photographingfairies

holding on tight -- vol ii

2009-02-28T19:55:00.001-08:00

i have started a new blog--it is a lot more pretentious than this one, a lot more materialistic, probably be a lot more gossipy, and polished. i want it to be the books equivalent of boingboing.net (love that site). i also want to have a blog that my mother can read (hi mom!), without being shocked at the archives. i will keep this one, because i love photographingfairies, and i will update here from time to time.

death and new york city

2009-02-27T16:26:00.000-08:00

today i interviewed a dancer who lived in new york's east village during the AIDS crisis of the '80s. he was rehearsing with the cornell dancers at the same time at the schwartz arts center--his eyes glued to the stage while he spoke with me. when the rehearsal music peaked, his voice would too; when it got quiet, suddenly aware of his surroundings, his voice would dip into a whisper. byron is an artist that has three eyes--one on his surroundings, one on his social responsibilities, one on art. we spoke in the dark, i scribbled in the dark, and he talked about taking his friends who had died out of his rolodex. he was tired, and he really wanted to get back to his dancing. i didn't ask many questions--but i asked enough. he was talking about cunningham, minimalism--the "scenes" in new york city's dance circle of the 80's. i tried cunningham last summer--cos it had been so long since i danced, it was the hardest thing in the world, your body only slowly gets into it after many studio sessions. cunningham is now an old man in a wheelchair, and it's hard to put together such a shaker with who he was. it's hard to imagine scenes growing old, scene's changing. i think that new york city must have been bursting with life and dirt, how our parents' jia hong generation was bursting with life, and how our lives seem so sanitized in comparison.

tomorrow am going to review his concert for the sun. i brought a stack of yellow notebooks yesterday for the next few weeks. i realise context matters for every review, if not you end up being an arts-for-arts-sake sort of critic. i hope i get to be the sun's regular dance critic--this will be my 2nd dance review in 2 weeks. the other article i am working on is about how the national institute of health's new law on open access is changing the face of research in cornell. really psyched about that article. :)

on another note, i might be starting a new blog. there's too much crap in the archives of this one. also cos i might be wanting to seriously consider freelancing--in the future. not anytime close to now cos i still dont have enough stuff for show--might want to do a proper freelancer-type blog, not the blogspot or wordpress kind of thing. oh well. will see how that pans out.

2009-02-22T18:44:00.001-08:00

ever get afraid of sounding stupid, boring, uninformed? i get like that sometimes. afraid of not knowing enough. sometimes i am stunned into silence at the eloquence of others. i wonder why my memory isn't as photogenic, or why i am unable to package things as well. sometimes i have a head full of thoughts i can't articulate, other times my mind is empty--that is the most horrifying. justin thinks i am the most interesting person on this planet. i am fortunate that he thinks so. but sometimes i wish i was more interesting. that i had lived longer, knew more, was a little more articulate (i am most articulate when i am by myself in a room of my own).

sleep activism

2009-02-18T17:27:00.000-08:00

so my SAD story got me nowhere, in the process i stumbled upon another story, it's about sleep advocacy and activism.
i forgot that i actually loved journalism--if i'm in a situation where i feel like an equal footing with the editors.

things im excited about

2009-02-12T19:41:00.000-08:00

- writing my first sun news article about SAD sufferers in cornell
- interviewing next week in the city--science editorial writing!
- attending and writing my first review this weekend on a hiphop poetry slam--yes, back to the newsroom, without the old pressure of having to be perfect!
- learning about libel law!
- updike article (arghh)

swamped with a lot of writing, but it's great, i feel as though i'm alive again. tired like i was tired a long time ago, it was a kind of tiredness that made me sad, but i glowed in that sadness, i pushed on and usually created things quite beautiful.

thinking about flight

2009-02-07T13:04:00.001-08:00

ive been weepy and discontented, and very nauseous, the past two weeks. i don't really know what it is, my body is acting up, i'm really hormonal, i swing between being vitriolic and happy, and my breasts have been very sore. i don't know what it is. perhaps it is the cold--it dipped to -10 deg c yesterday, and when i walked out, my face was frozen. unfortunately, i am also running low on money, and have been cooking to try to save money, and some of my food can get really unpalatable when i am not in the mood to cook. tonight i am going to fernando's house, he is cooking a big peruvian meal for his friends, in celebration of passing his q's. fernando makes the best butter beans and beans-and-rice, i should buy a bottle of wine, for the gesture. i have a lot of reading, i am also trying to read the extremely slow, depressing Widows of Eastwick, which i am writing for as an elegy to john updike, for the book review. justin agreed to get me an iphone for my birthday--i've been really hard on him lately, really moodswingy, really moody.

-

so i went for a run, and the nausea went away. i had a beautiful evening with fernando, and his crazy latin american friends. he had spent 4 hours just cooking--buttered lima beans with cream, pork and potato stew, lamb stew, feta cheese farfelle salad. a lot of wine, i brought a riesling in the end, but it would have been more appropriate if i'd brought a red. there were a bunch of new yorkers there, but i felt bad because it was very obviously a latin american party, a lot of cheek-pecking, the comfort of holding other strangers. i was the youngest, the only undergraduate. but i always feel at home with fernando's latin-amer friends though. there's no need to take on the role of anybody. there were jokes about people with "european colonial hangovers," and salsa line-dancing in korea, "like geriatric work outs," i said, things about afro-reggae, reggaeton, "you have salsa written on your face," irania, who is from boliva told me. spent most of the evening talking to a really handsome puerto rican ex-law and now a complit graduate student called ricardo, and we talked about the curse of living on an island. it probably got too personal too soon, and the sudden way we were talking inspired a lot of electricity. but electricity is one of those things that don't inspire wistfulness anymore, because i am simply happy in my life. i didn't join them for salsa dancing in the end, came home. but that conversation made me wonder how much growing up on an island shaped me. an island is a strange place to be, he said, it's too small, it's near the coast, it's always invariably with a history of colonialism, and can never be comfortable in itself. he said, "i left my law school, because i was, afraid that they would make me get a good job, marry a nice girl, and most importantly, " (he said this as a charming remark, meant to be cheeky), become catholic." for me, the island was the only reality, it nursed me and told me, it was the world, but when the world was not the world it had shown me, that was the moment i felt my life had been a lie, and that was when all my fantasies of flight began.

wishlist

2009-01-31T14:35:00.000-08:00

wishlist:

- iphone 3G (starts at $199)
- typewriter ($75-100) -- really not a bad investment, but this would really be for bragging rights more than practical purposes.
- kindle 2.0 ($359)

now i will just drool till i save enough $$

accents and attractions

2009-01-27T13:11:00.000-08:00

last week i read in the new yorker about how hannah arendt was heidegger's lover, heidegger, the embodiment of male, german reason, married, contemptuous of arendt, jewish, sensitive, vulnerable, half his age. my professor, the same professor for a couple of semesters now, is socially awkward and inadvertently flirty. (he used to be married, but is single now.) he introduced me to everything i truly love now--renaissance drama and theory. i used to fantasise about about him in my first semester, the same way i would fantasise about sleeping with a news photographer, when i interned in the newsroom. i think it's something i do, because i'm intrigued by creative or intellectual people whose jobs i don't understand, or seem too difficult for me, or beyond my years. this not knowing, this knowing that the other person knows more than me, this defining people by what they do, this knowing that i am young, much younger, gives me a huge sense of helplessness and pleasure. it's a terrible habit, because this means i enjoy exoticizing people. i remember the halloween party that a graduate friend--fernando, who is peruvian, 40-something--invited me to. i learnt for the first time that graduate party crowds are more eclectic, and international, it's a lot of fun. what is drunk is usually beer, not liquor. a lot of the talk that night was shouting over (super old-school) music with a whole lot of latin-american people about where we were from, and it was cool to not be american, to speak in an accent, any accent.
when the professor took a semester off for a brain operation, i finally got to think about just thinking for myself. i took an american lit course, i took a milton course, taking a break from renaissance drama, and discovering that his approach isn't the authoritative approach. i am back in a seminar with him again--it's a graduate seminar with seven guys, with the inadvertently flirty professor, and i am the only undergraduate, and female, and asian, and non-american. i am more self-assured; but this is not to say that first five minutes, i wasn't blushing a lot--old habits. sometimes we are attracted to people for the worst reasons, really. a lot of the (intellectual) pleasure of slowly falling in love was about understanding what justin did when he was working in the neuroscience lab, even if it meant long, nightly conversations about caged animals, and donated brains, biowaste, and new york city in the spring. i don't thinking learning can ever be, for me, disassociated from desire and transgression. but i think i have learnt, that not all learning, the most revolutionary or subversive of learning, has to scar.

2009-01-22T14:59:00.000-08:00

i got an on-campus job--production assistant at the college daily. its a daily that brings in quite a bit of revenue, and is thus independent from cornell. it pays (well) and it teaches me how to use quark express and the entire adobe package, and involves me staying at the newsroom from 6pm-3am once a week. we lay out the flats (industry word for the pages, meaning two sides of a tabloid spread), choose the comics, suduko, classifieds, and repair any emergencies. i wanted to go back to the newsroom to be able land some arts writing gigs in ithaca. who would have guessed.

stories

2009-01-20T17:40:00.001-08:00

as it gets deeper and deeper into the heart of winter, something grows inside of me. like there is this life inside of me that is going to burst, because there is way too much hope in me. after writing about the mein kampf copyright controversies and self-narrativizing--everyone does it to some degree or the other, so don't give me crap--("in my country, we ____ [invents the most outrageous thing, or frames it in the most outrageous way]") , i finally got into the super-exclusive, superhard, media law class--so i am going to be studying american copyright law and first amendment stuff beside pre-laws and grads. today at the first american lit class, we were asked what did we thought our ancestors thought when they came to america. there're 5 students in this class, which is going to make it probably a frightfully intimate experience, and people are already talking about their lesbian partners on the first day of class. so i said, i have no immigrating family members, i said, obviously, but strangely my boyfriend's father, who is from burma, only started telling him about why he came, and how he came, when i entered the picture. and i told them about funny pamphlets distributed by my school's international students' office, among them is, "what is a U.S. American?" which my room mate and i had a ball pouring over. i found a contact who does arts editing for our college newspaper, and he said, if i had a story, tell him. i am going to spend some part of this weekend writing my review of cynthia ozick. today was inauguration day. i get teary when i see old black women crying, you know? even though the more cynical part of me snorts, idiots! he's not black, he's not really african-american, he's--and unfortunately, the facts lack all lyricism--biracial. i'm also taking a class called history of the book--we study, touch, the materiality of old manuscripts, memorize different parts of a book, and its taught by the curator of the rare book library, which houses, among other things, a copy of the gettysburg address and original manuscripts of e.b. white's charlotte's web. and i am also doing a seminar of hamlet through the theory of bloom, derrida, and de grazia. too much hope in me, i could burst.

94 dean drive, tenafly

2009-01-12T20:36:00.000-08:00

these two weeks, his dad has been slowly moving out of tenafly, putting 20 years of life and marriage and fatherhood away in boxes, closing the deal and trying to work out the divorce. it's like inducing a sure, but steady atrophy of one's life. i remember the night the boys finally got to meet up--chris, the marine, had flown in from florida; gershon was home from penn state; terry and yim drove in from the city to tenafly; the two justins were back in tenafly for christmas. at triple a, the godawful korean bar, everyone was making both of us drink shots and margaritas, and beers, and shots, and justin got completely and stupidly drunk, passed out on the couch while the boys planted post-its all over his butt and face. i had a little some to drink, but i usually i don't go crazy, so i was printing out flight schedules for the singapore trip, sitting in another room listening to his dad talk about the divorce. let's go, he said. now? i said, yes, now. so me and his dad, we drove me to cvs to get my mom earplugs at 2 in the morning, even though his dad had to wake up at 5 to send us to the airport and later go to work.

driving half-drunk through tenafly at 2am with my boyfriend's father, listening while stanley talks about the places where he'd wait for his wife, the bookstores he went to, what justin was like as a kid. "what was justin like as a kid?" i ask. "smart, full of questions, but--" "always distracted," i complete the sentence for him. "i don't understand why he is so distracted sometimes," i say. "he's like that," stanley says.

when justin and i got back from singapore, stanley was still moving stuff around the house. "i have a secret," he said to me the morning after we arrive, "i'll show you in the basement." so i followed, and watched him open a plastic bag next to the laundry. it was full of milk bottles, there must have been 20 of them. "you can't throw this stuff," he says, "it's our secret," he said. a bit like the time he spooned bonito flakes into his potato dish although justin doesn't like it that way. "our secret," he also had said then.

the weekend we got back from singapore, when the house had been turned inside out like an old rag. his dad asked me to ask the son to pack, because he'd given up asking. justin poked around his room, kept some dinosaur things and pogs. "this is too much," he said, "i wasn't prepared to do this." after tofu soup at the corner korean restaurant in fort lee, his dad drove us to penn station. he thought justin would be taking the amtrak back to baltimore, but justin wound up staying an extra night in brooklyn with me. that was the night we both fell asleep in the car while his dad drove, talking about i-ching philosophy. "what was i saying," he said, "something about i-ching," justin mumbled. "no that wasn't what i was talking about," he said, and then the car became silent.

tonight he called me, hysterical and incoherent, about justin's stuff, about how michelle was calling in all these chinatown movers to systematically throw everything into garbage bags, about how we had to move my car soon from the garage, and then he said could he hang up please because michelle was calling. at little india in singapore, i picked out bundle of gold and blue bangles for her as a gift from justin. when i got off the phone, i called justin, and blabbered out the whole secret of the milkbottles. and then i told justin to get gerschon to collect all of justin's stuff and put it in his house for safekeeping. i told him to get well soon, and study for the exam, that we'd be in the house on wednesday to take the stuff for the both of them. "i love you," he said, "i'm taking the panadol you gave me." "i love you," i said, "be nice to your dad."

on monday, all of florence's gifts and things--books, a ship made of paper, "that woman who gave it to her, she smoked all the time and was the one who asked her to divorce me" he told me--were left in the garage for her to come to collect. on wednesday, all of justin's things will be in gershon's house. on thursday the house will be emptied, incapable of any more tears, ready once more for other lives.

the wages of dying is love

2009-01-06T17:12:00.001-08:00

the whole point of a subsidiary rights department is to advertise and sell, what is essentially, a construct--the right to rework a piece. it is almost like making money out of nothing, which reminds me of the idea of the hedge fund. today i wrote a pitch letter advertising the right to serialise a book--pitch writing will probably constitute most of these two weeks, but the notion of selling a right (what is a right anyway?) will remain deeply ambiguous for me.
the cat here misses kerry, the renter, very much. in the middle of the night, she starts clawing at the door, making me or chris (the other renter) open it for her. when we open the door, she looks outside, sees nothing, and walks away. when we close it, she falls into the same funk, clawing at the door, and asking for it to be opened again. she sleeps on my (kerry's) bed all the time, and enthusiastically receives me, rubbing herself all over me. perhaps she is trying to believe that i am kerry.
today justin sent me an email. it was very out of the blue, very uncharacteristic of him. he wrote:

Do you remember when you said something to me about not wanting me to die before you, so you could always have me around, or something like that? I know this is a bit morbid, but I just got this weird fear while looking at some pictures, like what if you were no longer around, and I could only view you in retrospect, only in pictures? It scared me a bit, because we have so many things to do together before I ever want to let things get to that.

i sent him a text, i said

the solution is clear. at 90, we need to od on e and weed.

he burst out laughing, on the phone, adding that by then, he would have accumulated enough contacts and credentials to make sure we would not be foiled.
i came to the conclusion that anxieties about death are really only anxieties of agnostics. i consider being anxious about death a good thing. this anxiety is partly a recognition that nothing exists after this life. and this frees us from the burden of trying to live this life to fulfill another.
on the train back today, i remembered the boy who was so adamant about being a good christian, till he was unable read with pleasure, casting books into categories of good books/bad books. he called the bad books, "postmodernist," something which was especially irritating for me at that time, because i was just starting to slowly love the grumpiness of derrida. i felt sorry that because of that insistence on shelving books, he would probably never understand a lot of things, and if he finally did, it would be too late, as our disastrous relationship ultimately proved. i also felt sorry for him for being so insistent on living right (vague as that was, to him) that he was unable to grasp the idea of forgiveness. he was unable to forgive other people, and unable to forgive himself. i think forgiveness is an attempt at rewriting the actions of the past, smoothing away hatred and turning it into gentleness. but rewriting is always the affirmation of the trace of what was written. the paradox of forgiveness is that it solidifies the past in writing.

