the story of m.

journey to the east.

2012-01-19T09:00:00.000-05:00

I was chatting with a co-worker the week before Christmas when he asked me if I would be taking any time off then. With a touch of wistfulness, I responded in the negative but followed up with, “But that’s okay, because I’ll be taking my leave later in January and going back to China.”

“Going back?”

A view of the Oriental Pearl Tower. Shanghai.

Acknowledging the inaccuracy of my choice of words, I rephrased the statement by omitting that last word, but, looking back on this otherwise banal exchange, was it really an incorrect thing to say? Among the overseas Chinese community (or, as I enjoy calling it, the Great Overseas Chinese Conspiracy – e.g., in ur math classes, trumpin ur inferior collective intellect, etc.), when we speak about making the trip to either the land of our birth or not-so-distant ancestral homeland, we never say that we are simply “going to China” (去中国). Rather, we use a more particular phrase, 回国, which literally translates into “to return to one’s country.” To journey to the motherland has always been to perform an act of homecoming; that I was born in the States, have spent my entire life in the West, and could – for a long time, anyway – speak more fluently about the French Revolution than the great upheaval that saw China transformed from dynastic empire to fitful republic never seemed to matter much in this calculation.

Sunset over Aimin Village. Near Xuancheng, Hefei Province.

Thus, for the first time in over three and a half years, I am going home today. That isn’t a very long time on paper, but, when I think about where I was in the summer of 2008 (fresh out of my first year at Georgetown, if I could believe that I was ever that young), compare that to where I am now, and think about everything that has happened in between, I feel like I’ve done at least a decade’s worth of ageing and growing in those years. A return is long overdue.

The distinctive pine trees of Yellow Mountain, Anhui Province.

I’ve done a handful of two-month stays in the country, but this jaunt will be just two weeks long. I am especially excited for it because this is the first time in my life that I will be marking the Chinese New Year in China itself, as it’s the first time since I was, oh, four years old that my existence is not under the dictates of the academic calendar – what a novel concept, the idea that I can go on holiday whenever I’d like (subject to office workload and accumulated leave, naturally)! I have been warned by my mother, with whom I am travelling, that it will be filled with more food than I could possible consume. To that, I say: bah humbug.

Inside the Forbidden City. Beijing.

There are, of course, also some anxieties involved. My ability to speak Chinese has rather fallen into disrepair – the longer I go without stepping foot in the Mainland, the worse it gets – and, every time I go back, I’m always vaguely terrified that the natives will think I’m some kind of linguistically challenged cretin. For all that living standards have improved dramatically in China within my lifetime, it still is a very, very different place from the United States, and I fear I have forgotten what it is like to actually be in the country. Also, the jetlag is absolutely miserable – as in, twelve time zones’ worth of discombobulated biorhythms. I am dreading it already.

The afterlife duties of a terracotta warrior and his steeds. Near Xi’an, Shaanxi Province.

But these are all minor quibbles in the grand scheme of things. This is a well-deserved holiday – no working vacation for me, thank you very much – and I will even be leaving my laptop at home, which feels like much greater a sacrifice than I know it to actually be. This is a time to disconnect (from unessential things), reconnect (with family, history, and so forth), and reflect. I’m keeping my personal possessions (relatively) simple: my Moleskine, two books, a manuscript of my novel to edit, erstwhile stuffed animals, my trusty iPod Classic, and a camera outfitted with a lightweight prime lens and two empty memory cards. It does mean that I won’t blog again until I return in early February, but don’t worry: my absence from your internet lives will be over before you know it.

See you in a few weeks!

la mer de pianos.

2012-01-18T09:00:00.000-05:00

I usually don’t bother devoting an entire blog post to one video, but this one, which I came upon via Kottke, resonated (no pun intended) with me so much that I simply had to share it:

La Mer de Pianos from Films & Things on Vimeo.

It’s a five-minute documentary about the oldest piano shop in Paris. I am an unabashed devotee of all things France and piano, so the the premise alone, of course, was enough to lure me in, but nothing quite prepared me for the magic and melancholy of it all: an immaculate handwritten ledger, narrow dusty shelves of hammers and dampers, and the owner of the shop himself, unflinching in the absence of sentimentality required by his line of work (“I put off the actual kill until the last possible moment'”) even as he doodles sailboats bobbing on oceans. (Surely there’s a novel to be written about this guy’s life. Idea for NaNoWriMo 2012? Oh, dear.)

♪ Frédéric Chopin – Nocturne No. 1 in B flat major, Op. 9 No. 1: Larghetto

When he speaks of the Pleyel piano of the 1920s, I remember that Chopin composed his indelible music on just such an instrument, albeit of an earlier vintage. I think about all that is lost to us and all that we try to salvage: sounds with no echo, a music that casts no shadow.

meanwhile, in real life…

2012-01-16T22:32:00.001-05:00

It occurs to me that, over time, I have become increasingly disinclined to use this blog as a record of the day-to-day happenings of my life and, instead, favoured more deliberately crafted content that either projects some kind of Greater Meaning™ or that I think will be interesting to the (limited) readership at large. This is primarily because my life is, more often than not, a pretty dull entity, and the last thing I would want to do is reveal to the internet just how uneventful it is. Oh, wait…Anyway, this is going to be one of those times that I talk about what I’ve been up to. When one is at a loss for things to say, self-centred bloviating is a reliable escape route!

It’s difficult to believe that the new year is only a shade over two weeks old. I have found myself so occupied on any number of fronts that the quiet reflection associated with the turning of the calendar page has long since given way to attempts just to keep pace with the present. Most of this can be attributed to work – more on that in a second – but I have still managed to have something resembling a social life as well. Two weekends ago, my friend and economics partner-in-crime Shapiro was in town during his temporary respite from graduate studies. The occasion was fêted by a dinner with Shapiro’s former roommate, Joe, at the H Street Country Club. It was the first time I had ventured into that part of the city, which, in classic realtor’s language, might be described as “up and coming,” but it was a welcome change from the usual NW haunts, and the food was also quite good.

Following dinner, we went to Joe’s place, where the boys unsuccessfully tried to hunt down a forthcoming episode of Portlandia before the three of us sat down to a game of The Settlers of Catan. It’s a strategy-based board game in which one must gather resources to construct settlements, roads, and other such works of infrastructure. Unlike many other such games, however, there is no killing, raping, or pillaging involved, at least not in a systematic fashion. In fact, the game is oddly progressive: for instance, if you have more than seven resource cards in your hand, you run the risk of forfeiting some of them. Playing this game, I felt like I was living out The Big Bang Theory, only, in our case, there were threats and profanity involved that likely were not kosher for network television.

Mostly, my life has been swamped by demands from the office. I am going on leave later this week, with the expected result that I have certain projects that absolutely need to be completed before I can decamp for my long-awaited holiday. How swamped, you might be wondering? I haven’t been keeping track, per se, but it’s been enough to make me feel like I am reliving my undergraduate days, guided so singular and obsessive a focus on the task at hand that everything else seems perfectly unimportant by comparison. This nostalgia reached its height yesterday, when I actually went back to Georgetown’s hideous concrete monstrosity of a library (and, yet, how very much like home it was!) to seek out some books for my research. I’ll remain mum on the specifics of what I’m doing, as I suspect the world wide web isn’t the right platform for that kind of thing, but it has involved Googling exchange rates between former European currencies and the euro – at a certain point, I realised I should just write them all down instead of constantly going back to the same Wikipedia page – as well as managing an Excel file that has at least 50 individual sheets within it.

I did take a bit of an extended lunch break from work on Friday, though, to enjoy Restaurant Week offerings with my friend Shuo at Kinkead’s, a seafood place near Foggy Bottom whose usual clientele, I would imagine, are the sorts of people with expense accounts and very impressive salaries. Fortunately, Restaurant Week opens these tony dining establishments to the rest of us through reasonably priced prix fixé menus! I, of course, had to be the annoying person who whips out her camera out at the start of every course to photograph her food, but I at least ensured that our waiter was out of sight before doing so. (Looking at these pictures again, I ought to have gone with a smaller aperture, but oh well.)

Finally, I would like to conclude this entry by saying a few words on the occasion of the basically inevitable demise of Jon Huntsman’s presidential campaign. Like so many Americans, I have been following the GOP primary competition as one might a reality TV show – that is, with both a perverse fascination at the foibles of so sterling a collection of nutters and nincompoops and a disgust at myself, that I should be so drawn to all of it. The obvious difference between the two is that the former will, sooner or later, produce someone who will contest to hold the highest political office in the land, which really just makes it the most terrifying spectacle on the planet. The only man in this cast of characters who did not serve to further degrade my faith in ~~humanity~~ ~~American voters~~ the Republican Party was Huntsman, and, as the use of past tense would indicate, he is gone now, having formally dropped out of the race today.

It’s not that I would have ever voted for him over Obama or that he was an especially good candidate – by all accounts, he was a pretty shit campaigner – but there was something rather appealing and admirable about his refusal to pander to the conservative id. That is the kind of character that has been sorely absent from the American right in recent years, and the fact that, at least for a time, even Herman Cain was apparently taken more seriously by that slice of the electorate than Huntsman ever was is just utterly damning commentary vis-à-vis the current state of the GOP. Also, I kind of have an none-too-disguised crush on him and his collection of colourful ties.

Too bad not enough primary voters thought the same, Jon!

second attempt at collaborative blogging.

2012-01-12T06:55:00.001-05:00

Just a quick, drive-by update (not the least because I am guiltily typing this at 6:47am when I should be getting ready for work instead): my friend Katherine and I have officially launched a collaborative blog called The Perfume of Paper, in which we set monthly reading challenges for ourselves (e.g., “Read a Serious Russian Novel”). It’s an idea that we had been playing with for some time, and it is my hope that participating in this side project will enable me to read a wider variety of books this year – and, assuming we can keep this going, in years to come! This is more for our own literary edification than anything else, but do feel free to follow along if you’d like to.

(May it not fall into neglect like my first attempt, though I feel that its short lifespan is at least somewhat compensated for by its fifteen milliseconds of internet fame.)

on letting my hair down, figuratively and literally.

2012-01-09T22:49:00.001-05:00

The first work week of the new year started on a rather bad, if also hilarious note. I had actually woken up with my alarm clock for once, proceeded through my getting ready routine smoothly, and was about to head out the door when I noticed the accumulated debris at the bottom of my tote bag – you know, the crumpled corners of receipts, glitter that rubbed off this year’s Christmas wrapping paper, and that sort of thing. Inexplicably, I was struck by the need to rid myself of this detritus without a moment to lose, but, not wanting to get any of it in my flat, I threw my window open, turned my ostensibly empty tote upside down, and began to shake it.

Something vaguely substantial tumbled out of my bag. Just a hair tie, I thought with a shrug as I watched it fall to the ground. Then something rather more substantial joined it. Leaning over the windowsill, I wondered what else I could have possibly left in my bag. And, this time, the thoughts that raced through my mind were decidedly less genteel:

Because, you see, I leave my work ID badge in the unsecured front pocket of my tote, as there is never really any point in placing it anywhere else, and, in my obsessive-compulsive daze, had thoughtlessly sent it plummeting into the gated patio of a first-floor tenant.

Fortunately, this story has a happy resolution: I left a deeply apologetic note, along with an envelope, for said tenant, explaining what had happened and whether it would be terribly rude for me ask if he/she could retrieve my ID for me. I was able to get into my office building with a temporary staff badge, and, a few hours into the morning, the tenant gave me a ring and told me that she had found my ID and slid it under my door. I thanked her profusely – and the kindness of strangers more generally – and promised to never do such a stupid thing again. Not the least because, when I thought about it, there really wasn’t much dirt & dust at the bottom of my bag to begin with.

On an at-first-glance unrelated note, I found myself desiring to waste time on Sunday – a treasured pastime of the working twentysomething – and decided to curl my hair for the first time in my life. Secretly, I had been wanting to try this for a while, but my hair required time to grow out and I needed to consult the boundless expertise of YouTube vis-à-vis the proper handling of a curling iron because, when I was a teenager, I instead chose to spend my time learning the ins and outs of the French Republican Calendar. Yeah.

Anyway, I spent more time than I am willing to admit in front of the bathroom mirror, trying my best not to inflict first-degree burns on my fingers or scalp, and the result came out satisfactorily enough that a crappy webcam photo was necessary to mark the occasion. Please forgive my wan & listless demeanour: I was not feeling well that day, and the lighting in these kinds of situations is almost always disadvantageous for one’s complexion.

I’ve had fine, (more or less) straight hair for my entire life. You’d think it would be easy to deal with, but the funny reality is that my hair is a maddeningly malleable thing: if I put it up in so much as a loose ponytail and let it down a few hours later, it will possess for the rest of the day that odd indentation where the elastic had been. I am deeply jealous of people who wake up in the morning blessed with easily manageable locks; mine usually resemble an electrified bird’s nest. And letting my hair air dry is a definite no-no unless I want odd strands here or there curling out at odd angles; ergo, I devote a good 20-25 minutes on most mornings emphasising applying copious amounts of product, blow drying it until my bathroom feels like a rain forest, and touching up the unruly bits with a flat iron afterwards. There is the sense that, because my hair is straight, it ought to be so in an unambiguous, clear cut fashion, and anything less than that is unacceptable.

As I was “posing” for this “photograph,” I found myself fiddling with my hair a bit, trying to make it look a bit less unruly before I committed it to my hard drive for all eternity, but then it occurred to me that it was supposed to be a little messy. By electing to curl my hair, I had already surrendered to a kind of disorder, albeit still a controlled one, and really, I began to tell myself, you know you’re just going to spend the rest of the day sprawled on your bed, crying your way through the second series of Downton Abbey and snacking on puppy chow. Honestly, is there even one defensible reason you should be wasting your time dwelling on this, of all things?

Thus, I threw up my proverbial hands and just took the damn photo, and now I’ve blogged about it. Daring to disturbing the universe is scary business indeed, but baby steps, as they say, baby steps.

a statement of purpose for 2012.

2012-01-02T12:12:00.001-05:00

2011 end-of-the-year meme.

2012-01-01T17:59:00.001-05:00

I’m putting this up a day later than I would have liked, but there were a handful of questions on which I managed to procrastinate for a good while before finally forcing myself to just write something or another down. It’s always interesting for me to go back and read what I wrote in previous years (2010 and 2009), if only to marvel at the contrast in my states of mind.

If this is too TL;DR for you (and I can hardly blame you if it is!), here’s the long and short of it: 2011 was, on the whole, a very fantastic year for me and certainly a very memorable one as well. Looking ahead to 2012, it will be something like take two of my senior year: I’m going to have to sit the GRE again, figure out what exactly I am going to do come fall of 2013 (as my current contractual position ends that summer), and hopefully see those plans through to fruition. But that all feels very distant from my current vantage point, and I feel that I’ve earned, at least for the moment, a little bit of time to bask in what I accomplished in the previous year.

