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.

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.

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.

Football Isn’t Coming Home Just Yet And Neither, Sadly, Am I

The last time I watched a critically important England match, I was in a pub off Petticoat Lane crammed to the gills with people at 7.30 AM. We got tea and fried egg sandwiches from a caff round the corner, but of course much like all England matches since 1966, it wasn’t exactly destined to be the breakfast of champions. I had great fun nonetheless.

Either on that day or another close by, I tried to keep my jubilation discreet as South Korea beat Italy and Matteo and Emmanuelle collapsed in tortured disbelief onto the floor of the TV room. Leaving the hall shortly after to run an errand, a guy was jogging down Gower Street draped in the South Korean flag and I gave him a whoop and a thumbs up. He dashed across the road with a huge beam on his face and we exchanged a high-five.

In comparison, watching the match yesterday in my living room in the dead of night with only my Fairprice chicken cup noodles for company was rather less memorable. Remembering those halcyon¹ days and then looking at my life two years on is decidedly depressing.

¹ I realize I haven’t actually used the phrase “halcyon days” right, but I plead music wanker’s licence in support of the reference – I saw an Orbital gig the night England lost to Brazil.

There’ll Be A Load Of Compromisin’

Karaoke today was a riot of cheese. The boys were in fine falsetto form with several BeeGees songs – Tragedy was especially successful, they even managed the harmonies – and I went on a one-hit-wonder rampage with Superwoman (Karyn White), If Love Is Blind (Tiffany) and Don’t Cry Out Loud (Melissa Manchester) before caving in to my long-repressed yearning for Rhinestone Cowboy.

Chinese songs were, of course, attempted, but my largely stagnant Chinese music horizons rendered me incapable of singing more than the songs I always sing. K Ge Zhi Wang and Qi Zi were mostly ungarbled, but I didn’t fare quite so well on Ti Or Or. I am now trying to decide whether to embark on the almighty challenge of adding Faye Wong’s An Yong to my repertoire. Right now I think it’s one of the most gorgeous ballads I’ve ever heard (in any language) but it also sounds fiendishly difficult.

Halfway through karaoke, I found out that the moot coaches have chosen the speakers for an upcoming advocacy competition NUS is taking part in. I will have to pass the shipping law arguments I’ve spent the last four months perfecting to my teammate, take on a whole new set of issues, and be lead counsel. By Monday. Apparently this is because I am the strongest speaker. I hope the coaches realize their strongest speaker is now strongly tempted to spend the next three weeks curled up under a table in a fetal position.

Jokes aside, I’m honoured by the choice, because I certainly wouldn’t give such a shit-hard job to anyone I didn’t think had the balls and brains to take it on. But it’s possible updates here in the next couple of weeks might be a little thin on the ground, or at least overly link-based.

Karma Debt

On Friday I watched a (magnificent) media preview of Mahler’s 8th symphony. The actual concerts on Saturday and Sunday had been sold out for weeks. Debbie was singing in the chorus, and managed to get me entry to this.

Tomorrow I am going to a Faye Wong concert, sitting in a $125 seat for which I will have paid $20. Esther is not using her tickets for some reason, and offered them to me.

After that I will be going to see Peter Kruder DJ at Zouk, for free, because Dominique is a member of the Heineken Green Room Sessions thingy (I’m not a member, never bothered to try and become one). I’m not actually a big fan of his, but the crucial point about getting into this for free is that I can also pop into Phuture for my hip-hop fix if I get bored.

None of this came about through any effort of mine, the offers mostly just dropped in my lap, and I took them up. I think I owe the cosmos a couple of random good deeds, and certain people some very fancy coffees at the very least.

Fare-Fucking-Well

My exam results arrived a few days ago, and I can at last confirm that my wasted year is finally, gloriously over. No more lectures which substitute Powerpoint presentations for actual imparting of ideas, no more constant cringing at people speaking in accents which are part-English, part-American, part-Singaporean and COMPLETELY annoying, and generally no longer having to be in a university I do not give a damn about and never will.

