It Will Messup Your Back

In Seoul I would periodically run into sprawling, crazy cheap vinyl record sales. I might be out with Marijn to get his camera fixed or to Sinchon to eat carcenogens and there they’d be– Korean pompadours from the 70s, Teresa Teng, the Beach Boys, Morrissey and even records to revive Dutch grandfathers. Musty and a tad folorn but sorted with OCD, they were surprisingly pristine. They nearly made me part with the money I’d carefully stowed away for pantyhose and other female nonsense. I was stopped only by the impossible task of getting them home unsullied (my luggage, I had to stomp on it for it to close).

 

Still for days I pondered. The extra pocket money I might have gleaned from the eclectic loot! The joy in my household! The excuses to visit Seoul! I pictured spreading a polka dot mat in a flea market or couching the records in a car boot sale, not to mention the hipster boys (um, hipster uncles maybe) who’d stop by, be stupefied and bury me in their money.

 

[I realise that money features too prominently in this blog. Perhaps if I were a business major this would be not a problem. But I am not. I fear my future children will catch pneumonia in their paper clothes. Potato chip bag shoes. In relation to the present, I wonder if they sell hotdogs in halves for people like me who spend lunch money on Holgas. I bought a Holga 120N.]

 

But I didn’t picture other, utterly sinister possibilities from a burgeoning habit in vinyl collection. My good fortune to have tripped over the genius of Stefan Glerum on crate digging. I am relieved and gasping with gratitude for I never knew what a drop it could have been. And I adore the fluidity of his pencil work!

 

Why am I writing on a silly flake of not-real-space? Why am I making presentation slides? Draw draw draw like there’s no tomorrow! Or at least make clothes. Menswear. Make men swear.

10 Things You Might Not Know About Me

As tagged by the winsome Nida.

 

I am tempted to make you regret knowing a few… But that should be saved for the ultimate Craigslist w4m post I will one day write just to see who responds to a perfectly truthful perfectly appalling description of me. Come on! I’m sure even the most delectable of you lot can make yourself sound revolting. Something to think about before bedtime.

 

But let’s stop stalling–

10) For nearly 10 years I have loved Shiina Ringo (and now her band, Tokyo Jihen). The woman is an aural tour de force and you know how much I hate code switching into languages I don’t even use unless I can’t summon an adequate equivalent in English. Or maybe you didn’t. Lucky you, two facts for the price of one. 

 

9) The subject of code switching has joined my higgledy piggledy spread of interests. Though I prefer not to code switch (switch… codes…) I greatly enjoy hearing other people do so regardless of how well I understand any of the languages used.

 

So you can “Shui2 je il suki nowadays?” me and I will blossom with mirth and sparkle. “I never realized… It was none other than you!” Imagine my rapture at getting to research the social and cognitive effects of code switching for a paper this semester.

 

8) Like a mexican jumping bean on glucose, I can’t stay on one thing. Crochet one moment, turntabling the next, tree climbing on Mon and marzipan sculptures on Wed. I am as interested in Dodie Smith as I am in Patrick Watson, which is to say intensely for a short-lived burst. For the same reason I have to change my hair several times a year or feel extremely ill at ease. 

 

7) You may think the same applies for people. I have fallen in and out of favour with some friends, broken bonds with people I once bent over backwards for. But for the large part I cling a little too long to people who stun me, whether we hung out twice or for two years. Yes I would save up for the plane ticket to see you.

 

6) Ironically I have a bad memory for lots of mundane things. If I cut class twice you can be sure I’ll be confused about which block the class is in.

 

5) I am not very demonstrative but if you’re my friend I adore you and probably tell lots of other people. “You know, I have this friend and she has a nose! Heart star zing koala!” I will probably write a garrulous blog entry listing your name in a flurry of sprinkles and sentiment.

 

4) I enjoy hearing about boyfriends’ ex girlfriends, not for the sake of undermining them/feeling unreasonably jealous but because I am a sucker for all love stories. That is also why I like hearing how people’s parents meet. And why I still talk to ex boyfriends. About their new girlfriends. Sometimes my ego gets a bit lumpy– “She cooks for me, just like you did! But she got her Michelin 3 stars last week”– still, stories they are so addictive.