1. What did you do in 2011 that you'd never done before?

I wrote a thesis, presented it at an academic conference, received many a rejection e-mail from grad schools, graduated university, somehow got a full-time job following graduation, and survived an earthquake and a hurricane in quick succession (…not that the bar for survival was especially high or anything). And, on a less serious note, I sang karaoke for the first time here in the States, woke up at 3am to watch an Australian Open match, and dressed up as Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong’s mad fourth wife. There was a good reason for the latter, I promise.

2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

I will review my resolutions from 2011 in greater depth later, but, yes, I managed to keep almost all of them. Resolutions for 2012 are forthcoming.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

No.

4. Did anyone close to you die?

No.

5. What countries did you visit?

None, sadly. I haven’t been able to leave the U.S. since I came back from Oxford, but I will be off to China in eighteen days’ time and am most excited about that.

6. What would you like to have in 2012 that you lacked in 2011?

A clearer idea of what I want to do with my life. Yes, I know this response is both too general and cliché, but there you have it.

7. What date from 2011 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

The Carroll Round (14-17 April), graduation (21 May), first day of work (13 June).

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

At the risk of sounding like I’m boasting, there are a number of justifiable contenders for this title, but, ultimately, it is hard to top graduating from university and getting a full-time Real World job. Writing an entire novel in thirty days does come close, however, and I still can’t believe I pulled off my senior thesis in as little time as I did, what with everything else going on at the time.

9. What was your biggest failure?

There are some fraying ties with various people that I never quite managed to mend, which I swear is what I say every year.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

Nothing serious. Nothing really minor either, now that I think about it.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

I would say my flat – because having a place of one’s own to live is kind of a big deal – except I am, of course, renting this place. As such, I will offer a decidedly more superficial response and say these black leather pumps from Ann Taylor. My professional wardrobe is still a work in progress, but these have definitely become a staple thereof.

12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?

Friends & family, as always. They keep me grounded and sane, and I would be lost without them.

13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?

The Republican Party? Alternatively, the European Central Bank.

14. Where did most of your money go?

Rent. And clothes for work?

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

Graduating from Georgetown was a pretty big deal, I dare say.

16. What song will always remind you of 2011?

♪ Data Romance – Swept Away

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:

i. happier or sadder? Happier, unequivocally so.
ii. thinner or fatter? Transitioning to the more or less sedentary working life coincided with the first episode of statistically significant weight gain in, er, the last six years or so. But, since I cook for myself now and exercise regularly, I feel much healthier than I have in ages, so this doesn’t bother me much at all.
iii. richer or poorer? Richer.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?

Er. Sleep? I am always of the opinion that I could have found more time in my life for sleep.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?

Conceding to my introverted tendencies. I know I can summon the willpower to remind myself that putting myself in social situations is, in fact, a good thing (in moderation), but, sometimes, it really is just easier to stay at home with a book, some TV, or Mozart piano concertos.

20. How did you spend Christmas?

At home, per usual. I opened presents in the morning with the family, helped my sister edit her college essays and set up her new laptop, and saw The Artist with my mother.

21. How will you be spending New Year’s?

Since the New Year is already upon us, I spent the last day of 2011 attending to errands, cooking myself a nice dinner, and watching Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy with Katherine.

22. Did you fall in love in 2011?

What a droll question. No.

23. How many one-night stands?

Does the average person have enough one-night stands in a year that a query like this is necessary? In any case, my answer is zero, of course.

24. What was your favourite TV program?

Oh dear, I consumed such an obscene amount of television this year: Peep Show, Glee, Game of Thrones, Downton Abbey, North and South, The Good Wife, The Big Bang Theory, Sherlock, and The Thick of It. I’ll just say that it’s a drawn between Game of Thrones and Downton Abbey while reassuring the rest of them that I still love them dearly. (Well, maybe not Glee as much these days.)

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?

Hate is such an unnecessarily strong word, as I was taught in primary school, but, even if I were to replace it with something less vitriolic (e.g., “mildly loathe”), nobody comes to mind. That is an honest answer.

26. What was the best book you read?

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder; because I apparently consume seriously depressing 900-page books on 20th-century European history the way housewives devour chick lit while vacationing at the Jersey Shore.

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?

Always a dangerous question to ask, if only because the answer risks become unnecessarily lengthy and unwieldy. From the non-classical music standpoint, this was the year I discovered Glee, and, as terrible as the show has become, I can’t quite divorce myself from the irresistibly catchy songs yet. Foster the People were, arguably, the only new artist to claim a spot in my regular music rotation; other “discoveries” of sorts – meaning artists of whom I had never heard prior to this year or to whom I only really started listening this year – include Fionn Regan, Bag Raiders, Gem Club, and Lykke Li.

From the classical music standpoint, this question is much more fun to answer! My collection of it underwent spectacular growth: Beethoven string quartets, more Debussy piano music, and Schubert in general. I really took to violin concertos this year, for some reason or another, and began the task of listening to the standards of the repertoire (Mendelssohn, Bruch, and Tchaikovsky come to mind, and I am in the process of getting acquainted with Stravinsky, Shostakovich, and Berg). My favourite violin concerto by far, though, was Prokofiev’s second. Other things that stick out in my memory: Fricsay’s recording of the Beethoven Ninth with the Berlin Philharmonic, Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” violin sonata, Alexandre Tharaud playing the keyboard music of François Couperin, and finding my ears more receptive to the “noise” of post-1945 classical music than they previously were.

28. What did you want and get?

A settled post-Georgetown future.

29. What did you want and not get?

More postgrad acceptance letters, I suppose? Not that this really made much of a difference after February. Also, this wool pencil skirt from J. Crew: I’ve been lusting for it since September but can’t bring myself to buy it. #firstworldproblems

30. What was your favourite film of this year?

The film for which I was most excited was easily Pianomania, a documentary about a Steinway & Sons piano technician who must satisfy the whims of anal-retentive concert pianists, not to mention his own OCD-necessitated aspirations. I mean, of course I would love it. (Trailer here, for any interested parties.)

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

Oh hell, I had a genuinely miserable birthday, as I spent all of 27 August hiding in my flat from Hurricane Irene. (The day was partially redeemed by an amusing e-mail exchange with Shapiro in which we competed to find the most ridiculous editorials possible on Fox News’ website.) I turned 22, a rather dull & insignificant age.

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

There were various points throughout the year during which I would not have refused an exogenous injection of self-confidence.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2011?

Pencil skirts, dresses, blazers, pumps – all for the office, naturally! – and my Banana Republic trench, picked up at a very steep discount during last year’s post-Christmas sales and worn absolutely to death since. This was the year that I learned how to walk comfortably in three-inch heels (I use comfortably in a very liberal manner here), and that’s actually an achievement of which I’m quite proud.

34. What kept you sane?

Classical music. Espresso. Preferably together at the same time.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

Is it redundant of me to say Roger Federer? I’ve loved the guy for the better part of the last decade, but there was something about 2011 being a rather poor season for me that masochistically upped my devotion to the fellow. There is also the second iteration of eye candy of the male persuasion to consider. Oh, and Dan Stevens/Matthew Crawley of Downton Abbey fame, who shall certainly be awarded a prime spot on the forthcoming third iteration of eye candy, date TBD.

36. What political issue stirred you the most?

I imagine my current place of employment has something to do with this, but I became much more interested in the ongoing clusterfuck that is the Eurozone debt crisis, as well as fiscal issues, more broadly speaking. I also made a serious attempt to get a handle on the financial bacchanalia that led to the Great Recession. Oh, and the debt ceiling shenanigans this past summer made me lose whatever miniscule faith I had left in the Republican Party’s competence and rationality.

37. Who did you miss?

Let’s change this question to “Who do I miss?”, and my answer to that is: Georgetown friends who are no longer here in DC. Geographic dispersion blows.

38. Who was the best new person you met?

I have a lot of supremely awesome co-workers, so I shall say them, collectively.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2011:

That I am never half as mature as I think I am; there is always so much more to learn.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:

‘cause when you find yourself a villain
in the story you have written
it’s plain to see
that sometimes the best intentions
are in need of redemption

-- Death Cab for Cutie, “You Are A Tourist”

this year in blogging.

2011-12-30T21:13:00.001-05:00

Even though I’ve been doing monthly recaps on my blog for some time now, this is the first time I’ve ever done an annual review of the writing I inflict upon the internets. Since I’m not feeling especially loquacious at the moment – believe me, it can happen! – here are some self-curated links to some of the more notable things that I’ve posted this year, all organised into a few handy categories.

mixes

musical appreciation/fangirling & concert reviews

mozart's requiem at the philadelphia orchestra.
happy 255th birthday, wolfgang!
ellie goulding at the 9:30 club.
learning to love ballet.
franz liszt: a bicentennial appreciation.
ra ra riot at the 9:30 club.
the “H.O.L.I.D.A.Y. Music” project: introduction, part i, part ii.

travelling the world – or just the continental united states, really

possibly contemplative things

personal milestones

books read in 2011.

2011-12-30T09:00:00.000-05:00

This is a bit belated, but I hope that you all had a lovely Christmas and are currently enjoying, if you fortunate enough to have one, a proper respite from work/academia. I myself had an enjoyable stay at home, received some imminently practical presents and one not very practical (but utterly adorable), and played enough Just Dance 3 on my family’s Wii to ensure a persistent soreness in my arms and shoulders. On Monday, my parents, with sister more or less willingly in tow, came down to DC with me for a short visit. The three of them stayed in my apartment, transforming my urban accommodations into a single-family domicile. It is possible, believe it or not. While I was at the office and before they left, my parents decided to clean the oil stains off my stove and take out the trash for me; this is to say nothing of the customary transfer of delicious foodstuffs – freshly picked oranges! dumplings! Mother’s signature homemade cookies! – that follow trips back home. Chinese parents are the best.

Anyway, to get to the original point of this post, it’s time to reprise the tradition of presenting the number of books read during this calendar year. At the beginning of 2011, I made a resolution to read at least thirty non-school-related books and am pleased to say that I met my goal! Here are the thirty-one that I finished; asterisks denote that the book was a re-read, and bolded items are those that were in some way thought-provoking and memorable (re-reads are excluded from this…with two exceptions, mostly because I want to talk about them – and this is my blog, so I can!).

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, J.K. Rowling (January 1)*
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling (January 2)*
The Tales of Beedle the Bard, J.K. Rowling (January 2)*
Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, Margaret MacMillan (January 10)*
An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears (February 7)
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, Timothy Snyder (February 12)
Ill Fares the Land, Tony Judt (February 17)
The Dream of Scipio, Iain Pears (March 7)
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, Michael Lewis (March 10)
Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro (March 31)*
Great Philosophers Who Failed At Love, Andrew Shafer (April 2)
Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, Tony Judt (April 24)*
The Memory Chalet, Tony Judt (May 2)
Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo (May 24)
A Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin (May 30)
A Clash of Kings, George R. R. Martin (June 2)
A Storm of Swords, George R. R. Martin (June 7)
A Feast for Crows, George R. R. Martin (June 18)
Essays in Persuasion, John Maynard Keynes (July 3)
The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro (July 9)*
A Dance with Dragons, George R. R. Martin (July 15)
The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British, Sarah Lyall (July 18)
A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf (August 12)*
The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown (August 22)
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace (September 17)
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner (September 25)*
The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, David Brooks (October 1)
On Beauty, Zadie Smith (October 14)
Eli the Good, Silas House (October 16)
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, Alex Ross (December 5)*
A Week in December, Sebastian Faulks (December 11)

An Instance of the Fingerpost and Bloodlands were discussed briefly here, and my initial positive responses to them have not lessoned over the subsequent months. Bloodlands, as you can see, set me on a Tony Judt binge. Ill Fares the Land is his defence of social democracy in an age when such a concept seems utterly passé, but it was his memoir The Memory Chalet, a series of recollections about his childhood woven into broader considerations of European history that were composed during the final months of his life, that I found most captivating of all. His voice here is shorn of the academic overtones of his masterpiece Postwar and the polemics of his essays: it is simple, understated, and elegiac.

I picked up The Big Short while killing time before a flight – who knew that an account of the origins of the financial crisis could attain the status of airport reading? It really is quite a gripping read, though: it was the first time I had read anything by Michael Lewis, and I was taken by his snappy and cynical style of prose. I am now eagerly waiting for his latest book, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World, to come out in paperback…

The Remains of the Day is technically a re-read. The first time I picked it up was for a summer reading assignment before my final year of high school. The novel centres on a butler reflecting on his experiences of serving in one of England’s great noble houses and had come to me highly recommended, but, by the time I reached the end of it, I was quite nonplussed. A few years later, I read my second Ishiguro novel, Never Let Me Go, and was everything but unmoved. In the course of discussing these two novels with a friend, said friend mentioned that perhaps I had to be older to appreciate The Remains of the Day more fully. That indeed proved to be the case. If there is a unifying theme of Ishiguro’s body of work, it is the disconnect between the perceptions of we have of ourselves and the reality in which we ultimately exist. His protagonists are of the introspective, melancholy sort, transfixed by memories of a past rooted in misunderstanding, denial, and naïveté – one needs a certain worldliness to identify with them. I am still young, of course, but the narrative tension and quiet devastation of The Remains of the Day were far more evident to me this time around. (That Downton Abbey has made me more acquainted with the upstairs-downstairs dynamic of the old aristocratic households also helped, I would guess.)

Just for the record, I didn’t bold any of the titles in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire saga because I am generally of the opinion that book series ought to be considered as a cohesive whole rather than individual volumes. That said, I really loved ASOIAF and basically spent the entirety of my three-week summer break devouring these books. The first three instalments had some truly epic stuff, while I was less impressed by books four and five.

As for Infinite Jest, you can read my thoughts on it here.

On Beauty is one of those critically acclaimed works of contemporary fiction that I simply never got around to reading until now. At the novel’s outset, I found it difficult to empathise with many of the characters and sometimes got the feeling that Zadie Smith was showing off, stylistically, just for the sake of doing so. Ironically, it was Smith’s writing that ultimately won me over about a hundred or so pages in. If I had to name one aspect of her writing that is simply superlative, it is her dialogue. She has a way of giving voices to her characters that are marked, above all, by an uncanny authenticity (though I shouldn't be surprised by this). Even when the person speaking in question is a hopelessly pretentious English major at a liberal arts college, none of the dialogue feels contrived or forced, and it gives her stories, which would easily fall apart in the hands of lesser writers, a real kind of vivacity. Beyond the writing, the book actually is very enjoyable read. Smith combines effortlessly lowbrow and highbrow, the sordid and intellectual, and anybody who has ever gotten into intractable arguments about postmodernism, aestheticism, literature, art, etc., or is/has been a resident fellow of the ivory tower – which I imagine must be many of you – will be able to identify with large portions of On Beauty.

I wasn’t planning on picking up The Rest Is Noise again this soon – I read it only last year – but I found myself flipping through it while at home for Thanksgiving while doing some research for my novel and that somehow led me to read it from cover to cover? These things happen, I suppose. Back in 2010, I mentioned that the book, which concerns itself with the hydra that is twentieth-century classical music, “can be quite erudite,” and, by that, I meant that it can be somewhat bewildering. Before I read The Rest Is Noise, much of this music (and especially post-1945 stuff) was marked with a menacing “HERE BE MONSTERS” sign. In the year since, however – and in no small part due to Ross’s advocacy – it has become much more familiar territory to me, and having at least a fundamental grounding in the subject allowed me to enjoy the book even more the second time around.