tarts

2009-01-05T19:54:00.000-08:00

it's cold in my room, but next to me on the bed, there's an old grey cat, purring and sleeping at the same time, with paws over her face to keep out the light. makes me feel fuzzy just watching jimmy. i'm in brooklyn now, carroll gardens, after the first day of work. learnt about the language of subsidiary rights contracts, and am possibly pitching the children's books to international agencies over the next brief, but hopefully full, 2 weeks. i also have a bottle of pineapple tarts beside me, from glory in katong, when i went back last week to singapore with justin. it was lovely, we danced to live music at chinaone (mr brightside, and sweet child of mine, and viva la vida, and all those great awesome songs to dance to, and we clubbed in sloppy t-shirts and shorts, cos the bouncer was awesome), me and my sister forced him on stage with the goodfellas at timbre to sing chasing cars (which he sang while, embarrassingly, forgetting the lyrics), we walked around geylang's back streets together with wilson (and it was lovely seeing wilson again), i got a whole stash of baked products from nurul's mom (aunty zarina) and then we proceeded to tell the boys about the merlion, j and my sis also got to see the new books actually which is absolutely lovely, full of interesting corners and an exhibit with furry, stuffed cloth tear drops and poems by people like cyril wong embroidered on them! and my parents forced him to eat durian, he and my dad sat outside smoking cubans and drinking beers. and new years was a ball with me and my sister and jay dancing hawaiian dance. i got to see my grandmother, and auntie caroline, and drink shots with my sister (she asked me if she could have my ic, i told her, maybe after o levels, but we'll see). and now i'm back, after he took the amtrak back to baltimore, but hopefully we'll see each other again in 2-3 weeks, and in the meantime i have a cat to warm the bed for me and a mound of new books to read from the office!

pre-departure

2008-12-21T14:39:00.001-08:00

i read jonathan safran foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close in one sitting. it was very good, but after just coming out of don dilillo's Falling Man, and Synecdoche, New York--all which arguably, restage september 11, and are totally devastating and heartbreaking in their different ways, i don't think i could deal with another novel like this anytime soon.

the new yorker published this beautiful review of the letters of elizabeth bishop and robert lowell, and in light of eric's musing, "i don't know how to answer your question: if i deliberately hurt myself to be able to write," and later, "is it ethical to write something that you know will hurt someone else?" i thought i would include what bishop says sagely, when lowell proposes to use letters a poetic material:

One can use one’s life as material—one does, anyway—but these letters—aren’t you violating a trust? IF you were given permission—IF you hadn’t changed them . . . etc. But art just isn’t worth that much. I keep remembering Hopkins’ marvelous letter to Bridges about the idea of a “gentleman” being the highest thing ever conceived—higher than a “Christian” even, certainly than a poet. It is not being “gentle” to use personal, tragic, anguished letters that way—it’s cruel.

The article goes on:

In a letter about the misuse of letters, Bishop asks Lowell to live up to a moral standard guaranteed by an aesthetic one: be a gentleman, like Gerard Manley Hopkins. Lowell’s and Bishop’s letters were themselves a long, collaborative work of art, as rich in their own way and by their own standard as the poems. But Bishop seems more concerned that Lowell had changed Hardwick’s letters than that he had included them. These are the objections of an author, and one who exercised an enormous level of control over her material. That Hardwick was a fellow-writer only deepened the transgression. The idea that someone would change a letter, as Lowell did in transforming Hardwick’s into poems: this was a supreme violation not only of life but of art, the art of the letter.

anyway, i am glad to be leaving my house tomorrow. driving up to new jersey, then harlem and the bronx, then back to jersey, then jfk on tues morning, in transit in tokyo, and then singapore(!), and then two weeks in brooklyn. living alone, i tend to traumatise myself with idle reading (mostly depressive stuff), disturbing justin on the phone to shake off post-book trauma, postponing the supposed epic cookie bake, and packing ugh, that i will do tonight! after cleaning my bathroom and kitchen, and, de-snowing my car to (ugh), returning all these possibly 40-50 books that have accumulated between me and my room mate. the occasionally unfortunate condition that defines my life is this: one never really leaves until one really has to.

hello, america

2008-12-20T09:54:00.000-08:00

when i look out of my window, where it is snowed out, beautiful, stark, desolate, ambulance sirens and snow accidents, in 14-inch snowed out ithaca, i think, hello, america.
i am alone in this house, because chandni has left. last night i had dinner with lu (bong, go figure), who ate this huge ton of food, and then then asked if i wanted to smoke up and wrestle in snow. we also talked (probably a little too enthusiastically) about yeast (yeast is really cool) and his cancer research with yeast cells and dna. i have lots of craigslist things to sort out (this house is being subletted to 3 different people over a course of 4 weeks, is that crazy, no? i also craigslisted--yes, get this--my car ride to nyc "calling for experienced driver to join me on the road from ithaca-bergen county. do not have much experience snow-driving. will share gas. room for 2" and got a lovely female law student as a taker). now i have my final paper to do for my independent study on book publicity. i am writing about trade book reviews, and amongst other interesting things, analysing charles bernstein's speech on the launch of Houghton Mifflin's Best American Poetry on the crisis of illiquid american poems, and the figure of the nytimes kamakaze reviewer, michiko kakukani, as well as dean howell's gilded age novel book salesman character, fulkerson. it's really random, and i'm not actually doing it for a grade, so i've got free rein.
i spent the morning reading on hedgefunds and madoff, and one thing that strikes me is that hedgefunds and pyramidal schemes are really borne from the same free market principles and the idea of spreading risks. and the difference between a ponzi scheme and the "hedging" of funds is frighteningly shady.
on another note, am writing a magazine article over winter for some cheapy new publication, cornell book review, about the history of secretaries and scribes. last week i read that v.s. naipaul wrote a bend in the river through the aid of his wife (he had multiple wives, and he was also a brutal sadomasochist.) he would sit in a room, call her into the room, and dictate the text to her, while she sat and wrote it out. but eventually, what started off as the illusion of authorship and authority collapsed on itself. he was unable to write without her presence. in the end, she was not only the secretary, she became the muse, and he was unable to write without her. this really really interests me, especially after my last paper on milton and his scribes (milton was blind when he wrote all 10 books of paradise lost through the aid of random scribes, as well as with the aid of his daughters, who really strikingly, read all these latin and greek texts to him, without being taught what they were reading--they were merely trained in learning how to pronounce the greek and latin alphabet, and not to understand the language) so i examined his invocation to his muses in paradise lost, and the concept of authorship. i've been really excited by this, because it brings together all these things like the long-established distinction in western philosophy between writing and the voice, the issue of oral versus written culture, gender politics, the complexity of authorship. i will probably take the concept of scribes and dictation further next year.
i get like this when i live alone, and am snowed it so dreadfully.

reeling from the snow

2008-12-19T07:23:00.000-08:00

SAN FRANCISCO (12-18) 20:06 PST -- San Francisco's gay community, which threw its political weight behind Barack Obama's campaign, is protesting the president-elect's decision to invite an evangelical pastor known for anti-gay comments to give the inaugural prayer.

Warren invited Obama to his church during the presidential campaign and more recently ignited a major controversy when he compared same-sex marriage to pedophilia, incest and polygamy during a video interview posted on Beliefnet.com and widely circulated on YouTube.

Obama, who opposed Prop. 8 but has also said he opposes same-sex marriage in favor of civil unions, defended his choice at a news conference Thursday, saying, "a wide range of viewpoints" will be presented during the inaugural ceremonies on Jan. 20.

Warren and Obama do share some common ground, especially regarding Warren's work in Africa on AIDS/HIV issues and his efforts to build schools there.

And Warren, who also opposes abortion, has drawn ire from within his own ranks for associating with Obama.

But gay leaders and supporters in San Francisco and across the nation said they are having a hard time understanding how a man who they see as associated with hate speech is worthy of giving the inaugural prayer. It is directly counter, they say, to Obama's campaign theme of unity and his promises to heal a legacy of cultural and racial divisiveness in his new administration.

Equality California, which led the fight against Prop. 8, has gathered 8,000 signatures since Wednesday night asking Obama to choose someone else, said Executive Director Geoff Kors.

Several gay civil rights groups issued Web statements asking Obama to reconsider, including the Human Rights Campaign, the National Religious Leadership Roundtable and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

Mayor Gavin Newsom, a strong supporter of gay marriage, knows Warren personally. He said he has conflicting thoughts on Obama's decision.

"Rick Warren is one of the most prolific religious leaders in the world, so from that perspective it is not a surprising choice," Newsom said in a phone interview. "He is redefining the evangelical movement by expanding it beyond guns, gods and gays to issues of poverty and global warming and peace."

Newsom disappointed

The mayor said the decision is painful for the gay and lesbian community, especially in California, where people are still reeling from the passage of Prop. 8.

"The gay community has every right to be upset," Newsom said. "I hope people appreciate that Rick Warren was not just indirectly involved but very involved in taking people's rights away. I'm disappointed, but I understand the decision.

"Rick Warren is not someone who has been a champion of gay rights, and the president-elect could not be naive to that, yet he felt that the other attributes outweighed that," Newsom said.

Warren's other attributes are not enough for state Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco.

"His work on HIV/AIDS is laudable, but that doesn't change the fact that he thinks I am a second-class citizen and should be denied fundamental rights guaranteed to me in a constitutional democracy," Leno said.

"My concern is the selection of Rick Warren goes far beyond Proposition 8. He has spent a lifetime disparaging and disregarding the LGBT community," Leno said.

Obama's choice appears to fulfill his campaign promise of bringing opposing groups together to heal, said Sue Kuipers, the youth pastor at Christ's Community Church in Hayward, whose Christian parishioners spent 40 days studying Warren's book, "The Purpose Driven Life."

"It's sad that it's become political," Kuipers said. "We can agree to disagree, but that shouldn't interfere with our ability to pray for each other as a nation."

San Francisco Supervisor Bevan Dufty first heard of Warren's selection in a text message from a friend in South Africa.

Dufty said he is perplexed but is giving Obama the benefit of the doubt.

"It's difficult to understand, but I would like to look back on this in a year or two and see it was a longer-term effort to heal division in this country," he said. "Maybe strategically we'll see something positive in this in the future, but right now, it doesn't make much sense."

Signal of anti-gay policies?

Andrea Shorter, campaign director for And Marriage 4 All, a Northern California gay marriage advocacy organization, is worried that Obama's choice could signal four more years of anti-gay presidential policy.

"Rick Warren is clearly divisive and anti-gay. He is a kinder, gentler dose of Jerry Falwell and Oral Roberts. He presents himself as a warm and fuzzy new-age version of the same old stuff," she said.

"I think Obama did this because he has been under such scrutiny throughout the campaign about his legitimacy as a person of Christian faith. Maybe he sees this also as a way to give a nod of thanks and gratitude to voters who come from the evangelical right."

The Rev. Amos Brown, head of the San Francisco NAACP, campaigned heavily against Prop. 8.

"I'm very upset. I can understand that Obama wants to be inclusive but not at this moment in his life and the life of this nation. We should be pulling people together. It is most unfortunate. Rick Warren belongs to a conservative evangelical group that is divisive and in some regards mean-spirited."

bill's mechanics

2008-12-18T14:54:00.000-08:00

tonight there will be a huge blizzard, tomorrow i will wake up to 14 inches of snow. i've weaned myself down to 1 benedryl a night. the whole day i have been drifting amidst a field of flowers, in need of sleep. i've done most of the craiglisting and apartment stuff (i love craigslist, and i realised the moment i discovered it, all i wanted to do was to list all of my stuff on craigslist and ebay, and that was the moment i realised, i had absolutely no sense of proper ownership). got the fireplace fixed, bought myself snow tires at the mechanic's. being the only girl in a workshop of grubby, cigarette-smoking car mechanics, is a hilarious experience. enter into bill's workshop, and the smell of noxious car fumes and stale cigarette smoke hits you like a vodka shot. the phone rings, it's the obnoxious phone advertisers, "you gotta call before 6am," yells steve, "that's when our boss, roger is in." (roger is not the boss, he is the cleaner, and he does not come in before 6am, steve explains later, eyes twinkling.) "you ever played a prank on s'one?" asks steve, tire in hand, rolling out the ithacan drawl, "i played one on that damn roger. i put a nail like this, something with 20 years of grease, (he lifted up a rusty nail for dramatic effect) into his soda, while he's not looking. he musta found out when he was three-quarters way through. oh boy was he mad." "so what'd he do?" i ask, amused. "roger, he took a grease gun, filled it with grease and shot me with it. i took an hour cleaning the shit up." then he asks, "so you ever played a prank before?" "sure i have, when i was little," i say. "how little?" "very little," i say, putting my hands out to illustrate heights. "what you say," asks bill, who is 70, the owner of the shop, cig in mouth, but doesn't look one day his age (and i tell him that, for his kicks and my kicks), "you gotta speak louder, you got one of those high girl voices that's hard to hear." they put the snow tires into the car for me, tell me to drive safe, and i do.

history

2008-12-14T07:50:00.001-08:00

when snow blankets the ground all weekend, and the only sign of life outside my window is an animal print, curiously bear-like, one gets the sense of winter, winter, winter. this is my second night of sleeping on benedryl pills, hopefully by the end of the exams i will get off them. writing to try to lift that strange blankness in my head that blankets me, like snow, when you first get up in the morning after benedryl.
waking up in the morning to read the times is a particularly emotional experience today--the realisation that to live in america now is to live in a very transitional period. growing up, i'd never known what it meant, that word, historical change. when you live in singapore, one senses nothing really changes. there is something about growing up in singapore, studying every day, that makes life surround you. there are financial crises, retrenchments, near-explosions, losses, always progress, progress, progress. but when i say change, change is a very different word from the linearity implicit in the word progress. then i remember wanting to feel unsafe. i think i let myself go in jc--i mean, really let myself go, hanging out, being involved with with people twice my age, motorcycle-pillion-ing, cigarettes--because i wanted to feel unsafe. it's something funny to joke about retrospectively, when you've gotten over it all--the nausea, the feeling of shaking yourself up so severely that you're certain something in your head has popped. i also remember my love of writing poetry then, the desire to capture little moments, the desire to make little moments seem momentous and historical. i don't write anymore, but if ever i got back, it wouldn't be to poetry, it would be either a verse-play, or a novel, or A Very Long Poem. a different notion of history that suggests it doesn't just reside in the re-imagination of moments.

doctors and nurses

2008-12-13T07:16:00.000-08:00

the female side of my family has a history of insomnia. my mother and grandmother steal sleeping pills from one another. after my ice skating accident and bronchitis, i stopped running outside (yes, snow and sleet and all), my body got softer, and then i stopped sleeping. in the past week, i realised the kind of desperation not being able to sleep. i saw a nurse yesterday, (you don't have to have the same state of being as the rest of them, she said, and i felt calmed) and gymmed myself to death. at 11:30, i popped some benedryl pills, and my room mate read me a chapter from betty neal's Saturday Child (british romance story involving doctors and nurses, sort of like a british, 1960s version of grey's anatomy). and for the first time since tuesday, i slept for 8 hours. it was lovely.

things to do when you have lost your voice

2008-12-06T19:47:00.000-08:00

caught a virus after spending 10 hours in post thanksgiving traffic, eating macdonald's veggie burgers, listening to my friend lu talk about his girl problems and frat problems and family problems, and problems from having moved from mongolia to china to boston to new jersey, before he fell asleep, emotionally exhausted, leaving me with the toughest part of the journey to work through wet, rained out highways and realise it would probably be a sleepless night with milton and baudrillard.

anyway, these are things to do when you have lost your voice:
live quietly. choose your words carefully, speak less, listen more. clean the mirrors and sink. drink a lot of water (preferably four glasses at every sitting). buy theraflu packets (daytime ones, without antihistamines). make tea--herbal, white or green. drink warm things. watch the steam rise from your mug. sleep enough. clear the bedstand of pills and medicine bottles--trick your body into thinking, wellness. minimise on salt and sugar. make soupy things for yourself, like chicken broth with corn and watercress and wholewheat spaghetti(lunch); like tomato-chicken soup with mushrooms and tofu (dinner). eat them slowly, thinking healthful thoughts about goodness and warmth. clean the kitchen (try not to get the room mate sick). buy a lot of tissue (i like kleenex anti-viral ones). do the laundry. spend a long time in the bath, so that the steam enters into you and moistens your airways. make yourself surrounded by love. use the quiet wisely, because you won't be ill like this in probably a long time.

sick to the core

2008-12-04T22:13:00.000-08:00

i actually really terrified hmh is going to bought up by one of the big four. talked to e, who said it is depressing and taxing in the office. i need to call to confirm again the internship in jan, despite having more or less confirmed it over the phone a couple of days back, but i am terrified that the person i confirmed it with has been fired. this is not a paranoid thing to say. before summer, i was overjoyed when someone from s called me. but a few days later, the recruiter who gave me the greenlight for the 3rd round of interviews was fired, and i was left with a much harsher recruiter (the hr director). so it was a wasted trip to new york. now i am sick, in self-imposed isolation (can't talk without getting into a coughing fit) i can't even talk to justin on the phone ("can we text? i have no voice"). my mother is asking why am i not staying in singapore longer. i want to tell her, because i am a fool.

