stand. Funky-ass gig with everyone in natty retro threads. Men in waistcoats and fedoras tap-dancing. It's like what Michael Jackson would be making these days if he had a clue left.

Tourist Twat

They entered the hip new restaurant in the centre of town with fresh tans and designer sunglasses, the picture of a happy young white couple on holiday in the tropics. His T-shirt read "VAGINAMATE". I guess she likes her men crass.

Baybeats 2004, Esplanade Riverside, Singapore

The BayBeats festival was a fairly endearing example of the classic Singaporean maxim: If it's free, they will come. The samfu-clad grandma seemed to have enjoyed The Observatory, but the 50something couple in one of the first few rows left at some point during Force Vomit.

Fleeting thoughts on the bands I saw/heard:

• Telebury: Quite pleasant. Like the child of The Shins and Coldplay if The Shins were British and Coldplay weren't shit.
• The Observatory: This band has an odd tendency to be present at my rare "Actually, Singapore isn't so bad!" moments, one of which was the first time I saw them, and the second of which was the sun setting on the bay as they sang their very pretty new song Sea Of Doubts. A class act.
• Surreal: The same And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead song for half an hour.
• Furniture: The same Mogwai song for half an hour, frequently employing the same chord progressions as in Aereogramme's The Black Path.
• Force Vomit: Not really my thing. I like my punk less catchy and more abrasive. Less smiling guys with indie hair and black plastic specs, more bald sweaty guys in huge singlets bawling out rants against corporate oppression. You get my drift. (Please come to Singapore, Fugazi!) But I can still see why this band has such a loyal following here, and why Paul Zach and Chris Ho have championed them so much. They were pretty fun. I'd see them again.
• Whence He Came: The same bad emo song for half an hour.

[In the not-so-impossible likelihood that a Googling band member comes across these words and feels slighted, these are the (very brief, and admittedly flippant) impressions I formed while listening to half-hour-long sets. I realize your albums may be quite different. If you feel I've misrepresented your musical vision, feel free to disagree. For what it's worth, I actually love Trail Of Dead and Mogwai, although I can't say I'm much of an emo fan. Also, if I ever give any gigs you will be fully entitled to write "The same complete silence for half an hour" in your review, because I'd chicken out before even going on stage. All power to you, and I hope you had a good time at Baybeats.]

Modern Mofo

The graffiti on the back of the bus seat read: FAX YOUR MOTHER.

Three Reasons Why I Rock

(Bearing in mind, of course, that after reading them it is rather unlikely that you will share my view.)

1. I decided that enough was finally enough, and sorted out the multiple electrical devices that had been uglifying my desk all these months. I unplugged, untangled, rearranged, cleaned and dusted, and at the end of a sweaty hour or two, modem, router, printer, speakers, laptop, phone, desk lighting, broadband cable and ALL THEIR BLOODY ASSORTED PLUGS AND WIRES were living in harmony and beauty while taking up very little space. I now have more space on my desk, the massive multiplug has been artfully concealed, and the wires are no longer a gnarled mess. I can now abandon all the DIY solutions I had been considering before, which would have involved drilling. I rock.

2. (WARNING: geeky.) Since the site conversion to PHP seems to have gone fine, I decided to plunge right into implementing the features which had motivated the conversion. After squinting at code for a couple of hours, I now have:

• Category archives which automatically paginate themselves, courtesy of the Paginate plugin for Movable Type. Particularly useful for my ever-expanding Music Geekery category (currently 80 posts and counting).
• A right side menu coded as a separate MT template and pulled into the page using PHP Include. It won't look any different to you, but it'll save me updating time and server load.
• Gzip-optimized pages, which will hopefully load faster for you guys.
• A drop-down box menu to replace the long list of monthly archives previously on the sidebar.

I knew almost nothing about any of the above possibilities before today. More changes are on the way. Google rocks. I rock.

3. On Singapore's Brainiest Kids, one question was "What is the name of the first book in the Famous Five series by Enid Blyton?" and I knew the answer in a split-second. Later, the question was something to the effect of "In Calvin and Hobbes, how many babysitters did Calvin's parents ask to babysit Calvin, out of which only Rosalyn agreed?" I yelled "EIGHT!" triumphantly and my mum reeled back in shock. I astound myself with my memory for useless childhood trivia. I rock.

Graham Greene Books (Thoughts)

In the middle of my third Graham Greene book (he's my current binge), I'm not entirely convinced by the way all his characters inevitably contemplate faith and God and Roman Catholicism at some point in the story.

Graham Greene characters are ordinary people, essentially good but often weak or wilful; their ruminations on faith are convoluted, not always logical and sometimes theologically dodgy. But they are almost consistently more engaged with the idea of faith as a palpable presence in their lives (whether welcome or not), and what this means for the choices they make, than most people (including me) are.