And that’s a wrap, I think! What are some of the best books that you read this year? Do you wish to hear me ramble about any other literary creations that I consumed in 2011? Are you wondering why The Lost Symbol is on this list? That is what the comments section is for, dear readers!

…and to all a good night!

2011-12-23T17:00:00.000-05:00

As a preface, I just wanted to provide a brief addendum to my “H.O.L.I.D.A.Y. Music” Project (intro, part the first, and part the second) by linking to two relevant items, in the off-chance that I have inspired you to rebel against the ubiquity of the Messiah:

The inestimable music critic Alex Ross helpfully contextualises the Messiah, noting that the words in the Hallelujah chorus are drawn from the fire-and-brimstone Book of Revelation. Since I’ve read the Left Behind series and am therefore obviously an expert on the End of Days, I can tell you that shit gets real in this part of the holy scriptures.
Over at the Atlantic, Heather Horn has a piece called “The Classical Holiday Music You Should Be Hearing at CVS,” which is in the spirit of my own project, only with a less pithy title (also, mine came first!). She has some really nice selections – if you’re feeling adventurous and modern, do give the Messiaen a try.

Anyway, by the time this post goes live, I will be back at home for the weekend but will return to DC on Monday evening so that I can resume work on Tuesday. Yes, dear readership: this will mark the first time in my life that I will be labouring during the week between Christmas and the New Year, and, if my to-do list this week has been any indication, it will be a very busy time indeed. I’m still not sure how I am going to handle this, given I am used to letting my brain shut down completely during the last few weeks of the calendar year. Thus, I hope to get plenty of rest and, perhaps more importantly, delicious home-cooked Chinese food while ensconced in my suburban abode.

As 2011 draws to its inexorable close (insert obligatory remark about time’s powers of flight), content in this space will officially shift into year-in-review mode. I would apologise ahead of the time for my navel gazing, but, you know, this is a blog, so.

With that, I hope everyone has a very happy Christmas!

the “H.O.L.I.D.A.Y. music” project part ii: choral music.

2011-12-22T09:00:00.000-05:00

(Go here for Part I.)

While the correlation between choral music and religious music isn’t perfect, it is still a very strong one, which makes it appropriate for a holiday that is, after all, a religious celebration in its essence. I personally am not an adherent of any faith and never have been, but, if there is anything that might make me believe there is some greater force moving beyond the shadows of the universe, it is music like this. Here are five choral works that help bridge the ineluctable distance between the mundane and the divine.

♪ Claudio Monteverdi – Laudate dominum

I suppose this is a hymn, given the whole Latin thing, but it’s a jaunty enough tune to pass as an antecedent to the modern Christmas carol. This is from a compilation disc I have called A Baroque Christmas, so it has the added authenticity of having been written for the holiday too.

♪ Johann Sebastian Bach – Jesu, Joy Of Man’s Desiring

This is a bit of a cliché choice, but it’s really impossible not to love (my favourite lyrics: “Striving still to truth unknown / Soaring, dying round Thy throne”). You may also want to check out Josh Groban’s version, which is just a touch more saccharine but, you know, it’s Josh Groban, ergo it’s marvellous.

♪ Ralph Vaughan Williams – Fantasia on Christmas Carols

A lot of Vaughan Williams’s works are drawn from English folk songs, and this composition remixes – if I might use that ostentatiously postmodern word – a number of them to excellent effect. A rich baritone part occupies the heart of the work and gives it a very homey, pastoral feel.

♪ Gabriel Fauré – Requiem, Op. 48: Pie Jesu

Let’s just overlook the fact that is a Mass for the Dead and focus on the music, shall we? To me, Fauré’s Requiem has always been about the transcendence of death, and the famous “Pie Jesu,” sung here by a boy soprano – as it should be! – is the musical equivalent of paradise.

♪ Johann Sebastian Bach – Mass in B minor, BWV 232: Agnus Dei: Dona nobis pacem

“Dona nobis pacem,” the last movement of Bach’s monumental Mass of B minor, translates simply into “give us peace.”

the “H.O.L.I.D.A.Y. music” project part i: instrumental music.

2011-12-20T09:00:00.000-05:00

(Cartoon by Pablo Helguera, courtesy of Deceptive Cadence)

For the first part of the “H.O.L.I.D.A.Y. Music” Project, I have selected five pieces of purely instrumental music from my iTunes library for your listening pleasure. Some of them have an explicit link with Christmas, while others are justified through a series of impressionistic reasons that may lead you, the reader, to hold in doubt my grasp on reality. If you missed the introduction to this project, click here for to see what it’s all about.

♪ Maurice Ravel – Rapsodie espagnole: Feria

First, we have this joyful little romp from Ravel. The prominence of the piccolo and flute, the lilting waltz-like metre, and the heavy use of the tambourine – silver bells, if you would! – in the main theme suggest to me that this is the orchestral version of a holiday party at the optimal level of inebriation. Keep an ear out for some crazy trombone glissandos in the last minute or so; maybe that’s when your friend has had one too many chocolate martinis?

♪ Igor Stravinsky – Three Movements from Petrouchka: The Shrovetide Fair

“Three Movements from Petrouchka” is an arrangement that Stravinsky made of his eponymous ballet for the piano. What I love the most about the Three Movements is how Stravinsky managed to replicate the various colours of the orchestra for the piano without forgoing the very musical essence of the piano itself; plus, Yuja Wang’s command of piano technique is just sterling. This last movement, The Shrovetide Fair, makes me think of a bustling village Christmas market.

♪ Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – German Dance No. 3 in C major, K. 605 (“Sleigh Ride”)

This is the eighteenth-century version of “Sleigh Ride” and finds Mozart at his breeziest and most facile. It even features bells. Alas, there are no horse-mimicking sound effects, but one can imagine them easily enough!

♪ Marin Marais – La Sonnerie de Sainte-Geneviève du Mont-de-Paris

I heard this absolute jewel of the French Baroque on the radio last year and instantly began scouring the internet for a recording of it to add to my music library. It always brings to mind this church that I visited when I was in Paris (scroll all the way down to the bottom of the post for pictures), due to its connection with the saint. I associate this piece with denizens of the ancien régime dashing through the streets of Paris to Christmas Mass, a fresh snow swirling through the air as the bells toll the late hour.

♪ Arcangelo Corelli – Concerto grosso fatto per la notte di Nitale No. 8 in G minor, Op. 6: Pastorale (Largo)

Known as the “Christmas Concerto,” this work by Corelli is just so sweet – perfect for curling up in front of a fire with a good book and cup of hot cocoa in hand. I featured the Adagio from this concerto in my Christmas mix from two years ago, but this final movement, the Pastorale, rivals it in loveliness.

introducing the “H.O.L.I.D.A.Y. music” project.

2011-12-19T09:00:00.000-05:00

Although I try not to be too much of a grinch, the truth is that some aspects of the Christmas season do tend to bring out the worst of my misanthropy. I can’t stand the forced merriment, the endless parade of adverts, or the music. Oh God, the music. First, there is the crap that saturates the radio and shopping malls and makes me wish that I could pull a Beethoven and go deaf during the entire month of December. Second, it means that, for yet another year, every musical ensemble on the planet feels compelled to perform Handel’s Messiah.

I’ve whined about this before on both Facebook and Twitter, but allow me to elaborate at somewhat greater length here. I have nothing against the Messiah and will fully concede that it is one of the greatest works of choral music ever written, yadda yadda yadda, but the singular and borderline fetishistic worship of the piece during this time of year gets mind-numbingly dull with a rapidity that typically only associated with the dissolution of a Kardashian marriage. It’s not like Handel even wrote the damn thing for Christmas! – which actually makes me wonder how the Messiah became so closely linked with this holiday in particular. But that is beside the point.

As such, I am proud to launch something that I have termed the “Handel Only Limits Ideas of December-Appropriate and/or Yuletide-Inspired Music” Project, which can be conveniently abbreviated as the “H.O.L.I.D.A.Y. Music” Project (see what I did there?). Its objectives are as follows:

To foster awareness of the fact that classical music is an excellent & inspiring accompaniment to the winter/holiday season and, in any case, better than listening to this load of tripe
To furthermore recognise that there is more to classical music than a gaggle of sopranos screeching, “HAAAALLELUJAH! HAAAALLELUJAH!”
To incite a worldwide revolution against the alienating conformity that stems from the reification of the Messiah – let’s #occupytheconcerthall! 1 percent of the oratorios generate 84 percent of ticket revenues, man.

Or, er, not, as far as the third point is concerned, but do check back tomorrow for the first part of this project! (For all of the facetiousness of this introductory post, I should mention that I really did enjoy putting this together – I’m not that much of a grinch – and hope that you, ladies & gentlemen of the readership, enjoy it as well and find some new works to add to your own holiday musical rotations.)

novel writing postpartum; mix: the isabelle and anselm ep.

2011-12-17T11:00:00.000-05:00

Now that NaNoWriMo has been over for about two weeks and most of the novel writing withdrawal has faded away, I can think more clearly about what I want to do with this manuscript I now have on my hand. While I cannot foresee a sufficiently uninhibited moment in which I decide to let anyone read it in its entirety, I should still like to produce a properly edited version of it, just as a matter of personal satisfaction and literary closure. This is something I never managed to do with my first novel, despite attempting it on three separate occasions – I speak from personal experience when I say that 200,000-word drafts are incredibly unwieldy creatures.

The plan is to begin taking the proverbial red pen to my novel at the start of the new year, but how to actually go about editing? Revising academic writing is fairly straightforward because there are rather rigid norms of style and structure that should be observed, but what about this creative mumbo jumbo, when the goal is not to advance an argument but merely to tell a story in as pleasing a manner as possible? I’ve been collecting some advice regarding this very question, ranging from this Lifehacker post to NaNoWriMo’s own “I Wrote a Novel, Now What?” page, and the most useful thing I found is from the latter:

The first step toward a productive revision is to read your manuscript as a reader not an editor. Just curl up and read it, and make two lists. One is the parts that don’t work — a character so dull you can barely remember his name, parts you were tempted to skip (or sleep through!) The second list is for things you did like, because that’s important, too. At the end, if that first list looks too daunting, read the second and remind yourself of all the parts that worked — all the great stuff that deserves an equally great novel.

You would think that this is self-evident, but it struck me as so revelatory that, when I came across it, I grabbed my official writing notebook, drew a line down the middle of one page, and dived straight into my manuscript, taking notes on things that pleased me (“p. 22: the contrast in personalities when A&I first meet”) and things that caused me to wrinkle my nose in writerly disgust (“p. 19: A being lovey-dovey w/ his wife – he’s supposed to be emotionally repressed!”). I did manage to stop myself after about fifty pages or so, but I already have an idea of the more drastic rewrites and addition of new scenes that I will need to undertake. Best to get the big picture stuff sorted out before I tackle the dangling modifiers, awkward syntax, and repetitive diction that writing a novel in all of one month undoubtedly produced.

As a bit of a postscript, I did want to share a small mix that I put together while I was NaNo-ing. Music has always been instrumental (pun intended, certainly) in creating the right atmosphere for writing, and that was absolutely the case for this novel, as my two protagonists are both musicians and classical music might as well have been the third. Therefore, one writing playlist consisted of all of the pieces that I referenced in the manuscript or somehow corresponded to events in the story; the other was an ever-evolving musical distillation of the relationship between the aforementioned characters that lay at the heart of the novel. After much tinkering, this is what I’ve got.

the isabelle and anselm ep
♪ download ♪

Noe Venable – Prayer For Beauty

Erik Satie – Gymnopédie No. 3

Gem Club – Twins

Ellie Goulding – Heartbeats (The Knife Cover)

Death Cab for Cutie – You Are A Tourist

Florence + the Machine – Only If For A Night

Ingrid Michaelson – Maybe

la ci darem la mano.

2011-12-13T10:00:00.000-05:00

Some exciting news to share: I’m going to the Met in March! And the opera I’ll be seeing? Is none other than Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Ready, get set, *flaaaaaaaail*!

Here is the story of how this all came about. My mother had wanted all of us, as a family, to go to New York over the Christmas weekend to watch a show on Broadway; this ended up falling through mostly due to time constraints on my part (guess who doesn’t get to take time off between Christmas and New Year’s?). Nevertheless, when we were still considering this as option for holiday-time revelry, I ended up on the Met’s website, wondering if I might be able to prevail upon my maternal parental unit to substitute the musical with an opera. While browsing through the current season’s offerings, I noticed that there was an 8pm performance of Don Giovanni on the eve of my mother’s birthday. She’s never been to the opera before, so, being a filial daughter with a regular source of income, I eventually decided to buy tickets to this performance for her as a present.

Needless to say, there was also a very strong element of self-interest at work, since “go to the Met because it’s the freaking Met, man” and “see a Mozart opera” are somewhere on my classical music bucket list. As I noted in my post on learning to love ballet, opera is a subfield of classical music in which I am still a neophyte. For most of my life, I associated it with insufferable sopranos and the headaches their arias would induce. Then Amadeus came along and changed my mind, at least somewhat:

It’s kind of a given that I will love anything that flowed from Mozart’s ~~pen~~ quill, but I do think there is a reason that it was through his operas in particular that I first became interested in the genre. Opera is, at its core, such a heavily ornamented and aesthetic enterprise that the theatrics I associate with the canonical 19th century works (Verdi, Puccini, Wagner & Co., I am looking at you) still tend to strike me as overblown rather than inspiring; it is all very weighty stuff. I have learned to appreciate it more as the years have gone on – after all, the two operas I’ve seen to date, La Traviata and Tosca, definitely do not hold back when it comes to drama – but it remains an acquired taste that I have yet to fully develop.

With Mozart, though, the fleet-footedness of his music is a welcome counterbalance to this, and his melodies are instantly memorable and crafted with crystalline clarity. I have three of his operas in my iTunes library, Don Giovanni being among them (the other two are Le nozze di Figaro and Die Zauberflöte). Merely listening to an opera, though, is like walking through a museum blindfolded as the paintings are described to you: it suffices, but not really.

Basically, I get all jittery with excitement and classical music nerdiness when I think about this, even though it is still three and a half months away, but I know without a doubt that it’s going to be a highlight of 2012. I will leave you the very famous duet from Don Giovanni referenced in the title of the post. I’ve been familiar with it since I was about eight years old, when I used my allowance to buy this "Greatest Hits" by Mozart CD, but there was no way I could have known at the time that it involves Giovanni putting his moves on a lady and being a total perv in the process.

cate marvin, “scenes from the battle of us.”

2011-12-11T11:33:00.001-05:00

You are like a war novel, entirely lacking
female characters, except for an occasional
letter that makes one of the men cry.

I am like a table
that eats its own legs off
because it’s fallen
in love with the floor.

My frantic hand can’t find where my leg
went. You can play the tourniquet. A tree
with white limbs will grow here someday.

Or maybe a pup tent
that’s collapsed in on itself
it so loves the sleep
of men sleeping beneath it.

