After a day of studying international trade law, it is immensely refreshing to meet friends for dinner and learn from Jeff that there is a Bollywood movie called Jism.
While we’re on the topic I must also alert you to a recent important scientific discovery. The last paragraph in particular is a real breakthrough.
In yet another related story, I’m pleased to see that scientists at UCL are maintaining its international standing as a serious research institution.
Can you tell I’m bored?
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.
What English can do: ransack
the warmth that chuckles beneath
fuzzed surfaces, smooth velvet
richness, plashy juices.
— Peaches, Peter Davison
Today’s Writer’s Almanac poem is lovely. Taste it all over your mouth like wine.
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. 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.
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.’ “
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.
I admit it, I’m stuck in the past. I sit here and try to think of something to write, but because my current life is boring beyond belief, and generally involves little more than me sitting in front of this laptop typing exam notes about judicial politics in France, me sitting in front of the TV watching Beyonce’s (fine) ass, and me sitting at the dining table eating chicken rice, I need to go back to a time I had fun. I’ll tell you about Ireland.
We were there to go to the Galway Races. And according to a secret plan of Alec’s, to also make me go up in a very small plane and make some pretence of learning to fly it. I don’t think he was planning to tell me this until I was actually thundering down the runway bug-eyed, but James let it slip earlier in the day. Fortunately or unfortunately, my date with the deathtrap had to literally take a rain check when weather conditions were unsuitable for flying, but I’m sure he’ll find a way of bundling me on another one some time in the future.
The Galway Races turned out to be quite similar to the Wimbledon Greyhound Races, except the things running along the track were bigger, and the chicks were better dressed. The major point of similarity between my two experiences with gambling is that we lost every bet here too. In the biggest race of the day, I scanned the 22 horses that were running and one stood out to me: Nearly A Moose. “Guys? I like Nearly A Moose! How about Nearly A Moose, huh guys?” The general response was that me liking the name was all very well, but look at its mediocre track record. I bowed before those who I thought knew better, and bet on another horse. Guess who won with odds of 52-1.
Further reliving our creeping dejection is too painful. I turn now to our creeping drunkenness. On the way back from the races, we stopped at a number of pubs. I forget how many exactly. At some point I revealed to Alec’s organic farmer friends that he often sought out organic food in the supermarkets. This brought much ridicule for him and hearty chuckles of “Take it from us, organic farming is bollocks!” At some other point I was at the bar ordering a round when the giggling ten-year-old boy beside me asked me if I was single on behalf of the very drunk old man beside him. We left the last pub around 1.30 in the morning. The third farmer brother had to milk the cows at 6. When we stopped along the way home to drop his girlfriend off, he decided to follow her, and did so amid shouts of “But what about the cows?” Poor cows.
Oh, my God. I may just have hit the Holy Grail of website modifiers since the pornolizer. This be the T’inator, fool!
Continuing the shameless dearth of intellectual content on this website ever since I started studying for exams, I just wanted to say I love summer hip-hop videos. Lots of bared skin, abundant booty, dance routines that make the most of all of the above, and, of course, that indispensable ingredient of summer hip-hop (some would say all hip-hop, but that just means they don’t actually listen to enough of it): misogynism.
I want to make a mixtape and call it Misogynists’ Party. It will feature classic tracks such as Baby Got Back, Rumpshaker, Hot In Herre and that new masterpiece by Nelly, P.Diddy and Murphy Lee, Shake Your Tailfeather.