I am very taken by this sentence: “…his voice was handsome and broken, like a cobblestone street…” (Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, p. 126).

Flying to Bali tomorrow, before making headway for Surabaya, Bandung, and Jakarta by overland route. Cannot decide if I want to bring Stoker, Chekhov, or a piece about special ops throughout history.

I am spoiled, I know. Well, bye!

Posted on July 13th, 2007 by Antiguit

It’s true. Case in point: if I try to sit down and pen a sad love song, all you would get is a pathetic down-tempo ditty that sounds suspiciously familiar to You Are The Sunshine Of My Life, with a chorus abundant with cooing and lyrics that rhyme with “love,” “inside,” and “hurt”. I think this may be so because I’ve never been heartbroken in the manner that good musicians have; and I’m not sure if that’s because my heart is made out of carbon fibre and Kevlar, or because I’ve no heart at all.

This stopover in Singapore has given me ample time to channel my energy to non-academic missions, which explains my absence on the online front. All I do these days is lie down in bed and listen to good music for hours on end. The past few weeks have been spent hunting down releases from Leningrad, DeVotchka, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Lemon Jelly (The Staunton Lick is king), et cetera. It’s just the kind of respite that escaped me when I slept in the company of night-dwelling creatures that are school papers and projects; evading unnecessary contact with unwanted school-like activities has finally reached the point where the password to my school e-mail account has left me for good.

The humidity and high temperatures here have a funny way of foiling the day’s important plans; for instance, finishing a hummus sandwich in the balcony requires the resilience of jealous ex-boyfriends hell-bent on murder, with the heat obstructing actions for further mastication and what not. You can try to hold out for as far as human limitations will stretch, but it gets so hot that there is nothing left to do but fall asleep with an open book over your chest and a sweaty mug of iced tea on the ground next to you. I can also no longer spend a day walking aimlessly without stopping to catch my breath and seek refuge in the air-conned comforts of a ridiculously large mall.

(On another note, I have picked up a habit that encourages power naps in daylight; this habit is foot reflexology, and—this is going to sound so so very very wrong—I quite enjoy having my metatarsals pinched and my calves kneaded into oblivion by random old Chinese men.)

To put my summer into quantitative terms, I have yet to visit Singapore’s eponymous art and history museums, but I have seen Hot Fuzz four times. I have played one fleeting hour of CounterStrike. I have completed three Sherlock Holmes novellas, as well as one gut-wrenching book by Jonathan Safran Foer. I am currently in the middle of Mr. Foer’s sophomore title: I think I will let my guard down and leave my imaginary bulletproof heart exposed on the post-mortem table for him to maliciously toy with, and maybe then I can write a good love song. My next entries should contain pictures from the islands of Java and Bali, where I will be dodging terrorists in between doing touristy things.

This has been a very good summer so far. But have I mentioned how hot it is here?

Posted on July 10th, 2007 by Antiguit