The reason why women dislike war movies
may have something to do with why men hate
romantic comedies: they are both about war.

Perhaps I should
live in a pig’s trough.
There I’d be wanted.
There I’d be tasted.

When the mail bag drops from the sky
and lands heavy on the jungle floor, its letters
are prepared to swim away with your tears.

One letter reads:
I can barely feel
furtive. The other:
I am diminishing.

five things i’ve learned from repeated twice-weekly encounters with a treadmill.

2011-12-08T11:00:00.000-05:00

With my novel writing days behind me, I’ve been trying to return to something that more closely approximates a normal routine: going to bed well before 1am, lowering my coffee/espresso intake, and returning to the gym after a month of spotty attendance. The latter is actually quite important to me because, as anyone who has known me for a while knows, I had been defying a lengthy history of aversion to physical activity until NaNo interrupted. I have hardly transformed myself into a marathon-running automaton – the longest distance I ever run is a shade over three miles – but this marks such a drastic change in my day-to-day life that I’ve been meaning to remark upon it for some time. This past Monday, I hit up the treadmill for the first time in two weeks, and here are some thoughts that passed through my mind at the time, distilled into a somewhat more coherent form:

1. There’s beauty in the breakdown, or so sang Frou Frou in that famous song from Garden State. Chalk it up to vanity, perfectionism, or both, but I always try to keep my appearance at work as immaculate as possible. As a result, I am constantly wondering about ultimately inane things like, “How badly has the DC humidity screwed with my hair? Did I just accidentally rub my eyes, thereby smearing mascara all over the place and giving myself that ever-so-chic racoon look? Rain and foundation are not an ideal combination.” The gym places a wall of mirrors right in front of the treadmills so that, you know, I can stare at my gorgeous mid-workout self? But I can’t tell you how much of a relief it is to just not give a fuck that there are unsightly sweat stains all over my shirt because, well, that’s the point.

2. Breathing solves most problems. In my two years of high school biology, I learned on multiple occasions about aerobic respiration and the Krebs cycle. When I played lacrosse in ninth grade – yes, yes, laugh away – I used to, during mandatory team runs, meditate on the chemical reactions involved in this process because they reminded me that, as long as I was still madly inhaling oxygen into my lungs, the mitochondria in my trusty cells would use it to create energy, which would help me keep running. And because I’m a nerd. Years later, can I recall any of these reactions in particular? No, but I do remember to keep breathing.

3. Music also solves a lot of problems, if and only if it satisfies certain conditions. I have spent hours in pursuit of the ideal workout music, and my empirical analysis has produced following conclusion: it must be (1) fast, which for me is 120+ BPM, and (2) loud, deafeningly so. Satisfy these criteria, song, and you will gain entrance to my exclusive “Gym Music” playlist, even if you are some awful Katy Perry tune that I would never listen to under any other circumstances. (I atone for this by rocking out to Prokofiev piano concertos during my post-workout commute.)

4. “Pain is fear leaving the body.” This is one of those stock inspirational sayings that I saw on a lot of sport-related attire in high school, but it does occur to me that there’s a modicum of truth to it. About fifteen minutes into my run this week, I felt the beginnings of a cramp spasm across my abdomen – a completely expected consequence of not having exercised for the last two weeks, I guess. Any time I am afflicted by some kind of physical ailment in the middle of my workout, I find myself seized by a momentary panic. Am I getting sick? Is my body totally disintegrating on me? I’ll bet that the super intense guy thoughtlessly sprinting away on his treadmill two down from me doesn’t feel like this. But then I remember the importance of respiration, tell myself that, baby, I’m a firework, and I keep going.

5. Nothing is as terrible as what I have already endured. Somehow, I happen upon my most melodramatic musings while in my most physically compromised state. I don’t necessarily believe that running makes me happy (insert obligatory Legally Blonde reference about exercise, endorphins, and their bearings on the likelihood of homicide here), but it does clear my mind better than just about anything else. I was in an especially crappy mood on Monday for many reasons – NaNoWriMo withdrawal, for one, was hitting me hard – and the last thing I wanted to do was subject myself to half an hour of voluntary quasi-torture. At one point in every workout, however, there is a Moment in which I find myself settle into a rhythm of syncopated paces and breaths, hit my stride, and, even though I know I am nothing more than the human equivalent of a hamster scurrying about in its wheel, I feel like I could conquer empires. Or at least run across one.

nanowrimo 2011: that’s all, folks.

2011-12-01T21:54:00.001-05:00

Disclaimer: Novel writing is an extremely mad undertaking that may result in extreme lack of sleep, greater-than-usual evidence of untreated obsessive-compulsive disorder, and a tendency to dance wildly in one’s chair to Florence + the Machine at wholly inappropriate hours of the early morning. Do not attempt this at home. Seriously. (But playing god to your own literary universe is kind of fun.)

I’ll try to keep this as short as I can, mostly because, after this most recent stretch of sleep deprivation – the last time I slept this little was when I was in the middle of Carroll Round/senior thesis madness – all I want to do is maximise the number of hours I spend unconscious tonight…in which case I shouldn’t be blogging at all, right? But rationality is totes overrated, you guys.

I had already won National Novel Writing Month on 20 November, but, last night, I accomplished something arguably more important: I finished my novel. The last time I attempted this writing challenge, I also won NaNoWriMo, putting down 65,000 words in November, but then it took me another two months of writing at a NaNo-inspired pace to complete the entire manuscript. I simply couldn’t imagine doing that again, so, after I went over 50,000 words, it became of paramount importance to have as near to a complete story as I could by the end of the month.

And that was actually rather difficult to achieve. I experienced a motivation/exhaustion crisis in the two days after I broke the 50K barrier. That was also around the time my novel, plot-wise (to the extent that it has one), was going through an uneventful patch, which made mindlessly spewing out words something of a challenge. Indeed, even though I was ultimately able to maintain my average of 2,500 words/day through the month, I can tell you that, post-50K, it took me significantly longer to produce said amount of prose than it did pre-50K.

But, you know what? I did it, and, even if the last thing I want to do right now is look at this novel after living and breathing it for the last thirty days, I am quite proud of this achievement. It’s rare for me to say such a thing, given my penchant for self-deprecation, so I hope that gives you some hint as to how much I mean that. I was so proud that I went ahead and dropped $25 on an official NaNoWriMo 2011 Winner’s Circle t-shirt (see: photo at the top of this post), which conveniently arrived in the post yesterday.

I don’t feel the need to reflect overly much on my second successful NaNoWriMo, since a lot of the lessons I learned the first time remained relevant, but I did want to relay one observation that I made. I wrote my first novel when I was seventeen, and, although that had any number of plotlines, one of the major ones went something along the lines of, “Female Protagonist meets Love Interest, a Lengthy Coy Flirtation ensues until a Dramatic Kiss occurs, and they are just, like, so in Love” (and, since I’m in the process of embarrassing myself on the internet anyway, I might as well mention that Love Interest’s name was Roger – and, no, that’s not a coincidence). At the outset of my second novel, my female main character is in a relationship, but that fell apart spectacularly within the first 12,000 words or so…

Here are some numbers, because numbers are fun. I wrote a total of 75,391 words for an average of 2,513 words/day. The fewest number of words written in a day was 1,015 (22 Nov), the most was 4,561 (30 Nov!). I fit these words into 1,941 paragraphs, which themselves consisted of a total of 5,711 lines. The entire novel was distributed into 7 chapters and 1 epilogue. To give you a sense of how long this is, this came out to almost exactly 125 8” x 11.5” pages (single-spaced with size 12 Times New Roman font, one-inch margins on all sides). To offer you yet a bit more perspective, the first Harry Potter book contains a total of 76,944 words. Thinking about that makes me realise how short my novel actually is, given I can breeze through Sorcerer’s Stone in about two hours. But, then, I practically have it memorised, so I’m probably not the best person to provide an objective opinion.

On a parting note, I do want to express my profuse & endless gratitude for all of the encouragement that you, my dear friends, have given me over the last month. Whether it was through Gchat, Twitter, e-mail, Facebook, phone, or Skype – O modern communication and its myriads! – your positive reinforcement was very much appreciated and kept me going when my spirits and caffeine intake were low. I couldn’t have done it with you. I love you. And I will stop spamming your newsfeeds with my novel-related status updates, I promise.

what winning nanowrimo feels like.

2011-11-21T21:27:00.001-05:00

To set the scene – because there’s no such thing as too much exposition, of course – I entered my Friday night writing session with just a shade over 40,000 words’ worth of novel-in-progress. It felt like just yesterday that I had reached the 10K mark and thought to myself that I could actually do this, so to suddenly be “only” 10,000 words away from the finish line provided me with a massive & sustained adrenaline kick. It also helped that I had an entire weekend ahead of me – seriously prime writing time for the frantic novelist. I had been happy to coast along at a rate of 2,500-ish words a day or so but kicked it up a fairly serious notch. I was determined to reach 50,000 words by the end of Sunday, not out of any necessity but largely just to prove to myself that I could.

On Saturday, I wrote 4,144 words. This came shy of the storied “5K Day” and certainly didn’t hold a candle to my 10K Day from NaNoWriMo 2006 (but that is an anecdote for another time), but it was my best writing day of the month so far. This took me to almost 47,000 words, putting me in good striking distance of my goal.

And, yesterday, I waited until after my afternoon plans and dinner had elapsed before sitting down at my laptop. I pulled out all the stops to keep my writing muse engaged and inspired: I wrote by candlelight, hosted a very loud one-person karaoke to this positively bitchin' remix of Ellie Goulding's "This Love (Will Be Your Downfall)," and listened to Beethoven’s Ninth. Twice. You know the one:

♪ Ludwig van Beethoven – ~~Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125 (“Choral”): Presto - Allegro ma non troppo~~ ODE TO JOY, WOT WOT

A little bit past midnight on Monday, while the above was playing, I happened to take note of my word count.

I kind of felt like this.

(And this, just because I never get tired of it. Suck it, Novak.)

(Or if Roger Federer isn’t your thing…)

I updated my spreadsheet of doom and provided some totally gratuitous commentary.

I put on some Phoenix and danced in my chair. Because I’m cool like that, you know?

So, yes! Although I cannot verify my word count on the NaNoWriMo website until the 25th, I have unofficially triumphed in this most absurd and unhinged of literary challenges. Of course, the story – both figurative and literal – isn’t over yet. I have another nine days to shoot for an even higher target (70,000 or 75,000? I haven’t decided yet) and, in any case, have an incomplete manuscript on my hands. I will write until it is done and am fairly confident that I can tie up the plot before the end of November.

At least I hope I can, because I really miss sleeping…

(And, now, back to my blogging hiatus. Which I realise I haven’t been keeping very well, but I can’t keep all of my promises, can I?)

ra ra riot at the 9:30 club.

2011-11-14T19:00:00.000-05:00

Taking a break from writing about, um, whatever it is I’m writing about for NaNoWriMo to recap a concert I attended before it becomes even more embarrassingly out of date…

Because I don’t go to concerts too regularly, I try to make each one of them count. The four artists I’ve seen live so far (Imogen Heap, Patrick Wolf, Ingrid Michaelson, and Ellie Goulding), I had already adored them for quite some time, so I went into those gigs being already more or less familiar with their songs. This was not the case with Ra Ra Riot, an indie pop outfit similar in sound to Vampire Weekend but with less irony and pretentiousness. They were a group that I enjoyed including in my music rotation every now and then but not one that inspired fanatic fangirl-ish behaviour. But I’m still very glad that I decided to catch them at the 9:30 Club for reasons detailed below.

Growing up as I did in the heyday of the Backstreet Boys/N’SYNC/Britney Spears/Like, Whatever Era, I was long under the impression that all concerts were large-scale affairs in which you paid $70 a head to sit in the nosebleed section of a basketball stadium, peer at the blurry figures on the stage below, and assume that among them was the pop god(dess) that one idolised from afar. I still remember being sixteen years old and shocked – shocked, I say! – when I showed up at the Theatre of Living Arts in Philly to see Imogen Heap and discovered that not all music venues were Coliseum-esque edifices. Six years later, and the novelty of that still hasn’t completely worn off.

I don’t believe that Ra Ra Riot managed to sell out the 9:30 Club for their gig, and this, combined with my insistence on arriving to these things freakishly early, meant that I was able stake out a place directly in front of the stage. Purely on principle alone, I thought that this was a really cool experience, and it also meant that I got to see things of which I normally don’t have a good view, such as the set list –

– the occasional toy piano lost among a tangle of cords and wires –

– and, of greatest interest to me, the curious set of knobs & pedals that the guitarist uses to distort, amplify, or otherwise alter the sound of his instrument. As you can see, I was literally standing next to this for the entire evening.

Before Ra Ra Riot took the stage, we were treated two not one but two opening acts. First up were Yellow Ostrich, whose frontman Alex Schaaf uses vocal loops to give his band’s music a very sunny feel to it.

Their debut album, The Mistress, is definitely worth checking out. For now, allow me to offer a song for your listening pleasure –

♪ Yellow Ostrich – WHALE

— and the obligatory set list:

Elephant King
Hold On
Campaign
Marathon Runner
WHALE
The Shakedown
Mary

Following Yellow Ostrich were a five-man act called Delicate Steve. They’re the only band I’ve seen to date who insisted on setting up their own lighting equipment. The stage was completely dark except for two lights placed on either side of it, which were turned on/modified with various colour filters as needed. (If anybody was at all curious, they were also responsible for the toy piano mentioned earlier in this post.) They apparently specialise in fairly loopy-sounding, incredibly frenetic instrumental pieces – not exactly my cup of tea, I think, but good in small doses.

As for Ra Ra Riot, they were, quite simply, a band with great stage presence and energy. Their records can come off as a touch cerebral and distant, so it was great to witness the sheer passion that went into their music making. They were the most guitar-heavy act I’d seen live, the openers that had just proceeded them notwithstanding. I’ve seen vocalists tango with their microphone stands all the time, but I got a serious kick out watching the guitarist and bassist rather lose themselves in their performances too.

I must, of course, also comment on the fact that Ra Ra Riot’s instrumental line-up features both a cello and a violin. Their presence was easily what drew me to the band in the first place, and, together, they give the music just right dash of sentimentality and warmth. The cello is also used to great effect to embellish the bass line (see: the track below).

♪ Ra Ra Riot – Ghost Under Rocks

Ra Ra Riot have released a bunch of EPs and two full-length albums, The Rhumb Line and The Orchard. I have much love for the former, while the latter meanders a bit too much for me to find it as compelling. “Ghost Under Rocks” is a favourite of mine, but, lately, I’ve been listening to “Can You Tell” on repeat quite a bit. “Dying Is Fine” probably takes the cake, though, for its sweetly sad instrumental bridge and the e.e. cummings-inspired chorus (“Oh baby, you know that dying is fine, but maybe / I wouldn’t like death if death were good / not even if death were good”).

