With certainty, I can say that it is becoming an obsession. What is there not to like? He's competent, intelligent, and, if not an economist by training, he is clearly enmeshed deeply in economic things. Best of all, he is utterly unattainable -- no romantic heartbreak can happen if there never was potential in the first place!

He will also keep me company while I, with fortune, produce ten pages worth of Chinese foreign policy papers this weekend, among other assignments that threaten to drain me of my livelihood.

See for yourself (click for a larger image):

To make this post a little more substantive, I should like to share some music that I've been listening to as of late. Its composer, Max Richter, calls himself "post-classical." Personally, I have always found post-[insert adjective here] terms problematic. Richter is a modern classical composer partly along the lines of Philip Glass -- namely, heavy use of repetition and minimalist elements and willingness to thrown in unconventional things like recorded voices and electronic dabblings where necessary -- and, while I do enjoy Glass's work very much, it still strikes me as ultimately abstract, cerebral, a mere experimentation in sound. Richter's work -- and I now have almost the entire body of it -- achieves an emotional depth, an unshakeable, beautiful melancholy entwined with such yearning, that it almost always leaves me speechless. "On The Nature Of Daylight" extracts from a simple string arrangement the purest musical distillation of, well, I'm not sure, for the song could just as be about the nature of night, of sunrise and sunset, of the waxing and waning of existence. A lone female soprano sings an endless note before a backdrop of string arpeggios in the sorrowful "Sarajevo." "H In New England" and "The Tartu Piano" are a perfect aural accompaniment for window alcoves and spring showers beyond. Do give one or all of these songs a listen, as I'm sure you will it/them!

♪ Max Richter -- On The Nature Of Daylight

♪ Max Richter -- Sarajevo

♪ Max Richter -- H In New England

♪ Max Richter -- The Tartu Piano

(For those who are more interested in more, I uploaded his most recent album 24 Postcards in Full Colour -- to which the last two songs there belong -- in this post.)

Yes, yes, I understand how easy it is to loathe the Secretary of the Treasury at this particular time. Depending on who you ask, he is a tax cheat, a cause of the economic crisis during his time as Chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, an idiot for pissing off the China vis-à-vis their currency policy, too bold in his actions to restart the flow of credit, or not bold enough. Besides, the stock market hates him, as the Dow Jones Industrial Index is, of course, the most rational indicator of the country's fortunes.

But I digress. Yesterday, I was doing a daily reading of my Google Reader feed (unrelated but necessary: those who follow many blogs and check them rather often would do well to follow my example and use this particular Google service, for it is damned useful and beneficial toward the furthering of procrasination) when I stumbled upon a post over at Swampland with this gem from YouTube:

For those who need a bit of a political refresher, Michele Bachmann is the House member who, uh, memorably suggested on Hardball that all of those subversive liberals in Congress ought to be ferreted out by the well-meaning and patriotic members of the media. I never thought I would meet a politician more hopelessly idiotic than she, but, then, the world is full of surprises.

The actual content of the video is, for the purposes of this post, not entirely relevant. It is a short snippet of yesterday's hearing at the House Financial Services Committee, where Treasury Secretary, the Fed Chairman, and President of the Fed in New York were giving testimony about the federal government's oversight of AIG. (Watch it, though, if you want to see Bachmann at her lunatic best, including but not limited to her curious pronunciation of Kazakhstan, Barney Frank bringing the full weight of Congressional procedure crashing down upon her voluminous new hairstyle, and the look on Geithner's face at the very end as he realises that he is dealing with a bona fide ignoramus.) The point is that I was watching this yesterday -- it was the first time I had seen our seemingly universally reviled Secretary of the Treasury talking about, well, anything. Very quickly into the video, however, it occurred to me that I didn't actually care about his views on financial stabilisation and toxic assets: I was beginning to find M. Geithner irresisitably attractive, which, naturally, took precedence over being an informed citizen.

This led me to do a bit of internet stalking and learn the following. He had the childhood I wish I had -- that is, one that involved living around the world and attending international schools -- before pursuing a double major in government and Asian studies at Dartmouth, where he studied both Chinese and Japanese. He has a masters in international economics from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (located near Dupont Circle here in DC, mind). His resume includes work with the the International Affairs division of the Treasury Department, the Council on Foreign Relations, IMF, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and, now, the unenviable task of lifting the U.S. -- and, by extension, the world -- out of this current economic mess.

If I were to meet Tim Geithner now, this is what I would say:

Me: I like economics, you like economics. I am interested in Asia, you are interested in Asia. We have been sharing the same intellectual lover for some time, international relations, who thinks that we would be really awesome together. I therefore propose that we have intercourse so that we can produce children who, when we tell them to do something they don't want to, will argue with us on the basis of their revealed preferences and utility functions.
Him: You're strange.
Me: But you, sir, are a dreamboat.

