Where In The World Is SuperMichelle, Singapore?

It occurred to me that for those who don’t know me personally and are wondering what’s going on and why I seem so damn depressed all the time these days, I should probably give a more precise explanation of what I’m doing now than the vague references I’ve been making.

I am doing a Graduate Diploma in Singapore Law at the National University of Singapore. It’s a conversion course for people who studied law in England. I’m also studying for exams for the Masters course I was on this past academic year. As can be expected, the overlap between the two courses is somewhat stressful right now.

I feel incredibly tired today. I walked through NUS (National University of Singapore) feeling like a complete alien. Attended the first class for one of my diploma courses, gave a stunningly mediocre performance in a presentation I was required to do, left feeling awkward and self-conscious for the first time in years.

On the way home in the bus there was a TV show (yes, we have TVs in buses) about Singaporean university students at home and abroad. One was a medical student in UCL. I watched as she showed the camera crew around the main quadrangle, through the cloisters, in the library, outside the Union, past so much that was familiar and beloved to me. My insides were churning with envy. I’m not used to having to deal with re-adjustment blues. I lived four years in London without a single pang of homesickness. Now I’m “home” the homesickness is killing me.

I’m sorry about all this whining – it isn’t what you come here to read, and it isn’t what I put up this site to write. I know I should and can get over this. SuperMichelle can pass the Masters exams. SuperMichelle can combine the Masters exams with the diploma course. SuperMichelle can redeem herself from today’s lousy performance in the moot course and make it into one of the international moot teams. SuperMichelle will balance keeping in touch with the people she loves in England (and Ireland), with catching up with the people she loves here, with making new friends in the new course. SuperMichelle will ignore the fact that in Singapore she looks and feels ten times worse than she does in England, because of how the humidity screws up her eyes, hair and skin. SuperMichelle will triumph.

I just have to bloody find where she’s hiding.

Clinging To Perspective

I’m back, vaguely unpacked, in the house my family moved to while I was away, sitting in my new room (the first time I’ve ever had a room to myself at home), typing this while my laptop receives broadband love vibes from the cable modem. We had barbecued stingray, chilli kangkong and crispy baby squid for dinner at my request. Recent events in my sister’s job have kept her working past 10 pm in the past few days, but she spent Sunday cleaning my room and preparing it for me to come home to. My mum is doing my laundry, and the “WELCOME HOME MICHY” banner they kept specially from last year is the first thing I see when I enter the room.

I can’t remember a more miserable 24 hours in my life than those I just went through, but I mustn’t forget that even in the gloom my blessings remain abundant.

Relocation

I can only give the following explanations and ask you, gentle reader, to forgive me.

I’ve spent the last week saying goodbye. Goodbye to Nick on Sunday, goodbye to John on Monday, to Ireland from Tuesday till today for a few snatched days with Alec, goodbye to other assorted dear friends and Fabric tonight, and Saturday and Sunday are the hardest goodbye of all, because everything I did in the past week finally hits, and I have to get to grips with the realities of packing, going to the airport, and leaving.

When I get back to Singapore on Monday, I’m going to have to study for exams starting on the 13th, combine this with another academic course that starts on the 11th, and try to stop missing London and everyone there.

I will try to blog, really I will. I love it, and feel something’s missing from my inner life when I don’t. But if real life gets in the way over the next month or so, updates may be sparse. Ineffable will also be moving to a new address soon, when my university computer account is terminated. I don’t know what that will be, or if it will even continue under the same name, but it will continue. Please bookmark temporarineffable to check if this one suddenly disappears, and when life is less ridiculously hectic I promise lots of messiness will be sorted out.

I’ll see you on the other side.

The Dream With The Lemon Cult

I went with a faceless friend to a flat. We were greeted by someone who was there to welcome us, but the other people who were meant to welcome us hadn’t arrived yet. The person served us lemon tea. It was very good lemon tea.

More people arrived, all dressed very well. They all knew each other. We didn’t really know anyone. They were all really friendly and welcoming, but in that way where you think, well, this is great, but I don’t know you at all, and I’m getting a bit tired of being so moon-facedly smiley, and actually, what on earth am I doing here at all?

I asked the first person we’d met why I was there. He looked a little surprised, but explained that they had invited us there to introduce us to worshipping the lemon. He showed us pictures and brochures about the lemon, and spoke earnestly of the need to worship it.

He asked if we’d like something to drink.

“The lemon tea you gave us earlier was pretty nice,” I said.

“Oh no,” he said, “that’s only meant to be drunk for special ceremonial purposes. That was part of your special welcome to our community.”

We left shortly after. Everyone was still very nice and friendly as they waved goodbye. I woke up craving lemon tea.

Some Vice With Your Chicken Rice?

