Amsterdam And Bruges, 2001

Any discussion of Amsterdam really must start with my priest, whose responses to my telling him where I was going ran the gamut from “You dirty slut!” to “Pull yourself together, girrl, and doan’t be goin’ to that city of sin!” (spelling irregularities my attempt to convey his channelling of our Irish housekeeper nun) to “Would you like to borrow a guidebook?”

In hindsight my mid-trip “Hi Mum, I’m in Amsterdam!” phonecall to my mother, who I’d forgotten to tell about my plans, was rather cruel, given that the answers I then gave to her anxious queries could hardly have brought maternal peace of mind eg. “Where are you staying?” “Hostel Kabul”; “Hostel Kabul? Is it safe? Is it full of drug addicts/sex tourists/generally unsavoury characters? Where is it?” “Oh, it’s in the heart of the red light district. It’s quite nice, really, don’t worry…” Sorry, Mum. I probably do this to you too often.

I wasn’t really lying about the hostel. Despite its roach problem (such as me opening my toiletries bag and finding a large roach perched on my toothpaste tube; said roach was given a 5 minute grace period to get the fuck out of there, after which it was unceremoniously hauled out with bare hands and savagely killed) and the fact that from the second night onwards I was the only girl in a 24 person dorm, and the fact that all the men in there with me seemed to be of the resonant snoring variety, despite all this, Hostel Kabul was actually quite all right compared to others I’ve been in. For example, water came out of the shower when you turned it on. This was a plus.

Apart from this, the rest of our (me, Russ) little jaunt involved lots of walking (good) in cold and rain and wind (not so good) with little more than my regularly inverting umbrella (bloody annoying) as protection against this. There were of course the requisite visits to the Anne Frank house, Van Gogh museum, friendly neighbourhood brothels etc., also a day-trip to Bruges, also rambling along the canals, stumbling down narrow wind tunnel streets brandishing umbrellas like shields, Russ chasing his umbrella down one such street, me laughing like crazy until my umbrella promptly did another topsy-turvy, long-drawn-out dinners that left us the last people in the restaurant, celebrating the phenomenon that is the Michelle-Russ dynamic, me making a silent promise to myself and him that things will not change (at least not much) in the light of recent developments in my life, that we will not lose this.

Stereotypical souvenir shopping: Belgian chocolates for hall priests, nun and Mark (Mark got “Woodies”, I obviously chose something different for the clergy), Royal Delft blue and white pattern teacup for mum, advocaat for me and Avril. Considered an inflatable doll for Alec, decided this was possibly not the best gift to give a significant other/boyfriend/whatever, even if he did once send me a tape of a song called Pussy-Pussy-Cat.

All in all, an exceptionally good Reading Week, but I really am determined now to slog for a bit and put in some hours in the library until Christmas. I needed to do this, but now I need to do that.

One Year

Ineffable [2008 annotation: that’s the name of my old blog] is a year old today. Fancy that. :)

This probably calls for some attempt at taking stock, a State Of The Blog address of sorts, except that I have nothing particularly profound to say.

Reading over a year’s worth of posts, I do actually like most of what I’ve written here, and how I’ve written it. I don’t think my writing has changed very much, either in style or subject matter. I write about how I’ve spent my days, partly to give friends who read it an idea of how I’m doing, but more to remind myself what the hell I do with my time. I write about where I’ve been, what I’m reading, listening to, watching.

I write almost nothing about the things that affect me most deeply, or that evoke the strongest feelings: rage, hurt, infatuation. (None of these happen to me very often at all, actually, so you’re not missing much.) I prefer dealing with these privately, because rage and hurt are always at someone, and I feel a bit nasty airing dirty linen like that on a public site. Infatuation (probably the rarest of the three) gets only very carefully calculated and massively understated references because I am generally far too romantically clueless and shy to let the relevant person know about it, let alone the world. Depression gets only occasional mention, because my problems are infinitesimal in the wider scheme of things, and whinging is boring.

So what of me are you left with, gentle reader (assuming you don’t already know me in real life)? Perhaps very little. You don’t hear the Michellisms that pepper my speech, the accent that I don’t believe can be anything other than refined Singaporean but which people keep insisting is Caribbean; you don’t see me dolled up in girly pink, or attitudinal in leather and gelled hair, or slouching around the house in baggy indie-rock T-shirt and drawstring trousers; you don’t really have a sense of what sets me off giggling quietly to myself, or collapses me with hysterical laughter while people look on bemused; you haven’t looked me in the eye, or hugged me, or even handed me the salt.