♪ Ra Ra Riot – Can You Tell

♪ Ra Ra Riot – Dying Is Fine

Set list:

Too Too Too Fast
Shadowcasting
Too Dramatic
Oh, La
Do You Remember
Each Year
You And I Know
Can You Tell
Foolish
Ghost
Kansai
St. Peter’s Day
Run My Mouth
Boy
Winter ‘05 (Encore)
Valerie (Cover) (Encore)
Dying Is Fine (Encore)

On a final, shallow note, I never understood the whole “girls being attracted to men who happen to know how to strum a few I-IV-V chords on a really much too ubiquitous string instrument” phenomenon, but, after staring at Ra Ra Riot’s guitarist Milo Bonacci for the better part of the evening, I think I get it now.

this is what happens when unrepentant econ nerds write novels.

2011-11-07T21:45:00.001-05:00

There was a time – not too long ago, in fact – when I barely knew how to use the “SUM” function in Excel (hint to younger self: it adds stuff), but no longer. Behold:

I also used spreadsheet back in 2006 to keep track of my NaNoWriMo progress, but it was little more than a glorified tally. This time around, I have outfitted an Excel file with plenty of basic arithmetic formulas, conditional operators, summary statistics, and a bar chart with trendline. Can you believe that I’m on track to hit 65,000 words? Yeah, neither can I.

And, of course, there are columns with much useful information: the number of words written each day, the total number of words written to date, the number of words I need to be writing in order to hit the 50,000-word target, and my net operating balance of words, as it were.

So, in sum, novel writing is going well. And I need a life. Not that the two are at all related or anything.

wanted: jaffa cakes, or at least a reasonably good approximation thereof.

2011-11-03T11:00:00.000-04:00

Some time ago, I found myself with a sudden craving for Jaffa cakes, which, along with salt & vinegar crisps and more cups of tea than I care to count, were a life-sustaining potable for me during Oxford essay crises. What are Jaffa cakes, you may be asking? To this, I answer, “Why, they are only the most divine kind of biscuit to ever be introduced to the digestive system of Homo sapiens.” The Wikipedia article on Jaffa cakes is rather hilariously serious and manages to leave out the best part about them: when dipped in tea, the chocolate gets deliciously melty, the cake softens just the right amount, and the only way I can properly describe the orange stuff in the middle is “OM NOM NOM.”

The next day, I went to my local Giant to see if they, by any chance, stocked them in their international foods aisle. Although I sadly could not find the proper McVities brand of Jaffa cakes, I did stumble across a kind of biscuit called Pim’s (heh) whose box promised “tangy orange flavored [sic] filling, soft sweet biscuit and smooth European chocolaty topping.” Apparently the biscuits are of Belgian provenance, which I am sure would make Middle England cringe, but what is a Yank to do? I took a box home with me anyway.

They look a lot like the Jaffa cakes I had in England, and, most importantly, they passed the Tea Dipping Test. Perhaps this means I have been away from the UK for too long, but these imitation biscuits tasted just as good as I remember the originals being. Yum.

Pim’s will therefore suffice while I continue my search for proper Jaffa cakes. If anyone has any tips on how they may be obtained short of (1) ordering them from England or (2) going to the other side of the pond to just buy a suitcase’s worth, they would be most appreciated!

october 2011 in review; novel-writing hiatus.

2011-11-01T15:00:00.000-04:00

This Month in Blogging

This month, I shared a mix inspired by Garden State, expounded upon my love for both Beatrix Potter and Franz Liszt, did a bit of cultural branching out, committed myself to doing NaNoWriMo, mulled over the death of Muammar el-Qaddafi & other related matters, attended my first Georgetown homecoming as an alumna, and played interior decorator.

Mind

October continued to be quite a busy month for me at work, and I am glad to have gotten through it without too many late nights. I finally splurged on a space heater for my office, so my workday, from a purely homeostatic perspective, has undergone a dramatic improvement.

My attempts at financial prudence rather failed this month, but it turns out that buying furnishings and organisational things for one’s flat is expensive! And I’m sure a trip to the outlets in Williamsburg, VA did not help. My budget is hoping for a less taxing (hah) November, but there’s a holiday season somewhere in the near future, right?

Body

I more or less continued last month’s progress vis-à-vis trips to the gym. I also made good on my promise to start practising yoga. It was almost miserably debilitating at first: I could barely walk after my first beginner’s class, as it was not at all relaxing like the classes I had done at Oxford! Post-yoga soreness has definitely lessened over the course of the month, which I take to be a sign that I am getting better at this whole fitness thing.

Heart

Last month, I reiterated my long-standing (indeed, lifelong) pledge to not lapse into misanthropy so much. This month was, in fact, a very good one for socialising: seeing my friend Amanda twice, hosting Katherine and Janice at my place during homecoming, homecoming in general, guest staffing at NCSC, going to concerts, and general catching up with distant friends. It was altogether very lovely!

Soul

There was a lot of media consumption this month in the form of TV (Downton Abbey, Sherlock, and, most recently, The Big Bang Theory) and music (ballet at the Kennedy Center and, on less highbrow note, Ra Ra Riot at the 9:30 club – recap of the latter is still forthcoming!). Much of the month, though, was devoted to daydreaming about and planning for NaNoWriMo.

And, speaking of which:

Given that I will be spending this month trying to churn out at least 1,667 words daily, I expect I won’t have too much time for blogging in this space (though I will be running a few posts – unless, of course, I just give up on the silly novel project altogether). It has been so long since I have written anything other than an academic assignment, e-mail, or blog post that I fear I have forgotten how to write creatively, but I do look forward to the challenge. As a certain fictional theoretical physicist once said:

(And, yes, I am bothered by the absence of a comma in that declaration. I’m sure Sheldon would be too.)

my flat still doesn’t have a catchy nickname, but it looks nicer now.

2011-10-31T10:00:00.000-04:00

Growing up, I was never one of those girls who aspired to be an interior decorating. Now that I have a residence of my own, however, I am starting to see the merits of having an interest in such a thing. Getting the aesthetics of one’s home right can go a long way in making it feel more comfortable, and, sometimes, small adjustments can greatly streamline one’s daily routine. After letting my flat more or less function and look the way it has since I first moved here (with the exception of the introduction of a designated table for dining), I was inspired by my friend Amanda’s enviable one-bedroom apartment to implement some improvements of my own.

First, curtains! These took forever to pick out, as all of Bed Bath & Beyond’s selections were much too large for my windows. Eventually, I found these turquoise (“Chesapeake blue”) ones at Target that both had the right dimensions and loosely matched the vaguely blue colour scheme of the surrounding furnishings. It is amazing, how much cosier my flat felt after I hung them up. They also serve an imminently practical purpose: facilitation of sleeping in on the weekends by keeping the sunlight at bay. Malin 1, east-facing windows 0.

From Bed Bath & Beyond, I did pick up two overpriced shelving units. One has allowed me to better organise my (admittedly limited) tea collection –

— and the other has allowed me to exploit more efficiently my kitchen cabinet space.

I’ve noticed over the last few months that I do not sit on my sofa very much. Ever since I placed a delightfully soft shag rug in front of it, that has definitely changed. In fact, it has become my favourite place for afternoon naps!

Of all the changes I have made, however, finally buying a shoe rack has resulted in the greatest improvement of my #firstworldproblems-worthy living standards. Previously, I had all of my shoes lined up on the floor in my walk-in closet. This not only meant that they took up a lot of space, but it was also grossly unproductive vis-à-vis getting ready in the morning, as I would have to get dressed, pick out my pairs of shoes for the day (yes, pairs: one for the office, one for the commute, and sometimes one of the gym), place non-commuting shoes in tote bags, store those tote bags in some larger bag that I would drag to work, and make my way to the door. At this point, I would realise that I did not have my keys or work ID card on me and scramble frantically about as I tried to remember where I tossed them the day before.

Oh, and there was always the risk that I would put on a pair of shoes while in my closet, be too lazy to take them off prior to the frantic scrambling, and end up getting the floor dirty, which only worsened my early morning grievances. Asian habits die hard.

Since the installation of the shoe rack, however, I no longer have this problem! My footwear, boots notwithstanding, is all easily accessible! And three adhesive hooks positioned directly above it mean that I no longer have to turn my belongings upside down in pursuit of an errant umbrella! Plus, more closet space, now that the shoes have moved out. Who would say no to that?

home is where the hilltop is.

2011-10-30T21:27:00.001-04:00

As always, a somewhat lengthy blogging queue to get through, so let’s get to it!

Georgetown Homecoming was last weekend, although, in my case, “homecoming” is perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, as I am no more than 2-3 miles away from campus at any given moment and have already gone back there a few times since graduation. That said, I remember being surprised by all of the Facebook statuses leading up to the weekend that went something to the effect of, “Can’t wait to be in DC!” or “How long’s it been?” For some reason, I never expected that alumni actually go back for homecoming, but, then, as a student, I was either in the library or England for all four of my homecomings. (I cannot know the library bit with absolute certainty, but, probabilistically speaking, this statement is true.)

As my friends and I walked the familiar route up O Street to Healy Gates, however, any cynicism and detachment quickly withered away. I’m not sure if it was the arch of blue and white balloons that adorns the university’s entrance every time Something Exciting happens or the “Welcome Home Alumni” banner that was indirectly addressed to me, but how can I ever forget that I spent three years working and longing to be here, another three years moulded by Georgetown’s tutelage, and will spend the remainder of my existence living out its lessons? Mingling among friends and classmates (some of whom had flown from places more far flung than, um, Columbia Heights to be there!) at the tailgate that day, I was reminded – not for the first time and hardly for the last, I am sure – of how unbelievably fortunate I am to have met them here, that, regardless of where the future may find us, we might all be able to call Georgetown our own.

And, yesterday, I relived my undergraduate days by dropping by NCSC to guest staff for my friends Adam and Shuo’s madcap Enron central management committee. Needless to say, orchestrating the demise of a massive multinational corporation amidst a sea of laptops, papers, and staffers shouting, “Does anybody want to be a Pakistani militant in five minutes?” was the most ridiculous and fun thing that I’ve done in a long time. While my List of Things I Rue About my Time at Georgetown is thankfully not too long, not partaking in more Model UN insanity is somewhere on it. Indeed, looking back of my undergraduate years, some of my best memories – staying up all night babysitting copy machines (this one being more ridiculous than fun, obviously), styling Matt Shapiro’s hair so that he might make a more convincing Hu Jintao, and learning far too much about the Chinese Communist Party’s penchant for plenums over the decades – were made in desiccated hotel conference rooms.

I’m having trouble properly expressing how lovely and touching it was to be able to wander back into the MUN world and still feel welcomed. That, too, was a kind of homecoming.

franz liszt: a bicentennial appreciation.

2011-10-25T10:30:00.000-04:00

The classical music world invariably goes a-twitter whenever there is some important anniversary to mark – unsurprisingly, they are a historically minded bunch – and, this time around, it is Hungarian composer Franz Liszt’s turn to bathe in the posthumous limelight. 22 October marked his 200th birthday, and, although I am not too much of a Liszt connoisseur myself, I can hardly let this occasion pass without word. (Previously around these parts, I celebrated Mozart's 255th birthday and flailed over Chopin, well, just because I could.)

Liszt is a towering figure in music history. Well before Beatlemania or Bieber Fever swept the world, there was Lisztomania: at the height of his fame, Franz toured the European continent and collected legions of (mostly female) fans along the way. His large hand span (see above photo) is a thing of legend. Yet Liszt can also be a rather divisive figure among classical music cognoscenti and has a bit of a bad rap in many circles. Not unlike a certain famous Chinese pianist, his music is criticised for being all style and no substance, encouraging heart-on-one’s-sleeve emotionalism at the cost of serious musicianship. His popular image as the premier rock star of the 19th century probably doesn’t help his case in the court of academic/elite opinion either. There is some merit to this view, I think: listening to his music, one can be hard pressed to find the ineffable qualities that could confer a sense of greatness to a composer. Measure him against some of the consensus greats – Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, etc. – and he does seem to fall short of this pantheon.

As NPR’s classical music blog posited, though, simply because Liszt was not “great” does not mean that he wasn’t important. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that, especially where piano is concerned, he had an undeniable influence on the instrument. I might even go farther and argue that modern-day piano was definitively shaped by both how Liszt wrote for the instrument and how he played it. If the compositions of, say, Mozart (1756-1791) sound too dainty to our ears, it is because the keyboard instrument of that time simply could not produce that kind of sound (music history digression: Mozart wrote all of his keyboard music not for the piano but the pianoforte, which sounds and looks like this – very different, no?). By the time Liszt took up composing, technological innovations allowed the piano to evolve closer to its present incarnation, and its sonic potential expanded correspondingly.

Liszt’s music exploits it to great effect; what some might write off as pure theatrics are, to me, a breathless exploration of the many colours that a piano can produce. His set of twelve Transcendental Etudes demonstrates wonderfully the expressive possibilities of the instrument. The third (“Paysage”) rivals the best of Chopin’s music for sheer romance –

♪ Franz Liszt – Etudes d'exécution transcendante, S. 139: Paysage. Poco adagio

– while the fourth (“Mazeppa”) is rather terrifying and unsettling –

♪ Franz Liszt – Etudes d'exécution transcendante, S. 139: Mazeppa. Presto

– and the ninth ("Harmonies de soir") has a ravishing elegance about it.

♪ Franz Liszt – Etudes d'exécution transcendante, S. 139: Harmonies du soir. Andantino

As you can tell from the names of these pieces, Liszt often wrote music with certain stories, ideas, or themes in mind. A great example of this is Totenanz (“Dance of Death”), which was written for piano and orchestra. It riffs on the famous “Dies irae” motif in the Western classical music tradition to divine demonic effect. Note the dissonant, almost percussions-like piano chords at the very beginning of the piece: they could have been written by some avant-garde composer living in the early 20th century. As New York Times classical music critic Anthony Tommasini noted, Liszt’s works foreshadowed the harmonic innovations and subversions of the modernist composers that followed him.

♪ Franz Liszt – Totentanz, S. 126

nd is some of his stuff the classical music equivalent of pop music? Sure, but must that necessarily be a bad thing? I dare you to listen to his second Hungarian Rhapsody, which I am almost certain you’ve heard before in some context or another, and not get carried away by it:

♪ Franz Liszt – Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 in C sharp minor, S. 244

The piano truly could have asked for no greater advocate than Franz Liszt. He almost singlehandedly invented the idea of the piano recital and the individual virtuoso-genius that helmed the entire enterprise: the vast concert hall dimmed but for the spotlight fixed upon an ebony-hued concert grand, the dashingly romantic figure seated at the keys, rendering the audience speechless with his brilliant technique until they erupt in a chorus of, “Bravo! Bravo!” What little kid pianist doesn’t dream, if only for a few deluded minutes, about owning the stage in so commanding a fashion? And any aspiring concert pianist will have to summit at least a few serious Liszt compositions – the colossal Sonata in B minor comes to mind – if his/her career is to have any staying power whatsoever. They’re like a classical music litmus test. (It is also useful to have a Liszt in your back pocket for truly jaw-dropping encores. “La Campanella” is a good one for those occasions.)

To end on a more anecdotal note, I owe Franz Liszt something of a personal debt as well. When I was eleven, my piano teacher assigned his aptly named Liebesträume (“Love Dream”) for me to learn.