We cooked dinner on Wednesday night for various old friends at the hall. Alec made chicken rice, and I made Thai beef salad. A simple, fairly healthy, fairly nutritious meal combining the smooth mild flavour of chicken rice with the piquancy of the Thai beef salad.

If only such meal-planning and flavour-mixing decisions could be equally applied to after-dinner drinking with similarly enjoyable, innocuous consequences.

The available tipples, mostly what Alec and I had managed to accumulate and needed help in consuming, included wine, vodka, mead, Sheridan’s, whiskey, schnapps and absinthe. After consuming almost everything there the hall bar’s stocks of Bacardi Breezers, Smirnoff Ices and a bottle of Jack Daniels were also raided. In the course of the evening I consumed almost all of the above, as did most others present.

Suzy provided an extremely appropriate cocktail for this evening involving former residents of a Catholic hall. The Weeping Jesus involves absinthe, schnapps and grenadine. The green of the absinthe is the Garden of Gethsemane, and the red grenadine gets dribbled down the sides to represent Jesus’s tears of blood. The instructions on the absinthe bottle say you must always dilute it before drinking, given that it’s 68% alcohol by volume. I don’t think they really meant diluting it with schnapps though.

As I write this (it was written on Thursday) it’s 2.32 pm. As of an hour ago, Chris was still in bed. Alec has taken some Resolve, and is now just about capable of vacantly watching old episodes of Jeeves and Wooster. And I am listlessly trying to tear myself away from this random typing and back to civil liberties and the responses to terrorism.

Mullet Musings

Warning: frivolous. A growing hazard of this blog, dear reader, as my days are increasingly spent studying for Masters exams and desperately longing for respite from deep academic thinking.

My preferred hairstyle for myself is an evocative mix of militant feminism, anime punk and, for those who don’t like it, mental institution inmate who somehow got hold of some shears. Given that I was unfortunately born with horribly frizzy hair (I blame my mother for tainting my Oriental birthright of silky straight hair with her Eurasianness), this was somewhat difficult to accomplish before I decided at 19 that I would be ugly no more, straightened the lot of it, and chopped most of it off.

Further hair-related developments were helped by being in London, where Medusa herself could walk down the street and no one would bat an eyelid. I knew I had succeeded in my hair goals when after one particular haircut, I got eyeballed disapprovingly by a nun, approached by a chap who randomly saw me in Virgin Megastore to appear in visual projections for a club in Brighton, and got chatted up by an equal number of males and females the next time I went clubbing.

Since then, however, vanity has had to take a backseat to other demands on my time, and as fretted about recently, I’ve spent the last few months as a total minger as my last haircut, which featured radical fringe action, grew out into an increasingly curly mullet. Yesterday I decided something had to be done, and got it all straightened. Unfortunately, not being able to get it cut at the same time (Toni & Guy Academy does straightening and cutting at two different academies) means I must now live with a ramrod-straight mullet until I can get another appointment with the other academy for a cut.

And strangely, once ramrod-straight, the mullet doesn’t look like a mullet anymore, I just look like a stereotypically sweet demure Chinese girl with a stereotypically boring haircut, and I realize all those envious teenage years coveting the long silky straight hair of my pretty sweet Chinese girl friends were a complete waste of bitterness. This time next week, I aim to be shorn and spiky once again.

A Bellagio By Any Other Name

Although the main purpose of the Italy trip was a Radiohead gig in Bergamo to fulfil my dream of seeing them live before I leave, we also spent two days in the Italian Lakes. We based ourselves in Bellagio, a little village on Lake Como. If you imagine Lake Como (see this map for best guidance) as a lithe, sinuous dancing girl in mid-step, you will come to realize the exceptionally pleasing location of Bellagio.

On the first night, Alec presented me with an inflatable sheep. I have received many bizarre love tokens from this man, including purple punk whore boots and a cigarette with “I love you” written on it, but an inflatable sheep complete with mascara’d eyes, coquette-red lips, beauty spots and, er, orifice, did rather push the boundaries. He said he could explain. He said he’d been thinking about how annoyed I get when bad weather on holidays makes for lousy photographs, but remembered how much I like sheep, and so he decided to get me a sheep so that I’d be happy even if we ran into bad weather. I think I’ll name her Bellagio.

Moving Out

I’m hard-pressed to think of anything remotely entertaining about the final day of the move out of the flat, except that I went into Waterstone’s in search of a travel guide and instructed Russ, standing outside on a busy street carrying a hoover and its assorted tubes, to “try to blend in.” I could also mention his regular exclamations of “You know what I really like about cleaning? I really like _____” as he hoovered the entire flat with unbelievable meticulousness, scrubbed footprints off the walls, and picked up really gross stuff from behind Tamara’s couch, but that’s not entertaining, it’s just freaky. There’s also the way I packed the 3 little sheep in the box for the ghetto blaster that came at Christmas disguised as a big sheep, but on closer inspection the little sheep looked rather lost and sad.