I mean, look at him:


Geithner seriously contemplates my offer of carnal relations serious economic things!


Geithner and the Obama economic team!


Geithner is adorable as he lectures the insipid masses!

Oh, Mr. Geithner: I'll be capital, you be labour, and you know the rest, baby.

In my closet at home, my journals rest in a purple-pink shoebox in rough chronological order. There are some notebooks that do not quite achieve that rank but addenda thereof that really ought to belong in the middle of their respective journals. This, alas, is physically impossible. But forgive my digression. While I was home for spring break, I finally put into action an idea that had been floating in and out of my thoughts for some time. I was going to select a day -- say, March 14 -- and look up the entry I wrote on that day (or the day closest to it) throughout the previous years, a selective sampling of the details that, in a particular moment in time, I believed worthy of remembrance.

Here are excerpts from those entries. Names, in the context of romantic interests, have been removed to spare myself public embarrassment. All spelling, punctuation, and grammar errors have been reproduced faithfully. I was born in August 1989, thus making me nine at the time of the writing of the first entry.

March 15, 1999

Guess what? Today, school closed. Rena (my neighbor), came over to my house, and I went to Danielle's house. At Danielle's, we made a 5-foot platform that allowed you to walk on the pond. I'm almost finished the book P.S. Longer Letter Later.

March 11, 2000

I took an "Explore" test a while ago. Guess what! I placed 87 among national 8th grades! That's really good.

March 22, 2001

My deepest apologies 4 not writing back. NM (nothing much) going on w/ _____.

March 12, 2002

I HATE Chinese school. Most hopefully I'll write again afterwards to show you the AFTERMATH of torture. Neopets update! I still have my old Neopets. I began playing this game called Neoquest. I know not the POINT of the game, but it is still much fun. I FINALLY fed my Neopets...hehe. Thank Frith [bunny god] that you are not my Neopet.

March 15, 2003

So very exhausted as I just got back from watching Les Misérables at the high school. Sammy and I were singing together a cappella during the intermission.

March 16, 2004

I should have expected it. Fitness only comes at the expense of pain. Lacrosse practice, though relatively fun, was agony on my muscles, and it is now victoriously proclaiming so. I worked with _____ in bio today. His hand accidentally passed by mine a few times and his leg brushed up against mine (again, accidentally), but it made me wonder what it is like to have a man's full weight to be pressed against me.

March 15, 2005

Fragmentation was at the soul of traditional European balance of power politics. It was a dividing force. Depression -era economic nationalism and protectionism, thus leading to rivalry between nations, the splitting of Europe into Triple Entente and Triple Alliance, the Allies and the Axis Powers -- what is all of it but the fragments of what could be a united Europe fighting each other?

March 15, 2006

Fuck, I hate myself. I have been wasting far too much time on the computer as of late. My willpower cannot be leaving me now. How often must I beg this of myself before hard work becomes a reality? Oh, the work I could have, should have completed. I am disgusted with myself. I need to change this. And I suppose writing in this diary isn't helping, but it is one of those things that keep me sane, not to mention I need some sort of forum in which to endure my self-flagellation.

March 16, 2007

I have not been reading. I have not been writing. I have not been editing. I have not been practising. I have not been working. I have not been learning. I have not been trying. That I am a senior has precious little relevance. I must bring structure to my life -- no frills, no wasted time, no squandered moments.

March 15, 2008

It is unfortunate that this generally enjoyable week has rather successfully been marred by my dearest roommate. She apparently thought that 4:30am on a Friday morning was a most opportune time to mutter to herself, clean her room, blast the air conditioner, and inadvertently wake up her roommate -- you know, the one who has 8:50 class on Fridays?

This exercise led me to ask myself a question: why do I journal? That I should have felt compelled to produce ten years of written records -- incomplete, slanted, and littered with curious grammatical practises, to be sure, but they are records nonetheless -- is indication enough that there must be some ultimate meaning to chickenscratch scribbled under cover of secrecy (my first serious journal, after all, came equipped with a petite lock and key, much to my delight at the time). It is that meaning I intend to explore now.

The most obvious perspective with which to begin, having just completed a retrospective of my journalling history, is the past. More intimately than any other document I have ever produced, my journals are the most complete chronicle of my development as a person. They cover, by the way, a time span that begins with my moving to the United States at the close of 1996, so they include the later years of childhood, adolescence, and the continuing, fitful transition to proper -- not merely nominal -- adulthood, which is to say that there is not an insignificant amount of growing occurring. It is entertaining, diversionary, a result of an innate curiosity, to want to tunnel through the archives of years past, recalling secondhandedly what I thought on a certain day, how I felt, the sort of person I once was and continue to be. I must have thought of this, for why else would have, for instance, created a time capsule, filled with facts about myself, that I tucked away into the pages of one of those journals and instructed myself to not read until ten years had passed (this happened in 2001, so those ten years have yet to fully elapse, unfortunately!)?

