Starting Third Year

I’ve finally managed to find more than ten minutes to spend in the computer room – it’s been frustrating these past few days, with so many things I feel like writing about, and so little time to put stylus to screen/fingers to keyboard to record it all. If anyone (anyone?) has been checking in here every now and then to find very little has changed, I apologize and plead Real Life Syndrome. But don’t give up on me yet – I’ll probably be cured of that particular malady soon enough, if 3rd year law and my intellectual pride have anything to do with it. Sigh.

Sunday was surreal. I spent most of the day in a narcoleptic daze due to having had no sleep for the previous 24 hours after spending the night alone in the Athens airport. I’m not really at my socializing best when acutely sleep deprived. I tend to vocalize my inner monologue a lot more. My usually intricate self-censorship system breaks down. I get goofy, almost child-like. I make even filthier comments than usual, or comments that only mean anything in my inner world and are exceedingly strange in the one everyone else inhabits. I don’t think of any of this as necessarily bad – it is, after all, a glimpse of me that’s perhaps more genuine than what’s normally available, but I don’t think it’s my preferred introductory impression either. One thing I didn’t exhibit was grouchiness, partly due to Russ delivering CDs, speakers and box-hefting assistance in the afternoon, John calling at night and just being John, and the general joy I always feel on coming back to London and the lovely hall I live in.

Oh yes, the hall. It’s lovely. It’s the same place I lived in last year, except this year I actually have to take on some responsibility. I’m the choirmistress (stop laughing, everyone who knows me), and have to choose hymns for our weekly masses, coordinate musical accompaniment for mass and do whatever the hell (oops) I can with throwing together a choir. At this point I should probably say I don’t sing very well. I sing in tune, but my tone is far from dulcet, and the last time I was in a choir I was a very ill little Christmas caroller who lasted a few houses before getting sick on the floor of some unfortunate person’s condo. But back to the hall being lovely. My two nearest neighbours are rather nice chaps who also happen to be exceptionally easy on the eye. My room is massive, which is a pleasant change from last year. So far the people who have moved in are promising to be excellent company – Mark, previously introduced here as My Bitch, is a source of eternal amusement, and other people with unconventional senses of humour are already becoming apparent. I thought I’d be going to gigs alone this year, since Marten’s graduated, but there’s a guy in the hall studying composition who likes Pixies and Pavement and Beck, so perhaps I’ll have some company after all. Our housekeeper nun still goes through occasional bouts of Nazi-ness, but you can’t have everything.

Speaking of gigs, I want to go to these, or whichever of these I can manage:

  • Mark B & Blade, 11 Oct
  • Sparklehorse, 11-12 Oct
  • Roots Manuva, 12 Oct
  • Rollins Band, 16 Oct
  • eels, 25 Oct
  • Mercury Rev, 2 Nov

At university, the first week of term’s been reasonably typical, or rather, reasonably typical for me and my particular social patterns. Feelings of extreme blahness at seeing most of my coursemates in the law faculty, although of course there were some exceptions. Walking around Freshers’ Fayre and getting accosted by various friends at various society stalls (Lib Dems, LGB, Film, Thai etc.) reminded me that I’ve always found the societies environment at UCL far more socially appealing than that in the faculty. My own quick trawl of what was available got me a place on the drum’n’bass society mailing list and a couple of jazz society leaflets which I’ll get round to reading at some point, and hopefully get round to attending at some point after that. I spent most of the time standing at the debating stall promoting our first debate of the year (This House Believes That Penetration Is Not Enough). I admit it wasn’t particularly hard work persuading people to come to a debate about hardcore pornography with free wine available, but for some reason I was exhausted by the end of it all.

Late nights this week have been spent snuggled in bed with a book (a trip to the library yielded the new Seamus Heaney collection, Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, and W.S. Graham’s Collected Poems), listening to all the music I missed terribly over the summer while my CDs were in Russ’s attic and I was in Singapore, and generally feeling, just for a few precious (delusional) minutes, that all’s right with the world.

Back. You Could Say, Home.

Obviously there are multitudes of things to do – get my room (lovely and big) in order, re-enrolment minutiae at UCL, reunion romps with old friends, conscious efforts to make new ones, get a lot of my hair cut off, that damned jurisprudence essay, start organizing the debating tournament I have to throw together soonish, start figuring out how to train a choir and play music at mass, and somewhere in all this I’ll squeeze in writing up my travel journal and putting it online.