 

3) If we eat good meals together I might accidentally fall in love with you, resulting in the usage of an argot where you are referred to as ‘Mushrooms’, ‘Glassesboy’, ‘Pine Marten’ and other such random nouns. Quite the way other people get indigestion. ‘Good’ is relative. I once fell in love over boiled asparagus, saltless pasta and frozen beef sauce.

 

2) If you wear a hat I will make sheep eyes at you especially if this is Korea. Me: “He’s cute.” Julienne: “No he’s just wearing a hat.” But this is not Korea anymore, so instead I ask all my friends if they know you. “Do you know this guy with a pointy hat?” “You mean the class dunce?” If you don’t smell good though not even the hat will do a thing for you, I am an olfactory elitist that way.

 

1) Tea and beer in all their flavours set me aflutter. Ideally, beer at 9 in the morning and tea after a hot shower with the crickets a-chirping.

The Professor Speaks

Reason to faithfully attend all her classes. 

“For example if I say Woman, with a capital W, I mean Woman as a social concept. You say, ‘Alamak! You open your pants, pull down and can see if you’re a woman already.’ But you don’t call a lionness walking around a woman lion do you? “

 

“I took you to the cemetery, you went ‘WHOA WHOA WHOA’ all around it and at the end of the day we had done an ethnography.” Actually that is really what we students did.

 

“If you went to a culture and they were not wearing clothes, they were wearing bits of bark and whatever around the what’s-it-and-the-what’s-it … The primitive fellows give a good example of what happened to you before.”

 

About Margaret Mead’s anthropological findings, in which her Samoan informants had lied to her about casual sex: “These ang mohs wanted to know about sexy things.”

 

“Don’t take my lectures for my lectures. Wrap your mind around it and form an opinion. An opinion is what I want in your exams. Give me one and you’ll never fail. Don’t just yes, no, yes, no, so hard to talk to you, you know. If you say ‘no’ I want to know why. Wilfred if you want to jump in with a tip, just jump in k.”

 

In imitation of a shallow observer: “The womb-shaped tombs– damn stupid man! Women’s wombs don’t look like that!”

 

Student offers food. “No thank you I’m on a diet. Been eating all day all night.” Pouts cutely.

 

Notices that the ribbon on her skirt is undone halfway through talking about presentations.

“I can’t knot it… Then I look like I have a belly in front” Demonstrates.

“Why don’t you tie it at the side?”

“Then I look like I have a wart on my side. Dede the Tree Man.”

 

A black and white shot of Malinowski. “Social scientists are sexy!” I second that.

 

Imjad asks how romance is conducted between the Trobriands.

Prof: “I think Imjad is asking… If they are not wearing clothes how then do they entice!”

Imjad: -panic- No no no no no! 

 

Love at work. I don’t talk in her class because I love hearing what she says.

1300 hrs in GSR 3.14

Dialogues with Dar*h

The D: “I think Confucius is very respectable… I don’t know, maybe because of his beard.”

 

Dar*sh returns disappointed from Mr Bean: “Mr Bean soya milk is very… creamy.”

 

Nisa: Your dress is very nice Dawn.

Me: Thanks, it’s good for buffets. I’m trying to make all my clothes buffet clothes.

Nisa: Buffet clothes?

Me: Yeah you can eat all you want and it’s fine.

Sue: No bulge.

Dar*h: No you shouldn’t have buffet clothes. Then you’ll get too complacent.

 

Everyday we Celebrate our Differences

In Chinese custom, paper effigies are burned as a sort of postal service to the dead. Xihao wrote in our Google doc:

“Apparently the afterlife has a booming red-light district. In April 2006, China’s deputy secretary of the Ministry of Civil Affairs prohibited the burning of ‘adult’ items such as paper condoms, karaoke hostesses and Viagra.”

Me: Why do the dead need paper condoms? Are they going to produce dead babies? Or get dead STDs that will kill them a second time?

 

Me: Where do animals go in Islam?

Nisa: All animals go to heaven. Even pigs. Pigs are halal in Heaven. Can eat pigs in heaven. -smack smack- Can’t wait for that.