You do, however, have a glimpse through a chink (no pun intended, ha ha) in the armour that not everyone who actually knows me gets. You read what I write about friendships I treasure that I’m sometimes too shy to say to the people involved in real life. You have the benefit of reading me edited for coherence and comprehension, rather than having to deal with my tendencies towards convoluted sentences, tangents, and habit of speaking in disclaimers. You get the expert tour of what I think is good and reasonably interesting about me, without having to wade through the rest of the mulch.

And what if you know me in real life as well as read this blog? Well hey, lucky you. :P

I don’t exactly have any big celebratory plans for this anniversary, but I thought it would be good to refer you to a smattering of posts I particularly like for one reason or another. (I’m going to Amsterdam from tomorrow till Saturday, so I also thought this might make up for not posting in the next few days.)

An essay weekend
A bookstore stole my day
The Lazarus glove
Generation surrenderist
Linkage jitters, reality bites, and the nonpersistence of memory
Don’t read Douglas Coupland on Valentine’s Day
The weekend my spring began
Birthday wishes
Commonwealth cynicism
Fire drill epiphany
Feeling low (and tangential)
Yo La Tengo!
Girl Narrowly Escapes Exam Disaster, Contemplates Bestiality
How not to make it in health advertising
Xtreme X-Files dissatisfaction
Giggling in church
Musings on conversational self-censorship
The first belly laugh of the summer
Michelle down. Michelle back up.

Happy Snippets

Snippets from the weekend (no more than snippets, though. Tufts in the fur of the woolly mammoth of my current happiness. Some of the reasons I’m happy make me go a bit shy and fluttery, and I don’t feel like writing about them here):

After an extraordinarily taxing day, Thai food, Mercury Rev and charming company made for an extraordinarily pleasant Friday night. Even though I somehow managed to buy a Rev T-shirt that was shocking in its random ugliness (I blame the wine, and Alec for not stopping me), and even though I was the lucky one who got to sit next to Stupor Guy, whose travails on the astral plane manifested themselves in the inexorable downward drift of his upper body towards an increasingly cringing me, the gig still had its moments – nice renditions of The Dark Is Rising, Spiders and Flies, Hercules, Tonight It Shows and Goddess On A Hiway’s always fun. I do wish they’d played Endlessly and A Drop In Time though, and I don’t think they played anything from Boces or Yerself Is Steam, which was a little disappointing.

Their live sound is rougher round the edges than the pristine sound on the last two albums. Their album sound feels as if each component of a song (think Endlessly, for example) occupies a distinct musical space with clearly delineated boundaries, and exists quite happily there without really interacting with other elements of the song, even though they all complement each other very prettily when taken as a whole. Like a consomme. Live, it’s more of a stew, or perhaps a chunky soup, and I’m not sure how much I actually liked hearing the songs that way. For me, Deserter’s Songs and All Is Dream are the sound of late nights studying or reading in bed, just right for the spaces between the sounds of night drizzle and Gower Street white noise. Having said that, I do think gigs are meant to sound different from albums, so all this is more commentary than complaint.

Saturday was the President’s Cup, the only intervarsity tournament for novice debaters in the UK, and something Mark and I had been slaving over (well, kind of) for the past couple of weeks. Relentless perfectionist that I am, I’m still half convinced that every person who kept coming up to me and raving about how fantastic the tournament was, was either piss drunk or just being polite, but there does seem to be considerable consensus that it was a resounding success. Which makes me happy, although it could all have been so much better if not for a plethora of organizational failures that I know I made, and which I feel lucky for getting away with.

Special mention must be made of:

  • Mark, tournament convenor AKA My Bitch, who ran himself ragged during the day, supplied alcohol at night, and has generally been absolutely lovely to work with because of his ability to find hilarity in drudgery and give wonderful hugs when I’m not in the mood for hilarity.
  • Russ, who sacrified his Saturday to perform the extremely boring functions of a tournament drudge, because I really needed the help, and because he’s sweet like that. (Oops, he hates being called sweet. Oh well.)