♪ Franz Liszt – Liebesträume

Certain parts of it sound very difficult and impressive, though I suppose the fact that little me could play it obviously suggests that it really isn’t! Nevertheless, Liebesträume was so different from the boring Hadyn sonatas and stuffy Bach minuets to which I was accustomed, and it was the first piece to ever genuinely endear me to the instrument that I had, at this point, played for seven years. And, well, if Liszt could compose something that made a mere child feel that she had a real kind of music within her, then he must have done something right.

interesting times indeed.

2011-10-20T23:19:00.001-04:00

I listen to NPR while getting ready for work, and, while making my sandwich for lunch this morning, I heard that Muammar el-Qaddafi was killed following the capture of his hometown of Sirte by rebel forces. It was the long-awaited conclusion to the fall of Tripoli in August, more proximately, and, of course, the entirety of the Libyan civil war. I’m not sure to what extent I expected this news, but I did put my mayonnaise-covered knife down and simply stood there for a moment, thinking about what I had just heard – not only about the deposed, now deceased dictator, but all that has transpired in the last year.

The Arab Spring, the long-term implications (or, indeed, short-term arrangements) of which have yet to be determined, but its mere happening is already of historical significance. Has the status quo in any region ever been shattered so utterly during the post-Cold War era? Osama bin Laden, killed nearly ten years after he, too, changed the world. The earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the latest reminder that nature can be capable of both great cruelty and capriciousness. The teetering fortunes of a world economy that never really quite regained its footing following a financial crisis and recession endowed with the kind of deeply scaring qualities that define a generation. Burning buildings in Athens that seem more at place in a tragic history about the 1930s than the present day, when we have declared ourselves done with All That. The world’s most influential country – as the U.S. still is, regardless of any relative decline in its power – often appearing on the verge of ungovernable, then turning to a vacuous real estate mogul, a failed narcissistic state governor, and/or former pizza company executive for national salvation. (Parts of the country did, in any case.)

During my lunch break, I came across the above video in The Lede’s coverage of developments surrounding Qaddafi’s death that was purportedly taken following his capture. Viewer discretion advised, as, well, it is incredibly raw footage. I am somehow reminded of the first and only political demonstration to date: “This is what democracy looks like!” we shouted, our collected voices throaty with idealism, but how silly and affected that all feels. No, this is what democracy looks like, or this is what democracy may look like. Its aims may be pure and noble – indeed, from the partisan’s point of view, they by definition must be – but revolution is always gritty, violent business, not at all like the romantic stories that I have read about in books and seen in films.

I am reluctant to gloat over anybody’s death, no matter how loathsome the figure in question, but, watching this video, I am moved by its power. In it, Qaddafi compels you to watch him: the despot who brought great suffering upon the people he ruled for decades while striding across the international arena, swathed in his silks and a hagiographic glow, reduced to a human rag doll by two gunshots to the leg. I wonder what he must have been thinking in those last moments of his life. Nothing humbles great men like the realisation that, at the very end of things, the tyrant is just flesh, blood, and bone.

down the novel-writing rabbit hole i go – again.

2011-10-17T23:23:00.001-04:00

Almost five years ago exactly, I was more or less completely finished with my college applications and was, as a result, dreadfully bored. What was an ennui-afflicted adolescent to do? Why, write a novel, of course! I had tried my hand at this noble and monumental task a few times over the years, making my first serious effort at it around age 10, but all I had to show for it was a number of woefully incomplete drafts, all of them composed in a frenzy until inspiration, perspiration, or both simply fizzled out. This time, though, I vowed to avoid such a fate. This time, I had NaNoWriMo on my side.

NaNoWriMo stands for “National Novel Writing Month” and happens annually in November. The goal: to write a 50,000-word novel by the end of the month. Perhaps you are wondering why anybody would submit him/herself to such a trial. Allow me to quote from NaNoWriMo’s website:

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. This approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

To summarise the entire NaNo experience, allow me to quote from a reflection I wrote for my AP English class regarding the entire experience (yes, I am a lazy blogger):

…afraid that I would come down with a severe writer's block at some point, I committed myself to writing at least and hopefully more than 2,000 words a day until the draft was complete. November came and went: my word count stood at around 65,000, making me an official winner, but I wasn’t finished yet. A story without a proper ending? Unthinkable. Thus, I settled into a routine of four hours of sleep a night and an over-reliance on caffeine, at last emerging victorious on January 29, 2007. The final word count: 201,884, or about 20,000 words longer than the Old Testament.

I was, in other words, more verbose than God.

I did not have the temerity to even dream of taking up novel writing again while at Georgetown, when I barely had time to breathe, let alone attempt this particular exercise. In the months since my liberation from university, however, I had been vaguely entertaining the idea of participating in NaNo a second time – I mean, if not now, when? I do have a novel under my belt, this is true, but, as promised by the website, the crap-to-quality ratio is incredibly high. Surely, I began to think, there would be merit behind a desire to improve this? I hardly aspire to, say, David Foster Wallace-esque literary heights, but it is not too much to hope that I can produce something better than the the transparently wish fulfilment-y dreck that saturated my seventeen year-old mind. Besides, almost everything I have written in the last five years was first forced through academic straightjacket, which permits little room for flights of imagination. How confining a space that has been!

In conjunction with my dear friend and Facebook spouse Carson, who had also been toying with a similar idea, it has been decided: come 1 November, I am going to retreat into my antisocial bunker, pick up anon the craft of writing, and butcher it as best I can in the pursuit of an arbitrary production target. We bounced ideas off one another over Skype for over an hour this evening, and it has been a long time since I’ve felt this giddy about a potential project. We have even set up a private blog as a way of sharing ideas and excerpts in the hope that shared insanity will be a more bearable madness, as well as a fruitful one. I do not need to write a 200,000-word behemoth this time; indeed, I never planned to write that much! If I can reach 50,000 words after this lengthy of a creative drought, I shall be overjoyed.

One of the rules of the game is that no writing can commence until November; until then, I shall begin happily outlining away…

learning to love ballet.

2011-10-15T22:21:00.001-04:00

Apologies, again, for the absence. I am finding it increasingly difficult to blog during the work week since, well, work takes up the majority of my waking hours, and the remainder needs to be apportioned between activities like exercise, leisure reading, dinner (both the preparation and consumption thereof), dutiful TV watching, mindless bumming around the internets, and so forth. Recently, it occurred to me that it really would be more efficient to write all of my posts for one week during the weekend, but, given I was out of town over the Columbus Day holiday, this plan clearly could not come to fruition.

I’ve also noticed that I have, in recent months, gotten away from talking about the day-to-day happenings in my life (remember when I used to detail my Oxford essay crises with an almost torturous level of detail? that was fun!). There is admittedly a very fine line to walk between “Here are cool things that I have done/witnessed about which a small number of individuals in the world may wish to read!” and “A load of self-indulgent crap here!”, and I likely do not walk it particularly well, which leads me to try to avoid it altogether. But this is a personal blog, when all is said and done, so I should feel less reluctance to talk about myself. (In moderate quantities, of course.)

Er, right, enough with the blog navel-gazing, then! As I mentioned in my monthly review for September, I have found a kindred classical music fan with whom to go to concerts here in DC. This afternoon, we went to the Kennedy Center for a performance by the Suzanne Farrell Ballet. I have observed that my appreciation for and knowledge of classical music can be quite myopic: I cherish pieces written for piano above all else, and beyond that, chamber music and larger orchestral works. Vocal works, such as masses and opera, usually rank below those, having never really done any singing myself (beyond the car, shower, and karaoke bar, of course), and, by the time we get to ballet, I am completely out of my depth. Prior to today, I had only ever seen two, The Nutcracker and Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. Ballet produces such beautiful forms, it is true, but I never really got it. For me, a mute pas de deux between Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers just doesn’t have the same emotional heft as “deny thy father and refuse thy name,” etc.!

Today’s performance featured four ballets choreographed by George Balanchine, who, according to the ever helpful concert programme, pioneered the art of pure dance, as opposed to dance with a plot in mind. Only one of the pieces of music used, Igor Stravinsky’s Le baiser de la fée, was explicitly composed as a ballet. The other three – Maurice Ravel’s Sonatine, Iannis Xenakis’s Pithoprakta, and Diamonds, set to music from Tchaikovsky’s third symphony – had the choreography grafted on later by Balanchine. I found that, without the need to convey some external story, the dancing itself was permitted to shine. The connection between ballet and music also seemed to me much more intimate and exciting: the shuffle of dancers en pointe would match a divine passage of strings, and the graceful extensions of the principle served to emphasise the phrasing of the music. Pithoprakta was a revelatory demonstration of this: it is almost unbearably modern composition, filled with highly unsettled and almost toneless string parts, and to see this kind of dissonance channelled through human movement produced a sense of breathtaking aesthetic completeness.

The Ravel Sonatine was a sentimental highlight for me. It was the last piece that I studied with my piano teacher, back in high school, and I played it at my final recital. I wish there were a video of the ballet on YouTube because it is every bit as charming as the music.

♪ Maurice Ravel – Sonatine

bunny stories.

2011-10-05T00:14:00.001-04:00

As a present to myself for my twenty-second birthday, I ordered a copy of Beatrix Potter: The Complete Tales. The book had been on my wishlist for ages: it is the kind of price-elastic purchase that is fairly difficult to justify, but I took advantage of the convenient cultural convention that usual rules regarding personal finances do not apply on the day one’s biological clock completes another annual revolution. Plus, I had a $10 Barnes & Noble giftcard at my disposal, so, really, there was no reason not to get it.

It took a month to finally arrive on my doorstep, but arrive it did. I form strong attachments with almost all of my books, but this particular volume and I share a genuine love.

I have adored rabbits and bunnies in all forms and depictions for as long as I can remember. They have always constituted a plurality – if not an outright majority – in my collection of stuffed animals, and I even kept a pet rabbit in the house when I was very little. This adoration also manifested itself in my fondness for Beatrix Potter’s “The Tale of Peter Rabbit,” whose titular character decided to steal vegetables from a menacing farmer’s garden, only to almost get caught in the process. The funny thing is that I can’t actually place that story anywhere in my childhood memories, but my mother assures me that she read it, among other Potter stories, to me countless times. Besides, out of motherly affection and/or need to justify spending money on a sewing machine, she even made a Peter Rabbit blanket for me. I still keep it on my bed, as it is perfect for curling under during an afternoon nap or adding a touch of extra warmth during the winter months.

My Peter Rabbit love lay dormant for quite some time until one fateful day during my year at Oxford. I was walking down New Inn Hall Street, one of the many narrow roads near my college, when I stumbled upon a display of Beatrix Potter-related merchandise in the window of some stationery/gift store. Among the goods was a little Peter Rabbit plushie, standing no higher than a paperback book. I resisted his charms for a while, but he eventually wore my resistance down and I brought him home with me. To be fair, I had just finished up an especially brutal tutorial that afternoon and could hardly be expected to make rational decisions!

Peter pops up in pictures on my blog every now and then, but he is so much fun to photograph. Mostly because he is absurdly cute. That jacket: it has his name printed on it! I mean, really.

So, with Peter tucked in the crook of my arm, I have been making way through the Complete Tales, limiting myself to one story a night. The stories are arranged in order of publication and include a brief introduction & background. I force myself to slow down and admire the illustrations, as I am sure I did before I learned to read. I am learning that Beatrix Potter wrote about a lot more than just rabbits; so far, I have come across stories about squirrels, mice, and even a hedgehog. I am also realising that, although these stories were ostensibly written for kids, the style of writing is surprisingly elevated for such an audience.

It might be that the general quality of literacy was higher one hundred years ago – no fancy electronic gadgets to serve as a distraction, after all, during the most formative period of mental development. Even accounting for this possibility, however, it is clear that Beatrix Potter pointedly refuses to talk down to the children reading her books. In “The Tale of Benjamin Bunny,” which is a sequel to “The Tale of Peter Rabbit,” Peter and his cousin Benjamin return to the vegetable garden. Benjamin is an even more mischievous creature, whereas Peter has been chastened by his previous experiences there. Benjamin insists on tying up a bunch of onions in a handkerchief as a present for his aunt, but, in the scenes that follow, the narrator makes references to Peter dropping some of the onions or letting go of the handkerchief. It is a nice example of indirect characterisation and, if I may fall back on a creative writing class cliché, of showing rather than telling.

There is a great emphasis on fair play and reciprocity as well. In “The Tailor of Gloucester,” the tailor in question inadvertently frees some mice, whom the tailor’s cat had trapped under teacups. The cat is a devious fellow: the tailor had asked him to buy some silk twist for him at the market, but he hid it away. In return for the tailor’s kindness, the mice sneak into his shop in the middle of the night and help him sew a waistcoat for an important order. They leave only one button-hole unembroidered, missing the aforementioned silk twist. But, also during the middle of the night, the cat came to understand that he has acted quite wrongly and brought the missing fabric to the tailor, who is able to finish the waistcoat on time.. It’s a fun and delightful story, to be sure, but it is also quite moral.

I always feel a vague twinge of embarrassment writing about topics like this in a public space – or even in a private one – because, by now, I should have moved on to grown-up things like pretentious literary fiction and the Financial Times. Which I have, certainly, but I should like to think that there is nothing wrong in vicariously reliving the innocence of youth through the writings of Beatrix Potter and recalling a time when being a good person actually seemed to matter.

mix: garden state mix.

2011-10-03T08:00:00.000-04:00

Fifteen was the perfect age to be when Garden State was released: its quirky sensibilities, cynical depiction of The System, and uplifting twee romance spoke spoke deeply to my adolescence. The soundtrack, too, was a revelation for someone whose Windows Media Player library (this was in my pre-iTunes days) was, at the time, embarrassingly heavy on Michelle Branch and Avril Lavigne. Seven years later, I am fairly indifferent towards the film, but the music that accompanied it proved to be surprisingly formative. It was my first exposure to “indie” music, or, perhaps more accurately, non-Top 40 music that wasn’t classical. Like many romantically minded females, I took a particular liking to Frou Frou’s “Let Go,” which is still one of my favourite songs, and that led to hunting down their album Details, seeking out Imogen Heap’s solo work, trying to find artists that sounded like her, etc. etc. etc. One could therefore conceivably make the argument that my current taste in music would not be nearly as expansive had the Garden State soundtrack not graced my ears way back when. I listen to it every now and then, and it has held up quite well over time.
A now-defunct music blog, Carry You Away, wrote a piece two years ago exploring just what made it such a good soundtrack. This meant, of course, that I had to try to put together a Garden State-inspired mix of my own. It has been one of those perpetually in-progress mixes, but, as I find myself reaching for it more often, I decided to at last finalise it. I tried to hew as closely as possible to Carry You Away’s song-by-song breakdown, and it turns out to be a rather winning formula indeed! I do think, however, that this mix is much more appropriate for the transitional days of early autumn than summer. A recent stretch of humid and dreary weather here in DC has finally waned in favour of a crisp, cool breeze, and I could not be happier.
(Zach Braff seems rather peeved, though.)

garden state mix
♪ download ♪

Bloc Party – Waiting For The 7.18

matt pond PA – City Song

Lykke Li – Let It Fall

matt pond PA – Brooklyn Stars

Andrew Belle – Oh My Stars

Fionn Regan – The Underwood Typewriter

Page France – We Remain As Two

Damien Rice – The Blower’s Daughter

Sanjay Mishra – A Different Morning

Simon & Garfunkel – Bleecker Street

Ellie Goulding – Heartbeats (The Knife Cover)

Data Romance – Swept Away

Noe Venable – Prayer For Beauty

september 2011 in review.