 

Nisa: If I eat it and I feel bad about it, then it’s wrong. If I don’t feel bad then it’s not wrong.

 

In Islam it is forbidden (haram) to eat pigs.

Nisa: It’s what’s in the pig. Cause they wallow in their own crap and eat it. 

Dar*h: So you can’t eat any scavengers? Like prawns?

Nisa: Crabs are scavengers, I can eat crab. It’s not scavengers, just animals that are not exactly clean… Like insects. But crickets are ok.

Dar*h: What’s the difference between crickets and ants??

Nisa: Basically I can’t eat anything that lives in two worlds.

Dar*h: ?!

Nisa: I can’t eat amphibians. I can’t eat turtles. Basically I can’t eat reptiles. Or anything that’s clawed.

Dar*h: But that’s crabs!

 

Sue: There was a period where my friend was going to convert to Islam, because of a boy lah. … When she told me she broke up I was like, “Can we go eat xiaolongbao now??”

 

Dar*h: Can you take me one day to the mosque?

Nisa: Can! But you gotta dress properly lah.

Dar*h: Can you sneak me into Mecca one day??

Nisa: Yes. But we need male escorts.

Dar*h: We need male escorts!

 

Also, I learnt alot about Patron Saints:

Adrian of Nicomedia is the patron saint of arms dealers and butchers.

Lawrence is the patron saint of cooks, as he was roasted alive by the Romans on a gridiron.

And the same guy who looks after shepherds looks after murderers.

Overheard in the BE Studio

Because I am a chump who comes to school on Sunday and steals the school radio studio to have a project meeting in (kind members of BE, thanks for not clubbing me to death), you get today’s post:

 

Singlish at its finest in the spirit of learning:

A: “That time I was very stressed… Studied business law until I cried because I didn’t understand.”

B: “Why you cry, business law not meant to be understooded one! … My prof just needs [me] to regurgitate.”

 

“You know that it won’t happen but you still need to talk about it.”

 

“I give up! I shall not do… Doeth! This! Stuff.” 

 

Girl A: “It’s not hard to be smitten with X… “

Guy J looks doubtful.

Girl A: -proudly- “The girls I hang out with, if guys don’t chase after them there must be something seriously wrong with them.”

 

‘you need a light, i find a match’

I don’t know you, but increasingly I’d like to.

 

It was the one day you were stoning on the bench at Business block that did me in. Plus the other one day on the escalator, which makes me look forward to the next time I’ll ride that confounded junk to Marketing Research class. You’re so cool and I’m so messy, unevenly tanned, 50s-haired and unable to carry my huge laptop. No New Urban Male for you, no school tees, those clothes of yours they grow well on the frame. You make me want to make menswear! 

 

‘I’d buy you Rogaine 
When you start losing all your hair 

Sew on patches 
To all you tear’

(Ingrid Michaelson. The Way I Am)

 

I’m still on the mend. It’s nice to dream and get away from the niggling feeling that it’s going to be a lonely year. Over in Seoul, the heat’s dying down, maybe falling leaves brighten the sidewalks and you walk every day with hands in your pockets. The subway releases you, you go drinking with your face half in shadow, I imagine you’re smiling and hope it stays that way.

 

I’m not trying to forget, it only ensures I’ll never be able to. So I just keep moving, thinking of the warm meal that’s ahead of me and the next green light at the crossing.

One afternoon in The Treehouse…

Five twittery little birds gathered, and as The Treehouse had nothing but tom yam soup and mee siam, we gorged ourselves on productive conversation. Which is to say we did discuss the significance of burial sites for our project, only after questioning the practice of sex in the afterlife.  

 

Men who are virtuous and make it to heaven may pass eternity with ”companions pure, most beautiful of eye”, which sounds paradisal even to me. Who doesn’t want company, “pure”, “splendid”, “of equal age”? If you’re a stickler, these heavenly wives come “with hymen unbroken”, “eternally young”, “with large, round breasts which are not inclined to hang”. Even better! “Non-menstruating, urinating, defecating and childfree”– because children can be so bratty and you no longer have to buy air freshener for the bathroom or marvel the freakiness of a creature bleeding 5 days nonstop without dying. Like the waxed ingenues of modern day porn, these babes are “hairless except the eye brows and the head” for nothing turns a man off like bristly armpits (Houri, Wikipedia, 2008). Which is funny because back in the 70s hirsute was all the rage.