Hello, London. It’s wonderful to be back.

I haven’t managed to get to a computer since I flew in early on Saturday morning, but have been recording snippets of clarity (or not) on my Handspring, which has also been a darling in facilitating my Making Of Lists and resultant (surprising) efficiency these few days.

So. Here be randomness, made marginally less random by chronological arrangement.

* * *

When most of your packing is incomplete and you’re on a flight in three hours, the most important thing you need to be doing is probably not arranging and re-arranging tacky metal letters on a tacky leather strap to see what words you can make, but this is, of course, what I found myself doing on Friday evening. My sister bought me a bag when she went to China recently. It was in almost all respects a very nice bag, except for the fact that on its front, shiny metal letters strung on a leather strap screamed MOSCHINO. After unpicking the strap and removing M,I, C and H thinking they might come in useful some time, I was left with O, S, N and O, which I fiddled around with a bit before settling on SNOO, which somehow appealed to me. Enigmatic. Fun to yell.

* * *

The in-flight entertainment on the plane wasn’t particularly promising this time – nothing I particularly wanted to watch except for stuff I’d already seen, but I couldn’t resist Coming To America, which I know in such frightening detail that it was a real effort restraining myself from joining in at “Freeze, you diseased rhinoceros pizzle!” The audio track to Moulin Rouge got inexplicably mixed up with the audio track to A Knight’s Tale, so after watching people doing the can-can to We Will Rock You for a few minutes (strangely appropriate, actually) I decided, and I maintain, only after all this, to switch to Bridget Jones’ Diary, for the nth time. With my Handspring, foldable keyboard and a dry martini on the table in front of me, and Colin Firth a foot away on the screen, I almost forgot I was flying economy class.

* * *

(written in absolute joy on Saturday morning)

I’m in my hall, sitting next to the window in my room, and despite having just gotten off a thirteen-hour flight with very little sleep and hauling my gargantuan suitcase across London and up three flights of stairs (with help from Justin, who thankfully responded to my unsubtle hints about men being strong and him being a Real Man), right now I feel like I want to sweep all of London up in my arms and kiss everyone hello.

The airbus from Heathrow was almost empty, which you’d expect at 6.34 am, and I sat on the top deck right in front, not caring that the sun was shining into my eyes because the vapour trails in the sky were worth risking blindness for.

(note to self, though: readjust paranoia from rock-bottom Singapore level to reasonably high London level. When probably-well-meaning guy helps you lug your suitcase onto the bus and remarks that it’s very heavy, replying “Well, it’s got my entire life in it!” is perhaps not the best of responses, given the slim but ever-present possibility that probably-well-meaning guy might turn out to be fucking-arsehole-thief guy.)

I got into the hall and my room, freshened up a bit and decided that morning mass would be a good thing to do. Finding out I was the only congregant put me on tenterhooks for a while (what if I suddenly forget the Hail Mary? what if I don’t stand up and sit down when I’m supposed to when I can’t just follow what everyone else is doing?) but everything went well, and I managed to make the minor liturgical re-adjustments from Singapore to London (“sins” -> “trespasses”, “do not bring us to the test” -> “lead us not into temptation”, which I vastly prefer) without any major mishaps.

After mass there were familiar faces at breakfast, familiar Saturday papers reminding me how London is teeming with things to do, familiar toast-burning toaster…and through all this I was feeling like I couldn’t stop smiling, that there was nothing I didn’t feel like doing, no one I wouldn’t be happy to see, that everything, at least right now, is as good as it gets.

Sucking Marrow

Trying to suck the marrow out of my last week at home for the next ten months or so means that entries lately have been sparse, sometimes petulantly idiosyncratic, or catalogues of events that are unlikely to be interesting to anyone but me. But give me a little time, and your patience. Knowing some entries here have been less than perfect doesn’t mean I wish them unmade. They’re parts, albeit itty-bitty, of the mulch that is this blog, and my head.

Summer Days Before Departure

Days in this week before departure (I return to London on Friday night), and how I’m spending them. Actually pretty boring for anyone who isn’t me, but I’m documenting it here just because.