Entire industries are predicated upon this desire to understand and, in some way, live again the nature of earlier times. The 1999 entry refers to a snow day, when my best friends were named Margaret and Danielle. It had snowed quite a lot, and, when we were playing in Danielle's backyard, we noticed how the snow seemed to extend from the edge of the bank of the pond, no doubt supported by some amount of ice. In our adventurous, unbounded ten year-old minds, the only natural thing to do was to extend that snow even further through the toil and labour of our own hands. Would I have remembered all of this today had I not written it into history almost a decade ago? It is uncertain, but that entry was like a catalyst to the mind that bubbled to the surface previously dormant impressions and led them again into the light.

More importantly, however, the past keeps me honest. Memory and experience are not one and the same. The latter is a neutral category, a statement of things that transpired. Memory, though -- memory is totalitarian in its lack of respect for such objectivity. It diminishes, perhaps erases entirely, that which I do not want to remember, and it strings together impeccable narratives so that the events of my life fall into a convenient, easily explained procession. What I come to perceive as life divers from how it has been lived -- an inalterable result of human-environment interaction, perhaps, but, to paraphrase a favourite poem of mine, it is truly a pity, how little we dredge from the shoreline. To look over my journals is to appreciate that I was not hopelessly immature until that magical age of sixteen or seventeen years old (indeed, I was surprised by the attempts at elegance in the 2004 entry), that my brief fling with netspeak was so clearly an indication of yearning for conformity with my fears (in place of a conviction that I have always prized my idiosyncrasies), that I was hardly uninterested in the ways of romance as an utterly untouched adolescent girl (in contrast to my current aversion to it). The stories I weave for myself about myself and drape around my thoughts like a net simply cannot withstand the cruel neutrality of truth.

But, then, how truthful are my recollections, often set down on paper not long after the events in question occur? My journals, after all, are not terse recitation of fact -- ate breakfast at nine, sat exam at ten -- but, rather, stylised accounts thereof, interposed with generous doses of cerebral opinion, unfiltered emotion, and poetic license. They are not as objective as a genuine record of the past should be. Here, I shift my focus to the present and the functions of journalling that fall under its purview. Journalling, I have come to understand, is not an activity that exists separately from me; it is instead an integral component of how I live on a daily basis. Not "I am Malin, and I journal" but "I am Malin who journals" -- though days can pass between entries on account of this impediment or another. I, to some extent, live to journal. Those details, fleeting or profound, and these grand arcs of existence bound to humdrum rhythms remain in a mental to-journal list until they can be safely stored away.

I live to journal, then, but the converse -- journalling to live -- is also true. No man has ever been content to merely report things as they happened. No, we engage in understatement and exaggeration, fanciful flights of imagery and strategic deployment of silence, not because we wish to obfuscate (though that, under particular circumstances, could also be a more devious sort of motivation) but because it heightens the experience for both the storyteller and the told, throws greater swathes of colour, dizzying, scintillating, ensorcelling, on the blank canvas with which we are endowed. It is our only endowment, this blankness purposeless and purposeful. Thus, we must paint like great artists of old.

The works of these artists line the walls and alcoves of galleries around the world, admired almost universally for their capacity to transcend the limitations of time. Their immutability through the centuries reassures, inspired awe, and leads us to wonder if a kind of immortality is, in the end, attainable. It is this inherent desire for permanence that brings me to the future and one final anecdote. I visited a cemetery for the first time when my Center for Talented Youth Great Revolutions class went on a field trip to a local burial ground in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. It was a dreary day, cloudy and touched with damp, during which I wandered, silently, around the tombstones. I was painfully conscious of the fact that the serenity of the place rested upon the now formless remains of previous flesh. It was an old cemetery: many of the names and prayers that had been engraved into stone were not smooth, indistinguishable from the unyielding material in which they had been preserved. Sometimes, a date would be faintly visible, and I would find myself staring at an object that had -- miraculously, in my mind -- withstood the wear of hundreds of years so that it might be here before me, defying death even as they realised that time could not be outrun.