2011-10-01T09:00:00.000-04:00

This Month in Blogging

This month, I swooned over another crop of gorgeous men, inaugurated a new Moleskine, observed the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, whinged about my commute, showed off my grammatically conscious dinnerware, and, in proper David Foster Wallace-inspired fashion, pondered the things I had learned from reading Infinite Jest.

Mind

September was definitely the busiest month for me so far, work-wise; now I know why “be able to multitask” was among the application requirements for the job! On one hand, late nights in my windowless office and severely disturbed eating schedule equilibrium; on the other hand, a general sense of accomplishment that I was able to get through it and learn some things along the way. I do have Georgetown and Oxford to thank for a high tolerance for this sort of stuff…

Regarding personal finances, even with an increase in my rent this past month, I was able to stay below my spending targets in virtually all categories. Part of it is due to the drop-off in initial fixed costs associated with living alone – and I am going to include expenditures on work-appropriate clothing in that category in an attempt to stave off too much retail guilt – but I plan on having this downward trend in consumption continue. (Until next month’s planned trip to Richmond, VA happens!)

Body

I have more or less held true to my promise to go to the gym after work twice a week, and I think I may have gotten to the point where I actually look forward to my sessions with the treadmill. As I have found it difficult to integrate working out into my daily routine for years, I cannot properly express how pleased I am at this development. I recently picked up via Groupon a 10-class pass to a local yoga studio located less than a block away from my flat, so I will be adding that to my exercise regimen.

Heart

Mental health status was robust until recently, when I found myself afflicted by one of those existential crises that occur every now and then (though, I must say, they happened much more often when I was a student). Most of it has passed, but I still find myself feeling a bit more downcast than usual, which means I tend to withdraw into myself, an act that only exacerbates the original despondence. Moving forward, I want to do a better job of being more open and social with those around me. This is a constant challenge for me, as a self-professed introvert.

Soul

…or maybe the aforementioned existential crisis was sparked by Infinite Jest withdrawal? That novel possessed me heart and soul, and, even though I am now happily wrapped up in much shorter books, I find myself wanting to re-read it and look for all of the plot/thematic connections that I missed the first time around. In the realm of writing, I want – and should be able – to blog more frequently. Keeping up this miniscule corner of the internet can come with a hefty time commitment, so it isn’t always feasible to write posts during the evenings. Thus, I am going to try drafting them during the weekends and queue them for posting throughout the week. Something I did not mention in this blog is that I met up with a long-lost friend who was at Oxford with me who has a keen appreciation of classical music. We went to see Tosca at the Kennedy Center earlier this month – my second opera, after La Traviata – and I look forward to sampling other exhibitions of culture with her in the coming months. Few things in the world, after all, are as delightful as classical music performed live.

thoughts that follow reading a 1,079-page novel.

2011-09-26T10:00:00.000-04:00

I mentioned at various points in this blog that I was reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest in accordance with the Infinite Summer schedule. Although I usually do not brag about finishing books, I really must make an exception for this one, for I did successfully conquer DFW’s gargantuan magnum opus four days ahead of schedule on 17 September. I was able to do this even after taking some time out to read the latest instalment of A Song of Ice and Fire, as well as Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol (yes, yes, I know). As far as lifetime achievements are concerned, at least in the literary realm, it is difficult to think of anything else that can top this.

Before I proceed to discussing the book itself, it is appropriate to spare a few remarks on the manner in which I read it. The Infinite Summer approach is a decidedly unambitious one, as it only requires the reader to digest, on average, ten pages of Infinite Jest each day. Meeting such low expectations, however, was surprisingly challenging, especially at the beginning. Anybody who has read even a sentence of DFW’s writing will know that it comes with its own learning curve; placed within the context of a 1,079-page postmodern novel, and that curve becomes that much steeper. My early days of reading Infinite Jest were characterised by a kind of brute force, but I discovered that there is a great deal of merit to this method of reading. Hand me Infinite Jest out of the blue and tell me to read it, and I might cry. Ask me to just read a little bit of it at a time and to be at peace with what I might otherwise think of as slow progress, though, and it becomes an attainable task. I wonder if I should not apply a similar strategy to other lengthy novels (The Portrait of a Lady, The Brothers Karamazov, etc.) that have thus far eluded me.

As an author, DFW demands your full attention. I couldn’t read the Infinite Jest during my commute to and from work, with the soothing music that usually accompanies leisurely interfacing with books playing in the background, or at my typical breakneck pace. Yet this also proved to be a blessing. Since I only had ten pages to read everyday, I had the ability to carve out a space of absolute, distraction-free silence to share with Infinite Jest and nothing else. It was so antithetical to this contemporary age of technology, multitasking, and minute attention spans that I felt I was learning how to read all over again – savouring the sublime joys of the writer’s craft, slipping away to a different world.

Talking about Infinite Jest is at once very easy and very hard. It is easy because its idiosyncrasies are many. There are the physical dimensions of the book, for one thing. Its 1,000+ pages make for a large book, about as large as the hardcover edition of A Dance with Dragons that many of you, I am sure, have sitting at home. But compare the font size and spacing between the lines (ADWD on the left, IJ on the right):

Infinite Jest, as you can see, makes much more efficient use of the page.

Then, of course, there are the endnotes, some of which are no more than one-line asides and others of which could serve as standalone short stories (with footnotes of their own to boot). The book features a sprawling cast of characters who inhabit a decidedly fractured and nonlinear narrative. The writing is quite unconventional, to put it lightly: multisyllabic words of Latinate origin that may or may not actually be words coexist with abbreviations like w.r.t. and w/out, all of which are bundled away in sentences with more clauses than you can count. Reading this book, one comes away with the impression that DFW, while working on Infinite Jest, either had a score of undergrads at his beck and call to research everything from local Boston geography to pharmaceutical industry outputs (unlikely) or is in possession of an aberrantly massive brain teeming with hyperactive neurons (more likely – depressingly so, for the rest of us mortals).

When it comes to discussing what the book is actually about, however, I find myself someone at a loss. I can recite the elements of the plot simply enough – a prestigious tennis academy, a halfway house, AA meetings, Quebecois separatism, feral hamsters, assassins on wheelchairs, and a work of entertainment so beguiling that it reduces anyone who views it to a persistent vegetative state – but none of that even begins to approach what Infinite Jest has come to mean to me, O humble and pedestrian reader.

I would be the first to admit that, on its surface, Infinite Jest is fairly ludicrous in parts – “wheelchair assassins?” somebody must be thinking at this very moment. In the hands of a lesser writer, it would all unravel, and, sometimes, everything about the novel felt so big that it seemed even DFW couldn’t possibly have a grasp on everything. Some anonymous fellow on the internet wrote that it takes 300 pages to get into the book, 400 pages to figure out what is going on, and the last 300 pages wishing it wouldn’t end. I must concede that, for much of that first section, as well as a bit of the second, I was borne along by the style of the writing itself, rather than its substance.

Mere lexical pyrotechnics are not enough to sustain my interest over such a marathon-esque distance. Thomas Pynchon may be a divine stylist, but that still did not prevent me from wanting to demap myself after the first hundred pages of Against the Day. DFW can absolutely go toe-to-toe with his cohort of postmodern/contemporary writers, even exceed them on occasion, yet, as I delved farther and farther into Infinite Jest, I discovered the earnestness and moral force that permeated its every aspect and elevated it from precious abstract exercise to a meditation of such heart. This became increasingly so as the plot and characters began to coalesce. If you ever pick up this book, the best piece of advice I can give you is to trust the author. Everything will make a certain kind of sense, even if you don’t fully get it, because I certainly don’t.

When all was said and done – and all 1,079 pages read – Infinite Jest was not a story in the conventional sense of the term but, rather, an entire universe, as vivid, tragic, hilarious, and encompassing as the universe that exists beyond its pages. I could turn all English major on this blog post and write endlessly about the grand ideas explored in the book: the blurry line between the pursuit of happiness and the peril of addiction in a world where meaning is less important than commerce, the gulf between self and society, the great alienation that exists within ourselves. When I think of those images from Infinite Jest that linger – Hal Incandenza’s plaintive “Please don’t think I don’t care” in the face of people who recoil from him, ex-drug addict Don Gately’s refusal of narcotic pain medication, even at the cost of terrible physical pain – I find above all else an exhortation to live, to persist, and to transcend, and not simply to transcend but to do so in the hope of connecting with others in a moment of true empathy, even though we may seem incomprehensible to those around us and shall surely suffer in the process of making ourselves so vulnerable. But to do otherwise is to be something less than human.

It was impossible to read Infinite Jest without remembering that David Foster Wallace hung himself in 2008 after a lengthy struggle with depression. I also cannot help but remember, with a decidedly cruel irony, what he said in his famous Kenyon College commencement speech: “…the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.” At the time of his death, I had only been exposed to his work via his essays on tennis, but, even then, I felt his death somewhat more keenly than those of most other public figures. By all accounts, he was an extraordinarily kind and decent human being; this was clear throughout in his writing. Infinite Jest is a work that is impossible to divorce from its creator, and, during the months I spent reading it, I felt like I was sitting in a sunlit café with him as he pontificated about this and that and I listened with rapt attentiveness. I have never met David Foster Wallace and I never will, but I miss him.

(and let’s not get me started on the oxford comma.)

2011-09-24T09:13:00.001-04:00

While I type-type-type away, however slowly, on some other blogging projects, I thought I would share a quick little something. When my friend Amanda and I celebrated our birthday together back in August, she asked me if I wanted a “practical” present or a “cute” one. Since I am all about affecting the airs of a responsible adult these days, I opted for the former, and this is what I got:

Plates with fussy grammar lessons! Can you think of anything more delightful?

For those who would like to give the gift of pedantic dinnerware to their loved ones, do skip on over to this website and check out the rest of this company’s equally pernickety products.

open letters to my morning commute.

2011-09-20T09:48:00.002-04:00

Dear Metrobus Driver,

I appreciate the fact that telling Washingtonians to move to the back of the bus is perpetually frustrating, not the least because my fellow urban denizens seem peculiarly averse to making room for other people. That said, when you cram that many people into an enclosed space, it tends to get quite stuffy – as in, sauna-esque levels of stuffy. Therefore, I would be forever at your mercy if, next time, you might elect to turn on the air conditioning just a smidgen. Such a simple action would, I think, greatly ease the strain associated with my body's homeostatic responses to the abnormally high external temperature.

All my best,
Malin

–

Dear Metrobus Passenger Body at Large,

Unless you have all discreetly lined your jackets and sweaters with ice packs, I know you must be as hot as I am. Windows exist for a reason. Open them.

Regards,

Malin

–

Dear Bloke with the Green Rucksack,

Dude, get your bag the fuck out of my face.

Cheers,

Malin

seventeen year-old me on economics.

2011-09-15T08:17:00.001-04:00

Every now and then, I’ll pick up an old journal of mine and read through a section of it, as it’s usually quite good for a laugh. Last night, I came across this little paragraph, written during the summer sandwiched between high school and university:

I’ve been feeling more partial towards a major involving economics – political economy, certainly. Higher-level mathematics (or the possibility thereof) be damned, I can’t understand the world without learning as much economics as possible, but economics without humanity is a useless endeavour.

I got a lot wrong when I was that age, but I think this is one of those things I got right. Nevertheless, I am amused at my blitheness in the face of more maths. That has certainly long ceased to exist!

9/11.

2011-09-11T18:44:00.001-04:00

I did not plan on writing anything about today because, in truth, I am a terribly insignificant witness to what happened ten years ago. I can tell you how old I was, where I was when it happened, and I can tell you about the agitation that gripped me throughout the remainder of that day, a powerful fear that the world as I knew it appeared poised at the edge of a great fiery destruction, but none of that seems important or meaningful.

The first thing I did upon waking up this morning, just before 10am, was turn on the TV. CBS were broadcasting live from Ground Zero the dedication ceremony for the official 9/11 memorial, upon which the names of those killed in the attack on the World Trade Center are inscribed. Pairs of individuals, who were sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, wives, or husbands of 9/11 victims, took turns reading the names aloud alphabetically at the podium. After a time, they would reach the name of the parent, child, or spouse who had died and append a brief, personal message to him or her. The entire affair was unlike what I have come to associate with official events of remembrance: high-level office holders, military pomp and circumstance, grandiose proclamations of love and sacrifice for country. And this is not to discount any of that, but the act of citizens without outsized political or economic influence paying tribute to perished loved ones seemed so artless and pure that everything else that has been written or done to commemorate 9/11 feels hollow by comparison.

I am reminded, on this day, of the episode of Mad Men that centred on the Kennedy assassination. At the end of it, Peggy seeks refuge in her office, telling Don that her mother was crying so hard that there wasn’t enough room for anybody else to grieve. 9/11 is often described as a national tragedy, and I would be lying if I said that I did not feel the events of one decade earlier weigh quite heavily on my thoughts today. But this is not my tragedy, when all is said and done. I try to imagine one of my parents – or, God forbid, both of them – stolen away from me in such a violent fashion, and twelve year-old me, beginning the process of living the last ten years without them. I know that I cannot even begin to comprehend what that kind of loss might mean. I know that this is not my grief to appropriate.

a changing of the journalling guard.

2011-09-09T23:10:00.001-04:00

The week back from ~~Labour~~ Labor Day has been a busy one, and time in the evening usually set aside for blogging was appropriated by the U.S. Open and all associated yelling at the matches on TV and clutching on to my Feder-bear for dear life (yes, I own one – what of it?). I will attempt to make up for the writing slack later, provided my well of blogging topics doesn’t run dry.

On the subject of writing, a rather meaningful – for me and only me, I should say – event happened the other day: I filled up the last lines of my Moleskine and began a new one. As I mention in the primer to this blog, I have kept a handwritten journal of some sort since I was seven years old (you can read my "why I journal" monologue here, if you really have nothing else to do!). Every time I finished one, I would head down to the local Barnes & Noble or now-defunct Borders and derive great joy from browsing notebooks until I found one that came closest to fitting the exact specifications of my ideal journal: a not too ostentatious cover, an absence of superfluous design elements in the pages themselves, and lines spaced as narrowly as possible so as to not overwhelm my rather compact handwriting. During the waning months of my high school years, I discovered that my ideal journal does, in fact, exist. Accompanied by a retail price of $17.95, the large hardcover ruled Moleskine notebook – black preferred, though I did once buy one in red – qualifies as something of a luxury good, as far as basic stationery supplies are concerned, but, to this day, I have found no better capsule for my daily scribblings.

