Online Vs Offline

Two days on, and things are looking (very) slightly better. Some sort of start has been made on Milosevic, although everything else I was depressed about on Friday is pretty much still going on.

An addendum to one thing I wrote on Friday, about anti-abortionists: I am anti-abortion, except in cases where the mother’s life is in danger, or both the mother’s and child’s lives are in danger, where I believe it becomes a moral grey area where any decision either way is incredibly difficult. I believe abortion is the taking of an innocent life, and in my ideal world, it would be illegal. Then again, in my ideal world, there wouldn’t be rapists, and contraception wouldn’t fail, and people who didn’t want to get pregnant would act responsibly in their sex lives. But there isn’t much that’s more hypocritical than anti-abortionists murdering, and it disgusts me that in their moral universe and mine, some points overlap.

This is actually a subject I can go on and on for hours about, but it’s something I generally prefer to deal with through real-time conversation rather than in a blog, because misunderstandings are so much easier to deal with face to face. I’d also state that almost everything I said above is, at best, a simplistic summary of my thoughts on the subject, and I don’t think any valid opinions can be formed in response to my views (either for or against) until you’ve actually talked to me.

It just struck me that many of the things I think about a great deal are hardly represented in this site. I think a great deal about politics, and religion, and morality – basically, all the stuff that people disagree most violently and irrationally about – but I seldom write about any of that here. I think it’s because in real life, I spend a great deal of time in the company of debaters and at debating competitions, where all the above subjects are, surprise surprise, violently and irrationally disagreed about. And as I said earlier, I actually prefer talking about things like that face to face with people, rather than chucking inflammatory words into the ether where they can be easily misunderstood and people can think of me as a bad, bad person.

Which does trouble me. I’m perfectly happy with people having less than positive opinions about me (because sometimes, no one agrees more with them than me), but I like having the chance to defend myself if they’ve got me wrong, which they frequently do, either through a fault of theirs, or mine, or both. And although people frequently get me wrong in conversations as well, at least I’ve got more of a chance if they communicate their displeasure there and then, and we can try sorting it all out.

So that was yet another simple comment turned into a personality rant. They tend to slip out from time to time.

Low

It might be having to study for exams, or it might be hormonal, or it might be the changing of the seasons, but whatever it is, I feel incredibly low today, and not in a cool indie-rock Mormon couple way.

(Note to self: Evaluate at some point whether references like the one I made above are attempts at over-cleverness which reflect some deep subconscious pop-psychology-stoked insecurity of mine, or whether they’re perfectly acceptable expressions of the connections my mind makes, and this is the one place I can express them given that if I said things like that in normal life, people would look at me with polite incomprehension. As I said, note to self.)

Reading the news with any sort of emotional involvement at all is a recipe for depression. Bush says fuck you to Kyoto. Anti-abortionists just keep on killing abortionists. Timothy McVeigh calls the children who died in Oklahoma “collateral damage”. Trouble goes on in the usual trouble spots, and then some. I feel a sort of impotent fury at the world, and the conglomeration of human (un)reason that goes into making these things happen.

You know what else terrifies me? The fact that all this is going on, and chances are that I can keep on living my charmed easy life, flying between comfort zones London and Singapore, and none of it is likely to really affect me that much in my lifetime, unless weapons of mass destruction get involved.

It disturbs me how easy it would be to stop caring. To shut myself in with my books and my music (geez, this all sounds very I Am A Rock) and shake my head in resignation when I read about 10 month old babies killed by snipers, and then go play Dope Wars the next minute.

And then the other question is: what the hell is your caring worth, Michelle, if you don’t do anything about anything except sit around all day reading the news? I’m sure suffering people are grateful that you care even though you spend far more money on buying CDs than in donations to charities that might help them. I’m sure they speak fondly of you to aid workers, because you spent five seconds thinking “poor, poor suffering people” before you turned the page and read about the Oscars.

It’s a Moebius strip of frustration and malaise and “Michelle, everything may be crap but so are you” and I really just wish we were all better people, and I also wish that didn’t sound as stupid and trite as it did, but I did mean it.

(Note: Dope Wars deliberately not linked to. May you all be spared from its enslavement.)

Contradictions

Somewhere in the giant cosmic calendar, today is marked “Michelle, London: Contradictions, contradictions. Haha! Hahaha!”

Staying awake the entire night trying to make up for a lazy day. Making it downstairs for breakfast, and guzzling coffee, only to go back upstairs and fall asleep for five hours till three.

Magical fantastic hair, which would be reason for a little frivolous gleeful smile if I was going to Cargo tonight to see Ninja Tune maestros in action. But I’m not, because of the tube strike. I hope the strikers know that because of them, the tiny proportion of the world that would have been at Cargo have missed out on my hair.

Happily putting up my new Sandman poster (O gods of Blu-Tack, I beseech thy benevolent stickiness). Getting annoyingly outbid at the last moment for a Sonic Youth poster at ebay.

Cave paintings in the sky around half past four. I saw an icthyosaurus, struggling out of the tentacled grasp of a giant squid, and its beak broke the surface of the clouds in a flurry of blues and lilacs. An hour later, all is dull greyness and spittle, and I write this in a mood of restless discontent, hoping that the next contradiction for today will be something bad turned good, which would be refreshing.

Then again, I fully acknowledge that lots of my days involve no early risings or breakfast, evil hair, things at ebay that I can’t even afford to bid on or don’t get shipped to the UK, and disgusting weather, with none of the little joys that peeped into today, so I suppose I should quit kvetching.

