Episode 312: These Soles Were Made For Walking (Not!)

I finished another collection of Chad Oliver's short stories, Far From This Earth, and they were really, really good. The anthropological thread that runs through most of them imparts a different flavour to the science fiction. Today, I told Shirley that human beings are probably the only species on Earth in which stupidity is tolerated, and even rewarded. She agreed. If you don't think about it too much, it does have a glibly persuasive ring to it, and I can't really be bothered to be contrary and suggest counterexamples. Having finished that book, I've now started on Toh Hsien Min's poetry collections. (Yes, he's on the list of local poets whom I genuinely admire.) As for the title of my post, let's just say that this has to be one of the funnier reasons for not turning up for Alpha on a Friday evening. I made it as far as Northpoint before realising that the soles of both my shoes were coming off, and it was too late to go home, change my shoes and still make it down in time for the session, so I just gave up and wandered around the library for a bit. Bumped into my mum and Natalie, so I ended up having dinner at Swensen's. Just one of those random things.

Episode 311: Aerin's & Raffles Creamery

Met up with some of the MOE scholars from my batch for lunch at Aerin's. There was a 1-for-1 offer going on, so the meal was rather affordable, still a key concern for me these days. Dessert was ice-cream at Raffles Creamery, tucked away inside Raffles Hotel. It's got some novelty flavours like Singapore Sling sherbet, but price-wise, I'd definitely still go for Venezia. The service was a bit lacking as well. I spent a couple of hours in the National Library after that, just browsing. I did eventually pick up Tomas Tranströmer's The Great Enigma, among other things, including a book translated from German by Michael Hulse, Alexander Kluge's The Devil's Blind Spot. Have liked what I've read so far very much, so I might go so far as dropping him an e-mail about it. I've also developed a newfound respect for the amount of poetry that's actually stocked, considering it's highly unlikely that many library users go there to pick up poetry by John Ashbery or Paul Celan. I was pleasantly surprised by the number of collections published by Carcanet on the shelves, and wondered why I'd never noticed them before. Why do Borders and Kinokuniya not stock anything from Carcanet? It seems a bit of a travesty, now that I think about it. I mean, if the National Library managed to find it, surely booksellers can as well?

Episode 310: I Baked A Cake!

Today, I baked my first cake. It was flavoured with cinnamon and honey, a very simple recipe really. It turned out well though! My mum agrees. This is the start of bigger things, mark my words. Before you know it, I'll be a master chef. Haha! Have just revamped the contents of my iPod, rediscovering in the process some music that I'd forgotten I even had. I really need to get myself an iPod Classic that can hold my entire iTunes library! This exercise of picking and choosing what goes into my iPod is, admittedly, not very useful, since I tend to listen to a particular album a lot for a couple of days, then switch to something else. I like having options though, that's the thing. Have also begun watching the short-lived New Amsterdam, and yet again, I find myself lamenting how screwed up Fox is as a television network. These days, it really is all about advertising dollars and the bottom line, huh? Virtuality, coincidentally also staring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau from New Amsterdam, is a prime example of how Fox just can't get things right. So another perfectly adequate premise bites the dust, simply because Americans want more of trash like American Idol and The Amazing Race. I swear reality TV has killed off meaningful programming.

Episode 309: Joss Whedon, I Salute You

Have watched the unaired pilot of Dollhouse. Despite Alex's protestations, I still really like this show and I'm glad it hasn't been cancelled. Yet. What I don't get is why the pilot was supposedly too confusing to the test audiences it was screened for. I hate to say this, but is the average American even lazier than I thought? I know we call the television the 'idiot box', but the pilot's plot is hardly rocket science. Besides, if you could peg the show right from the pilot, why would you want to carry on watching? The unaired bonus episode, 'Epitaph One', is brilliant, although I can't imagine how Joss Whedon is going to get to that dystopian 2019 before the network pulls the plug on the series. Haha! My theory is that the pilot was asking too many difficult questions and not delivering the pat answers Americans seem to take such great comfort in. Oh well. Anyway, I've copied over the contents of Eugene Chan's external hard drive, so I'm more or less done. Just need to find a couple more shows, which will take a week (but it's nothing urgent), rip his Six Feet Under DVDs for him, and I'll be done. Have also found some new music today, including solo work by Switch 22 member, Stefan D'Bart, flaunting a grittier image than in his duo project, now apparently on hiatus despite being signed to Universal. The tunes straddle the boundary between radio- and club-friendly quite nicely. Also had the chance to listen to a few Steve Appleton tracks, and I think this is one album that I might be getting. It's like acoustic electronica, if that even makes sense. The music itself sounds relentlessly happy, which is bound to put some people off, but I can deal with that. So along with his debut, I'm eagerly anticipating that of FrankMusik as well as the sophomore Sleepthief album, which if the first single, 'World Gone Crazy', is anything to go by, is going to be amazing. On a side note, O2 is the second UK mobile network to provide two-way service on Twitter! Perhaps more of my friends will get into it now?