Friday: lunch with friends from debating past at the Taman Serasi hawker centre, which meant that there was shade, and defiant breeziness, and views of mostly green through the gaps in the roofing (and this is always a good thing when the mostly green in question is trees), and satay and chicken rice and soursop juice, and Yuping haranguing Fengyuan (“Non-threatening! That’s what all you guys ultimately want, a girl who’s non-threatening!”), and terrible jokes (“A termite walks into a bar and asks, ‘Is the bartender here?'” – Jolene. “Girl runs into a police station and says ‘I’ve been graped! I’ve been graped!’ Policeman says, ‘Don’t you mean raped?’ ‘No, there were a bunch of them.'” – Yuping. “Girl runs into a police station and says ‘I’ve been reaped! I’ve been reaped!’ Policeman says, ‘Don’t you mean raped?’ ‘No, he used a scythe.'” – Me) and a discussion stemming from Dworkin’s writings on abortion, and all this continued into the gazebo next to the lake in the Botanic Gardens where there was cramming on bench and perching on railings, a fleeing couple and a fleeting swan, and Yuping and otherMichelle and I all agreed that we own way too many strappy tops.

Later, me and Yuping in absolute geekness in front of the big screen at Lido, infra-red-frenzied handhelds and bubble tea on the table, Yuping playing newly-beamed Dope Wars, getting the stares that any conversation about the game gets in public (“Okay, so what’s a good price for heroin?”…”I personally don’t bother with Ecstasy, it’s small potatoes”…”YES!!! COCAINE BUST!!”), and eventually I went home for dinner with family and Return Of The Jedi with Mum.

Saturday: lunch with Kevin, who I hadn’t seen for two and a half years, poetry reading at Kinokuniya by folks from the2ndrule, girlie shopping with Edlyn who blew me away with her knowledge of slingbacks (Note to self: slingbacks=shoes, silverbacks=gorillas, don’t get mixed up) and Italian straps and other fashionista jargon, and home in good time for dinner with family again, which I was glad about, because I do rather love them.

Sunday: a day of relaxed excess. Mass celebrated by an Irish priest whose severe mumbling didn’t prevent my usual reaction of “I have no idea what you’re saying, but damn, it sounds wonderful” to the accent, shopping with wonderful mum who bought me THREE pairs of shoes and lots of other miscellany, and then I decided to cook dinner for everyone (tricolore fusilli with chicken fillet pieces, peppers, onions and sweetcorn in tomatoey-olivey sauce, stir-fried cabbage with freshly ground black pepper and bacon bits), then White Teeth until The Phantom Menace and Bejeweled addiction (damn you, Yuping) till bedtime.

Monday: Lazy comfortable afternoon with Pei Ee, buying each other birthday presents, dinner with Terry at scattered places, a day of long meandering conversations and conversational ranges from ephemeral to weighty, rainy day with skies that reminded me of London but rain that was unmistakably tropical in its intensity and MUAHAHAHAness.

Tuesday: Limbo snoozing for most of the morning, lunch with Luke and Ida, which involved much maligning of Luke’s badminton coach dress sense and hyena laugh, ridiculing of Ida’s rebranding herself as vestal virgin, and some very expensive bubble tea. Dinner with Jacinta and Poonam at the East Coast beach, although in the midst of girlie catching up we never got round to actually going to the beach. We headed home at eleven – it was time for Gilmore Girls.

Wednesday: Futile afternoon trudging on pre-departure errands, dinner with Rafflesian girlfriends Jiawen, May and Gwen at the distinctly untrendy but truly lovely Chomp Chomp hawker centre at Serangoon, barbecued stingray, sambal sotong (loosely translated to chillied squid, but trust me, a lot is lost in translation. Slurp.), chai dao kuey (carrot cake, but not the sort the Western world is used to, this one’s oily and fried and wonderful.) and satay (strips of flame-cooked meat), under stars that were hard to see because of the lights of the estate, getai (cheesy Chinese singing) and auctioneering (both events which take place in housing estates during the Hungry Ghosts Festival, which is nowish) blaring from nearby, but in the midst of all this sensory overload a feeling of happy contentment, dessert in the distinctly trendier Big Apple Cafe where May made pompoms out of shredded serviettes and Jiawen did strange things with the window blinds and Gwen and I sat there and laughed.

When Angst Attacks!

(Been trying to post for the past few days, but Bloggerglitches kept getting in the way)

Last Wednesday and Sunday were meetings with people connected in one way or another with the hall I stayed in this year – dinner for Martin on Wednesday, barbecue in honour of Father John on Sunday, mildly enjoyable but forgettable occasions I went through feeling somewhat detached, as if I were floating above conversations, consciousness in one place watching body go through the motions of socializing.

