The Sloth of Despondency

Lordy, it’s been a while since I managed to write something here, and unfortunately I don’t have a whole lot worth writing today either. The last week has been spent wading through international law research, getting to grips with the intricacies of extreme Microsoft Word formatting issues, and periodically questioning the meaning of it all.

As always, I list the small glimmerings in the gloom in my attempt to convince myself that not everything sucks. Because it doesn’t! (Attempt #1)

Attempt #2: French-pressed coffee at the Ritz-Carlton is a sexual experience. S$15 got a pot of Chocolate Raspberry blend for two with side platter of whipped cream, chocolate shavings and crystallized sugar stirrers. Vikram said the stirrers are normally chocolate-coated as well. Hell, I wasn’t complaining.

Attempt #3: I have a new baby, and his name is Thinkpad.

Attempt #4: I went to the OG Moving Out Sale at Great World City on Saturday and came out alive. Many of the middle-aged ladies present that day should be told they have lucrative career prospects as military advisors on reconnaisance, hand-to-hand combat and survival training. Perhaps I’ll write to my MP and suggest it.

Attempt #5: My other friends’ lives suck even more. I always pride myself on my ability to keep things in perspective.

Last of the summer wine

The entry begins as a flippant comment on how it probably doesn’t do much for my indie cred to be giving props to the new Fountains Of Wayne album, but fuck me, Mexican Wine is catchy, and then I think about a line in the song (“but the sun still shines in the summertime”) which is undeniably vapid when considered in a vacuum, but less so when I realize I no longer live in a place where “summertime” has any real meaning; when I realize the last time I had wine, Mexican or not, was the Saturday of the weekend I left England, when we finally went to Incognico and things were said that keep me going on lonely nights here, when we went to the South Bank and the Royal Festival Hall had been transformed from cheerless 60s edifice into a phantasmagoric Bollywood playground (we missed the stunt skateboarders in saris, dammit) and the night was a riot of colour and exuberance next to which my past two months here can only be described as monochrome.

[I realize this represents a bit of a regression from my recent efforts at perspective. It can probably be chalked up to the fact that I’ve had a shitty week, and the weeks to come offer no respite. But fear not. I continue to see the glass as half full, it’s just that right now I happen to be drowning in it.]

Last night a DJ saved my life

It’s a rare DJ that can transform an exhausted, ridiculously sleep-deprived Michelle in an overcrowded club full of Singaporeans into, well, a happy Michelle, so I guess DJ Jazzy Jeff (yes, Will’s friend in Fresh Prince of Bel-Air who kept going over to the house, annoying Mr Banks and getting physically thrown out) must be one of those DJs.

Before he came on, I was ready to kill. I was annoyed at overdressed people, yet annoyed at myself at the same time for giving in and dressing fractionally better than I would have for a London club (where you could walk in wearing a clown suit and the most anyone would say is “Love the baggy trousers, mate”). I was annoyed at the stupid level of crowding in Phuture, and at incredibly rude people who pushed past others way too violently, or literally just leaned on the people behind them to force them to give way. (Big Bald White Guy, this means you. You’re an asshole, and I just wish I’d elbowed you in your spine a lot harder than I did.)

In the crush of the crowds, I remembered how Russ always managed to protect me, dance behind me without ever hitting me, and look good dancing, all at the same time, and I remembered how far away Russ is now. I remembered Nick and Vish gangsta’ing it up on the empty dancefloor of a Glasgow student union bar, not caring how ridiculous they looked. I remembered trudging painfully up the Ramsay Hall stairs with Gareth in daylight, vowing futilely never to club again and knowing this scenario would repeat itself in the near and irresponsible future.

I felt constrained by the atmosphere of the club, very much a place where people go with people, and don’t tend to strike up random conversations with strangers, and again felt annoyed with myself at the same time for letting them affect me. Coincidentally, the only stranger who struck up a conversation with me the whole night was from England. Go figure. To be fair to the club, and my fellow Singaporeans, I was probably mostly just pissed off because it wasn’t London.