Which is why I get something from Graham Greene that I haven't really found before in other writers. I like the time I spend in his world where faith matters, it torments Scobie in The Heart Of The Matter, it separates Sarah and Bendrix in The End Of The Affair, it's even a chink in Pinkie's armour of ruthlessness in Brighton Rock. They don't all deal with its dictates sensibly, but they find themselves incapable of indifference towards it.

This idea - that try as one might, one cannot be indifferent to God - is precisely what draws me to Graham Greene novels, but also precisely why I sometimes fear his books are getting more and more fictional as the years go by.

PHP Virgin Going It Alone

I am attempting to convert this blog to PHP despite not knowing very much about it. Rather stupidly, I am also attempting this while my usual technical advisor Russ is in Italy on a charity project and completely incommunicado.

I've located a number of dummy's guides online so theoretically everything should go fine, but if things start looking a little strange around here over the next couple of days, you'll know why.

[In general, if you're looking for something here and get an error message, try changing the file extension of the URL from .html to .php. If that doesn't work, laugh maniacally. That won't fix the site at all, but it's always so therapeutic.]

The Buddha Of Suburbia (Hanif Kureishi): Extracts

Shadwell didn't require much encouragement. It was easy to see that he was clever and well read, but he was also boring. Like many spectacular bores, his thoughts were catalogued and indexed. When I asked him a question he'd say, "The answer to that is - in fact the several answers to that are...A." And you'd get point A followed by points B and C, and on the one hand F, and on the other foot G, until you could see the whole alphabet stretching ahead, each letter a Sahara in itself to be crawled across.

* * *

"Concentrate on the way you think your position in society has been fixed," said Pyke.

Being sceptical and suspicious, the English sort to be embarrassed by such a Californian display of self, I found the life-stories - accounts of contradiction and wretchedness, confusion and intermittent happiness - oddly affecting. I giggled all through Lawrence's account of working in a San Francisco massage parlour (when she was stranded there), where the women were not allowed to proposition men directly in case they were cops. They had to say, "Is there any other muscle you'd like relaxed, sir?" This was where Lawrence discovered socialism, for here, in a forest of pricks and pond of semen, "I soon realized that nothing human was alien to me," as she put it.

Richard talked about wanting to fuck only black men, and the clubs he cruised constantly in order to acquire them. And to Pyke's delight and my surprise Eleanor told of how she'd worked with a woman performance artist who persuaded her to extract the texts of poems - "Cows' teeth like snowdrops bite the garlic grass" - from her vagina before reading them. The performance artist herself meanwhile had a microphone up her vagina and relayed the gurglings of her cunt to the audience. This was enough for me. I was hot on Eleanor's trail. For the time being I gave up on Terry.

Not Quite An After-Party

As predicted a while ago, the advocacy competition which finished yesterday kept me fiendishly busy.

The short account of things is that we got to the finals, where we lost, but won prizes for best team in the general rounds, best memorial, and I won for best speaker in the finals.

A long account of things, however, will be difficult, since writing about the final here in any amount of detail might be risking defamation suits. It would also make me look like a sore loser, which I am not. I congratulated the winning team with all sincerity. They were a good team, and nice people. I would have been fine with losing to them on an equal playing field, but (through no fault of theirs) that was not the case.

It isn't really worth writing much more about the final, because it will sound unbelievable to anyone who wasn't actually there to see it for themselves. All I'll say is that if it had been a real arbitration proceeding, our team would have had grounds to appeal against the award. I have lost considerable respect for two prominent professionals involved in the final, and if I ever meet them again, I will be hard-pressed to be civil.

At times like this I suppose one is meant to focus on the good things:

• My wonderful teammates, who did everything I hated (practical stuff like photocopying bundles of authorities) so I could concentrate on everything I loved (the actual advocacy), and kept me supplied with Coke.
• My co-speaker, who never thought he'd deserved to be chosen to speak, but was so excellent in the finals that I hoped against hope that he'd kept our chance of winning alive.
• Our amazing coach, who, unlike previous coaches I have had, helped me develop and refine my abilities instead of stifling me with overdirection. I became a much better advocate because of her than I had been before. (And in my not-so-humble opinion, I was pretty damn good before.)
• Over the course of the competition, certain compliments I received from people (who had no reason to exaggerate or be anything but honest) staggered even egotistical me so much that I'm not actually going to repeat them here.

At any time over the past 5 months, if you had asked me if this damn competition was actually worth it, I would have given a resounding no. Sitting here today, despite what happened in the finals, for the first time ever I'm considering a yes.