In a few short hours, I will get on a plane to sweat it out at Coachella! As excited as I am for this, I think I’m also already exhausted just thinking about the hassle of flying into and living in the desert for three days, drinking overpriced campground water and eating expensive junk food. And don’t even mention the toilets! Ignorance is bliss, ignorance is bliss.
I’m going to bring along some homework to put me to sleep when drunken revelers are going to keep me awake, so let’s see how well organizational theory, Emperor Hirohito, and Portishead mix together. Hah! Check out this week’s Muxtape for a selection of artists whose music I will be enjoying the hot southern Californian desert sun to. I would put in some Goldfrapp, but Muxtape won’t let us upload .m4a files yet.
Tent, check. Cameras, check. Composure—uh, rain check on that. I am so nervous! If internet cafe prices are decent, I’ll work on letting you all know I am alive and having a good time, maybe put up a couple of pictures on my Flickr stream. Or maybe I won’t, because who has time for the internets when you are stuck in the desert with a boatload of wonderful musicians and interesting characters?
On that note, I bid you adieu, and let’s put in another exclamation point to stress just how jacked up my nerves are!
P.S. Dear SP crew: I really meant it when I said bring on the welcome wagon on my arrival; nothing like rambunctious fanfare to welcome a girl back home and wish her a happy birthday with! Have I mentioned how much I love you all?
Posted on April 24th, 2008 by Antiguit
If you are reading this, I am flying somewhere over the Pacific. One of the four (!) books accompanying me on this long haul is a book called Nostromo by Joseph Conrad of Heart of Darkness fame. I picked it up because the title reminded me of Sigourney Weaver’s ill-fated space barge from Alien, and I thought it’d be interesting to see what kind of inspiration and themes the filmmakers pilfered from the book.
Inspiration indeed! Flipping past the introductions and onto the first chapter, imagine my surprise when the first sentence I read contained the word Sulaco (if you know your Aliens, you know what I’m talking about). How a hundred year-old story about the mining industry in turn-of-the-century South America fit into a series of movies about slimy, salivating Xenomorphs simply blows my mind.
Things are simplified when you are buckled down onto a chair in the slim fuselage of a commercial Boeing carrier. Highways that hug the curvatures of impossible hills and long stretches of asphalt carved on desert wastelands are no longer testaments to the inherent industriousness of man, but premature wrinkles on the earth’s epidermis. The Grand Canyon is downgraded from a geologic formation formed by centuries of water erosion to the remains of a pint of chocolate ice cream in the hands of a hungry four year-old with a soup spoon.
Some things, like the human mind, take strange turns (something to do with regulated oxygen, maybe). One instance of such strangeness takes place in the in-flight shopping catalogue of one American airline: it offers everything from recliners to vintage hot dog carts. What I covet is the friendship of the person who boards an airplane and thinks “Hey, I’d really like to buy a vintage hot dog cart right now.”
On a sombre note: goodnight, Aleksandr. My wonderful little workhorse, a four year-old iBook G4 running OS X 10.3, has been retired, its duties downgraded to harmless internet surfing. Taking its place will be a shiny black MacBook running OS X 10.5. I will miss that little bugger, it has been very kind to me.
If this post reads like a scatterbrained English major, then this has been poor reading.
Posted on January 19th, 2008 by Antiguit
How much history and charm can you cram into two American city blocks? Washington, D.C. can probably do it better than you, and with twice the finesse and personality you can ever muster in a lifetime. The streets are peppered with points of more historical significance than my head can wrap around, and the people we’ve encountered during this trip had more personality than you can shake a stick at.
Take, for instance, the people we shared a ten-bed hostel room with: travelers, whether traveling solo or in little bands of two, flit in and out of residency. From the conversations I have held with some (and eavesdropped through the night with others), I’ve encountered a French couple, a gaggle of Germans, a Brazilian, a South Korean, a Japanese, a Dutchman, and another fellow whose nationality I’ve yet to discern because the only thing we shared was a fleeting “hi.”
On a taxi ride to Chinatown, the driver asks how things are going in our home towns. How’s Nepal, with blackouts and unhappy denizens marching the streets? Complicated. How’s Cyprus, who crave independence but are in the middle of a tug-of-war between Turkey and Greece? Complicated. How’s Mexico, facing American antagonism in the north and a dodgy government in the centre? Complicated. How’s Indonesia, with surges of radical Islamism and random demands for secession? Complicated.
“That’s just like life, isn’t it?” the driver muses. “If it ain’t complicated then it ain’t life. Now all we need is an Israeli.”