NEW YORK – More bad news from the book industry: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced that it is "streamlining" its educational business, and eliminating jobs in both its education and general divisions. HarperCollins and Pearson, parent company of Penguin Group (USA), are freezing wages and considering layoffs.

"This is the most challenging economic environment that any of us has ever experienced," Penguin Group chairman John Makinson wrote in a company memo that circulated Thursday, in which he announced that raises worldwide would be held off for Pearson employees making $50,000 or more and said he could not promise there would be no job losses in 2009.

"In this financial climate that would be plain foolhardy," he said.

This week alone, Random House Inc. announced a massive consolidation that will likely result in layoffs, Simon & Schuster cut 35 jobs and Thomas Nelson Publishers fired 54 workers. A top executive at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Becky Saletan, quit in apparent protest of a hold-down on acquiring new books.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, one of the world's leading education publishers and home to such authors as Philip Roth and Jonathan Safran Foer, announced Thursday that it would combine "various of its businesses into a new K-12 organization comprised of School Publishers, Holt McDougal" and others.

"The streamlining of the business will result in the elimination of some positions, even as new roles are created that will let the company serve educators and students in new and unique ways," according to Thursday's statement.

"These actions are consistent with those occurring within other companies across a full spectrum of businesses, and include the reduction of some positions in the company's Trade and Reference and Riverside Publishing divisions."

Houghton did not immediately say how many jobs were affected, or which employees would be be involved.

"The company is proceeding carefully and thoughtfully to assure that it is making the best, most productive use of its resources," the publisher said in a statement. "Overall, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt anticipates that the changes being announced will better position the company to realize its long-term strategic objectives while taking into account the current economic environment."

Caught in a credit vise related to the 2007 merger of Houghton Mifflin and Harcourt, the publisher has denied rumors that it's up for sale, but has not ruled out potential offers.

At HarperCollins, whose authors include Oprah Winfrey, Wally Lamb and David Wroblewski, spokeswoman Erin Crum said that pay raises had been delayed until next July and that "no decisions had been made" on job cuts.

"We're doing everything we can to manage in this tough environment," she said.

wedding glassware

2008-12-02T14:15:00.000-08:00

i drove up to jersey for thanksgiving with justin and his folks. his dad is still trying to pack up the house after the divorce, he's moving into an apartment in flushing, and donating everything to the salvation army. in alarm, i decided to inherit the wedding glassware. he loves those plates in a sentimental way. so i tried to take 2 pieces from every set. perhaps sometime in the future i will give it back to him. i also got a set of knives, a colander, and definitely, the coolest and best of all, justin's childhood dinosaur blanket.
justin and i met up with tee in new york city in the cantonese restaurant that i love on bayard street. i was so happy to see tee--was reminded of how he looks at life with such honesty and thoughtfulness--and very tickled when tee and justin started going on about guitars, amps and incomprehensible music things. justin and i watched synecdoche, new york (very, very good) that night at sunshine theater and discovered a tiny cafe/bar that plays portuguese jazz and sells lithuanian beer. i also found an apartment in brooklyn--carroll gardens, a very catholic italian neighborhood. i'll be living there with jimmy, an elusive old cat for two weeks in january.

am lit

2008-11-20T09:01:00.000-08:00

justin is always intrigued when i talk about the american literature class i'm taking, because it's the epitome of the liberal arts american studies class that he never got to take. it's a big class, 30-40 people in a lecture hall, it's crosslisted with government studies and american studies. despite the lecture-ness of it, our professor knows all our names. it's always feels like what i would think a town hall meeting would feel like--plenty of conversation despite the size of the class. sometimes it feels like a high school class, chalkboard scribbing, getting in groups of three, writing exercises at the start of class, historical contextualizations of each novel. you also find a plethora of accents--southern accents, a range of new york accents, desi-accents, spanish accents--around the room--in the beginning when someone heard a voice that sounded different, 20 heads in the front would turn around to try to match a face to that voice. eventually that stopped, because if you are a careful listener, everyone sounds different, and it is very tiring having to turn your head around everytime a person speaks (ie, every 1/2 a minute during the more vibrant discussions). also, everyone eventually started getting comfortable with the differences around the room, and differences stopped being cool. it was obnoxious, not maliciously so. our teacher is a berkeleyite, thus the uber-liberal spin--we started on the staples like the jungle, a hazard of new fortunes, toni morrison's song of solomon--it's like going to the soap opera, talking about absent fathers, racism, immigration. today we are reading lynda barry's graphic novel, one! hundred! demons!--filled with tagalog expletives, and dysfunctional characters.

break my hea-a-a-a-a-ar-t, break my heart

2008-11-15T21:10:00.000-08:00

i have been spending the past few days in the library basement2, reading dusty manuscripts and studying production histories, learning about reformation typology and printing presses during the renaissance. it's almost become a kind of psychosis, my constant return to kroch library. i did feel at one point today, breathing in dalton's comus, 1738, like dying, when the dust got into my throat, like crap. i learnt two cool things today (for those already in the know, please be generous with me about dates, etc, cos i am typing these things at the top of my head)
1) drury lane and covent garden were the only licensed playhouses during the post-reformation under a 1730s law, aiming to prevent subversive theater. in the 1760s, licenses were given out to provincial playhouses, this caused a sudden interest amongst sailors, carpenters, farmers in theater, and royalty flocked over to the provincial playhouses. to prevent losing profits, drury lane and covent garden started expanding their audience to the vulgario. the provincial playhouses were only licensed to do burlesque, music, etc. yet the circumvented this law by creating an entire visual language to stage plays like hamlet, and turned the verses into "music" by forcing musical accompaniment. the rise of visuality in theater was linked to the increasing vulgarisation of theater
2) "In 1774, the House of Lords came together to hear arguments in the landmark case of Donaldson v. Becket. Donaldson maintained that once the twenty-eight year maximum term of copyright under the statute had expired a work was freely available. The works of Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton ….all the perennials of the book trade that the booksellers had been accustomed to treat as it they were private landed estates were suddenly declared open commons." mark rose, on copyrights, and a foucaultian analysis of what constitutes authorship.
--
last night i was on the phone with my parents. they're really excited about me and justin coming home. "what do you wanna do when you come home, you have to let us know what you want to eat! we're counting down the days!" i was really sad when i heard that. i sent an email, saying, "all i want is for us to be normal, because if i feel like a tourist in my own house, having unnecessarily large, special meals cooked for me, that will break my heart."
---
watched the wizard of oz in the gym, i love it. so old school, so excellent. also cooking with fernando tomorrow a sunday brunch. i called him, delirious from librarying, at 9pm. "have you had dinner? if you have, you are useless to me," i say.

Comus, 1787

2008-11-11T15:38:00.001-08:00

I sat in the basement of Kroch reading a 1787 script of Comus by Milton. this manuscript contains all the stage directions and added on epilogues and prologues as well as the cast members for the coventry garden production of Comus, a Maske performed at Ludlow. i kept searching for fingerprints. like dimples, beautiful blemishes. they didn't allow me to bring anything that would contaminate the moisture of the room. they didnt even allow me to use my own note pad! instead they provided me with acid free green paper. then they put me in some room with walls of glass just to make sure i wouldnt tear up the pages. and made me read the text over a spongey desk which wouldnt damage the pages. holding a manuscript worth thousands of dollars makes you realise the value of reading, and makes you treat a text with lots of respect.
which makes me think about times when i have gotten mad when texts i check out are vandalised. not that i mind the scribbling (i do it too), i enjoy the chatter sometimes. reading as solitary and yet a dialogue with some unnamed person. but i take offense to stupid comments, racist comments, anti-psychoanalysis comments. why check out a freud text if you are going to spend the rest of your time scribbling "asshole! pervert! fuck you!"
which makes me realise, what if all the books we had became expensive relics by 3000? did you know that elephants are projected to go extinct by 2020? (according to my flaming greenpeace expert boss anyway) and that kindle prices are going to go down by the next 3 years. (i'm waiting for that). what shall i tell my kids then, about elephants? ("they had trunks, like dicks, like gardening hoses. it was awesome.") will someone be reading my texts, and feeling my handwriting, like beautiful blemishes?

on another note, I have a weird, rushedly written article published in the language pairing / translator-interpreter newsletter.

OBAMA IS BEAUTIFUL WORLD

I got mad with my best friend this week.
“What do you mean you’re not voting?” I asked. I must have sounded as though I was accusing someone of murdering babies. “You’re joking, right?” I added.
He proceeded to count down the number of reasons why he couldn’t, and didn’t, need to vote. Because he had forgotten to file an absentee vote. Because his home state, New Jersey, is “bluer than blue.” Because “everyone’s mother and grandmother and great grandmother is going to vote for Obama anyway.” Because he would have to drive 10 hours up and down between Baltimore and New Jersey just to vote.
“Because your dog ate your absentee ballot.” I said.
“You’re being unreasonable,” he said.
“Your loss, not mine,” I retorted.
That night I sat watching NBC with my roommate. From my window in Eddy Street, we could see tons of fireworks going off in Trumansburg. We could hear the shouts of people going crazy with joy. It was also her birthday. “Happy Birthday, Chandhni,” I said, as Obama gave his acceptance speech. At the same time, I was having a three-way gmail chat with my mom and dad, who live in Singapore, who were typing deliriously in caps and emoticons, as they watched CNN on the other side of the world, where it was still light.
I was telling them that I loved the burst of idealism on facebook. I loved having a boss who campaigned on weekends for Obama in October. I loved those dudes selling “Pallin is Gorges and not much else” t-shirts on Ho Plaza.
But at the back of my mind, I also wondered how much of what I felt was unfounded emotionalism, because I was looking at this from the viewpoint of an non-American accustomed to a political culture of resignation, and thus idealizing the sense of excitement and hope I saw around me. I grew up in Singapore, where people tell me they spoil their ballots, because there is no point voting for a ruling party that is going to win, or a weak opposition, they say. Between the devil and the deep blue sea, they rationalize, the choice not to make a choice, is nevertheless, a choice.
DIY youtube videos like “OBAMA IS BEAUTIFUL WORLD” [sic], or “The Rams for Obama” (involving rather bewildered children, some still in diapers, made to do a choreographed dance in support of Obama) are hysterically funny, but they make me question the value or the amount of thought that drives that emotionalism, and they make me question what drives my blueness, as a non-American.
And I also wondered whether I had a right to tell my best friend to vote.
Collective events are always strange moments, because even as the camera zooms in on a crowd of pure joy, each person is joyful for a very particular reason. This moment, so historical and so collective, is at the same time so deeply and personally felt, that perhaps it is known only to oneself.

on the verge of a trembling

2008-11-04T19:25:00.000-08:00

got into an argument last night with j about why voting is important. it's been an ongoing upset between us, the fact that he ruined the chance to cast an absentee ballot, out of stupidity, and my realisation that it's not my right to tell him to vote. and it's new jersey, for christssakes, he says, bluer than blue, he says, i'm sorry but i am not driving 5 hours up and down. don't say sorry to me, i say, it's not my loss, it's your loss. to which he gets really angry and starts railing like an old man at me. living in uber-liberal ithaca, with pockets of republicans beside friends who make hussein their middle name, makes me realise ithaca isn't as blue as it is, and that makes me anxious. if ithaca--and ithaca is as hippy and pro-lgbt and intellectually demanding as it gets in a university town in upstate new york--has a quad full of screaming, "pallin is gorges" fanatics, what about anywhere else that is possibly less blue? on one hand, i am torn between the desire to believe that this country is on the brink, trembling, embracing a new. i want to believe that the face of america will be the face of someone who doesn't believe that america is world, but part of a larger world. on another hand, he says, rather cynically, that change is ultimately rhetorical. so i got angry, which inevitably leads to sexual frustration on my part, my desire to match a face and hand, to touch that face and hand, of that boy who makes me disturbed and yet i love so much.

walking with grace

2008-10-24T21:10:00.000-07:00

i will back in nyc, at the same old in january, interning at the contracts and rights department as well as doing a day at ap travel news. it'll be a learning experience. i am delighted to have an excuse to be in the city again. i love new york, because every major decision that i owned and made for myself took place in new york city. deciding to leave, deciding to leave another place, learning about the death of the first person i ever cared for, learning to love someone in the city, dreaming of returning to the city together, with a dog, because of that, new york will always be a part of me. ithaca is the town that nurtures me, tells me my voice is valued, tells me i can be happy, and tells me that i am capable of loving. in ithaca, the brown leaves and air, teach me to respond to my body. here, one gets a sense truth and hope is still valued. i have a boss at the publishing press who campaigns in philly for obama. i read 17-century manuscripts in a library, reading on out of the fear that they will crumble into dust in my hand if i wait too long. here i can speak with confidence and tell people about their own country, without fear of sounding foreign. here i am in love with the most wonderful person, the person i respect and love, the person who gave back a broken new york to me, all fixed and brand new, on christmas last year. (merry christmas, he said. merry christmas, i said, unnerved by the skaters and the christmas tree, the horrendous holiday traffic, and the prospect of a flight i had to catch to singapore in 3 hours) and after all this, i know if it lets me, i can go back to the city again, knowing exactly what i want, walking with grace.

little moment

2008-09-25T07:46:00.001-07:00

i just had my road test. i am now the proud owner of a new york state driving license, and thus no longer an illegal car driver and owner and co-insurance owner. :)

fannie and freddie

2008-09-23T15:17:00.000-07:00

this week is the last week of summer, i feel as though i have to write about it. my town marks it with an annual apple festival, when street performers and hippies and farmers come out and display the fall harvest--30 different types of apples, apple cider, caramelized apples, apple pie, apple bread, apple paintings, apple everything. outside, a squirrel is singing. last week, tree around the corner was shedding apples, the pavement was blotted with sweet, red, rotting dye. outside a squirrel is singing. have you ever heard a squirrel sing? rats laugh, sounds like chirping. i think i am hearing squirrels' songs now. american tv and books would translate them industrious mexican fruit pickers' tunes. he's looking for acorns on our lawn, darting about in the setting sun, sounding like a broken record and a rusty spray can. he has a partner. i call them fannie and freddie. they live in the tree outside our house. they have a humorous aptitude for disaster that manifests in the form of extremely violent play, a hybrid of hide and seek, which involves the seeker jumping on the hider's back--all done while they're dangling vertically on a tree, causing a pretty frightening fall, after which they pick themselves up, and repeat the whole game and everything again.

ithaca

2008-09-22T17:00:00.001-07:00

ithaca is how the sun sets and i see the lights of trumansberg come on, while the sky is streaked with pink. ithaca is walking home past apple trees, playing with maxmus as he frisks his tail around and pretends to bite me. ithaca is the asian frat house overflowing with garbage. ithaca is how i run home, to a fridge filled with rajma, and pots bubbling with carrots, scallions and tomato puree and cumin seeds, an oven filled with mussels in white wine and tomatoes. ithaca is me holding victoria, and this is the best sushi and avocado we have eaten in our whole lives, ithaca is me finding secret places, me on a phone, 2 am, aching from having slept on his too-high shoulders through the night, somehow praying that the boy caught on interstate 81 in a broken car, waiting for the tow truck, will get home soon.

2008-09-15T20:36:00.000-07:00

consumed by the details of my life now. it mostly involves money, work, cooking, volunteering, and much reading. i'm busy and happy and tired. i'm trying to find a good way to say, i'm sorry i no longer have the lyricism, or desire to be heard, and i want to keep in touch with people in a more personal, less public way. i will be writing less, because the immediate life that demands me, demands me.

i might still update sometimes, but less. i love you all, and thank you for everything.