 

Methinks though that a virtuous man might not be too excited about this sort of thing, dead or alive. Maybe all he’ll want to do is eat Philadephia Cream Cheese. Spend the day golfing. Stick with the woman he loved for 50 years. After a lifetime of women I think he will agree that only one requirement reigns supreme: ”I don’t care about the swollen breasts and hairlessness and whatever, as long as she doesn’t come with PMS”. (Xihao, 2008).

 

If I were saintly virtuous I know I’d like a heavenly sewing machine, angelic bales of shining fabric, and one $2000 intelligent iron but such materialistic desires damn me. Okay okay, I’d want to smite the meanness out of evil people from all the way up in heaven, turn their hatred into Poifull which is a type of Japanese jelly bean that satisfied my longing for gum in a gumless nation. I’ll have timsum with inspiring fellow dead people, go to the moon with my dogs, family and friends and discover a harmony of religions because hopefully we all share the same plot of stratospheric real estate. This is why as a Christian I’ve never told any Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, homosexuals and so on that they’ll burn in the dunnies of hell. Pish tosh. I believe that atheists and agnostics, too, can enjoy life after death as motivated microbes and cosmic dust. Segue into new life forms! Like pokemon. “Darwin! Daaarwin. Darrr.”

 

Back to the concept of a heavenly woman. Like all good things there is a catch. Gorgeous, gravity-defying and clean in her crevices as she may be, your little dreamboat will be ”60 cubits [27.5 meters] tall”, “7 cubits [3.2 meters] in width”, and “transparent to the marrow of [her] bones”. True beauty lies within. You will see for yourself what is truly in her heart, as well as what her kidney and intestines do to pass their days of joblessness.

telephones and telegrams

These phonecalls were a nightly business, 10pm or 2am depending on my mood. What’s changed: I don’t crave to dial a voice every night, don’t crave questions that rise sweetly to suggest your care for me. What’s been kept the same: every ring tone till you pick up is a moment slow and scrutinized. I shift from one foot to another, sometimes I sit on the table, periodically I turn on the bed so my cheek presses on hair. While waiting for “Hello?” I loosen my buttons, so that I shed the trappings of a tiring day. So we are one layer closer to the real me, the me that walks with you.

 

Who’s the ‘you’ I address? Everyone I ever call for something lovelier than work. Tonight it was Andrew. Big surprise there.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m sad.”

“You’re not the only one.”

“He’s seeing someone. It’s not that I didn’t see this coming, honestly I didn’t know what to ask for. Didn’t ask anything.”

“Is that the real reason you’re crying?”

“It’s hard to talk about this. But yes, because even if I didn’t have anything I hoped for it anyway. How are you?”

“I’m an idiot. I’m an idiot because she’s staying at his place tonight and I keep thinking about it.”

“Don’t. Don’t think about her.”

“Are you sure you want to talk to me when you’re crying?”

“Why not? Option 1, I cry on my own. Option 2, I’ll cry here, but tell me about your day and I’ll stop eventually.”

 

So the tears faded to six thick crisscrossing streaks on my face, like I’d been slapped with moisture and smudges. I gulped my green tea and enjoyed the sensation of washing my face. He browsed an online phone catalog instead of glowering through the dim lens of a bitter imagination. I don’t think either of us were jealous as much as lonely. It is lonely to fall in love at the wrong time.

 

[I say time, not person, but that is because I do not believe in doubting the subject of desire. This though only applies to my choices. How many times have I thought someone else's love misplaced?]

 

Irvin thinks it is ridiculous we don’t just get back together (‘get back together’, a term to use on stray sheep). He remarked this in a setting of love: before me oozed the ardent juice of a freshly-seared steak while Irvin cut love handles from a monstrous chicken cutlet. Behind him a girl in green simpered for her tidy date. To the left someone whinied her boyfriend into settling the bill. I wasn’t feeling it, this paper cutout picture. I could only taste the steak, a flavour to savour without guilt, intimidation, no long, hollow fear of nothing ever pulling through. I liked the laughter of the friend before me, a man I couldn’t lose, someone I could voice affection for without breaching invisible parallels.