The taxi driver embodied the American that, once upon a time, some of the world came to love: friendly, laid-back, and not gagged by political correctness. Another affable American we encountered was Banjer Dan, a fellow who is as passionate about his music as he is good at performing it. In addition to being a first-rate human being and an A-grade performer, the man has some mad banjo skills. His charisma and plucking on the five-stringed banjo has confirmed my suspicions: that there is nothing wrong with country music, bar the crap on the radio and television that they are passing for country music.
What a charming, charming little town. Everything about the world’s most powerful nation is condensed into this tiny district, a district where the frightfully rich brush shoulders with those plagued by poverty, where the steps of an ancient building of justice are home to someone without a home. So how much history and charm can you cram into two American city blocks? More than you can possibly handle in five days, if you are in Washington, D.C.
Posted on November 26th, 2007 by Antiguit
And so another summer has almost come to an end, and with it, I give you the obligatory photo essay. This is a shoddy recap (so shoddy it probably does not deserve an entry of its own, but alas, quality control is not my forte) of some of the shenanigans that have kept me busy over the past three months. Naturally it was impossible for me to chronicle everything that happened—whether it be concerts, escaping the sweaty grip of lecherous boys on the dance floor, or regurgitating continental breakfast on a moving train—but I try.
Ah, Singapore. The group of kids I went to high school with share the same love-hate relationship that I have with this island. On a strictly superficial level, we are happy that tipping at restaurants is not mandatory, that haunts for good food and drinks are aplenty, and that we can humor ourselves for twenty-four hours on the cheap. The ‘hate’ part of it involves things that would affect us only if we choose to live here permanently, such as CPF deductibility and the rising cost of living. Other than that, this country’s iconic aunties and hawker centres will be a welcome, and perhaps unwitting, shrapnel of memory that makes up the sum total of our experience here.
Everybody loves Bali, but I’ve never understood why. People use words like paradise and magical to describe this island, and they always do so with a dreamy, faraway look in their eyes. I’ve been to Bali several times and always thought it expensive and overrated, and that there are other wonderful places in Indonesia fit for hardcore culture vultures to visit for much, much less.
You can picture my cynicism when we first touched down on the island, but all feelings of indignation slowly dissipated with every dish and traditional dance we ran into. By the time my day for parasailing came around, I was sold into the classic sun, sea, and sand state of mind. Bali will always be an unabashedly touristy destination, but you can still fake the rugged backpacker look by leaving the fanny pack at home.
A big part of this summer holiday involved journeying across the island of Java by land; one transport method used was taking a train which took us from Surabaya (east Java) to Bandung (west Java) in twelve hours. Now, Indonesia has recently taken a beating when its national air carrier was lambasted by the European Commission for having a poor safety record, and the same should probably be done to its trains. Railways in Indonesia make me nervous because they pass through very crowded squatter/housing areas, and everything about the train, from its rusty tracks to its freezing carriages, looked awfully sketchy. Thankfully, I was too busy focusing on keeping food contained within my GI tract to worry about the train falling into a gorge and having my life end in a violent fiery death among mangled steel and the stench of burning petrol.
And then there was Kuala Lumpur: good grief, there is an alarming number of very beautiful people in the Malaysian capital. I don’t know what kind of magic visage-enhancing crack the authorities are diluting in the water lines, but Jakarta could very much use some of it. What Jakarta lacks in charm and eye-candy, Kuala Lumpur seemingly delivers in double portions (Am I shunning my capital city, in the wake of dampened and disillusioned post-independence day truths? Not after reading this.). On a somewhat related note, I do not really recommend going 160 km/h in a torrential tropic downpour.
The final third of the summer was meaningfully squandered on good people from my middle and high school years. This business of ‘growing up’ oftentimes includes growing apart (an unfortunate handicap that comes with the international school alumni territory), but decades of un-contact—and the resulting moments of awkward silence at lunch meet-ups—are substituted with raucous laughter following sentences beginning with “Do you remember that time when…”. As an added bonus to the wonderful folks I’ve reunited over coffee and photo booths with, Facebook has allowed me to reunite with people I have not spoken to since I was busy memorizing Spice Girls dance routines. These online reunions have been refreshing and, at times, humiliating.
(Legitimate rest has been evasive lately, but I hope to have plenty of it on the flight this Friday. I have packed three books, a deck of Star Wars cards, and a Rubik’s cube in case it continues to shy away from me, or in case I require a conversation starter. Is this adequate? )
Posted on August 28th, 2007 by Antiguit