2008-09-09T16:00:00.000-07:00

i have been stressed out. only just secured my schedule, had to talk to advisors, talk to the dean, about acceleration, then i find out my car registration messed up, which means i am driving an illegal car. the highpoint is discovering that i am able to graduate early, and that my transfer credits transferred over smoothly. the low point was getting mad on the phone with the car dealer. i hate that putting life in shape is so difficult, and things like electricity bills, and that all that stupid jazz. i am glad that i have discovered all these problems, i am mad that i got mad with justin over the phone. i am glad that nothing terrible has happened, and that everything is ok. living--and getting everything right, a legal car, working through systems--is so difficult. i am going to clean my room, run, have dinner and start on my reading. declutter, declutter.

fireworks

2008-09-06T12:56:00.000-07:00

so i relented, and i am coming home this december for a week. justin's coming too, perhaps it might be quite lovely for him, and for all of us. my skype session with my sister turned into half an hour of us holding up random objects in our rooms that both of us remember. remember the bear, he's 9 years old? remember this pillow? remember this cup? much reading this weekend, much exhaustion from this week, including a long day that began at 7 in the morning for class, and ending with me getting off work at the university press at 5, on friday. had dinner with jm, i bet you will not want to come back to singapore when you no longer need to, he says. yeah right, i totally will, i say. ok, i'll call you in 40 years, and you tell me, he says. in 40 years, you won't be able to talk to me because you will have no teeth, i hiss, and we collapse in laughter. at night, we drive to a dark field to light up these dubious 1-buck fireworks because i need to let off some steam. the last time i lit them in jersey with yim, tom and justin, we did it in some small suburbia high school parking lot, and the fireworks seemed so big then, and i almost pissed in my pants in alarm and joy when they rose while yim exclaimed, in his usual vulgar way, "man, that's tight." this time, the vastness and darkness of the field dwarfed each set of fireworks and occasional traffic caused the pine trees to glimmer with ghosts. today i wake up to greyness, leaves scattering around me, and i can smell hurricane air from the coast.

ithaca is gorges

2008-09-03T14:34:00.000-07:00

just met up with philip, my professor last semester, who just had an emergency brain surgery, which involved drilling 3 holes in his head, and sucking out the blood in his brain--yes, like the bloodletting of the renaissance modelled along the greek idea of catharsis. "i was reading derrida's the double side, and i started seeing double, and i called my doctor, and my family and wife is in new york, but i had to do an operation in ithaca, in 10 hours. ithaca is a great place to get sick--if you are a dog." (this is a reference to the fact that i live in the country, and the only great hospital is a veterinarian hospital) we might go out for drinks, which is ridiculous when you think about it, but thoroughly great. "coffee, or a beer," he suggests, testing the waters. sounds good to me, i say. justin came over this weekend, and it was crazy too. we jumped from gorges 40-50 feet high, into pools of rocks, encouraged by some hippie guy in front of us. we made an herb chicken, went to the farmers' market, and bought these crazy sunflowers without middles--they're called sungolds! it was actually really scary because his car broke down 15 times along the way from baltimore and when he finally arrived at night, he was a complete bundle of nerves. now his car has been left with me--along with the 2 sacks of rice and a huge wok which he got in a tizzy at an asian supermarket here--and he took the greyhound back up, on a bus which overheated and then subsequently broke down. and last week was dinner (2 times in a row) with the parents of my ex--sans the ex--which was terribly awkward but wonderful. then out of the blue while i was queuing up at the farmers' market for squash stew and roasted walnuts, sam calls. "i'm sorry," he says. "i'm sorry too," i reply. it was a long overdue end. last night i cooked dinner with my room mate, and she was trying to teach me how to parallel park. on my russian speaking room mate who went to russia on a cia-sponsored language program, on't piss your room mate off, justin tells me, or you'll get the cia at your back. in his awful handwriting that he leaves on a post-it, he writes, "ithaca wasn't as gorges without you." we talk about houses, i owe him money (4 digit figures), his car is to be parked on my street, and he is theoretically the owner of my car, because of his credit history, and i am a co-owner. i keep thinking about the future, he says, daring me to answer. live in the now, i say, because the future will happen if you don't live in the now. he leaves for baltimore. he makes me feel more youthful, and older, than i have ever felt before. the afternoon he leaves, i cook, clean, buy books, sweep the smell of his body out of my room. but the promises have been made, and i realise, almost with shock, that i have gotten myself deeper into this than i ever have been. our names co-signed in various car and insurance documents are just the tip of the iceberg, of an unspoken promise that we indelibly, almost too innocently, made.

browntown

2008-08-24T09:23:00.003-07:00

it's browntown here on eddy street! chandhni, my room mate has moved in, and with her, her parents. who have brought, from new york, a sack of indian bismati rice, spice racks (we have a--revolving--spice rack with 20 indian spices and things like galangal, tamarind, and amazing, demonic things that have no name, all handlabeled by soumya, chandhni's mom), and my garam masala! this is insane. and my first time living with another english major. pajama party every night, she says, grabbing the diary of anais nin from my shelf. i'm raiding this, she says.

2008-08-18T08:17:00.000-07:00

it's been pure madness, and i have just moved into a new house. a new house--with garden and patio and driveway and kitchen and fireplace and all that jazz, and for really little money really, cos its far from school. i'm paying less than i paid in that mad co-op-with-14-sorority-girls house. but with all that stuff its a lot of work. if you have a garden overlooking mountains, you have to rake the leaves, you have to make sure you don't thread on poison ivy. with 4 pretty glass doors, you have to make sure you lock everything. with a car, you have to do stuff with the radiator and engine, and im just spending my days in shorts, cleaning the washer, driving to the mall to buy a vacuum cleaner, scrubbing, and i am all alone doing it cos my lame room mate is still in new york. (though it means i have dibs on the best furniture). paying your own electricity bills. last night i went out with one of the new freshmen from hwa chong, fetched her home (oh god, how did that happen? when did i become a driver? when did i become an adult), and was reminded how im done with all that politicking and easily-amused-ness. there is a gravestone outside my room--a big one and a small one, so i am guessing it's a mother and child. there are cicadas constantly singing. i have a day of more physical work for me.

bayard street

2008-08-12T18:12:00.000-07:00

last week in the city. it's one week shy of 3 months in manhattan. i think i've learnt much, if not about publishing, at least about the city. today i am stressed by work. today was a lot of calls, a lot of press releases. tomorrow is a lot of galleys to be sent out, and i brought work home tonight. sometimes i want to throw my arms about michael. he's one of the assistant publicists, in charge of the poetry and cookbooks and other miscellaneous things, he sits around with plaid shirts, and says pedantic things, and feels sorry for the interns, and is just very nice. someone from a book packaging company called me today, they got my resume ages ago, and asked if i was interested in interning with them. what i like about publishing is that it feels like we're all in a miserable boat. nobody knows how the hell they got there. "you have nice dimples," said the woman in the subway today. "why, thank you," i said. "i get off on the wrong stop constantly," she said. then we talked about how wonderful williamsburg bridge was, the yankees stadium.

in the cantonese eatery today, i sat in front of a very old man. i go to the place often, i come alone because it's cheap and reminds me of china. it reminds me of the nights in shandong, when i'd finish teaching the korean kids, and take the bus to the hole-in-the-wall-restaurant where an old man and his wife cooked while holding their dog in their hands. but i am not in shandong, i am in new york now, bayard street, chinatown. this is a small 7-table family restaurant, with everything written in fan ti chinese, and where everyone speaks cantonese. i usually come with a manuscript, and i sit down with a plate of rice, fish and vegtables, a cup of grass jelly. i am the only one who cannot speak cantonese. but the proprietor likes me. in the beginning when i did not know the place, and could not recognise the fan ti words, i'd ask him, what should i eat? he'd mumble something incomprehensible in cantonese, point somewhere in the menu, and i'd say, all right, i'll have that. the first time that happened, he came out with a plate of rice, drowned in runny egg, battered fish, and pearls of corn. i swear i could have wept. so today, i sat in front of a very old man. he ate very slowly, he had pockets full of stuff. he was wearing a hat, and people seemed to know him. he ordered herbal soup, rice, and one chinese sausage. he reminded me of my grandfather. and then he left.

i talked to leon today. i told him about my crazy plan to wake up at 5 on saturday, take the first bus in to new jersey, take the car, drive up, move my stuff, get my friend, drive out of the city. help me?, i asked. but it's my fucking birthday, he said, i'd be drinking the night before. leon's birthday is the same as sam's birthday, i remembered, sitting in the deli, waiting for the passing shower to end. it has been a long time since i talked to him. sam is a good kid, we had some fun times, but we wouldn't have worked out.

today i read that m ravi was arrested, apparently for disturbing the peace in a mosque. i wonder how the papers responded to it. i wonder what is worse: the flurry of voices in america that fight to be heard, because there are so many voices struggling to be heard, performing to the watchers, they no longer hold any credibility, or value. or is this worse: a pregnant silence? last night i wrote to justin. he sent me the link to a blog "an american in singapore," that florence, his mom, sweet woman, sent him, with me in mind. i told him how much that blog disturbed me. i didn't tell him it offended me. i told him that too much emphasis on understanding cultural differences is to simply reinforce your point of reference, and then you will always be alone, thinking "ah, but in my country..." i told him that the moment one loses a point of reference is the beginning of true empathy.

red moon

2008-08-10T22:00:00.001-07:00

got back from baltimore for the weekend--i drove up with his uncle and dad to move in his stuff, then took the amtrak home. baltimore, around umaryland and johns hopkins, is a desolate wasteland, and he lives in a ugly and dangerous neighborhood next to the hospital, where tons of bored ghetto kids hang out outside black soul food joints, and the stretch sells nothing but fried chicken. baltimore near penn station is glamorous, expensive and beautiful, littered with gothic cathedrals and memorials. i was disconcerted, and uncomfortable, and dusty. the amtrak at midnight is full of grumpy travelers and quiet readers, few children. the train moved from baltimore to philly to new york and would continue on to boston.

i got robbed and molested last week around my house--the molesting was a ruse to get me scared so they could grab my ipod from my hand. because the nypd in new york is a silly bureacratic blackhole ("uh, do you know where exactly, it happened? we'll drive you over to look at the spot. i'm awfully sorry but you have to file with the 25th precinct if it was before 110 st, but if the incident was north of 110th, you have to report to the 24th precinct..." "detective," i snap, "are you trying to say that i have to go through this all over again, if so, i am beginning to think this is a waste of time and because i am leaving the city, i value my peace of mind from silence more.") to cut a long, and unpleasant story short, i have decided, well, to hope they like my music. (also, if you are family or family friend, please don't mention this incident to my parents because i haven't told them about it yet, or they would be worried sick.)

other than that, i've been reading. have an interesting manuscript about a boy who gets killed in a murder executed by all the girls who have had their virginity taken from them by him. i get irritated on the subway, and the best part of the very stressful last week (had to freeze a card, pay my school fees, deal with money issues and other grown-up things, drive myself up the highway to get my car number plate--ycl20n, emblazoned embarassingly, and beyond my will, with "maywood, new jersey," much to justin's delight) was swearing to no one in particular when i got out of a jam-packed-my-face-in-your-pits 1 train, like a crazy person. also took the wrong train one night, (the n, to coney island) but to my amazement, it flew from underground over the air, and over the east brooklyn river, where i watched a blood red moon rising over manhattan and the brooklyn bridge. so beautiful.

clambake

2008-08-06T20:39:00.001-07:00

i haven't written for a long time. i was too occupied being happy. life is what happens to you when you are too busy making other plans, sings john lennon. what does that mean?, i asked one night. it means you have to pay attention to details, he said. he left earlier today for maryland to start med school. so, goodbye, i said to him this afternoon while we cried outside my apartment next to a car packed with blankets, suitcases, his guitar and eukele. i was late for work. is this how it feels like when you talk about 'big old dogs that make you want to throw your arms around and weep'? why are we crying?, he asked. because we are happy, i said. we had just lived 3 months together between new york and new jersey. he saw me through the first significant death, a contract, my first car. the biggest clam bake we made together while getting horribly drunk on empty stomachs, and then in a happy drunk stupor, sauteing cabbage with beer, and dunking a half bottle of yuengling with the baked fish and clams and onions--that night, eating clambake dunked in beer out of the baking tray with his father, all of us digging into nutmeg flavored rice way past midnight, 5 empty bottles of yuengling--was orgasmic. coney island, brooklyn: sitting by the walrus enclosure, to watch a mother walrus nurse a baby walrus for the rest of the afternoon. co-signing an insurance policy on my new kia rio, feeling terribly stressed out at the realisation--and the finality of being legally intertwined. telling my father, after the fact, that i had just bought my first car--second hand, ugly, bought on his credit history--like all freedom. letting off fireworks in the parking lot behind his former middleschool with yim and tom, us screaming as the burnt stubs came raining down on us. the drives between manhattan and jersey, when i would fall asleep in his car. how i skyped my dad during his birthday, and it ended up with my family clustered around my sister's macbook, while he played his eukele with my dad strumming his guitar, all over skype. the many fights about race and environmentalism--which we never resolved. this summer i felt alive. i felt like i loved, not out of fear of loss (like before). i just loved, generously, with certainty. i am leaving for upstate, ithaca, in a week and a half, to start school. last time i would have said, all this movement, can't be good for the heart. now i think, that if you have something to hold on to, all that movement can't be that bad. it's a little expensive and uses up lots of gas, but there is nothing more wonderful than being on the road with a destination.

cars and dirt

2008-07-13T21:07:00.000-07:00

drove up to ithaca for the weekend. cooked a steak and tilapia fillets for dinner with baked fries and grilled peppers. lots of rosemary. didn't really want to go to ithaca, wanted to stay in the city, have been exhausted, and i knew the drive up would be exhausting. but i think he really wanted to go upstate, get into the country. i drove 2/3 the way there, 3 hours on the expressway and interstates in the dark, mind-numbing upstate new york roads with monstrous mountains and lakes. just got back, i fell asleep for the most part in the car, thus putting him in the miserable boyfriend position of having to drive 3 hours downstate in torrential rain and cross a massively congested gw bridge into the city while i slept. (so we were driving, the rain came down so heavy that the entire landscape was blotted out and turned into a massive dali-scape, i was drowsy, where were we? which country was i in? when i woke up, everything was clear, and yes, i was in america.) on the way back, we stopped at a fireworks factory outlet and bought some fireworks (can't wait to set them off illegally in some random ithaca or jersey field), then i took the wheel, got into a massive jam on some interstate with construction while desperately needing to take a piss, i stopped at some gas station to use the bathroom and we bought some greasy bk hamburgers which we ate--with humor--in his car, we got lost, he took the wrong turn, ended up on some interstate 476, which lead us to some boondocks down in pennsylvannia, the town of taylor--that was depressing. and work is getting slightly depressing--i rejected 12 manuscripts in an hour last fri, and had to go out with the publicists for drinks and lunch and an author reading last week--all that oily schmooozing. work again tomorrow, i sorta wish i didn't go up to ithaca--getting wet by the lake with a flock of geese and wearing flowers in my hair perhaps wasnt worth all the stress, but whatever i am discontented and rambling and i am upset that i have to do all the laundry and apartment cleaning that i could have done over the weekend.

plant

2008-07-03T13:17:00.000-07:00

109th street and broadway--am stopped by a beautiful boy in skinny jeans, he asks me to support gay rights in america. on the 1 train on 42 st, i ask a man what he is reading, 30 days of night, he says, in it the northernest of the northernest towns is submerged in darkness for 30 days and attacked by zombies. we laugh. that's awesome, i tell him, i love it already. across the road on 111th, a baby is crying. i had a half-day today. the fourth of july weekend. i am helping to publicise the best american comics 2008. i'm also reading ozick's heir to a glimmering world--in it rosie, orphaned at 18, becomes the typist/babysitter/housekeeper to a haphazard family of german immigrants. set in new york in the 1930s, it takes us through rainswept bronx streets, the grime of manhattan, the secrets of a mad woman (is her madness a ruse? like hamlet?). it's wonderful. the typewritter seems a central motiff for ozick--the upcoming dictation is a fictitious novel about the (female) typists who transcribe the novels of megalomaniac male white writers (i think conrad is one of them, if i am not wrong). fernando, my peruvian friend in cornell who is a grad student in south american literature, is staying over this weekend, and i am excited too.

i sent off a letter yesterday. i finally made the decision, after half a year of agonizing. i actually do grasp the magnitude of what i have chosen. i've put my parents through grief, but i think we've all become closer through this, and i love them for everything. i look outside, and i miss home, i miss ithaca, but new york is beautiful, and i am in love, burning, occasionally afraid to, but determined to become someone. i hold my life in my hands like a plant.