Episode 308: Feedback Session

I've begun restoring the contents of my external hard drive! I know, exciting times. This is pretty much going to be my focus for the next couple of days. Am going to try to replace some AVI files I have with versions in 16:9 resolution, and then I will pretty much be done with this whole business. Yay! Fortunately, the hard drive crash happened during summer vacation, so I've got plenty of time to spend on restoring/adding stuff. The feedback session in the morning was a bit weird. I know it was meant to be informal, but giving us half an hour discuss our attachment experiences among ourselves in four huge groups was possibly one of the stranger ways of trying to get feedback. Was a bit disappointed by the tea break. The chocolate éclairs weren't as good as the ones I had during my attachment. Haha! I was thinking though, that instead of a live forum, we could have an e-forum, which would allow more questions to be posed and provide for greater flexibility in replying, since whoever was supposed to be taking questions could reply to them at their leisure, and only the people interested in getting replies would need to attend an e-forum. Seems like a win-win to me!

Episode 307: The 48 Laws Of Power

Have had my eye on this book for a while, and since it was going for 20% off at the books warehouse sale, I decided to get myself a copy. Why? Well, partly because I think it's an interesting read, especially with all the historical anecdotes, partly because some of the laws are things I (un)consciously practise anyway, and even if I'm not bent on manipulating other people, it is useful to know when I am being manipulated. It sounds terrible, but it really isn't. Law 45, in particular, seems to be the mantra of the government here, and it actually makes a lot of common sense. Will get back to reading the book after I've finished with all my library books. It was the only book I bought at the sale, unlike the two Eugenes, who spent about $100 between the two of them. Was going to get myself a load of Teach Yourself books, but then I decided that it made more sense to borrow them from the library. Save my money for things that I really want! Was listening to some Planetshakers songs today, and just when I was thinking that it was the older songs that sounded better, along came a couple of tracks that proved the Planetshakers band can still come up with something that sounds fresh. Overall though, still not a really big fan of their sound. I am very close to restoring my entire TV show collection, at least in terms of what Eugene Chan's hard drive doesn't have. So by this time tomorrow, I should really be 95% of the way to completion. Just missing Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who, both of which are the largest to reacquire in terms of file size.

Episode 306: Lazy Days Are Here Again...

Singing practice was cancelled due to insufficient numbers, so I got to sleep in this morning. It was fantastic! I've just spent most of the day reading A Star Above It and watching various shows, which has been an awesome way to pass the time. I'm meant to start running regularly from Tuesday onwards, but knowing me, I'm probably going to put it off, again and again, and before you know it, it'll be time to fly back to the UK and I won't have done a spot of exercise all summer. I really want to though; I just don't have enough motivation. Am also going to get back in full swing learning Spanish. Have been looking at Open Studies courses for 09/10, and there are a couple of tempting options, like Archaeology and Philosophical Studies. Am not sure if I'm so keen on the language courses now, unless Chernise is still up for Arabic. It's having to learn a new writing script that puts me off, as I was explaining to Shirley. Otherwise, I would gladly venture into things like Greek. At the moment, if I'm not doing Arabic, I'm thinking of Turkish. We'll see how things go when I get back to university...

