weekender

Last night’s dinner at Dish-Dash in Balham was stomach-splittingly filling. Every single one of us (and there were about 16 to 20 of us, depending on the time of the evening) had to get up and do a little stroll around the place, down to the washrooms and up again.

Middle-eastern food that wasn’t bad at all, but not exactly very exciting. I wish someone would come up with unpretentious good ethnic food, and cut out all that ‘ooh look it’s exotic, so we have to dim the lights and serve everything on tiny plates and have silly camel things (candleholders? Napkin ring? What?) all around!’

I miss the hawker centre and kopitiam.

But, it was a good night. And T ended up with 5 pots of plants for her birthday presents – everyone obviously knows about her and that green stuff. We gave her a rather well established spider plant with its own baby plant dangling off the side of the pot. I had to take apart one of the hanging baskets just to extract that specimen because their root structure is absolutely mad and is impossible to separate without being really vicious and just tearing the whole mass of roots apart.

Other the highlights of the night included:
- talking about gardening at 2am while drunk on too much red wine
- doing arm-bendy exercises and trying to outdo each other on the most intricate arm-hand-shoulder-twist
- watching R try to lean against the wall several times before giving up and walk back to sit in his chair
- from the upper-deck of the bus home, making up stories about the people we saw below us on the pavements and street corners
- watching a woman in white bridal dress with a big cleaver stuck in her stomach and (fake)blood streaming down

+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-
the hallway into the house, i.e. right outside my bedroom door, smells like gas. Apparently. So if it really is gas, I’ll be roast suckling pig even before I register the explosion.

O, R and I have spent more than several minutes sniffing around the house looking for the source. Or maybe it isn’t gas. Oh I don’t know. I never know about these things.

And so came the inevitable, after we didn’t know where the gas-smell was coming from

‘Where’s [the boyfriend]? Is he around?’
‘Uhm... no... he's gone off to berlin… you knew that’
‘Did he bring his mobile with him?’
‘Uhm... What can he do? He’s not coming back till Wednesday’

I tried to feign ignorance! I attempted to shield him from stupid questions! But I failed! Now the boyfriend will get text messages when he's not even in the fucking country asking where the gas pipes in the house are. Brilliant.

It’s really not so surprising, when you think of it, that he wants to move away and not have to deal with 6 other people haranguing him whenever something goes wrong in the house. And it’s really not so surprising, that I agree wholeheartedly with him when these situations arise and they think it's fine to hassle him.

Maybe i'm just being over-protective. But still, 5 years of cleaning up other people's mess is more than anyone should have to deal with, much less having to deal with the (i quote) bigoted, rascist bitch who is the landlady.

Yeah, so change is afoot. Hurrah! (especially if i'm not burnt to death in my sleep before then)

fotoberlinische 01

very long overdue pictures of berlin.
from top: part of the berlin wall at potsdamerplatz; the bar at club icon where we saw a jazzanova dj set and mr scruff as part of the popkomm festival; the train station we got off at to go to the hamburger banhof art museum; father and son at the holocaust memorial; beautiful lights at the sony center; pay-as-much-as-you-like wine buffet on the corner of friedlichstrasse tuesdays and thursdays.

many many more to go, but HLA Hart's The Concept of Law is being very coercive at the moment. i want to go on holiday again.

the woeful tales of gluten intolerance

I have a post-it note stuck to my table lamp that states: stop eating things you know are bad for you. Big black letters on bright orange paper. Pretty attention grabbing, you’d think.

But what do I do? I go ahead and have bacon-mushroom-fried-egg sandwiches. SANDWICHES. Two of them. Not just one.

I’m not supposed to eat anything with gluten in it, which cuts out everything wheat-based in my diet, along with oats barley rye and a gazillion other cereals/grains. Do you know how expensive gluten-free stuff is? Thank god I’m Chinese and love eating rice and kway teow and bee hoon. But yeah, so gluten anything is a no-no, and I go eat 4 slices of wholewheat bread – which is 4 times the amount I’m not supposed to eat, which means it is 4 times infinity of my wrongness.