I am not meant to live longer than my lease upon this planet permits me to live, and things sigh in their irreversible disintegration. The forces of nature are too powerful and must always claim their rightful triumph -- what am I but a single speck of nothingness? But even nothingness must dream of somethingness, a root that ensnares the earth, and I turn to face the great entropy. There is nothing permanent about these words that I produce, nor there necessarily meaning to them either, yet they are the singular light I bear aloft as I peer into the darkness in which we all must subsist. In my wake, these ink-stained pages; there is no way to go but forward.

me: Shapiro, I have a question.
me: why did we think it was a good idea to take macro again when it wasn't even required of us?
shapiro: i followed your lead
me: okay.
shapiro: i should have taken calc
shapiro:damn it
me: why did I think it was a good idea to take macro again when it wasn't even required of me?
shapiro: you thought it was necessary for your econ education
me: macro is starting to make me dislike econ. or at least that part of it, very, very vehemently.
me: huh.
me: well.
shapiro: haha
me: I am now asking myself if I have learned anything that has thus far proved necessary to my econ education.
shapiro: no
shapiro: i already knew about solow
shapiro: i would rather have waited
shapiro: when i was qualified for the "nerdy" stuff
me: and I learned about Solow in idev [international development], anyway.
me: even then, I think I would have stayed firmly on the micro divide. >.>
shapiro: yes
shapiro: i love micro
shapiro: its just
shapiro: more fun
me: it really is.
shapiro: it embraces what i love about econ
me: I feel like. I dunno. I'm doing something real and important that actually matters in, you know, solving problems.
me: macro is a lot of bullshit handwaving about why convergence happens, really, if you squint your eyes and look closely.

My spring break is very quickly drawing to its unavoidable end (this leads me to ask myself: why is it I bother to blog when I really ought to be stuffing my suitcase full of those of things I brought back home or, at the very least, making my bed); thus, for the past few days, my parents have been constantly asking me about one thing in particular. It does not concern grades or my odd sleeping schedule -- although I did get a grumpy lecture about that -- but food. Do I want to bring two dinners' worth of dumplings back to school? What about cereal? How about instant noodles? What kind would you like? And so forth.

My parents have, in true stereotypical Asian form, tended to be rather stingy with me over the years. Even when I was in elementary school and my desires were as simple as wanting to by the latest Wishbone novel, they would have me earn spare change through chores -- easy things like washing the dishes and wiping the table off after dinner -- until I had enough to purchase it. These days, they insist upon a certain amount of financial independence for this university student of limited means, even when I believe that they have a significant interest in helping me fund a certain venture (e.g., professional clothes for my internship and future ones, as they are an investment that all nineteen year-old females need, agreed?). The one area in which they have always been lenient about this, of course, is food.

I imagine food is important in all parts of the world, if only because we cannot survive without it, but I have always suspected that Chinese culture places a particular amount of emphasis on it. There is a phrase in Chinese, 请某人去吃饭, which translates into "to take somebody out to eat," that is used in the same context as the English. Yet there is a deeper meaning there, as the character 请 means to ask -- one must ask another person if one can take him/her out to a meal. What more, this character also means please, and so to place it in front of a phrase is to imbue it with a politeness that did not exist before. I do not merely want want to take you out to dinner and pamper you in all the ways a host ought to pamper her guest: I humbly beseech you for the honour to do as much. (And then there is the meal itself, which is a Chinese ritual for an entirely different time!)

I imagine it will be a work in progress. It is difficult for me to maintain a regular posting schedule when I am first and foremost committed to journalling (with, you know, pen and paper). Anyway, I have been on spring break for the past week, which is a most necessary American institution placed halfway through the second semester. During this week, I have, among other things, outlined close to a thousand pages of Chinese foreign policy reading and recalibrated my sleep schedule such that I now wake up almost exactly eight hours after turning off the light. (College will disrupt that one in due time, no doubt.) Now that I think about it, I have been doing an inhumane amount of work this break, and I still have more do complete before I head back to Georgetown on Sunday. Oh, the curses of being an academic masochist!

On a note entirely unrelated to school, I cleared my flickr account of previously uploaded photographs as I was unhappy with how I had decided to format them. I have thus begun anew the process of selecting those pictures from my computer that are worth to be dubbed "photography" (rather than "These Are the Slightly Cool Things that Malin Decided to Encapsulate Forever in a Series of Pixels"). It is a bit of a slow process, mostly because of the editing that has to be done, but I am enjoying the final result immensely. Here are a selection of photographs that I have uploaded to date that I particularly like (details can be found by clicking on their respective photo):

Curiously enough, they were all taken in China, but this is because I have yet to go through the other folders in my library. I enjoy photography because, other than the fact that it is the only art form I can competently attempt (even then, I am hardly as good as I wish I could be), by framing the world, I am taught to see it in a different manner. In doing that, I can, in my own deficient way, preserve forever the beauty in things that I might otherwise miss.