2008-06-28T19:11:00.000-07:00

i wrote this after leaving for new york.

Ars Poetica

I didn’t sleep the night before flying
into New York.

I spent the night
spinning a roomful of silk.
So when I emptied the room of myself,
The room would not be empty.

I stayed awake
to watch my sister waking.
Delivering her into the dawn,
her face disappeared
like a star.

I picked through the debris
of the years, deciding
what to take. Finally, I took with me
nothing more than
a pair of wings.

I am leaving now, I nudged my grandfather, still asleep.
What? he said, turning
his better ear towards my lips.
Nothing, I said, Get back to sleep.
I left. He continued sleeping,
as though woken by nothing more
than the slightest kiss
of some winged thing in passage.

the man at the gate

2008-06-28T18:47:00.001-07:00

been reading a bunch of philip roths that the place where i work published. i also brought home ozick's heir to the glimmering world. i have an idea for a novel: about a country where spoken words have to be purchased. it opens with a birthday scene, and the line, "for my son's birthday we bought him a birthday song. it was expensive, but i did it on a whim, much to my husband's annoyance."

called home. my sister described my grandfather's body. the weirdest thing was that it didn't look like a person's body, she said, i went for the pre-funeral events, then flew to london and couldn't attend the crematorium. i keep thinking about how jay kept telling us how my grandfather kept mentioning that, "there was a man at the gate," the weekend before his heart failed. he didn't just see a man at the gate, he saw an a young chinese man, an indian man, and a caucasian man. when jay went to the door to see who was at the gate, she saw no one.

breaking bread

2008-06-23T19:45:00.000-07:00

on sunday, we drove to central jersey for dinner. there was free flow of sangrias all afternoon. the uncles roasted an entire pig, and i taught the black and asian-american kids how to play lao ying jua xiao ji (the owl catches the little chicks). i wanna be the wolf, one of the kids said, ana said, no i want to be the wolf. why don't you guys rock paper scissors, i suggested. yes, he said, almost in glee, you said rock paper scissors! i stole a scooter. i played with the kids and ate fruit till the summer sun came down. i raced through the lawns screaming burger king burger king, marco polo. then we took the car home through the interstate 95. fell asleep in the car, woke up in tenafly, the mist all around us. i talk about the games i played all my life. zeropoint, circus-circus, pepsi cola (1-2-3!), sissy my baby. the games i played in shandong. the games he played.

i haven't been blogging because my internet connection's been really bad. i havent been emailing because i can't write an email without being interrupted by a bad connection. work is waiting and feeling occasionally useless but at the brink of something wonderful. went to watch ted leo and the pharmacists in hoboken. ill be going to watch aimee mann live for 30 bucks at the highline ballroom downtown end july--i wish chit and pak were there with me. archiving media clips, shelving atwood and kinnell and a whole lot of poetry books and write press releases, rejecting slush manuscripts. i feel like i'm standing at the margins of a room i can't enter. i go to merce cunningham studio with meredith to dance after work. you have to pay attention to details, i snap. and you can't live in my room everyday, i say, i need my space you know, then i slam the door and leave the house, leaving him in the room with his boxers and taking the keys, boarding the 1 train to the west village, where i wander alone for hours. i come back, feeling guilty, holding a wrapped bundle of baby's breath, and a bag of groceries. let's bake bread, i say, attempting to undo the damage with gentleness. the two of us are in the kitchen pressing our fingers into a bowl of wet flour, butter, milk, yeast. we hold our breath, wait for the dough to rise.

2008-06-20T11:41:00.000-07:00

his mother gave me a silver and glass pendant, it's very strange getting a pendant from his mother. on his 23rd, i drove us back home over george washington bridge, and will probably drive him uptown to harlem tonight because he is going to be drunk again with his banker friends. i take the train 80 blocks downtown everyday to work. i am happy.

jaz

2008-06-03T21:01:00.001-07:00

my dad wrote

by the way, we have another member of the family in Jaz, a female golden who joined us on monday - she was supposedly the quietest of 5 females in the litter, but that disappeared by the second day, once she had the run of the house - she has become quite a rascal, biting leaves off plants - but is surprisingly quite well toilet trained, going to the same spot over the drain to wee and poo. By the time you get home, she will be full grown i'd expect.
We didnt get a chance to send lyn off to the airport for her london trip, as her flight clashed with the funeral, so mom got jin to send her there. but we will pick her up this sunday evening, when she returns - we have not told her about jaz yet, as we want that to be a surprise.

The Summer Train

2008-06-02T20:06:00.000-07:00

He lived in a house near the railway tracks.

All through the night, the cargo trains would sound their inhuman calls, whoooo whoooo whoooo

When he was younger, they would recur like bad dreams. Prowl the night like wolves.

In the history of poetry, writing about trains has got to be the most overtraveled and worst route to take.

I dragged him screaming and kicking into Ezra Pound’s and Paul Theroux’s train with a map and digital camera and I LOVE NY t-shirt. God, not not Ezra Pound. Anything but Pound, he yelled.

We sat on his futon, waiting to board.

I was leaving winter, arriving into spring. The cold tapped my shoulders, brusque and impertinent, asking if I had a ticket into this country.

The terrible thing about those cargo trains was that no one rode them, he said. Completely empty, they whistled in the dark like ghost trains.

I did not know what I was doing in New York, except that I would be spending three months here when I was supposed to be in another country.

But there is a train filled with letters. They fly across the land like pigeons.

Summer announced its arrival with a screech and a stop. We stepped into the train, and fell asleep.

i heart new york

2008-06-02T16:01:00.001-07:00

to overgeneralise. i think i'm beginning to be able to tell the difference between a jersey and a new york accent. the jersey accent feels more, homely, lazier, singsongy (maybe i associate these qualities with justin, thus jersey and justin are inextricable); the new york accent sounds sharper, more nasal, and slippy. this hardly makes sense, but i think it does.
today, sorted through royalty statements and read through unsolicited manuscripts, the slush pile. then i sent out 2 rejection letters, and one maybe-but-we-need-to-see-50-more-pages-and-then-we'll-see, and then, i felt bad. but not bad for too long, because the sun that fell on me when i got out of the cathedral parkway subway entrance was lo-ve-ly. i wish i had the self-assuredness of sophia, sophia with her little black dresses and cigarettes, but that's ok.

beautiful

2008-05-26T21:47:00.000-07:00

i am back in nyc. this moving around is crazy. i am leaving the lower east side and moving into my permanent home in harlem this week. i drive around jersey in his car in search of the best soondoobu and inoki mushrooms. we read and fall asleep on the grass, davis johnson park, tenafly, beautiful day. he drove me home tonight, and we passed the george washington bridge into a road over the harlem river, never saw new york city so beautiful. for no reason, i tell him, remember tonight. after work tomorrow, i want to find a chapel where i can pray for my grandfather.

justin

2008-05-25T19:06:00.000-07:00

i am in jersey now. he drove us up from ithaca. the day was a lot of sun. i peeled oranges over the highways, and passed them to him on the road. yesterday i wondered where those letters that my grandfather wrote me went to. i am afraid i have already begun to forget. in my forgetfulness, i am unable to feel the grief i need to feel. we clear out the last of my room at wait terrace. he packs my books for me into a box. it's like putting my life in another's hands. if i return to it, will i be able to find anything at all, on my own? i open a shoe box, there is a silver ring, remnants of the previous relationship, but mostly letters from him, things of the present. where did the rest of my years go? you lose a lot of things on the move, i told him, and i've moved so many times. his breathing keeps me up at night, and the dogs howling in the night. i sleep a little on the i-80, i wake up and he's singing to the beatles. all chipper now? he asks, gonna be the poster girl for catnaps?

running with donald

2008-05-22T08:11:00.000-07:00

i'm settled into the city now, living on the east side by the river in stuyvesant town. stuyvesant town is one of new york city's gems, one of the most iconic and successful of post-war private housing communities in nyc. i live with a 60-year-old artist called donald. he used to be a franciscan monk, before he became a guidance councillor. now he writes poetry and novels between 7pm and 4am in the morning. justin cooked dinner for me last night. then, i cook for us--grape crumble and ice cream; peanut butter and cranberry cake. donald keeps me awake by talking to me at 1am when i scoot into a kitchen filled with magazines, books and artwork to do my dishes, and before i realise it, its 3.15, and i still haven't done the dishes and i've gotta work tomorrow. justin takes over, and talks to donald and makes excuses for why i can't talk, and the two of them talk about neuroscience the rest of the night. i've started work at the publishing firm, it's tedious work, being pushed between 4 bosses, i also will have to get myself familiar with all the magazines here, but it's one of the most amazing things ever, to be working on union square, pouring through a travel novel that i might be helping to publicise, lunch hour in greenwich village, conference calls with boston. i will be starting work at the literary agency tomorrow, juggling two unpaid jobs. in two weeks i move into harlem, with denise, who has a collapsed trachea, and owns a dog hotel. my grandfather passed away last night at 12.02pm, after having held on for a couple of days after his body failed, and after being on morphine for about a week, i think. stubborn till the end, my father says, my father sounds tired over the phone, drained, i can't talk to you now, he says, i'm talking to the undertakers, and he hangs up, leaving me in the dark for a while, and i suddenly feel far away from home. later he calls again, my father tells me, he had been waiting for my grandmother's ashes to be shifted to the st. mary of the angels columbarium from mount vernon, because he only finally was willing to sleep, almost immediately after my father received the call confirming that they could be placed side by side. i was close to my grandfather, and i lived with him in the house for most of my life. i am not coming home, because my father wants life to go on. i told justin i couldn't go out with him. i was supposed to go up to his place in jersey, i told him i couldn't. i had to stay in and spend time with donald--donald who reads with a magnifying glass, donald with an apartment full of junk, donald who plays the harmonica, donald who reminds me so like my grandfather--i have to spend time with donald, i blubbered away, i can't hang out with you. it's fine, do what you need to do in your own time, i understand, he said. we finish the last of the crumble with bryers ice cream, and then he tucks me in, and leaves the house. i am exhausted from accumulated exhaustion of driving into the city, packing, walking around, working, bad sleep, calls back and forth between ny and singapore. i pass out the moment i hit the pillow--forgetting to put on earplugs--i got into the habit of wearing earplugs when i spent freshman year in nyu because of the ambulance sirens and stuff like that throughout the night. i wake up with a splitting headache. today i am going jogging with donald by the east river. do you really want to run with me, he asked, eyes shining, hair all white; yes, i would love to. oh, it's a date, he said, it's a date.

tired

2008-05-15T16:35:00.000-07:00

these papers on desire are just, emotionally exhausting.
to write papers on desire, one has to be playful, suggestive, intelligent.
when one's stomach is hurting, hard to be suggestive.

feeling whimsical

2008-05-12T21:50:00.001-07:00

if i had a choice of living in any play, i would want to be in midsummer night's dream. i would want to be hermia, because she says wonderful lines, and that play is the exact model of a state that accommodates desire. (at least that's how i read it, anyway)

love and desire

2008-05-12T15:02:00.000-07:00

the problem with the first person you ever loved, and the person you left is that that person will always remain a ghost to haunt, unless you can ever demystify him.
alenka zupancic, whom i'm using to read midsummer's night dream now. it's such a girly paper, god i should print it in pink, and freak philip out--ok it's not completely girly, because it is ultimately about a political state and how it can accommodate desire:

the miracle of love is not that of transforming some banal object into a sublime object, inaccessible to its being--this is the miracle of desire. if we are dealing with an alternation of attraction and repulsion, this can only mean that love as sublimation has not taken place, has not done its work and performed its trick. (175, "addendum," The shortest shadow: Nietzsche's philosophy of the two)

this is what i'm thinking now--very reasoned, lit crit terms. i want you to stop being an object of desire, i want you to stop being sublime and monstrous. the problem is, i left you before you stopped being sublime. i left you the moment you turned monstrous, because of that, i couldn't ever turn desire into love. unfortunately, i only desired you, and i didn't love you. you were too strange to be loved. desire institutes a lack, and an impossibility. you are still that lack and that impossibility. this is where i have to figure things out and turn you around from that sublime figure into the you, of the banality. when i have done that, i can finally live my life in peace again.

gum and media

2008-05-09T18:35:00.000-07:00

bloghopped today, stumbled upon an ex's new blog, got hit by an overwhelming sense of ambivalence. and then more, i went to dawn yang's blog, and other old friends' blog, more ambivalence.
i told him, i worry that i'll return to a place that i never knew, a place that is growing increasingly distant and appears monstrous sometimes.
he said something like, you are wonderfully deep and thoughtful. don't worry about it, he said.
how do i explain that my country is probably one of the only countries in the world who would think about putting some blogger through intensive grooming to become an artiste. we were always groomed, that's the word. how overseas scholarships are shaping a certain clique of its own. a poetry scene ridden with its little petty pockets. how size becomes a self-policing mechanism, "it's not about censorship," i told the german studies prof, who teased me about gum and media, "it's just size. it's a neat, inbuilt, self-functioning mechanism, there's not much to say in a small country, so no one wants to burn bridges." and singapore, and temple mediums, all that crazy stuff i've had to live through, i need to figure it all out--that mess of violence, neverending nights that were my jc, and post jc years, and that i've only finally been able to speak out on. each time i speak to him about singapore, it's as though i'm speaking about a different country, all that love and hate in me.
so you really wanna know about singapore? don't give me some half-assed yeah, cos i could speak and speak and speak, because i don't understand it, i really don't. what does it mean to fall in love with someone who is radically different, and ultimately, the same?
most times, i'd rather just listen though. jersey, tenafly: you at the guitar, playing everlong, and even the ukulele, singing will you still love me tomorrow. you, and then certain people,
"and so i ate a 3000 calorie lunch, which is heated in these little packets, packed with fat for the soldiers on the field," "what's the difference between platonic form and substance," "so my father died, i left the town, i left that small town, came to america, and i decided to stay on here for good," "we need to find an american to marry, i swear we do," "so when we went to hawaii when i was 10 and my mum told me i was conceived there, i refused to speak to them all day after that"
"and that thing about love you said last night, when you were half asleep, did you mean it? i just need to know, did you?" sometimes, i speak, but speak silence. we talk, and then, more. i listen until i forget myself, forget how far i've travelled.

(in between books) when i was young, when it was hot, i'd stand in front of the fan, arms outstretched.
stop talking, get ready for the test, ms cho was say, and we'd stop talking, but keep signing to one another (wish you good luck, wish you good luck...)
we'd curtsey to the pianist after ballet class. sometimes the pianist would make mistakes, and we'd stop in between steps, enraged and indignant. we were so young, we didn't have a right to be enraged with anyone, but seemed always to be told what to do. it felt good being able to be indignant.

guns and boys

2008-05-07T15:44:00.000-07:00

i think im getting tired, i realised i was when i fell asleep middle of the afternoon. justin is in virginia shooting guns at some army base now, attending his marine buddy's graduation, that stupid boy, the silence makes me miss him, but it is good for me. i won't let derrida--and multiple meetings with professors over papers, and trials, and language--make me panic, oh derrida. "you adopted a pre-saussurian linguistic formulation, which is a conceptual stretch," prof g. said, we sat at a bench overlooking the quad under a tree, and he was drinking orange juice, which softened the blow a little bit, "you need to realise that language is a tripartite linguistic structure, referent, signifier, signified." yes, i said, sort of discouraged. i have three papers to write and an exam to take--one of which is a grad style thesis thing. i hope i don't end up crying the end of this week.

in this term, i've managed a breakup, applied for 20 internships, found a new york apartment, found someone, found city internships, worked with grad students, learnt how to drive, found a new off campus house and cool english major roomie to stay in next semester, found a job, worked during school, done language pairing--it's been mad-ass, i just need to finish this term ok, and if i've juggled it thus far, i hope it'll be ok.

on another note, told the agent to refund the ticket. so that's it, won't be coming home till next year, may. god, that's the longest i would have been away from home. 1 and half years, two winters. i wonder if my grandpa will have forgotten me. i almost feel preemptively homesick.

making magic

2008-05-05T14:56:00.000-07:00

insomnia last night, partly because all night i was dreaming about baroque art, and prof. gilgen appeared in my dreams asking, what's your paper about, after justin called me, what's your paper about, and i panicked at 2am, because he couldn't understand what i was talking about. i love writing about nonsense. i'm writing about the creation of nothing, and the baroque in midsummer's and calderon. the turn is when nonsense turns into something dead political.
if people ask me what's going on, i'd say, i'm making magic.