And now I suffer the indigestive consequences 6 hours after I stuffed them down my gullet. The boyfriend has been called upon to buy me fizzy drinks on his way back from I-don’t-know-where in hope that the acid levels (enough to dissolve your teeth!) will break down all that gunk in my rumbling tum.

I really ought to learn my lessons and eat proper things, things that I know will not be bad for me. I am much too greedy for my own good.

rub-a-tum-tum

night comes too quickly, and darkness falls much too swiftly.

it's warm outside, though. rather balmy, in fact.

but it might have changed since i last stepped out into the garden a while ago. you know how fickle the weather is here.

and the leaves have all dropped off the trees. it's just golden, yellow, brown and green everywhere. crackly sometimes, and squishy others. and a great big bunch of them floating about in a pool created by days of continual drizzle.

today we're having sardines for dinner. proper sardines, not those in a tin. grilled sardines with raw onion salad and roast potatoes. mmmmm....

with dinner at tim&gair's tomorrow, and at tracy's birthday thingamajig on saturday, this is going to be a week of yummyliciousness. i can tell.

white rabbit

Whatever happened to my free days and nights and weekends of endless hedonism?

Gone with the wind, with the changing leaves and the falling chestnuts.

Everyday I read (as in read articles and handouts and other photocopied-in-breach-of-copyright material or a chapter in a textbook) after I get back from school, make dinner and chat with whoever’s around for a bit, then go back and sit at my desk with my eyes trained on those little black prints that end up looking like not so many trails of ants.

I do this so much more now than ever before. I’ve always been the type to ignore my readings until March/April came around, and then I’d knuckle down and consume everything before spewing them out at my exams in May/June. But this year, strangely, I have rather unconsciously changed my habits white being extremely aware that I am behaving in an exceptional way.

But anyway, the point. The point is that I am tired already. How do people keep this sort of intense-ness up for months and months and years and years on end?

I am exhausted from having to plan my life around my readings and more readings. And I am so much more uptight and nervous about time and what I do with it, and where I go on the weekends, that honestly I’d like to slap myself. it’s as if this whole new work ethic is trying to take over my (social) life. I mean, I was in the library on Friday at 9pm – ok, so I only went there to look for an article I had to do a report on and headed straight back home when I realised it didn’t exist in the collection, but still. The library. At 9pm. On a Friday. I don’t know how the boyfriend puts up with it.

Of course, when it’s the right time and the right place I will be sure to clear my schedule by moving my readings to the right or left of the event. Which is why the house is having a Halloween/Guy Fawkes party on the 4th of November.

It is why I was in the country this weekend looking at the rolling fields and silhouettes of trees against a darkening sky. And also why I spent the better part of today walking in the woods while trying to pick mushrooms that would not kill us, nor impart us some psychotropic experience in between the trees- I have no time for that right now, dammit .

pre-emptive nostalgia

Sundays are for sleeping in, watching the sunlight stream into the room through bleary eyes, and then getting out of bed to watch breakfast being made.

And also for a walk to the Newington Library in the Cuming Museum Building on Walworth Road with huge skylights and dainty balconies all along the top half of their walls filled with books the reason for their being placed so high and beyond a door marked ‘Private’ I was yearning to know. And all the walls were painted in a lovely mint/pistachio-green.

Then, feeling absolutely saintly after finishing my Political and Legal Anthropology report a day before it is due (hurrah!), I spend the rest of the afternoon reading the Sunday papers by the dying light of day whilst having fridge-cooled Spanish omelette (leftover breakfast that tastes so much better cold with a dollop of salad cream or mayonnaise) washed down with a cup of tea.

Perhaps it’s that voice in the back of my head telling me to collect all my memories of living ‘sahth of the rivah’ that make these everyday things resonate with greater meaning than one would usually attribute to them. But all things must pass, as T said on Friday as we drank that last bottle of wine in the little late-night Italian place on Lower Marsh Street. And so they do.

Moving in with the ‘east-end wallahs’, as a classmate of mine once called her kind. Hopefully everything goes smoothly, and I’ll be there before Easter comes around and all settled in by the time I need to knuckle down and do some serious studying for my final exams.