There were always many reasons why doing my law degree in London was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, but until this year, those reasons were never academic. I didn’t choose UCL because I thought it would give me a superior legal education to NUS, but I spent most of this DipSing year thanking my lucky stars for that choice. So goodbye, NUS. May we never meet again.

Home Bittersweet Home

Perhaps some of you may wonder if walking through the Heathrow departure lounge trying to stop sobbing gets any easier the second time round. It doesn’t. You can deal with it differently – I hid behind the Telegraph until the plane was well into the air this time, instead of pressing myself against the window shuddering – but either way, things get soggy.

* * *

I got home having had no or very little sleep due to the two louts behind me who spent most of the London-Bangkok flight loudly telling a Thai woman about their girlfriends in Thailand (Graham has two, Ashley only has one, I think), and later due to the need to not fall asleep in Bangkok airport and miss my transfer. My mother then informed me that it was my Sunday obligation to attend 6 pm mass instead of the solemnization ceremony later that day of the wedding of one of my oldest and dearest friends. Never mind that I had deliberately shortened my initially planned holiday just so that I could be at her wedding. Apparently, Pei Ee would “understand” me missing the most important part of the wedding since I would be present at the big banquet later which is usually far more meaningful to a couple’s parents than the couple themselves.

An argument, much stress, and a tearful call to Alec later, I took the drastic step of text messaging Pei Ee seeking confirmation that no, she would not fucking “understand”. Confirmation came in the form of Pei Ee actually sending her bridal car to pick me up from my home and take me to Sentosa. Within half an hour, I wriggled into my dress, threw stockings, makeup and hair products into a bag, and rode to Sentosa in the front seat.

* * *

Attending a wedding just hours after parting from Alec at the departure gates was never going to be easy. This poem was read at the wedding dinner, and I hope the couple will forgive me for co-opting it to describe my own feelings.

Love
And in Life’s noisiest hour,
There whispers still the ceaseless Love of Thee,
The heart’s Self-solace and soliloquy.
You mould my Hopes, you fashion me within;
And to the leading Love-throb in the Heart
Thro’ all my Being, thro’ my pulse’s beat;
You lie in all my many Thoughts, like Light,
Like the fair light of Dawn, or summer Eve
On rippling Stream, or cloud-reflecting Lake.
And looking to the Heaven, that bends above you,
How oft! I bless the Lot that made me love you.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge

* * *

As I was leaving the dinner later that night, I shook Tjin Kai’s hand meaning to congratulate him and say something merry. All I managed was “Take care of her” before I started tearing up and hastily moved on out of the ballroom. It might just have been residual waters from what I had already shed that weekend, but I’d like to think it had nothing to do with me, or the man I had had to leave behind at Heathrow, or the old life I had briefly lived again in London only to have to abandon once more. I think it was just about Pei Ee, the gem of a friend who I have loved for 18 years and is now blissfully happy. Congratulations, Pei Ee and Tjin Kai. I wish you all the love and joy in the world.

Reunion

Finished the DipSing exams on Friday (passing, however, is a huge assumption I’m not willing to make right now), hopped on a plane that very night and have resumed my perfect London life right back where I left off. Saturday lazy lunch, Covent Garden girliness, coffee at Paul’s with Nav, dinner and drinks in Brixton with Nick; Sunday mass at Newman House, Spitalfields Market trawl, lazy afternoon in Hyde Park with Russ and Dave, Múm gig at night. London is as beautiful and bizarre and all-out wonderful as it has always been, and the part of me that loves comfort zones wishes I had just decided to spend the entire 15 days here instead of attempting to explore new parts of Europe I haven’t been to yet.

There’s so much more I was meaning to write today, but Russ is waiting patiently for our precious Russ’n’Michelle time to start, and I don’t want to lose any of that. I think we’ll do a Regent’s Canal walk today.

I’ve been told by other people who studied overseas and have since had to return to Singapore that as time passes, you gradually begin to accept that you’re back, and that part of your life is over, and Singapore isn’t really that bad. Unfortunately, this has obviously not happened to me yet. Being here only reminds me just how much Singapore sucks donkey bollocks in comparison. I have not felt so happy, so sad, so thoroughly alive for months. And Alec hasn’t even arrived yet! (Later today. I can’t wait!)