Episode 305: School Attachment Day 14

So it's finally over, and with it, the routine that's governed the past three weeks of my life. It's been an eye-opening experience, both in terms of seeing how a school is run, as well as how people react to the school environment, whether as staff or as students. Having been at NVSS for the past couple of weeks, I can honestly say that my previous conception of the school has been overturned. I sincerely wish everyone there the best, especially the students about to take their 'N' and 'O' Levels. Maybe it's just me, but I get used to things very quickly, so having to show up in school from Monday to Friday was less of a chore than it might seem. Especially towards the end, I got to do a lot of reading, for which my fellow scholars mercilessly teased me. Hey, it's not my fault if I managed to finish all my work earlier! Anyway, started reading the first volume of Chad Oliver's selected stories, A Star Above It, and so far, I'm really liking it. It's science fiction, but with an anthropological and cultural slant that really appeals to me. I have a thing for alternate histories and projected futures, simply because what-might-have-been and what-might-yet-be are concepts that I find genuinely fascinating. Where have we come from as a species, and where are we going? Some of the answers Oliver's stories provide give me pause, and I like how his future societies aren't all cybernetic nightmares, although those can be interesting reads nonetheless. I managed to finish more than half the book in about five hours, which is pretty impressive, given how I proved totally incapable of reading the vast majority of my course texts during the past academic year!

Episode 304: School Attachment Day 13

Finished the Palmer collection, and am still none the wiser about what the poems mean. They remain, nevertheless, beautiful. I would still prefer to read stuff that I can sort of identify with though, like the work that was read out by the guest poets during the Alumni Day. Now that was cracking stuff I could engage with. Also began re-reading Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, which is one of those rare books I wish I had written. Honestly, I would learn Italian just to be able to read it in the original language. Demonstrating how perceptions can change, however, this re-reading has led me to conclude that while I still find the book exquisitely wrought, there is also a profoundly disquieting quality to the descriptions of the cities. If you're wondering why I've suddenly been able to get so much reading done, it's because this past few days have been light, schedule-wise. I've even found the time to write one of those poems that's just been lingering at the back of my mind ever since I got back. I'm really kind of biding my time till Friday. Would love to just crash when I get off work then and sleep till Saturday afternoon, but I've got to go for Alpha because I already agreed to sing weeks ago. Might have a class gathering though, so might end up leaving after the songs, or at the very latest, the sharing. Ça dépend...

Et il me faut continuer d'apprendre l'espagnol et l'italien! The course validity is only till late September! I've realised that Rosetta courses are actually identical regardless of language though, so to do basic rote-style learning isn't impossible without the images. Just download the pdf files for your particular course and study them alongside the equivalent files from the English course. It's a lazy way of designing a product, but I doubt Rosetta is really aiming for native fluency, despite its claims to help people acquire a given language the way its native speaker would. There was an article in the newspapers about how children acquire languages with much greater facility when they're younger, with the ability diminishing sharply after puberty. In that light, I think MOELC probably needs to start lessons from a younger age, if they want students to actually pick up a third language. The high rate of attrition at MOELC is proof enough of the difficulty students face in learning a third language in their teenage years.

Episode 303: School Attachment Day 12

Taught my final lesson of this attachment! It does get easier the more you do it, although I wouldn't dare to claim I'm good at it now. I managed to finish reading my book on mitochondria, but only because it was due today and I can't afford to pay renewal fees. Still, it was an interesting read, and I'm pretty sure now that if I didn't like books as much as I do, I would probably have ended up as a scientific researcher instead of a literature teacher. So reading the occasional popular science book is my way of keeping abreast of developments in the various fields of science that still fascinate me. Moved on from that book to Michael Palmer's The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972-1995. I find most of the poems so far beautifully incomprehensible. If this were a course text, I would probably throw my hands up in despair, but since it's not, I'm just enjoying the baffling turns of phrase scattered liberally through Palmer's work. Bought my new external hard drive, which it turns out I had to anyway, since I'm supposed to send in the power adapter with the drive, and my other adapter is in the UK. So I'll spend the next week or so after the attachment ends sorting out this mess. Best part of the day was meeting Claudia and Vaish for dinner at Central, and then drinks afterward at Timbre@The Arts House with the latter's Berkeley friends. All this going out is taxing my finances though...