Then Jazzy Jeff came on, and all my acrimony melted away into happy flailing and perspiration. Great selection of material ranging from the obligatory to the obscure, pretty damn inspired treatment of well-known samples and recent hip-pop either through mixing or scratching, some moments of total weirdness like when he played Smells Like Teen Spirit, and always on the right side of the fine line between turntable mastery and turntable wankery. I must admit that his decision to tempt us with the intro of Sound Of Da Police but never actually give us the track frustrated me dreadfully, but maybe everyone else except me is tired of it.

I snapped back into perspective. I was with great company, friends no less dear to me than the ones I’ve left behind. I was witnessing one of the best live mix sets I’ve ever seen. I had a wonderful boyfriend to talk to on the phone when I got back later that night. In England I gained everything and lost nothing. I mustn’t forget to keep focusing on what I gained. I mustn’t forget that I have lost none of that just by having to be somewhere else for a few years.

Spice Daddy

We walked out for dinner to the Yin Yang Palace which serves rather wonderful Chinese restaurant-quality food at coffeeshop prices. We had steamed tilapia in spicy nonya sauce, chilli kangkong, ma po tofu (in lots of chilli oil) and herbal mutton soup. Additional small dishes of chilli also came with the food. The herbal mutton soup was the only non-spicy dish. My dad dunked his mutton in the chilli before eating it.

Two Memories

Yesterday, trying to wake myself up, I put on Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back. In the first few seconds London is asked to make some noise for Public Enemy, and I remembered making lots of noise for Public Enemy, a few months ago, in London.

Last night, trying to get myself off to sleep. I put on Sigur Ros’s (), and lay there in the dark listening, remembering sitting entranced as that same opening track started their gig in London, that sparse beauty in the bass clef, that earnest weary voice singing words that mean nothing and everything at the same time.

Yesterday Was Dramatic – Today Is OK

Handy coincidence. I was sitting here trying to think of a way to start this entry, and was looking through my CDs to choose one to play, and hey presto.

So anyway, this entry will be all about how I had a tough exam yesterday, and then had to leave straight after it to go to uni to do a simulated arbitration which I had done zero preparation for and could therefore have really sucked at, and how the day could have gone really badly, but it didn’t at all, and I’m happy. If all that sounds boring to you, that’s probably because it is. Go read The Onion if you’d rather. Otherwise, read on.

—

Waking up was agony. I used to have to stay up the whole night before most of my O’level prelims, given that I only tended to start studying the entire year’s work at 3 or 4 that afternoon. In the first year of uni, I remember a delirious conversation around 5 am with Esther the morning of the property law exam, trying to work out what the fuck the case Re Vandervell was all about. Those days seem to be gone. Yesterday, I’d stayed up cramming till 4, and woke up at 9 feeling like I’d been hit by a bus.

Sitting jittery outside the exam room hoping that the questions really really wouldn’t require a sound understanding of hedging or forward markets (i.e. the introductory chapter I didn’t understand) or, actually, international trade law at all (i.e. the entire course), that familiar old internal refrain of “In all fairness, Michelle, you don’t really deserve to pass this exam anyway, given this sort of preparation” was seeming as pertinent as ever.

But then the lovely old retiree who’s been invigilating these exams handed me the question paper and oh joy, oh providence, there were questions I could do, although forgetting all my cases couldn’t have helped, and I think I might just have gotten away with this.

I left jubilant, grabbed a coffee, and got on the bus to uni. Prepared doggedly for the arbitration over the next hour or so, fuelled only by a char siew pau and fear of humiliation, and managed to deliver a credible performance despite being mentally dead and feeling somewhat intimidated by the formidable abilities of everyone else. After class, the professor took us all for a drink. I swigged a strangely headless Guinness, got to know my rather personable and engaging coursemates a little better, and generally had a grand time.

—

Today, in contrast, has been sedate. Woke up in time for lunch. For dessert my mum whipped out a gargantuan tub of chin chow (grass jelly, it’s much nicer than it sounds), and I gorged myself happily. Lazed on the couch. The Discovery travel channel was featuring the World’s Top Ten Seductive Beach Resorts, all of which looked samey and artificial. After a while I got tired of seeing gooey-eyed couples embracing in the sunset, mostly because of my current geographic inability to do the same.