Why is it so hard to connect with some people and so magically easy with others? The question is so trite it’s almost not worth answering. I lived with wonderful people this year, yet for most of them we were connected by little more than our common religion and a year’s worth of pleasantries. Some of this is admittedly my own fault – I spent the first half of the year too caught up in my life outside the hall to enjoy life inside it. When exams loomed and I had to stay home and study, I discovered a few with whom conversation managed to blossom, but then the year was almost over, and till now they know only the tiniest fraction of me, which is something I regret.

The problem was that there was the me who lived outside the hall and the me who lived in the hall, and the people who inhabited each sphere only ever saw scattered pieces of the picture. Trying to unite the spheres was never particularly successful either – I didn’t think most of my Catholic hallmates would be particularly interested in the details of my clubbing, or the latest gig I’d been to, or why I’d kicked ass in a debate, and I certainly kept a lot of the bitchiness which I indulged in out of the hall to myself when I was within it. Conversely, my outside friends, composed almost exclusively of steadfast atheists, weren’t particularly interested in how it was the most spiritual Easter of my life, although they would probably have applauded Alec, Chris and Enoch’s drinking shenanigans on Maundy Thursday night. And I talked to almost no one in or out of my hall about what I loved when I was alone, the books I read, the music I listened to, the strange workings of my head, because there simply is no one I know in the UK who I thought capable of understanding it all.

It’s not that I’m terribly dissatisfied with my social circles – a lot of the time they can be immensely fulfilling, but once in a while they seem overly compartmentalized.

I can only talk about poetry and literature with Creative Arts Programme friends. I can only talk about debating within my respective debating circles in Singapore and the UK. Scattered friends share my passion for music, but only in generality; once we get down to specifics the compartmentalization begins again – only Marten will go with me to indie rock concerts, only Russ will go with me to hip-hop clubs, Jeremy loves both but is in the US, the people who like popular music can’t talk about classical, the classical musicians know little of popular music.

It’s also not that I feel totally alone in the world. I’ve been blessed with a few friends who share a number of my interests, or perhaps they share none but ultimately they understand me nonetheless. They know who they are. I guess I just wish there were more.

At its core, stripped of the nuances and accoutrements my psyche tries to sneak in, there’s a longing, sometimes unnerving in its intensity, to scream: I am so much more than this that you see and presume, than the limited dimensionality which is all most people ever manage to grasp of me. Or all they’re ever interested in grasping, anyway.

And I guess, on the rare occasions that being alone ceases to be a source of succour and bliss, it is the age-old longing for just one person who thinks this odyssey is worth the effort.

GEP Guys, Tennis, Blockbusters

The last couple of days have been refreshingly different in small but worthwhile ways.

Friday: dinner at Newton hawker centre (where I haven’t been for years), with, er, seven guys (which I also don’t do too often. I usually stick to about four or five), followed by the immensely entertaining Rush Hour 2 (as cosmopolitan as I like to think of myself as being, I still enjoy watching a yellow man kicking white butt), and intermittent discussions about the sociological ramifications of the GEP. (Gifted Education Programme. All seven guys were from it. I got in but chose not to go. Obviously there was lots of room for discussion.)

Monday: night tennis fun with Ken. Despite my stint on my primary school mini-tennis team (downsized racquets, oversized spongy balls) and Ken’s recent buff sportiness, our tennis hour could perhaps be accurately described as a breathtaking showcase of incompetence, as much of our cross-court repartee acknowledged.

Ken: Okay, let’s set a goal for ourselves! Let’s try for a rally of five!
I serve into the net.
Ken: Okay, one! Let’s go for one!

Me, serving: Right, let’s focus on control!
Ken swings the racquet but misses the ball completely.
Me: Right, let’s also focus on aim!

Today: excursion with Luke and Yuping to Darkest Singapore to watch Moulin Rouge at Causeway Point (I admit that in a country with a total landspace of 640 square kilometres, nothing is very far, but Causeway Point is as far northwest as you can go in Singapore without having to visit Malaysia), because it was the only cinema left in Singapore that was still showing the movie.

The movie? Nice eye candy. Reasonable ear candy. Liked their cover of Roxanne. John Leguizamo’s always a treat to watch. But it left me completely unmoved at the end, so I’m wondering why so many people kept telling me how much they cried. I guess the fact that I feel absolutely no need to spew copious amounts of words in either praise or censure of it probably says the most of all, and something tells me this is actually the worst possible reaction a director like Baz Luhrman could have. It was worth the money, effort and time, but I like it the least out of the three Baz Luhrman films I’ve seen. (I liked Strictly Ballroom best, followed closely by Romeo and Juliet)

Where Have All The Gorgeous Gays Gone?