Some Days

You know how some days you wake up at two and start swearing wildly because you meant to wake up at eight and be all responsible instead of sleeping half the day away, and then you mean to go grocery shopping, but instead you squander even more hours away in the computer room, and you return home seething with disgust, and then you find a CD-shaped parcel in your pigeon-hole wrapped with paper saying “This is not a CD” repeated all over it in various sizes and ink densities, and there’s a poster-shaped parcel waiting for you in reception, and when you get up to your room and open them, they’re belated birthday presents from your best friend, and one is the lovely soundtrack to Hilary And Jackie, and the other is a beautiful rare Sandman poster you’ve spent years longing, longing, longing to own?

Usually, me neither, which is why yesterday was so great. Thanks, Russ. :)

Raven Lunatic

Last night, while we were watching an X-Files episode involving ravens (Chimera), Michael walked into the TV room halfway through the show.

Shortly after Michael came in, when the camera focused on a mirror (which basically meant a raven was going to appear and caw, followed by some dreadful blurred monster thing), I went “Aaaark! Aaaark!”, which was supposed to be a raven imitation.

Mary (to Michael): Oh, that’s something related to the show. She hasn’t just gone completely mad.

Michael: Thank God. I was about to start baaaaing just so she’d feel someone understood her.

I love my hallmates.

Clubbing Protect-tor

Something I didn’t say in Saturday’s Fabric report: It would all have been a lot less fun without the company of Russ, who always manages to be the best dancer in the club, yet never (well, hardly ever) hits me even while dancing right behind me (which is why, yesterday, I only described my experience in the drum’n’bass room as being battered from almost all directions), and somehow manages to keep me feeling safe and secure even as I’m stumbling completely blind through smoke.

Worst Asian Fetish Subject Ever

I didn’t actually mean to leave the house today, but there was this strange French guy staying in the next room (when Easter holidays begin, spare rooms in my hall get let to tourists) who paints Picasso pictures on neckties, and wanted to take me for a walk and talk to me about China and have me speak Mandarin to him. This continued even when I explained that I wasn’t from China and speak only very bad Mandarin.

“Oh, ze gai-rls from China, you arre so preeeetteee.”
“Actually, I find Chinese beauty too boring. They all have long hair and meaningless smiles.”
“Yessss, you have ze shorrt hairrr. Eet ees so charrrming and fool of life.”
“Um, thank you. I actually have a lot of work to do today.”

Exeunt hall, to computer room.

Epiphanies

At some point last night in Fabric, blinded by smoke and battered from almost all directions by too many pilled-up people crammed into too little space with music that was probably too loud (although I’ve probably already damaged my hearing enough to have lost awareness of this), I thought about how one day, I might look back on these antics of my youth and shake my head in rueful amusement.

And it will be a sad day.

Because last night, when the bass was so powerful I felt my bones shudder in submission, and the beats so compelling it seemed as if they’d assumed control of my pulse, it was visceral and euphoric and exhausting and uplifting and (shall I use it? shall I use it? It’s way too overused but what the hell…) transcendental, all of those at once, and even though I know there are moments far worthier of immortalization and with far greater depth than a night in a drum ‘n’ bass room, I arrived at one of the many little epiphanies that brighten up my life in the UK, that this was one of the things I came here for.

They come to me at wildly different times and places, these epiphanies. The last one was when I was sitting in my debating society’s annual Foundation Debate, watching MPs engage with each other and the students in the audience in a way that was stunningly different from the sterility that permeates Singaporean political awareness.

They’re not an indication that I will go home to Singapore and look at it as a poor substitute for life in London – over the summer at home, I had similar little moments of clarity when I suddenly realized I was in the middle of something wonderfully unique which I would have to go without during my next nine months in London.

I guess you could say they’re moments when, wherever I am, I am suddenly aware that the fabric (no pun intended) that is my life will be variegated and Technicolored, and I hope I’ll be able to look back on both the glamorous and the mundane and wear it all with pride. At the same time, there’s the awareness of the inexorable passage of time, and how “looking back” will still only be looking back, which is only ever bittersweet at best.

And I am here in London for these three years, and I feel that old, cliched fear, redolent of high-school prom night sobbings and adolescent angst, but still resonant to me nonetheless, that things will never be the same again.

End Of Term! Beginning Of Studyness!

And term is over! Or at least, it’ll be over in ten minutes, as soon as my property law essay gets printed out and I shove it gleefully into my tutor’s pigeon-hole. Disturbing but viciously gratifying mental pictures abound.

I spent all of today enslaved to the essay, due to a highly enjoyable meeting last night with friends I don’t often get to see. Walter had come over from the States on his spring break, Vikram was down from Cambridge, and Jeff was in from, er, Tooting. For reasons I’ve described before, their company last night was worth today’s misery.

Later tonight is an outing to Fabric Live to celebrate Nick’s birthday, anticipation of which was one of the main reasons I didn’t slit my wrists a few hours ago in mortgage-related boredom.

But on Monday, yes, MONDAY, studying for the exams starts. I mean it.

Darwin And Our Fire Drill

At 7.15 a.m. today the fire alarm went off in my hall. In the bleariness that generally defines me at any time before, say, 3 p.m., I floundered around in absolute confusion for a while before I realized that it wasn’t my alarm clock having delusions of grandeur, and stumbled downstairs. Trying to find something to do other than shiver while waiting for the fire alarm drill to end, I squinted at a plaque on the Anatomy Building saying something about Charles Darwin having lived there. And I thought about London in 1666, a city built of timber and pitch, ignited by a spark and then burning for four days, and I thought about fire alarms, and fire drills to make sure the fire alarms work and people react the way they’re supposed to. And I somehow drew parallels between this and Darwinian evolutionary theory. And then the fire drill was done, and we could all go back in, and I went upstairs and got back into bed and fell asleep.