After Saturday, Sunday was a day for nothingness. Woke up at noon. Practised the organ for evening mass. Spent the rest of the afternoon in bed with Seamus Heaney and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, falling in love all over again with the Olivia Tremor Control’s Dusk At Cubist Castle, munching Kettle Chips, breathing in chrysanthemum tea. Had fun at evening mass playing my calypso version of How Great Thou Art. Chocolate pancakes a la Mark for dinner. Subjected Alec to The Lost Children (stomach-turning song on the new Michael Jackson album, to be excoriated here in the very near future). Camp dancing extravaganza with Mark to New York City Boy (Pet Shop Boys), which might possibly have been quite inconsiderate to Stefan downstairs due to my very creaky floorboards. In retrospect, I suppose you could say it wasn’t actually a day of nothingness, except in the sense that it involved nothing that detracted from happy, happy, happy me.

(Are you tired of this yet?)

Incidental Hobbitness

I’ll write more tomorrow. But right now what needs to be said is that:

  • Friday was great
  • Saturday was great
  • Sunday was great
  • I haven’t been this happy for a long time
  • And incidentally, my hobbit name is Tigerlily Proudneck of Longbottom.

Real Life Syndrome Strikes Again

I never really mentioned the debating tournament I have to organize for Saturday, my skyrocketing workload or the fact that I have to spend about six or seven hours a week organizing the liturgical music for my hall before, mostly because I don’t like whinging and do my damndest to refrain from it, but this week I think the proverbial shit just hit the proverbial fan.

But! I am far less stressed than I should be, mostly due to frivolous shopping, decadent meals (Busaba Eathai lunch with Ken, dinner at Mash for Gareth’s 21st birthday), and a Mercury Rev gig tonight – these diversions (oh, mustn’t forget Bailey’s doubles) have done a remarkably good job of persuading me that I still have a life, and therefore I remain reasonably smiley, albeit occasionally wild-eyed and muttery.

And! Once tomorrow is over Reading Week starts, and I will magically combine some solid academic catching-up with more frivolous shopping, hopefully The Homecoming, hopefully The Man Who Wasn’t There, hopefully Amsterdam, and it will be one of the first times in my life I’ve actually deserved a bloody good break.

Operation Get-Michelle-Out-Of-The-House: Initial Success

But then I got lazy.

Thursday’s usual crapness was substantially mitigated by a night pilgrimage to Cargo with Esther for Xen bliss. Lots of fun discovering the joys of frozen melon schnapps shots (topped with Bailey’s), two successive gorgings on fries gloriously slopped with ketchup and mayo, and the sonic smorgasboard that is the Ninja Tune sound unfolding around us all the time. Satisfyingly vigorous stints of probably the most uninhibited dancing I’ve done for a while. An atmosphere I hadn’t felt for ages – that the people on the dancefloor were there simply because they loved the music and wanted to dance to it. Not to look beautiful, not to pull, not to be able to say they’d been to the latest trendy Shoreditch bar. I liked that.

Thursday’s exertions necessitated a restful Friday night, so the highlight of an extremely quiet night in an eerily deserted hall was laughing maniacally to the South Park Thanksgiving pageant episode with Zad and Tay, although watching Zad and Tay chortle and fall off chairs was almost funnier than what was on the screen.

The most fun I had on Saturday was doing the Big Issue crossword (party on, Michelle), which really does sound rather pathetic, especially since we somehow just couldn’t manage to figure out “Producer of natural foods” (available letters *A*R*M**) and eventually scrawled FAARRMER.

I think I still need to get out more.

Lots of things appeal. Surrealism at the Tate Modern, The Homecoming, The Man Who Wasn’t There, long sprawling walks around London (which I haven’t done for a while, and rather miss), and of course there’s always frivolous shopping. Also, I suddenly feel like Barcelona or Berlin. Possibilities, possibilities…

Sholipshishism With Seamus

As is often the case when work and various other things start encroaching on my usually satisfactory sense of mental stability and general well-being, I’ve been feeling an ever-increasing compulsion to do anything but everything I should be doing.

Hence: tendencies towards extreme offensiveness at debating committee meetings (this would involve interrupting the President’s incessant whinging and acute martyrdom complex by shouting “Well, BOO HOO!”, and then collapsing in helpless cackles), rather too much time and money spent at the hall bar drinking dodgy £1 vodka alcopops, and a general longing to just get out of the hall, the law library, the debating chamber, the entire UCL locale altogether.