Out of all the stereotypical reasons why straight girls like going to gay clubs, the only one that Taboo (at Tanjong Pagar) didn’t epitomize on Saturday night was that they’re full of gorgeous men. I have to say I didn’t find the sight of an entire club full of skin-tight singleted sweaty men with meticulously gelled and almost universally spiky hair particularly pleasant. While I admit to the occasional beefcake weakness, the rumpled intellectual look tends to keep my knees most lastingly shaky. But hey, there was good music, no sleazy gropers, good company (Ida, Yen, Fay, the guys will remain unnamed) and no cover charge, and so I had a smashingly good time.

First Belly Laugh Of The Summer

Clubbing at Eden yesterday with Ida, Rashidah, Addy, Jianyi and Billy. The club is a converted old-style Singaporean terrace house – narrow but long, you can cram lots of them on a street, but they extend back a long way, and many of them have skylights. I’ve always liked them. Anyway, lots of these houses have been converted into clubs and bars on Mohammed Sultan Road, which means that movement through these clubs tends to be extremely linear. From the front of the club to the back. From the back to the front. Not many lateral options.

So we’re all on the dancefloor, which is long and narrow like the rest of the club, and there’s an exceptionally vigorous guy dancing behind Rashid and me. Very closely. Jianyi chivalrously changes places with Rashid. Vigorous Too-Close Guy accepts this philosophically and moves on to me. Billy chivalrously changes places with me. Vigorous Too-Close Guy remains vigorous and too close behind Billy.

Billy’s eyes pop. The rest of us start to giggle.

So Billy decides he’s had enough, takes a “Still vigorous and too close? I’ll give you fucking vigorous and too close, you wanker” course of action, and starts gyrating madly in full camp mode, head thrown back in orgasmic joy, arms raised in limp-wristed exaltation, hips a sinuous maelstrom of bellydanceresque splendour, and the rest of us are cracking up, and in response to all this Vigorous Too-Close Guy is undeterred, whereupon Billy’s eyes pop again and the rest of us start to completely lose it, all sense of rhythm deserting us, all efforts at dancing replaced by spasmodic twitching as we hunched over aching stomachs, laughing, laughing, laughing, and I felt hysterical and helplessly silly and gloriously alive.

East Coast Afternoon

The weather’s been moody the past week with sulks and squalls every now and then, and on Saturday in the car on the way to Pasir Ris every drop of rain seemed to think it was a kamikaze pilot seeking final glorious death on the windscreen, but yesterday, yesterday it was breathtakingly sunny, and I got lured outdoors.

The Marine Parade library’s one of the best ways to enjoy a beautiful day – tall glass walls let the light in, but air-conditioning and frappucinos protect you from the heat. On a Monday afternoon you escape the Sunday crowds, but there are just enough people to give it a contented buzz, more than enough comfy chairs to go round, and no queue at the Starbuck’s. I was disciplined and kept my four book limit in mind when scouring the shelves, instead of the way I usually end up staggering around with over ten books, most of which I later have to discard sadly, and settled down happily for the next two hours or so.

Final choices: The Passion (Jeanette Winterson), The Eye In The Door (Pat Barker), and the Lonely Planet guide to Turkey. I still had Let’s Go Greece 2001 on my card from two weeks ago, so that made four.

While waiting for the bus, I took a patriotic picture – the walkway in the public housing estate was festooned with flags in preparation for National Day, which is on 9 August. Lately our public housing estates have been looking more and more like condominiums, but the old building in this one does actually correspond with more typical ideas of “public housing”.

At my bus stop I decided it was still too pretty outside to go home, and walked to Katong Shopping Centre for black economy delights. If you’re Singaporean, you’ll know what I mean by this. If you’re not, let’s just say that in certain stores here they sell lots of flat shiny things with lots of other people’s intellectual/artistic property on them for very low prices. At least, that’s what I go there to buy. I daresay the middle-aged men in certain sections of the shops trying to conceal their salivation and callused right hands were after pleasures neither intellectual nor artistic.

I took the long way home, walking along the entrance to the expressway, and was conveniently informed that when I leave here for London on August 31, it’ll only take me 9 minutes to get to the airport. I love this home, but I still can’t wait to get back to that one.