Channel surfing revealed a Hallmark movie featuring an inordinate number of grizzled old men in flat caps and tweed gathered on a rugged beach for a horse and buggy race. It was immediately obvious to me where this movie was set even before anyone opened their mouth and sounded lilting, and the appearance of the prosthetic-eared leprechauns confirmed my suspicions. So anyway this touching love story unfolded between an American, who of course had gone to Ireland to find his roots, and a sassy Irish woman, and there was, like, this PARALLEL love story between a fairy and a leprechaun, and obviously the uniting factor between both love stories was that they come from DIFFERENT WORLDS, and there are all these OBSTACLES to their love, but of course their love TRIUMPHS over all, because doesn’t it always, and at some point I fell asleep.

Home Sour Home

Recent silence is due to the severe illness of my laptop. It happens every summer when I come home – frequent freezing, blue screens of death, restarting itself (and I use Windows 98 so the Blaster worm doesn’t affect me), switching itself off, telling me “Operating system not found” when I try to start it again – and the problems magically disappear when I bring the laptop back to England. Except of course this time there’s no return to England in sight, so I think my baby is toast.

This is just great. Not only does Singapore reduce me to a miserable existence – constantly red eyes, nose won’t stop running, eczema reappears – it also targets one of the few things that makes life here bearable.

As you may have gathered, I am extremely grumpy right now.

Last Legs

I just realized the last few times I meant to type “stipulated” in my international trade notes, I typed “stupilated”. Time for bed. I feel stupil.

One down, three to go

One down, three to go. Studying three topics for an exam where I had to answer three questions was probably not very clever, but let’s move on.

Life has been mildly more muesli, less Weetabix these past few days in that there have actually been enjoyable bits, and not everything has been dry, dull and turd-like.

I had four hours to kill between the exam and meeting people for dinner, and atavism took over – I went shopping. In the same way Gabrielle’s Greatest Hits is an inseparable part of the UK girlie shopping experience, market researchers here still seem to think tragic techno of the Forever Dance Anthems ’98! variety is what will get those halter-neck tops flying off the shelves. Other things have changed since I was last around. There’s nothing quite like a recession for improving quality of service – I was greeted and thanked in every shop, and it even seemed sincere. There’s also Dorothy Perkins here now, which I find difficult to understand given that it makes clothes for fat English frumps and Singaporean girls tend to be none of the above.

Dinner involved Luke, Vikram, Zakir, Luke’s friend whose name I shamefully can’t remember (it was Chinese) and parts of what must have been a scary mofo of a swordfish. I went home happy.

Today was one of those rare days where most things go right. I woke up early, got to NUS in time to meet classmates and prepare for a presentation, got a decent amount of study done, and didn’t fall asleep at all at any point. I met Terry, Yish, Yen, Don and Zak to smoke hookahs on Arab Street, and for another few blissful hours exams didn’t exist.

I won’t go into a long sentimental ramble about how special old friendships can feel when you realize you haven’t seen them for a while but you still feel comfortable, conversation still flows, and you’re having a great time, but I think these few days it has been exactly those inner sentimental ramblings, and the company that inspired them, that have pulled me somewhat out of the doldrums.

Excerpt: The Singapore Story: Memoirs Of Lee Kuan Yew

I may have had to wait four years to wrestle The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew away from the rest of my family, but at least I’m finally reading it. It’s great. Here’s a passage:

“By his unpredictable and inconsistent twists and turns, Marshall had alienated not just myself and the Liberal Socialists, but his key Labour Front members. His wanting to restart the talks to save himself was too much for them. “You cannot eat your own vomit,” as one Liberal Socialist delegate put it in vivid Hokkien. Half an hour into the meeting, Marshall knew that if he tried to resume negotiations, he would have to do so on his own. He had overplayed his hand and was isolated.

That night, he went to a performance of Madam Butterfly with Lennox-Boyd and Lady Patricia Boyd, and then on to a Spanish restaurant to dine to the tune of guitars and the stamping feet of flamenco dancers. Meanwhile, I decided to stop him from staging a recovery. At a press conference that same evening at Malaya Hall, I made it clear that the PAP would have nothing to do with a reopening of the conference. I said it was a ‘final, desperate attempt to hang on to office, a sign of incredible political ineptitude’, and rounded it off with ‘Never in the history of colonial evolution has so much humbug been enacted in so short a time by so erratic a leadership.’ “