2008-05-03T06:59:00.001-07:00

i don't mean to be bimbotic or anything, but sabrina and co's handsewn dresses and fashion online business thing is so cool! these are basically friends of friends in singapore doing their thing.

http://freyascloset.livejournal.com

that funny old hurt

2008-05-02T20:21:00.001-07:00

today i got an unexpected phonecall. one of those late phonecalls that are months overdue. the expected sorries, the kind of sorry that doesn't do anything, but makes that funny old hurt reappear. there were a lot of silent moments in the conversation. imagine a pinter play, imagine racine's phaedra attempting to speak, and knowing the moment she speaks is the moment that speech cannot conjure presence, and the language she speaks is not the reality she lives in, speech that creates the split in the desiring, longing subject. and he asked, how are you? and then i knew what he wanted to ask, but ultimately didn't ask. i said some, didn't say some. i'm not telling the other person who is starting to inhabit my life about that call, not that i don't have anything to hide, but simply that i want to protect them. and i can deal with it myself, i'm not going to go crying into someone's arms (not that he is vaguely anywhere near, because it would be a 6 hour drive across the country) i am a big girl now. (i did tell my daddy though, he said, that's ok, it's good to just catch up, and be friends, so how is he? he's good, i said, and left it at that.) learning to grow up is learning to be silent, realising that some things don't need to be said ultimately.

the world is melting

2008-05-01T13:06:00.001-07:00

last night, we had wine and sushi with philip over renaissance prospectus presentations. virginia talked about native american languages made out of pure energy. imagine strings, and strings of sentences, made purely out of energy. glaciers that listen, and cease to listen because the ice is melting and the world is turning.

in a way i don't want this term to end, i don't want to leave ithaca and enter the real world in the city, because it's downright mean. i'm also coordinating two different work places. maybe i am crazy. there's only one thing that remains certain of the city, and im glad at least there is one thing.

you are the glacier that listens, even when the world and you would have melted, in a world of pure spirit, there will always be he who listens.

end of term blues

2008-04-29T16:57:00.000-07:00

"i dreamt i was in virginia, and in virginia, all language was actual, there was no duplicity of meaning, form and meaning totally became one."

"you have to add a southern drawl for the dream to make sense,"

"if language actual was to be spoken in a southern drawl, the world is definitely coming to an end,"

this is what i am reading now:

In an exergue to the collection of poems she entitled Requiem, Anna Akhmatova recounts how her poems were born. It was in the 1930s, and for months and months she joined the line outside the prison of Leningrad, trying to hear news of her son, who had been arrested on political grounds. There were dozens of other women in line with her. One day, one of these women recognised her and turning to her, addressed her with the following simple question: "Can you speak of this?" Akhmatova was silent for a moment and then, without knowing how or why, found an answer to the question, "Yes," she said, "I can."

Did she perhaps mean by these words that she was such a gifted poet that she knew how to handle language skillfully enough to describe the atrocious things of which it is so difficult to write? I do not think so. This is not what she meant to say.

For everyone, a moment comes in which she or he must utter this "I can," which does not refer to any certainty or specific capacity but is nevertheless, absolutely demanding. Beyond all faculties, this "I can" does not mean anything--yet marks what is for each of us, perhaps the hardest and bitterest experience possible: the experience of potentiality.

[...]

He is potential...on the basis of which he can also not bring his knowledge into actuality....but not making a work for example. Thus the architect is potential insofar as he has the potential to not-build, the poet the potential to not write poems.

(Agamben, Potentialities, "On Potentiality")

eric asked me why i stopped writing, i said, i will in my own time. perhaps i am writing too much about writing. perhaps this self-reflexivity is important too. perhaps there are things that i cannot write about, i tell eric, i will, in my own time. perhaps i have simply abused the word too much, how often have i said, "i promise," "i can," "i forgive," "i love you" without knowing what i was saying. Agamben would tell me, that is simply the structural collapse within language, and the inevitable condition of language, language can only have potential to signify if it can inhabit the privation, the abyss, the limits of signification. when you realise this, you will realise that everything you write is the absolute abyss, that absolute collapse. i want to go that, to enter into the absolute abyss, but it is tiring, and i will do it, (an unfortunately this is becoming me and justin's favorite word), later. always later.

i'm also working on this play by calderon. this particular passage is to the spanish golden age as hamlet's to be or not to be speech is to the english renaissance

I dream that I am here
of these imprisonments charged,
and I dreamed that in another state
happier I saw myself.
What is life? A frenzy.
What is life? An illusion,
A shadow, a fiction,
And the greatest profit is small;
For all of life is a dream,
And dreams, are nothing but dreams.

(Life is a dream, la vida es sueno)

oberon

2008-04-27T11:18:00.000-07:00

i got home really late last night. i wasn't doing anything crazy or anything, i was driving. except that it really, really scared me, because at the lake, there was something there. what is that, i asked. flickering lights nearby, and the sound of fire, balls of fire. when we drove out, there was no one, absolutely no one where the lights had come from. only a mist rising in the afterrain.

and then i had that horrible guilt complex, i texted him, and i said sorry, i shouldn't have been out so late, and gotten myself into an uncomfortable, awkward, one-to-one, potentially physical, situation. nothing happened, because i'm a lot more mellow and sure of myself, my body. but it was a reflex from before--how whenever i was out, i'd be overwhelmed with an irrational guilt, and i would be met by with irrational anger, coming from another city.

he called back. he is in another city, and he has a different face. because i always fall in love with cities when i leave them. you don't owe me any apologies, he laughed, honestly. and i then i laughed too, finally. and then--although i don't know how we got there, oh yes, because he started talking about his grandma who makes the best fried rice ever--i talked about that fantastic night market in yantai university, the best fried rice ever (it even had tomatoes and cucumbers in it) the woman who cooked with dirty hands, the best food ever, the cheapest watermelons. and then i did my remarkable translations, conversions, "it was so big it was the size of 3 manhattan blocks," and that strikes me as hilarious to have said that. i think if there is ever a way to leave the past, it might be through him.

-

other random thoughts: eric says he is writing a systems proposal based on my paper on metaphorical displacement, i am so intrigued; sasha tells me she has broken the kosher prohibition against bread, maybe i will write a poem about that; also, he is writing a song about the circus that came to new york, we are planning to write about mary blumberg, the scam artist on craigslist who scammed me almost; i have found temporary housing with a 60-year-old man who paints for a living, on the far east side in stuyvesant and alphabet city. i have never been so far east in nyc before. after that i will be moving in with a columbia med student and a disabled woman called denise.

eve was smarter than adam

2008-04-25T07:09:00.001-07:00

he's writing a song, he says. what's it about i ask, i'm not telling you, he says. so that means it's about me, i say. you're horrible, he says. what's it called, i ask. providence, he says. that's horrible, i say, and tacky too, please change the title. what the hell, he says, you're horrible. change it to, "i do kungfu and kill people while cooking with the other hand," i say, "change it to horseshoe crabs"
i'm writing about forgiveness for one of my papers. i also attended a talk yesterday, the speaker was speaking about the renaissance through pictures. at least eve was smarter than adam, he said, adam was stupid, he didn't make a choice like eve, he just took what landed in his plate.

/ on another note, i am sad that i probably didn't get the job--will call them on monday--that looking back at my old writing, i had a lot more to write about than i do now. then, everything was sublime. now my mind is a cesspool that is festering with flies, ambitious plans and living plans, emptied of faith, without an opinion, devoid of compassion. i felt like a robot at work at the press today, one of the editors downstairs said, "god you're too young to be in this place when it is so beautiful out, tell your boss you are sick." last night i dreamt i was a mother. it sucked being a mother.

2008-04-22T17:15:00.000-07:00

i'm so blue today. new york city gets you down like that i think. bloo.

back

2008-04-21T23:50:00.000-07:00

got in late. was a good trip. we laughed a lot at the tacky manhattan skyline from weehawken, and the neon NEW YORKER, i relieved old memories in washington square park. the trees were in full bloom, and the village was pretentious and collegiate and flamboyant and flirty and bookish all at one--all the contradictory impulses of NYU in spring. gotta love that school. it was wonderful just being in the children's publishing division surrounded by books and passionate in s&s. i don't know how it went, and how the international student status looks, because they dont get a lot of international students applying obviously, and i sounded really stupid trying to explain what OPT meant. this f1-status. im psyching myself that im not getting it. anyhow i'm probably a lot better after this trip, and after issues have been cleared up. and at least i have discovered something about myself: that i hate shortlines and greyhounds. 12 hours on the road up and down new york state by yourself, with random people trying to talk to you and ipods blasted around you. godawful. i actually got homesick for ithaca halfway through, and upon arriving at port authority at the shitty route 20 booth. i'm so in love with ithaca that i'll be coming home every other weekend bound for ithaca in the summer. nothing beats tompkins county! local pride! whoo hoo:) i ought to get some sleep. cos tomorrow is a big day.

children's book week

2008-04-19T21:21:00.001-07:00

it's children's book week soon.
http://www.bookweekonline.com/index1.html

love how there're all these events created within the circle. good marketing techniques.

growth dividends

2008-04-19T18:07:00.001-07:00

i typed out my ic number for the growth dividend website to collect my $250 that the wonderful government has given me. i felt really weird--i haven't typed out my ic number in 4 months, but it came back to me like the rush of water that tugs at your body when hits the water after months of not swimming, the same rush of water that compels your limbs to move, and in that second your body has forgotten that it forget how to swim, and you are swimming like a fish. first time receiving hand-outs from the government. i got nauseated by myself, i got nauseated with the government--why not use the money to open a singapore publishing house? on impulse, donated everything to the arts (my mother would kill me if she found out what i did with the money so my mother is not going to know.)

i ran today, through the route jm brought me on, it was twilight. twilight through the forest on your own, running up the hill strewn with leaves towards the top of the hill, where a big plain lies, open field that stretches out and, in the center of it, a single tree and a swing.

i also went to say hey to sarah today. somehow it was really important to me i saw sarah as just sarah, lovely sarah, sarah who stresses, sarah with eyeliner, sarah and chocolate, just sarah.

he mowed the lawn today "mouth tastes like grass, dirt and gas." someone is baking gingerbread men in the kitchen. passover is a fridge full of challa loaves and baklava. in the kitchen, i break bread on my own. passover is a time to be joyful and grateful, a time to be asked to be forgiven.

at least a little bit

2008-04-17T15:25:00.000-07:00

long week, passover week, insomnia week, phonecall, phonecall. 3am, 4 am. talk about remarriage. talk about gratefulness. goodnight, don't let the crabs bite.) irritating derrida and his cat. interview in the city on monday, big interview. need haircut, and to figure out how to use In Design. tiffany, save me! thank god for tiffanies. will i get to see you, asked. want to, at least a little bit, said. i, incidentally, want to see you too, replied, at least a little bit.

a big room

2008-04-14T10:13:00.000-07:00

i am not staying in harlem in summer, i have decided to go all midtown with a professional model as a roomate. it's going to be hilarious. i will probably get totally homesick and lonely, so i am making sure there is a place i can return to in ithaca time and again. i might possibly get a chance to see ted leo in hoboken, jersey, cos justin got tickets for a vegan cult band, which the jersey indie circle suspects is actually him. that's all very cool.
i sent out an email to someone last night which was full of rage, it was so angry that i surprised myself, and i am subsequently exhausted this morning. but i woke up absolutely sure of myself. wake up, sleepy, i felt the sudden urge to say, to no one in particular. wake up, sleepy, i wanted someone to say. you know what i'm thinking? of a big room that is completely unfurnished. i'm thinking of you raking leaves in the lawn with your dad, a chip off the cheesy joke block, you say. he's just dyed his hair. there's duct tape on the car's side mirror. you're going to go running. we have no expectations about the weather, we've never had any.

when the thunder called

2008-04-12T08:59:00.001-07:00

thanks to everyone for their opinions on forgiveness--yeah pak, maybe we can talk soon (i haven't spoken with you forever.) i did talk about forgiveness again last night. it was a wonderful conversation, one of those crazy 2am conversations, despite the fact that he was back from some law party in the city probably flat out in bed where he was, and i was tired. i talked about how the idea of forgiveness, immediately places the forgiver in a position of power, the forgivee(?) in a position of willing sacrifice of power, the power is that which is structured by a system of morals in which we are living in. this mutual consent and reciprocity (i remember what we said, "forgiveness is like a kiss") is the cementing of a kind of power dynamic, this is what i meant by "forgiveness is the closing of the system, that ultimate foreclosure." and then i had all these questions, is forgiveness a negation of what you've done, an alteration of memory (remember that aphorism "to forgive is to forget"?); and if we argue --like he did that forgiving isn't forgetting--if it doesn't change what you've done, how is it so that there is that mysterious, enigmatic process where suddenly everything is ok? i honestly believe that to some extent forgiveness is impossible, forgiveness itself implies the paradoxical attempt to remove the anger and disappointment you felt, from the act itself. but the truth is, the anger and disappointment is what constituted the act for you. forgiveness is like repression, that attempt to smooth out the edges through self-persuasion. and if you disagree and say, some wonderful thing, some process of translation, reconfiguration is taking place through the command, "i forgive", what on earth is that?

he didn't diss my crazy stuff on language and power, but put things in perspective. he agreed that we're structured by arbitrary morals, and language does encode the categories good and bad (thus the moment we enter into the symbolic space of society and language, we are guilty, that's original sin, it's not the mythical category that we tell to the children) then he said, but the notion of forgiveness suggests that moral categories are in flux, there's something very fluid within language that disallows congealing of right and wrong within language itself. (if i forget everything in this conversation, i'll remember that. but there were lots of moments to remember in that conversation.) forgiveness is that ambivalent drive, what was the word he used, the intangible, and then some annoying french phrase, which basically translates to "the i don't know." and he told me that forgiveness might actually not be a speech-act, and it transcends language. then he started talking about animals, and there was that open question, do animals--without words--forgive? maybe they just forget, i said.

my dog was put down last night cos both his kidneys failed. my parents called me, heartbroken. i am secretly glad they are heartbroken. at least they have something to latch onto, now that i'm not at home. maybe i am cruel that way. i am glad he doesn't have to be limping around, undignified and pathetic. we were sitting in my room, listening to the thunder (there was lightning, and it felt like a tropical storm, did you know?), when they called. i felt nothing. when i went back in december, one of the sadder things was that my dog--ailing, 12 years, arthritic, had forgotten me. the other sadder thing was that my grandfather started mistaking me for other people. i don't know how it all comes together, language, memory, forgiveness. it is such a secret. i have forgotten people, i have mistaken people for strangers too. i have not forgiven, merely forgotten, and in my failure to forgive, i have started breaking down the concept of forgiveness, wearing it down, waiting for it to walk out on me. if i have failed to understand, forgive me.

relieved

2008-04-10T15:37:00.001-07:00

i'm playing with some ideas. i'm interested in the theoretical idea of forgiveness. the more i think of forgiveness, the more i think it's a terrible, terrible thing. forgiveness as a speech-act, upholding what, power, ultimately, the story of forgiveness also a teleological narrative. i understand genesis now, i understand the meaning of original sin, how it is inextricably intertwined with political functions, and language as a political function. this is why i can't become a christian, i finally realise. i'm so relieved i finally understand. this is not to mean that i don't believe in a god, but i don't believe in a christian god.

mothers and brothers

2008-04-09T18:57:00.000-07:00

virginia is 46, she is one of the grad students i have renaissance english class with. she has two daughters. we have a strange relationship, a little awkward, because i'm the age of her daughter, but sitting next to her in class and sharing my book with her when she forgets to bring her texts, or borrowing books from her. walking out of class: dawn, are you biking home? me: yes, virginia, i am. virginia: in the dark? me: yes. virginia: oh what would your mother say if she knew you were riding home in the dark? me: my mother doesn't know. brian, another grad student chips in, yeah she got bitten by a horse, you know? virginia: this is why i can't send my kids to college. me: brian, stop telling everyone about my exploits. suddenly everyone else (it's not a big class, just 5 of us) starts asking me about my horsebite. john: i used to work on a horse farm, we'd kill any of the horses the moment they bit anyone. oh god, this is horrible, i say, it's like adopting a whole lot of mothers and brothers. you better give us your medical records, brian says, we might also need to sign parental consent forms. i laugh, say goodbye.

the upshot of it is i am going to a doctor and getting a rabies shot tomorrow.