Except that most of the time my inertia and disorganization means I end up retreating to my room and music and books, which are all far cheaper forms of escapism than the alternatives that come to mind, but this tends to steep me in solipsism after a while, which I don’t like.

[Speaking of solipsism (or perhaps not, because I don’t think the poem is entirely solipsistic, but it did somehow get associatively recalled by my use of that word) please read Personal Helicon (Seamus Heaney) because I just love it.]

[You could also do with reading Anahorish and Death Of A Naturalist, and pretty much everything else he’s ever written, while you’re about it.]

[You could also buy me Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996, if you’re feeling generous.]

[Or you could buy it for yourself, which would admittedly make me less happy than the above option, but would nevertheless make me quite happy, all the same.]

Where was I? Oh yes – solipsism. :)

Onion Gems

U.S. Vows To Defeat Whoever It Is We’re At War With:
“For example, we know that the mastermind has the approximate personality of a terrorist,” Gramm said. “Also, he is senseless. New data is emerging all the time.”

President Urges Calm, Restraint Among Nation’s Ballad Singers:
In the wake of the recent national tragedy, President Bush is urging Mariah Carey, Michael Jackson, and other singers to resist the urge to record mawkish, insipid all-star tribute ballads. “To America’s recording artists, I just want to say, please, there has already been enough suffering,” Bush said. “The last thing we need right now is a soaring Barbra Streisand-Brian McKnight duet titled ‘One For All.'”

God Finally Gives Shout-Out Back To All His Niggaz:
“The Lord Almighty finally responded to nearly two decades of praise in hip-hop album liner notes Monday, when He gave a shout-out back to all His loyal niggaz…”Mad props to P. Diddy, Jay-Z, DMX, Lil’ Kim, Mystikal, Eve, Ja Rule, Jadakiss, Trick Daddy, and Xzibit. And one love to Meth, RZA, GZA, Ghostface, and the rest of My real niggaz in the Wu-Tang Clan,” the deity said. “These My beloved niggaz, with whom I be well-pleased.”

Northern Irish, Serbs, Hutus Granted Homeland In West Bank:
“Though hopes are high for Ethniklashistan – a name created by a team of linguists who combined 17 different languages’ words for “sanctuary” – the establishment of the new homeland has proven rocky. Of the more than 500,000 people relocated there so far, approximately 97 percent have responded with violent resistance, swearing oaths of eternal vengeance against U.N. volunteers conducting the forced relocations.”

Working Lunch

Epic fusion lunch with Mark on Monday involved leftover claypot rice with lap cheong (Chinese sausage; Mark popped some in his mouth and asked what was in it, I said probably dog, Mark spluttered a bit), fusilli with pesto, chicken kievs, cherry tomatoes, and mouldy bread.

Other features of lunch included surprisingly efficient planning of Tuesday’s debate workshop, managed far more successfully than all our previous attempts at planning sessions because at those we always end up wallowing in mad gossip and agonizing over respective affairs of the heart – today we were in the dining room and didn’t have the requisite privacy.

We also tried formulating a cunning plan to discourage a girl who’s after him and needs to know she’s barking up the wrong tree (so to speak). One possibility was that I call him a “fucking faggot” in front of her. The problem with this, of course, is that it calls for careful planning and judicious implementation, because otherwise I might end up just looking really, really mean. His solution to this: “Oh, just say you’re post-menopausal…pre-menstrual…oh, whatever, female bits, you know…”

Oh, Mark. I may have spent most of two hours last night shouting “All men are bastards/fuckwits/arseholes!” (with a long-suffering but highly entertained Avril), but not you, never you.

Happy Birthday Fabric

I’ve been meaning to say: Happy 2nd birthday, Fabric. I won’t be around for your third, though.

(Which depresses me slightly, even though Friday night didn’t evoke the sheer glee previous excursions have managed. I haven’t quite decided if I’m mellowing, or Fabric’s lost something, but it was, nonetheless, nice to be there with Russ and remember us there two years ago in its opening weeks, our first weeks at university, going to Fabric at 9 pm absolutely determined to get in, talking for hours before we started dancing, me clueless and flailing in my first drum’n’bass experience, him the epitome of non-camp-male-dancing coolness that he still is, walking back to Ramsay Hall in my decidedly unsensible shoes, talking, talking, talking, and two years later here we are, and this friendship has only gotten closer and better and stronger along the way.)