In general, the day was one of those times where I realized how sheer personal will and capacity for exhaustion is sometimes just simply not enough for the task at hand, no matter how much you mutter “I think I can I think I can I think I can” and wear your superwoman underpants. Sometimes even independent Michelle needs other people. Russ to help me heft stuff to the charity shop, my shit to my new lodgings, a borrowed hoover back to the flat, hours of aforementioned cleaning. Alec to use up an entire bottle of carpet cleaner on our disgusting floors, return the hoover (carrying my laptop and a bag of random kitchen supplies at the same time), give me alcohol and sunflowers before I collapsed into bed.

We all had an 8.40 plane to Italy the next morning. Russ only got home after 1. He had to leave for the airport at 5. He got almost no sleep. He said it had been his pleasure to help me. The other night I was crying my eyes out at the thought of August 3, departure doomsday. Among other things, I was remembering this.

Packing Up

Whew. Handed in the dissertation on Tuesday. Am moving out of flat today. Going to Italy tomorrow to watch Radiohead. Hence recent silence.

The move so far has involved Alec in latex, James hanging out of windows, and later today, quite possibly Russ walking down the street cradling a very happy vacuum cleaner.

There’s something uniquely depressing about packing away the vestiges of a life you love in an empty flat. But at least with all the dust you have an excuse for the sniffles.

On a cheerier, more frivolous note, I cannot believe I am going to Milan (well, Bergamo to be exact, but Ryanair equates the two) at the precise point of time in my life when I have a total mullet head and seem to be going through a glut of Bad Face Days. It’s going to be pretty hard to avoid looking like a tourist.

Mainly For Accounting Purposes

I want to make quick notes about these few days, if only for the fact that if I don’t, I’ll forget how I managed to spend so much money and pass out when I get my bank statement.

Friday was relatively restrained. Dinner at good ol’ Sweet And Spicy never costs much more than £10 for both of us to stuff our faces. We decided to have a walk down to Columbia Road rather than go to the Califone gig I’d been pondering originally. We were looking for a drink, and wavered outside a particular pub. Peering in revealed an almost totally male clientele, and the fat slob staking out the pool table didn’t look as if he’d relinquish it willingly. Alec thought the place looked a bit loutish. Having had an awful day, I was, however, in dire need of alcohol, so we went in. The first thing I noticed was that it was playing George Michael. The second was that the bartender was a little camp and looked at us funny when we ordered drinks. The third was that the one woman I’d seen when I peered in appeared on closer inspection to have rather rugged features and didn’t seem to be wearing her own hair. When we left, everyone was singing “Anything you can do I can do better” and the slob was dancing.

Saturday being the day hippies were staking out Stonehenge, we decided to go to Greenwich for the summer solstice. Or at least, we walked through Greenwich Park to Blackheath, and toasted the summer solstice from the artificially-lighted insides of a rather nice microbrewery.

On Sunday I managed to visit Spitalfields market and only spend £10 (a T-shirt). All was going well, but then that night’s attempts to see electronica maestros Four Tet and Prefuse 73 at Plastic People fell through when the gig got totally sold out in advance, so we went to The Elbow Room instead for two hours of pool and several rounds of drinks. Team composition shifted constantly, and despite playing 5 or 6 games, some partnering Nick, and others partnering Alec, I can’t remember if my team ever won.

Monday was the first Tony Hawks day, which wasn’t the best intellectual preparation for Brand that night. But I must confess my motivations for seeing the play weren’t entirely intellectual to begin with. The Independent review begins thus: “Casting an actor of such extreme gorgeousness as Ralph Fiennes in the title role of Brand somewhat undermines the plausibility and point of Ibsen’s tormented hero,” to which I say undermine away, Ralph baby, you were scorching, which is impressive for any performance in a Norwegian play. (I am actually capable of deep commentary on the play, but I’m saving my deep commentary skills today for deconstructing the respective Canadian, US and German approaches to content neutrality in free speech adjudication.)

Tuesday wasn’t meant to be stupidly indulgent at all, but then I went and read the second Tony Hawks book, and a dinner trek with Alec to the seedier bits of King’s Cross ended up decidedly non-seedily in The Perseverance with blackened cajun salmon on a bed of rocket and cherry tomatoes, eton mess with assorted berries for dessert, and a lovely Rioja.

Yesterday I met Jiawen and Gwen for dinner at Little Bay (lovely, I’ll definitely be back). Today I’m watching Henry V. On Friday Benny’s doing a birthday thing. On Saturday I’m going to the Bridget Riley exhibition at the Tate Britain with Russ. I am fervently hoping nothing comes up on Sunday or Monday. And on Tuesday the damn dissertation is due, whether or not I have finished writing it.