 

Southern Singapore. Andrew drowses and I leave him be.

South Korea. Someone’s dreaming and making plans for the weekend. I’m too late but still I want to say, in morse code across the inefficient airways, good night, thank you, be happy, be safe.

 

Overheard in Ethnography

It’s a joy to work with my ethnography team, everyone is so generous and eloquent with their thoughts, so individually varied yet synchronized. But what fun would there be in posting the glamour alone?

 

Actually let’s skip the glamour for today.

 

Xihao, lone male in a group of 5: “Females are getting more empowered. You all have the ovaries, you have the eggs! You can screw the men. You can keep your father’s surname when you get married.” 

On Indian surnames versus Chinese.

Sue: “Pakir?”

Darsh: “Yah it’s like an Indian Tan… No it’s not like a Tan.”

 

Sue’s t-shirt brings back whiffs of Korea: “I GOTS TO KRUMP/ I GOTS TO KRUMP/ I GOTS TO KRUMP.”

 

Context: it is Ramadhan so all our Muslim friends are fasting.

Nisa: “Oh shit… I needed to call someone at 5.30 to wake them up.”

Everyone glances at clock: it is 6.43pm.

Me: “Couldn’t he just set an alarm?”

Nisa: “I needed to call him to wake up and fast.”

Me: “But if he’s sleeping he’ll be fasting… He can’t sleep and eat at the same time.”

 

Security Fish and Stagflation, what ho.

So yesterday I discovered that Windows Vista Home Premium cannot join any domain. Yes children I’m cut off from the school domain and can’t do quizzes saved on the school’s directories because my laptop is an unsociable dick (“no honey, I don’t want to meet Adam Smith tonight”). I don’t take kindly to paying for an upgrade just so I can take these quizzes, because I will be paying to take quizzes and that is just what I long to spend my measly money on.

 

My college lacks an engineering faculty, but that did not stop the nation’s premier engineers (mostly balding, stately dad-like men and one or two women in first lady outfits) from using our auditorium to confer fellowships and other lovely laurels. Over and over the speakers exhorted us to study engineering; I began to feel that my life has been prematurely sold into the Social Sciences. Engineering would have allowed me to base buildings on spinal cords and design security systems employing fish to guard key spots in the nation. I shit, pardon my language, scatologicalize you not– thanks to FAMS, or Fish Activity Monitoring System, we will be alerted to security risks when fish are in distress (cue screaming fish; all batons and uniforms fitted with gills). Moreover, the male-female ratio in engineering school would have boosted my marriage prospects (a possibility that is remote as long as I spend time with Sewing Machine and Marketing Research instead of wholesome, vaguely desperate men). I too should help the nation pop out babies. Chinese babies. You know it’s my calling.

 

But I did enjoy the engineering meet. Vicariously I began to picture day after day of solving people’s problems with blue prints and compasses. It is very noble. More noble than my desire to spy on people in their natural surroundings.

 

Josh, my Ultimate Frisbeeing friend and paradoxical senior-junior (thanks to the army, he has been demoted from being my Senior to being my Junior), chanted “ENGIN, ENGIN” under his breath throughout the talk, adding his breath to the fervour of the auditorium. Being a true accolade of creativity, he also spent the evening writing sideways, a groundbreaking study trumped only by Vanessa’s doodles of hello kitty, reindeer and raccoon faces. 

 

As usual my economics Prof is hilariously random:

-Prof approaches hapless TA-

“Justin you look like a boxer. Who is the top boxer right now?”

“No idea.”

“No idea? It’s not you?”

 

You never thought me an economics student did you. It helps that I’ve read 3 chapters of International Economics and only 1 for psychology. While the rest of my sleepy class chats on MSN and facebook, I actually google “Stagflation” and stick a quote about Schumpeter on Facebook. Schumpeter’s duel with the librarian is the stuff of romance. One day my professor, too, will uphold book loaning rights by assaultingthe  library staff. And we will ride into the sunset. Me, a prof and a newly minted A+.