--

i went to the lake tonight. it was my first time running in the dark. you don't know how it feels like, the mist rising to your face. the moon was so close i swear i could have touched it. i didn't dare go further, afraid of animals. i am also afraid of horses now. i didn't say much else, but i did say one thing in class today, "forgiveness, is the closure of the language system; but prospero's reaching out to an unnamed audience, to ask for forgiveness is the re-opening and the rupturing of that system." brad replied, "yes, but that is also the end of his magic." "yes," i said, "that's true, very true."

--

at the end of the magic, i am neither lonely, nor happy, nor regretful, nor wistful, simply indifferent. if i were in love, i wouldn't have run to the lake in the dark, that is simply not what someone in love does. i decided to turn down tara's offer in the end, i don't want to stay in a flat in spanish harlem filled with lesbian musician-type columbia grad students, with a curtain partitioning us. if i lived like that i would be at leon's all the time. i want a place where i can dissolve into the city soundlessly.

clearing up

2008-04-06T07:05:00.001-07:00

i dreamt about the mother last night again.
why are you always so stressed and unhappy, she asked me. i had come home at 4 am, i had forgotten his block address in the dark, i groped upstairs, and she was telling me to pick up my hair from the floor. she wasn't speaking in any language, but i understood her.
because i have a lot of work, i said. how come you never go home, she asked? because my house is full of people, my brother is married, i have a sister, it's a lot of noise, i said. is this the baby's bag? i asked, picking up a woolen and denim sling bag, it's cute, realising that i had not been playing with the baby very much in the past few days.
what language was i speaking in? it was neither chinese or hokkien or english, it was a language of murmurs and no consonants.
i took out a paper towel, and i begun clearing the entire room of my hair. she was watching me, not spitefully, just quietly. after that, i took a broom, and begun cleaning the bedroom.
your every posture reminds me of myself, she said.
and then the alarm went off.
someone was asking me if i wanted to go running.

horses

2008-04-05T07:31:00.000-07:00

today i took up jm's car, and we went up to the plantations. we stopped at the stables, and i met this donkey called black jack. donkeys have this way of looking very intellectual. they stood stock still when we climbed over the gates. it's too strange, they're a little too still, almost hostile, he said. but black jack melted to us when we held out our hands to him, and stared up at us with the most philosophical eyes ever.

there was a horse called sparky that i thought was playing with me when it tried to nuzzle the sleeves of my sweatshirt. i laughed a little, nervously, because i wasn't sure if it was playing with me, or being violent. and then, it sank it teeth into my left wrist and wouldn't let go. i decided not to freeze, but acted casual. its teeth eventually slid from my wrist to my sleeve. there was no blood, but red teeth marks, and the skin turned purplish and bruised. i was very shaken, because suddenly the horse seemed like a familiar, deranged man that i couldn't read, someone who wouldn't let go even when i said, stop that's enough. and when i looked into its face, it was like looking into the face of hysteria.

we left, climbed back over the gates, he offered to drive, but i decided to drive. i'm home now, icing the bruise. maybe it's all the derrida and his cat literature that i've been reading, and how for a long time, how memories of being afraid were cast out of my mind--i have been very happy and preoccupied with books and things for some--it shook me a little, not the horse, but the sense of utter helplessness, incomprehensibility, when i laughed and said, ok, that's enough, as though it would understand. and i know that even if i write this, i am utterly alone. not jm, who was there, nor anyone would understand, the absolute alienation of asking a horse to let go of your skin.

very interesting

2008-04-04T19:32:00.000-07:00

New HarperCollins Unit to Try to Cut Writer Advances
By MOTOKO RICH, April 4, 2008

HarperCollins Publishers is forming a new publishing group that will substitute profit-sharing with authors for cash advances and will try to eliminate the costly practice of allowing booksellers to return unsold copies. Robert S. Miller will oversee the new unnamed publisher.

In a move that surprised many industry insiders, HarperCollins announced on Thursday that Robert S. Miller, the founding publisher of Hyperion, the adult books division of the Walt Disney Company, would leave his post of 17 years to lead this new, as yet unnamed entity.

The new unit is HarperCollins’s effort to address what its executives see as some of the more vexing issues of the book industry. “The idea is, ‘Let’s take all the things that we think are wrong with this business and try to change them,’ ” said Mr. Miller, 51. “It really seemed to require a start-up from scratch because it will be very experimental.”

The new group will also release electronic books and digital audio editions of all its titles, said Jane Friedman, president and chief executive of HarperCollins, a unit of the News Corporation.

“At this moment of real volatility in the book business, when we are all recognizing things that are difficult to contend with, like growing advances and returns and that people are reading more online, we want to give them information in any format that they want.”

The new group is entering a difficult market for books generally. Citing economic uncertainty, the Borders Group announced last month that it was considering selling itself. Barnes & Noble also said it expected first-quarter results to be slightly down from the previous year.

Author advances and bookseller returns have long troubled the publishing industry. Best-selling authors can command advances so high that publishers often come away with slim profits, even for books that are significant successes. Publishers also sometimes offer high advances to untested authors in the hopes of creating new hits, but often those gambles do not pan out.

Ms. Friedman said the new group, which will initially publish just 25 titles a year, would offer “low or no advances.” Mr. Miller, who was most recently president of Hyperion, said he hoped to offer authors a 50-50 split of profits. Typically, authors earn royalties of 15 percent of profits after they have paid off their advances. Many authors never earn royalties.

Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, a literary agent, said: “I’m not cynical about it, and I’m open to ideas, but I think it’s too soon to say what the validity of it is. These words seem fine and interesting, but how does it benefit the author and how do we find our readers?”

Under standard practices, booksellers can return unsold books, saddling publishers with the high costs of shipping and pulping copies. Mr. Miller said the publishers could share with authors any savings from eliminating returns. A spokeswoman for Barnes & Noble declined to comment on HarperCollins’ plans.

Robert P. Gruen, executive vice president for merchandising and marketing at the Borders Group, said that it was premature to comment specifically on the new business, but he said, “We generally support the idea of looking at potential solutions to a return system that is not working well for the industry as a whole.”

The new group, which Ms. Friedman is calling a studio, will most likely publish hardcover editions priced at the low end of the market, around $20 a copy. She pointed to some of the titles that Mr. Miller had published while at Hyperion as models, including “The Five People You Meet in Heaven” by Mitch Albom and “The Best-Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.”

Mr. Miller’s exit from Hyperion follows the departure in January of Will Schwalbe, editor in chief, to pursue an unspecified Internet-related project. Ellen Archer, publisher of Hyperion, will take over as president from Mr. Miller.

Also on Thursday, Weinstein Books announced that Rob Weisbach left his post as president and chief executive to pursue other publishing opportunities.

At HarperCollins, Mr. Miller said he was considering offering both e-book and audio editions of the hardcovers at no extra cost to the consumer.

pneumonia

2008-04-02T13:39:00.000-07:00

i'm tired. i am in need of a good night's sleep. i smashed my full length mirror today, like a drunk. wear socks, he suggested. i will wear socks, and uggs and duct tape over the uggs for good measure, happy? very stylish and hot. i also got invited to a professor's acreage. she's got a flock of 12 endangered native indian sheep, 4 dogs and 3 cats. one sheep has pneumonia because of the unpredictable weather. that sheep has blue fleece.

-

i miss the city. i can't wait to be back again.

summer ambitions

2008-04-01T18:05:00.001-07:00

i have, admittedly been horribly distracted. got a call from a small literary agency that they'd be happy to have me for reading of unsolicited letters, manuscripts, slush piles, and drafting rejection letters. it's unpaid, but i would love the experience. especially, when they said they would like me to help out with translation and subrights deals.

i have a phone interview with a huge publishing firm on friday. if i get the internship, it will be absolutely disgusting, and completely commercial, 9-5, slap in midtown, at the peak of the publishing season, very depressing, totally sell-out. but i'm going to read the publishers weekly everyday, because i totally want to learn how to be a sell-out. commercialism is the necessary, circuitous route that has to be taken for the world to be able to afford classic paperbacks. i used to be all idealistic and stuff, but i realise to move books across the world, you have to institute necessary evils.

...it's the first time i've heard him detached and valiant, and suddenly the banking crisis seems horribly real, and he seems horribly real.

when i was young, my mom would always tell me my eyes were bigger than my mouth, and i'd never be able to finish what was on my plate. it's times like this when i wonder, should i really have left the city? but other times, i think, it's good i left the city, i'd be totally paranoid, totally ambitious, stretching myself all over the place to juggle work and study. i mean, two months in ithaca, and i started searching for all the publishing presses here, if i stayed on in manhattan, it would have been ridiculous. i like america. i like new york city. things are happening in the city. the ugly and beautiful, the beautiful can only be manufactured through the ugly, and my eyes are bigger than my life and my abilities allow. i would give up a lot for a job in book publishing where i feel i was actually moving books to places. i would give up past loves, past memories, so much that it would probably break the hearts of those who have ever loved me.

this is messed up - happy april's fools:)

2008-04-01T07:00:00.000-07:00

New! Gmail Custom TimeTM

Ever wish you could go back in time and send that crucial email that could have changed everything -- if only it hadn't slipped your mind? Gmail can now help you with those missed deadlines, missed birthdays and missed opportunities.
Pre-date your messages
You tell us what time you would have wanted your email sent, and we'll take care of the rest. Need an email to arrive 6 hours ago? No problem.

Mark as read or unread
Take sending emails to the past one step further. We let you make emails look like they've been read all along.

Make them count
Use your custom time stamped messages wisely -- each Gmail user gets ten per year.

Worry less
Forget your finance reports. Forget your anniversary. We'll make it look like you remembered.

gold

2008-03-31T17:17:00.000-07:00

so i'll be working and interning in the city in summer, in the publicity department in a midtown publishing company. plans finally have materialised, some extra paperwork is needed, and i need to settle where to live, but i am definitely excited about returning to a city that no longer is indifferent to me, but perhaps, loves me. (i'll wear an apron, and cook and clean and nag you to death, he said. and i'll put the food the table and be a complete asshole, i said. we joke like that, irony is the best defence against the realisation that the future isn't ours to claim.) and at the same time, i'm hoping to get some part-time work done at literary agencies. i talked to my parents at 2 am singapore time about this. my dad, sleepy, after wine. he told me that someone had a compliment about the book that he published (it's a gardening book that he wrote for charity.) i told him, when i become famous, i'll distribute it all over the world for you. he laughed, and i laughed and then i put down the phone. but there was something sweet, and possibly sad, but gently sad, and ironic, about the ambitious and unsettled daughter who was finally going to work in the city for a summer, telling them, it's gonna be ok, with some luck, i'd be able to make gold out of dreams, i'll distribute your book all over the world for you.

how to sleep

2008-03-30T16:24:00.000-07:00

i'm grappling some difficult questions, and i admit it has been eating into my study, eating into my sleep, popping up when i'm trying to appreciate ithaca during afternoon runs, when i am driving, when i am eating.
it's times like this, when i think about what sam used to say: let go of things, and leave it to Him. Him has become a more elusive concept, now that i'm on my own, floating in a world of uncertainty and possibilities, reinventing and inventing religion in every sense of the word. Him teaches me to realise that there is only so much i can do, and worry won't really help me at all. this doesn't mean being foolishly patient, but it means letting go when i have done all i have needed to do. i need to stop envisioning a tomorrow that is ultimately not mine to claim. until i can do this, i will never be able to sleep.

-
i wonder what you are thinking. i am reading mourning and melancholia now, freud. i am tired, but at least i am happy. there is a wind whipping up here. thunderstorms to usher in spring. if i stay in ithaca, i will be able to write in peace, if he comes up though, there will be no peace. with my writing, i will become famous and lots of men will want to have sex with me. ok, joke, joke. with my writing and my intense slowness at writing, if i get something out, it will be embarrassing. there are some old yellow roses stuck into a wine bottle on my table. very cliche, no? i am queen of cliche, queen of kitsch. it was some crappy 2006 australian red plonk, the roses were from my mom. last night he made a joke about bad poetry. but it's not really a joke, i do write, i said. then there was a long silence, and apologies. (a bit like how i very meanly, joke about his med school application essays, "you should write, "i'm awesome. and you're awesome. you know you want me. so you should take me. best regards.") so he asked, may i see what you write? i suppose so? i said. that's what they all say at first, and then all can't take in the end.

missing me

2008-03-29T06:19:00.000-07:00

today i chased deer in his car. at a NO TRESPASSING zone, and figured out the chords for 1972.
i called my parents, and i knew they loved me and i loved them.
i am also excited to hear from myself again. i miss me. :)

geryon

2008-03-28T18:47:00.000-07:00

you were born in the honduras, i said? that place of volcanoes and mountains? i ask. he laughs, i guess you can say there are a lot of volcanoes there. i am sorry, i am ignorant, i say. no, one needs to ask questions, he says, how else do you learn? we are processing forms in the public service center. we talk, because it has been a long week, because it is snowing, becuase there is no one to talk to, i haven't spoken to a winged person in some time. i know, i often joke that i need to marry an american he says. perhaps you, too, will leave behind, many husbands and many broken hearts, he says.

responsibility

2008-03-27T08:08:00.000-07:00

i am about to sign a new house contract, while at the same time, am being wooed by another real estate agent? is that responsible of me? on the other hand, i did tell sasha, my cooperative house manager that i wouldn't be reserving the best room of the house anymore--i did the responsible thing. i usually sleep fine these days--and dream about funny things, happy things--these days, and i'm a lot more serious about my work. but last night i started thinking about what's going to happen in 4 years, my having to go home, leave friends behind. there're only a couple of people i truly care about here, but i do care about them alot. i was talking to henry on my birthday about relationships and things, and he said, "one girlfriend criteria is that she has to be willing to go back to singapore with you," and i started disagreeing, and he started getting very bewildered with me, "but isn't that socially irresponsible?" he said. yes, it would be socially irresponsible. i want to be responsible. but it's one of those words that have become trite, overused by chicken soup, readers' digest, pro-life advocates, environmentalists, soap opera actors, religious groups who don't know what they're talking about, ex-boyfriends, parents, people who have agendas in your life.

you can make an argument that to be responsible to yourself, you have to be accountable for what you do to the people around you, you should shape yourself around the needs of others. but i hate that saintly argument. it irritates and bores me to tears. it reeks of the hypocritical stuff of the charity pages i used to write for the straits times, christian hypocrisy, and american idealism and ideology. (and i was so annoyed that i inserted a swearword earlier, but it's gone now) it doesn't accurately represent the complexity of a life that is irrevocably divided. i believe that to be responsible to the people around you, you have to be honest about your own needs and desires. you can do alot of things for another person, for instance, do things for someone, make yourself love someone else, try very hard to understand something fundamentally alien to you, your upbringing, your needs. but if from the start you didn't really want to be there, then although you might have made the other person happy, who were you trying to kid by thinking you were being responsible? you weren't being totally responsible by raising expectations. to be responsible, you would have to realise the truth of what you wanted, rather than simply living for someone else's happiness. realising the truth of what you want is more than realising you really want to smoke your lungs out or fuck the brains out of the people in this world, or run around the world in 80 days to raise money for charity. that's really all child's play. knowing a is lot more complex than the myths we've shaped about ourselves, knowing is more than knowing what you want to do. this emphasis on doing is very american, people who act before thinking. knowing, knowing what you want out of this life. being responsible doesn't mean living for other people, it means being accountable to the people around you by recognising your limits to being able to live with them, live for them.

cockroaches

2008-03-26T20:56:00.000-07:00

he told me that he let go of the cockroaches today after the lab experiments, so they could enjoy the beautiful weather.
i told him, that was a very buddhist thing to say. i said it reminded me of a place i used to know, not here. that was a place where old people let go of crabs bought at markets, peace-offerings.
i showed him a discussion i had with the singaporeans on food. that's really intense, he said. now he wants me to teach him how to use lah, mah, leh, hor, lor, and has valiantly attempted to add lah's and then a tentative question mark to the end of his sentences. it doesn't work that way, lah is a sign of power, lah is phallic, lah is impatience with strangers. i told him, it's really complicated, actually. i don't actually know why i speak the way i speak.

thinking about home

2008-03-25T06:53:00.000-07:00

ive been dreaming of home the past few days, old friends. chalene was laughing with me yesterday in my dream, and i talked to a woman about the beauty of shandong in another dream while waiting for the 5 train (5 train? was that new york, but i was sure it was singapore, but singapore doesnt have 5 trains) maybe i am homesick, not in a crippling, sad way, but the way you stand back and gaze from a distance and think, that's beautiful.