Until then, I’ll continue making up lists of what I want my new place to have – sash windows, balcony/garden, kitchen with all mod-cons including an oven, rooms at least 3m in width and length, high ceilings, wooden floors, central heating, bathroom and/or power-shower, lots of light, nice quiet tree-lined street etc etc etc.

If I am going to move somewhere else, I really should make the most of it (and my lettings agent), shouldn’t I?

this, and that

Walking back from the bus-stop after a night out in a strange pub on bethnal green road, we were trailed by two young men.

Young Man 1 struck up conversation with the boyfriend on the topic on Young Man 2’s headgear.

YM1: you have the same hat as my friend!
Boyfriend: why yes, I do
YM1: I prefer yours’ though, it looks worn
Boyfriend: yeah well, I do a lot of work in it

This was supposed to be funny, but I didn’t get it. And still don’t.

Then,

Boyfriend: so where are you from?
YM1: we’re from the States. I know… we’re such losers huh?

The poor dear. He must have come to London thinking that he’s going to have such a great time on his General Course being a typical English bloke getting pissed and watching footy, and then realized the disdain the British have of them Americans soon after.

I feel for them (the Americans), but I agree wholeheartedly with the English. Once you’ve sat in a pub with a group of American tourists in the sofa next to you making inane comments in their loud and nasal voices about the pub itself (oooh, this is like a real pub, totally) and how everything in England is so old, you’d want to punch the lights out of them as well.

***

Can I say that I heart my school? I really do.

I know I complain, as one does, about reading about too many things and having too much work to do and that everything is too damn hard.

But, and this is my point, somehow or other when I go to class or when I go to lectures everything falls into place and I can think. And I can bring up issues without the teacher going ‘yes, but this is not what you’ve been told in the textbook so shut up and listen as I recite from it’. And we get constructive feedback. And they love what they’re doing.

They make the fact that I don’t have time anymore worthwhile.

Awwwww…

iBookiebookiewookie

guess who's typing away happily on her brand-new just-out-of-the-box all-white minimalist iBook?

the delivery man came as i was asleep, and i immediately jumped out of bed with glee at the thought of my iBook at the door. he must have thought i was a crazy pyjamas-clad oriental girl, answering the door so bleary-eyed and signing away without knowing what he was talking about.

all i wanted was my box! (like a crack-addicted squirrel i was.)

have been trying out all these new things that Tiger comes with, and the one thing i really want right now is the software serial number to activate iWorks - but i have to pay for it. that thing is pretty cool and would totally trump Office anyday. so... christmas present, anyone?

appleworks seems like adequate enough though, for my laziness right now. i'm too lazy to go find my copies of Office to install, even though it's right up there on the shelf in the box of computer things. the shelf is high, i am short. i shall wait out my slothfulness whilst making my tour around this Tiger thing...

...or until appleworks pisses me off and i feel the need to run back into the safe and familiar arms of Word (that evil thing).

okay, so how do you know that what you know is really what you know?

is your sense of reality actually an absolute factual reality?

and how can one use shared experience as proof if everyone has different experiences? how shared is a shared experience?

ok too much jurisprudence and anthropology is doing my head in.

will go do even more reading now and convince myself that even though i don't understand all these introduction chapters, what follows will make everything so much more obvious.

hah yeah right.

first to bata, then to school

term's started.

my book list is longer than my arm, and i'm supposed to have read several chapters of some book for a lecture happening in 15mins, but i only knew about it half an hour ago. there goes my 'be super duper on the ball' resolution out the window.

so anyway, i've narrowed my choices for a new laptop. it will either be a 14" iBook, or a 12" powerbook. but i'm open to influence, and anyone with any insider info on the merits of a 12" powerbook vs 15" powerbook (apart from the obvious it's bigger!), or a palpable difference between an iBook and a powerbook (apart from casing) will be warmly welcomed. just bear in mind i mostly only use it for surfing, school work and occasional photography.

and time's up. copyright law in the uk, anyone?