-

i swam today. i am getting quieter. spent the morning sitting in sangam by myself, listening to the conversations around me.i swam long, slow laps in an empty pool. the lifeguard let me swim, even though it was afterhours. i thought of Trois couleurs: Bleu. but i am not as skinny and vulnerable and pretty or in grief as juliette binoche. i am merely swimming alone in solitude. before i jumped in--without my glasses, i had a thought that there was no water in the pool, because its surface was completely still. afterall, it was afterhours, perhaps they had drained the pool. so for a moment, i thought i was jumping to my death. in that moment, i thought of nothing. it was completely empty. in the next moment, i was in the water, my eyes had been open in an attempt to hold in the last moments of life, and they hit the surface of the water like coins, and i began swimming.

lah

2008-03-23T19:53:00.000-07:00

i am reading shakespeare's coriolanus now. to my utmost surprise, the women add "la" to the end of their sentences, and the friendly index says "la is an emphatic interjection, without meaning in itself." this means that renaissance england also "lah-ed" their way through language, thus the origin of "lah" is not entirely clear altogether (?)

the artist

2008-03-22T18:30:00.001-07:00

There is a path that leads back from phantasy to reality—the path, that is, of art. An artist…desires to win honor, power, wealth, fame and the love of women; but he lacks the means of achieving these satisfactions. Consequently, like any other unsatisfied man, he turns away from reality and transfers all his interest, and his libido too, to the wishful constructions of his life of phantasy, whence the path might lead to neurosis [ie, the retreat from reality]…An artist however, finds the path to reality in the following manner…he understands how to work over his daydreams in such a way as to make them lose what is too personal about them and repels strangers, and to make it possible for others to share in the enjoyment of them. He understands too, how to tone them down so that they do not easily betray their origin from proscribed sources. Furthermore, he possesses the mysterious power of shaping some particular material until it has become a faithful image of his phantasy; and he knows, moreover, how to link so large a field of pleasure to this representation of his unconscious phantasy that, for the time being at least, repressions are outweighed and lifted by it. If he is able to accomplish all this, he makes it possible for other people once more to derive consolation and alleviation from their own sources of pleasure in their unconscious which have become inaccessible to them; he [enters into a shared world of objects and a shared system of representation] earns their gratitude and admiration and he has thus achieved through his phantasy what originally he had achieved only in his phantasy—honor, power, and the love of women.

Freud, General Theory of the Neuroses, Lecture XXIII “The Paths to Symptom-formation”

forgiveness

2008-03-22T16:11:00.001-07:00

today, i fried broccoli with garlic for dinner. first you boil the broccoli for just a minute, till it turns all keen and dark. not too long, because you don't want it to become mushy, just enough to soften its edges, and make it moist, so you don't feel like you're biting into a bundle of strings and fibres. drain, add olive oil to a pan, wait till the oil bubbles, and put the garlic, wait a few seconds, hear it simmer, oyster sauce, and then water, the water falls on the pan, and dissolves immediately into steam. and then salt. you always add the salt last when frying, because salt makes the surface of vegetables crinkle and tends to make them shrivelled and mushy. (boiling, on the other hand, is a different story, you salt the stew early because you want the vegetables to become mushy). frying vegetables--it is all a matter of timing, a matter of listening, a matter of putting the least of each condiment, so that you can taste the sweetness of the vegetables, in the case of broccoli, its piquant nuttiness.

i thought about william's mother today. i used to go to his house, and sometimes she would be cooking dinner. she was skinny, always in a floral blouse. she was pretty, despite her age. when she laughed, the wrinkles would fold into what seemed an expression of despise. but she was not a spiteful woman, she tolerated her son's bouts of anger, tolerated his inexplicable decisions, tolerated his slew of stray lovers, tolerated me in my uniform, beside her son in a tie. sometimes i would talk to her, despite my stumbling chinese. i would talk about my own mother, the reason why i couldn't speak chinese, miscellaneous things, like school, then he would always look up from whatever he was doing, in wonder at the two women talking, one was young enough to be his daughter, the other was his mother. she would cook the most amazing things--they were always very simple and subtle. pork fried in cornflour, and fried with cabbage. there was no sweetness in that dish, the sweetness came from the cabbage. she would make the best tauyoubak, it was deep and sweet and thick and swimming in fat. she would also make her own fishcakes, mixing fish with flour and chilli, and stuffing them into slices of brinjal. then she would throw them into a pot of oil.

i try to remember these things, the smell of joss sticks, the tv on some shitty chinese serial. after i walked out of him, there was always someone who would try to mute this part of my life into silence. because i am alone again, there is no one telling me what to think, no one threatened by my past and telling me forget him, think about other things. it has been exactly 2 years since i left, and more than 3 years since i met him. he is older now, and so am i. if i remember these things, the smell of vegetables simmering in garlic, the smell of that home, the sound of the baby laughing, perhaps i will have a kinder, softer image of that man, perhaps i will forgive him, and know that he has forgiven me.

small press month! fyi

2008-03-21T16:32:00.001-07:00

March is National Small Press Month, a nationwide promotion highlighting the valuable work produced by independent presses, and the innovative writers they publish. An annual celebration of the independent spirit of small publishers, Small Press Month is an effort to showcase the diverse, unique, and often most significant voices being published today. Co-sponsored by the Small Press Center (The New York Center for Independent Publishing), the CLMP (The Council for Literary Magazines and Presses), and PMA (The Independent Book Publishers Association), Small Press Month is a collaborative initiative that seeks to increase the public's awareness of the crucial and creative work put forth by independent presses.

horseshoe crabs

2008-03-21T13:50:00.000-07:00

i am trying to get used to my new skin. in my new skin, i'm not sad or scared, i haven't fought, i haven't been upset, i haven't been moved, i swear more, cook less, i think simply, in words like "gorgeous," "very cool," "messed up," i have, simply put, forgotten. suddenly home is truly faraway, and i am suddenly strange to myself. yesterday i went to the liquor store to buy a jacob's creek, the shop cheered and congratulated me. i have a new pair of thighs, which don't seem like mine yet, and threaten to walk out on me. they're impatient with me, they want to run. keep quiet, i say, i don't want to go to the gym, i only want to run outdoors. i get impatient and bored these days, impatient for the weather to become warm. my body is rebellious though, it doesn't care that gymming is boring, it doesn't care that the weather is crazy. i'm angry today because the weather is glorious, sun and clear sky, but it is freezing. it smells like pine, he said. really, i can't smell a thing, i said. that's crazy, he said back. i had a handwritten letter in the mailbox, and a white candle sealed inside it, overnight mail. it was all rambly with horrible handwriting, it looked like burnt bush. difficult to explain the shock of seeing handwriting. it's like seeing another person's pubic hair for the first time. i saw five deer at my doorstep last night, one gazed at me, petrified. bambi? i called. it was a deer surprise party, he suggested. maybe it'll be good to be closer to home, closer to upstate, maybe. i make plans. one of them includes learning to cook burmese food from the father with the machete. another is waiting till the tide dips in the morning in brooklyn to pick horseshoe crabs like stars.

spring equinox

2008-03-20T14:33:00.000-07:00

i feel very loved, very much like a child, very much in love. woke up to a drunken call from my mom and dad, "hey i'm passing the phone to the dog, say hi," i think i made my sister cry though, when i said, hey, i'm not coming home this year, or christmas, only going to be home next year, summer. there was a call from new york, and aunty zarina made me a ballerina cupcake!, then on arriving from london and new york, he went to wegmans at freaking 5am before the car was bound for new york again, to buy steaks. who the hell does that? because past years were always crappy--i was studying, or reeling from something bad, or i remember, in the midst of a really cruel breakup--a part of me thinks i'll wake up and realise, perhaps it was a dream, la vida es sueno. i'll bake myself an apple cake to make sure it is not. i am happy now, i wrote in an email last night, i give so much more of myself to people. and they give me so much. thank you for everything, all of you.

-

on another note, the american economy is in the complete pits now, and it worries me slightly, because i would very much like to find a good internship.

jerk

2008-03-19T16:14:00.000-07:00

it's foggy outside. tonight, i will sleep in a land of mist. i ran till i hurt today. received chit's text (i love you too, sweet.) tomorrow is the spring equinox, did you know? i want to wake up early to usher in the spring equinox. it marks the date the sun sets later and later each day. it means winter is over. april is the cruelest month, the earth awakens and heals, but one senses this only happens through much pain. like the paradox of turning 21, the realisation that i'm entering into the spring of my life, but this means that a lot too, has had come to pass.
i could have stayed in the city, i suppose. it would have been crazy though. i'd have probably have been made to drink till i left my mind and heart--probably my wallet and handphone and charger--there. no, unlikely. i would be nursing expensive and pretentious steamers in the village over a book, running by the hudson till my lungs expired, fancy candlelit dinners. i don't know, the point is i came home. do i sense in myself, a certain pang? if i stayed in manhattan, i would have started conversations i wouldn't have known how to end. i talked to leon today, to the background of horrible communist music, what the fuck, leon, i said, how weird is it talking to you with that stuff on.
i picture you driving over george washington bridge into the city for work, singing to freddie king, tapping at your wheel, you and your blues. duct tape to keep your side mirror from disintegrating. the sunlight was blinding. we were running late. rushed out of the house and shared a banana in the car. jerk, i said. jerk, he scowled back.

tired

2008-03-18T20:36:00.000-07:00

arrived at 2 am last night, slept at 3, woke up at 9, for driving. on failing my driving test, i drove up to syracuse. one hour upstate, the mountains were blue. i ran again, it's good to ache. i ran the quad, pretended it was saturday again, leaping into the arms of spring. had homecooked dinner at valentine's. singaporeans give love a bad image, i'm glad to have left valentine's. i'm alone in this big house, it's big, and i'm walking from room to room, turning on the lights. the wind is tapping against my window, the empty swing outside sways absently, and i need to clean my room. when electricity fails, we turn on the candles, and weep.

spring and summer

2008-03-17T23:04:00.000-07:00

done fishing! home in ithaca again. overfed (hell, yeah.) happy. on saturday, we saw the first robin of my spring, and discovered the first buds. also, i received notification today, that the shop that is holding on to my coat has re-opened--so my winter coat will be retrieved!-- and i am staying in the states for summer :) all this news falling on me today like the glorious manhattan sunshine on washington square park. the city's no longer mythical, just another lovely place with lovely faces. i'm thinking of the city colored with radiohead's weird fishes, eating in a cavern at midnight, honey mustard chicken salad and tzatziki with flatbreads, the world's craziest sundaes. rachel and yuanyuan in the backseat, looking out at the lights. i sat in dean & deluca's on university place, nursing a steamer, amongst the nyu grad students, the clackety-clack of macbooks reading coetzee's disgrace, saying hey, to the bespectacled man reading yesterday's new york times, feeling absolutely pretentious, absolutely city, absolutely alone, and remembering sitting here once, also with a macbook beside munir. i walked by one of the city's oldest bars, and the crowd was already queuing to get in at noon, green facepaint for st. pat's. i'm home so soon, perhaps it was all just a dream. "that's why it's lonely, multiple homes, because you can never truly enter into the particularities of either, you can never truly return. also a mark you've become a true individual," said leon. word. leon never fail to puts things in perspective. leon, of a flat by the hudson river, with buddhist carpets and an israeli flag on his ceiling. what a great guy. if only he didn't smoke so much.

green dragon day

2008-03-14T08:55:00.000-07:00

today i have to go to work at the press, also trying to understand the meaning of "sacred life", dinner tonight, also have to meet up with my prof. biked to school today, then went to the public service center. i'm tired, but happy.

i walked past trees strung with toilet paper today. the architects pulled a prank in anticipation of green dragon day. every year, on the last friday of spring, the cornell architects emerge from the architecture building with a huge dragon made of paper. it is long, huge. they parade around the arts quad, string toilet paper around the trees, march to torment the engineers in their quad, and then set a weeks' work aflame. imagining setting a week of work aflame, a year of work aflame, years of work set aflame. i should do what the architects do, create a dragon, and then on the week before the spring equinox, close my eyes, extinguish it like a candle. happy unbirthday, i say, (like yesterday, slightly embarrassed that what was held out was a hazelnut, chocolatey thing. i don't eat chocolate, i tried to explain), but happy unbirthday, may tomorrow be better.

/ on another note, i took my friend's keys, and drove to the mall myself today. i got myself a pair of running shoes and new jeans. i feel so liberated. finally. i had been waiting for this for so damn long. i even gave my friend a lift--and completely freaked her out--when the cars behind me started horning. and i have both jm/ernest's and wangwang's keys for spring break while they're gone. i better pass my driving test next week. :) oh what would i give to have some mobility!

lovely

2008-03-13T14:58:00.000-07:00

slammed my hand on my big wooden door today, it was funny, and very painful. was a great start to the day. fourth finger. it's the wedding band finger, i think, on the left. it's kinda swollen, but the day's too lovely for me to care. :)

/ and on another note. i just got a really really early pre-birthday surprise. it was so funny. and my finger's throbbing like crazy, but i'm like really happy.

arcana imperii

2008-03-13T07:20:00.000-07:00

the secret to happiness is never asking for more than you can have. some people. how do i explain that my apples would have no taste to them? they would have to enter into the world of mortality, the symbolic order of death, first. the more they asked of me, the more i locked shut into myself. i entered into the world of kafka, a world of silence, and i have pledged a vow of silence. in the end, gregor died with a rotting apple in his flesh. this is how history is made. i finally slept all right last night, it's been some time since.

traveling

2008-03-12T13:22:00.001-07:00

influenced by agamben, modeled on his ideas of sovereignty and life. if the basis upon which love can be founded is speech, insofar as the speech is contingent upon the voice (perishable, mortal), the lover is he who cannot be silenced, but can stop speaking. in that sense then, the lover who promises is he who is constantly undone by his voice. does that work? maybe not. it was just an idea though.

/ on another note, wasn't a very easy day to get through. but people were lovely. like walking through west campus with chandhni, seeing the most beautiful home i have ever seen, the man who gave us free tickets at the arts center, so i hilariously ended up sitting with yutao at stephen petronio dance company, jm asking if i wanted dinner, walking to willard straight with tywanquilia to get dinner, me and yutao making everyone laugh at the public service center. receiving eric's beautiful poetry manuscript. re-reading the email i sent to duana, and realising that my own voice makes a lot of sense, when i think it's gonna fail me. speaking to other people is precious, because everything you say to other people may not strike you at the moment you talk to them, but they come back to you, like little tealights, to take you back to where you wanted to be. now i'm eating oats heated with old apples and soymilk, with kafka open before me. i want him to take me to a place i've never been before, and then set me back where i started, so i can realise the magnitude and the distance i've travelled in a day.

memories

2008-03-07T18:11:00.000-08:00

i'm camping in valentine place tonight. it's good to be home. i also got a first homecooked singaporean dinner in this year. and the guys next door just cook so well. ernest: "dawn, why are you eating like you haven't eaten before?" jm: "yeah, how many days ago did you eat?" it's good to be home. i have a lot of wonderful memories in this room. and the truth is, i miss being singaporean. i miss being pissed off with my singaporean housemates and wishing they'd shut up. how when i was shit ass upset, there'd always be something stupid going on downstairs, and that made things just great.

beautiful sunset

2008-03-06T15:16:00.000-08:00

today brought mixed feelings--i was, for one, too quiet in class--but it was a very full day. it was filled with blessings of life. good news from home, good news from new york--another acceptance letter for jk ("i'm putting you on speaker, hear the rustle of my lab cockroaches"),(lovely, beautiful), duana mailed me back ("thank you for being," awww, get well soon dear), and i unexpectedly texted my old bestest best friend in anxiety that my macbook was gonna crash ("i've been breaking things all week in the lab"), first proper day at work, beautiful jog in the morning, i accidentally got a lift home from jm, (all we talk about in the car is the usual, well, food and running: "the ribs i cooked were like crap"), cooking with sasha in the kitchen (i came home today, and i exclaimed "sasha, what's going on, the kitchen smells so...asian!" first i--get this--set a pot on fire, and leave the kitchen in fumes "it's a flambe without the alcohol" i exclaim, we tuck into tofu like loaves and bread, "grapes make me fart," she tells me smugly), prof. l ("presentation, would you like to work on some milton?")

and on another note, i'm spending the night in my old room at valentine's; and i miss china.