This is my fifth Moleskine in four years, which means that it takes me, on average, a year and three months to fill 240 pages. At this point, the rituals associated with the transition between notebooks are well established. I lay old and new side by side and marvel at how full & bursting the former became – both figuratively and literally, as the pages curl with the force of my pen and the covers buckle outwards – and wonder at the kind of journeys that the latter will take. I transfer the contents of the inner pocket: photographs, keepsakes, and the like. I turn to the cover page of the new Moleskine, fill in my name and address, and inscribe below them some vaguely meaningful quotation plucked from my personal collection thereof. It is at once a dedication and an aspirational reminder, contributing in some way to the divorce between out there and in here, the places I reserve only for myself.

(Apologies for the very artless blurring of the address, but broadcasting that to the internets at large is probably not a good idea.)

When I was much younger, I was inspired by the example of Anne Frank to give my journals names; for the sake of my dignity, I will not disclose them here. I loved the idea of my diary, as I called it back then, acting as my dearest confidant, patiently listening to my litany of childish secrets, dreams, and woes. It was a more conscious act of storytelling and dialogue, and reaching the end of one journal meant writing a lengthy farewell entry to that particular friend, reflecting on the time that we had shared together, before introducing myself to the next one. I have grown up a fair bit since then: instead of “Dear Such-and-Such,” my entries begin with a time, date, and place, and my Moleskines have no particular terms of address. Indeed, I hardly think of them as discrete entities at all: their tangible physicality represent only arbitrary demarcations inserted within the ebb and flow of existence, which recognise neither beginning nor end. The form may change, but the story is ultimately amorphous.

eye candy of the male persuasion: a second top ten list.

2011-09-03T12:06:00.001-04:00

Last year, I posted a list of ten imminently fanciable men; predictably, perhaps, that remains the second most-read entry on this blog. I have since then had the opportunity to ogle at and dwell upon other prominent representatives of the opposite sex, including some I overlooked the first time around, and can now present to you a second instalment of eye candy. Everybody needs a bit of mindless superficiality every now and then!

Richard Armitage

During my British television binge this summer, I finally got around to watching the BBC’s adaptation of North and South. I processed it in more or less the following manner: “Cotton mills and social strife, HELLO THERE JOHN THORNTON, the woes of industrialisation, OH MY GOD JOHN THORNTON HELLO.” I honestly cannot understand how Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy is the gold standard for emotionally repressed and irresistibly handsome (fictional) men when Richard Armitage’s Mr. Thornton could out-angst and out-brood him any day. Plus, Darcy is a poncy rich boy, whereas Thornton works for his lucre, thank you very much. Erm, where was I? Oh, yes, Richard Armitage. You are impeccably gorgeous. I would give up my long-standing scepticism regarding the utility of matrimony for you.

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau

I typically don’t fall for blonds, but, for Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, I make an exception to this rule. He plays Jaime Lannister in Game of Thrones, and, for those of you who are not familiar with this character, allow me to make a cross-fandom comparison: Jaime Lannister is like Draco Malfoy, cf. the haughty aristocratic carriage and golden tresses, but is much better at killing people and infinitely more attractive, which is almost enough to offset his twisted moral compass. As for the actor himself, I don’t know much about Nikolaj – indeed, I have no idea even how to pronounce his name – but he is absolutely the biggest troll on the internet ever (ASOIAF spoilers within, by the way).

Juan Carlos Ferrero

My love for Roger Federer is no secret in these parts. What I do keep hidden is the fact that, before I fell for the Swiss Maestro’s charms, my tennis heart belonged to someone else: a swarthy clay-court specialist from Spain named Juan Carlos Ferrero. He won the French Open in 2003, was runner up at the U.S. Open in the same year, and held the No. 1 ranking on the men’s tour for a time. Injuries rather put a damper on his career, and, although he has enjoyed something of a renaissance in the form of a trips of the Wimbledon quarters in recent years, his game isn’t strong enough to allow him to truly complete with the upper echelon of the ATP. He is, however, still very pretty and much better looking than his more famous compatriot, Rafael Nadal, at least in my opinion.

Andrew Garfield

He was very winning in The Social Network and utterly devastating in Never Let Me Go. His hair. He is half-British, half-American. He sang the Bed Intruder Song on national TV. His hair. Those eyes. Did I mention his hair yet?

Josh Groban

Since I realise that he majority of women who fancy Josh Groban are forty-something suburban women who wish that their daughters could bring home a man half as wholesome as he, allow me to make the case that he is less lame than you think he is. The pitfall with crooners is that they seem to take themselves very seriously. Josh, on the other hand, has a penchant for self-deprecation: his guest appearance on Never Mind the Buzzcocks is just too hilarious for words, and, if you haven’t heard him sing Kanye West's tweets, then you are missing out on the greatest two and a half minutes ever uploaded on YouTube. His own Twitter account is actually funny. Then there is the achingly romantic balladry, of course.

Jeremy Irons

The elder statesman of this round of attractive men, Jeremy is as debonair and irresistible as they come and, for goodness sake, even managed to make Humbert Humbert – that would be the morally repulsive paedophilic yet maddeningly ensorcelling protagonist/narrator of Lolita, for those living under a literary boulder – come off a tragic, gorgeous figure. Furthermore, how can you not love him as Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited, all wide-eyed and adorable in a three-piece suit and Oxford gown? Oh, and his voice. I could listen to him read an econometrics textbook and never get bored.

Takahiko Kozuka

Another figure skater, you say? Yes! I first watched Takahiko Kozuka skate at the most recent Winter Olympics, and, even though he only placed seventh, his swoon-worthy edges, footwork, and spread eagles were enough to pique my interest. He has gained much more confidence on the ice since and performed quite well last season. I love that his music selections are more unconventional than most – he has skated to Jimmy Hendrix! – even if his costume choices occasionally leave much to be desired.

Yundi Li

Where Lang Lang, the other famous young pianist to come out of China, is extroverted, outlandish, and just a little fame whore-ish, Yundi Li has taken the opposite tack, cultivating a much more rarefied, elegant air. It should be no surprise that I prefer the latter. A bit more information can be found at this post, but, for now, allow me to link to this “music video” of him playing Franz Liszt’s devilish “La Campanella” etude, which proves that classical music is, in fact, the ultimate aphrodisiac.

Matthew Macfadyen

Who knew that I have a thing for British actors and costume dramas? Matthew Macfadyen is the most recent incarnation of Mr. Darcy, and, while I’ve raved about that particular performance of his, he is excellent in everything else I have seen him do: principled priest in The Pillars of the Earth, skeavy fop in The Way We Live Now, and generally hapless dude in Death at a Funeral.

Francesco Piemontesi

Another pianist for whom I have already expressed my affection. I have yet to track down a proper recording of his, so, in the interim, I shall continue fawning over his bookish demeanour – he reads about physics in his free time, after all – and listening to this Stravinsky transcription forever & ever.

august 2011 in review.

2011-09-01T21:51:00.001-04:00

The fall semester officially began at Georgetown yesterday, which means that, if I were still operating on an academic schedule, my summer would be at an end. Nevertheless, even without this marker of time, I have already fully in an autumn state of mind and looking forward to what the next season will bring.

This Month in Blogging

This month, I posted a French mix and a mix for afternoon tea, pondered the Great Recession, travelled to Boston, survived both an earthquake and a hurricane, and turned 22 somewhere in the middle of that. So, altogether, a more eventful than usual month.

Mind

I’ve been very busy at work this month, and, if anything, things will probably get busier in September. I have been told by people higher up than I that, during the first year of my job, I should expect to be learning something new everyday. Although I suspect this is the kind of truism that gets bandied around a lot in workplaces, I am discovering this to actually be the case.

As for the personal financial management issues I mentioned in my previous monthly reflection, nothing puts a damper on personal discretionary expenditures like the double whammy of rent increase and quarterly tax payment due in the same month. It is good for me to be more prudent about my spending and to better prioritise my material wants. It is less good for the U.S. economy, though.

Body

I am terribly pleased to say that I have recommitted myself to going to the gym on a regular basis. The trick was ditching the elliptical for the treadmill: actually running, albeit in an artificial environment, gives my workouts much more satisfaction than before, and I think I even get to experience a bit of an endorphin high afterwards. It’s a very great feeling.

Heart

Mental health status: holding up very well. As a natural pessimist, I must wonder how much longer it can continue to defy gravity in this manner, but I may yet be surprised.

Soul

I am even more ensorcelled by Infinite Jest than I was at this point last month and, in a seriously insane way, am contemplating re-reading it again soon after I finish it for the first time. On a completely unrelated note, my new aim is to find somewhere in the District where I can practise piano without having, you know, to buy one, as I lack both the money and the physical space for that. Anyone have any pointers in this regard?

the second annual pembroke-in-new-england reunion.

2011-08-28T18:12:00.001-04:00

I am both pleased and relieved to say that Irene did not live up to apocalyptic expectations, at least in this corner of Washington, DC. The worst of it passed over here just past midnight, when the wind picked up a sufficient amount such that I could actually hear it whistling by my window, but that in itself is hardly out of the ordinary. When I wandered over to the supermarket this afternoon, everything was bright, warm, and lamentably humid again. One could hardly tell it had rained the night before, let alone that a tropical storm had skimmed past the East Coast.

I did use my copious amount of free time yesterday to work on some blog posts so that I don’t end up going on accidental week-long hiatuses again. One of the things about which I have neglected to blog is my trip to Boston earlier this month. Although I was only there for a weekend, it was the closest thing to a proper holiday that I have been able to enjoy this summer – an unfortunate, unavoidable consequence of employment. Readers who have been around for a while might recall that I ventured up to New England this time last year as well, and the purpose was the same: to see friends who had studied abroad at Oxford with me. Since a disproportionate number of them have recently graduated from Tufts, many of them are still in the general Boston area. I was never able to follow through on my plans to visit them during the academic year, so I was determined to make up for that at some point during the summer.

I know that I have previously remarked upon this, but I am constantly awed and humbled by the permanence of my Oxford experiences. They are over, of course, in the sense that I have not had to lose sleep over an essay crisis since last June – and, come October, it will have been two years since I jetted off to England – yet there is not a day that passes when I do not, if only for a few moments, immerse myself in memories of hushed college quads and silly academic dress, dream of walking through Christ Church Meadow, or wonder what would have happened if I had gone back (because there was a chance, albeit a stillborn one). There are any number of reasons for this, but the fact that I became inordinately attached to the people around me is surely one of the more prominent ones. We might not have had the opportunity to talk much during the time since, but, when the bonds of friendship are there, any such disconnect is always transient.

This time around, I stayed with Rachel and her family in Lexington, which meant that I saw more of Boston this year than I did last. Robin joined us from Rhode Island for a planned trip to the Chihuly exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, but, sadly, it was sold out. In lieu of culture, we headed over to Cambridge for cupcake consumption, shopping at Anthropologie, and general strolling about. It is a very lovely neighbourhood, even if I am slightly resentful towards its resident university, from which I have been rejected on two separate occasions. But let us not dwell on my academic bitterness!

Later on, dear Bryan, whom I had not seen since leaving Oxford, joined us for dinner at the Corner Café, where we enjoyed delicious Mexican fare and likely inappropriate conversation. Drinks followed at Tory Row; I appreciated the British-inspired name, naturally. I nearly outdid myself by having half a glass of beer.

The next morning featured an absolutely delectable brunch at Sound Bites, which, I was told, is something of a Tufts institution. It did make me deeply sad that I never found an equivalent place in Georgetown, but maybe that is inevitable when one attends university in uncompromisingly upscale neighbourhood. I am sure there was good brunch to be had somewhere, but would it have been affordable on a student budget? Not likely (please correct me if I am wrong, Hoyas both present and past). I had a fair chunk of unconstructed free time that afternoon, so I hopped on the T, filled with romantic notions of exploring the downtown area on foot as I had so many European cities.

Alas for me, the weather was wholly uncooperative – let’s just say that Boston was being hit by more than just a little fall of rain, if I may make a Les Mis reference. I braved the conditions long enough to wander around Boston Common…

…and Beacon Hill. The latter reminded me very much of Georgetown, all brick sidewalks and tony rowhouses, though with fewer tourists, I think. That is always a plus in my books.

At a certain point, I did tire of feeling like a drowned gutter rat and sought shelter in a Starbucks, where I caught up on some journal writing while attempting to coordinate meeting up with more people. Eventually, they all somehow converged at the Starbucks: Greg and Limmy from Oxford, and, more unexpectedly, Sarah, a very close friend from my high school days who recently moved to Boston. It’s always slightly jarring, at first, to have two separate social circles, but we had a very lovely time together, huddled in a nearby pub – food is clearly the unifying theme behind this entry – and chatting away until, miraculously, the skies cleared.

(Note: the soft-focus, vaguely angelic effects were entirely unintentional result of my camera lens fogging over. This is what I got for trying to take pictures earlier in the pouring rain, sigh.)

After left, Greg and Limmy provided an impromptu tour of other parts of Boston, including the North End with its unapologetically Italian character. Along the way, I managed to get at least one nice picture of the city:

The sidestreets of the North End, narrow snakes of cobblestone lined with cafés in the shadow of cast-iron balconies, seemed to be distinctly Old World and European, and it occurred to me how unusual it is, to find such history – a history diffused through the everyday, not the sterile, meticulously cultivated kind commemorated with plaques, museums, and statues – in an American city. The allure of modernity always proves stronger, or perhaps I am simply not looking closely enough.

The only downside of this trip was my return flight to DC being delayed by a number of hours, resulting in my not getting home until almost 1am, but such an inconvenience felt very minor indeed when compared to the manifold joys of my Boston adventures.

i’ve always wanted a hurricane for my birthday!

2011-08-26T20:36:00.001-04:00

One of these days, I will go back to blogging about shiny, happy things, but the universe, being unsatisfied with the earthquake that visited the mid-Atlantic region earlier this week, has now seen fit to rain, well, a lot of rain upon us this weekend in the form of Hurricane Irene. Incidentally, the storm shares a name with my younger sister; interpret that how you will.

I am deeply resentful about this freak weather, as it just so happens to coincide with my twenty-second birthday, which is tomorrow. I have to say that I rather dislike my birthday on principle – since it coincides with the beginning of the academic year and all of the transitional craziness that goes along with it, it is quite poorly timed – but, really: I have to spend this one huddled away in my flat all weekend and pray that my windows won’t get blown out in some spectacular fashion, thereby potentially maiming me for life if I have the misfortune of being near them when that happens? Cheers.

Part of me is convinced that Irene will amount to nothing more than a bit of wet weather, though perhaps more sustained than what I am used to. The other part is taking very seriously indeed the need to stock up on non-perishable food items and water, in case this storm leans closer to devastating than merely a nuisance. I steered clear of the supermarket today and simply picked up some things at the CVS across the street from my office, correctly assuming that it would be better stocked and less busy than the alternative, even if it did mean that I had to lug a three-quart jug of water halfway across the city. I felt like I was outfitting a fallout shelter for nuclear winter, although it has occurred to me that much of my stockpile will be fairly useless if I cannot boil water (see: instant ramen, copious amounts thereof).

The one item I was not able to procure today was a flashlight, naturally, as I have been informed that power outages are possible/likely. Fortunately, I realised that I do have one candle in my flat and was able to find some cheap lighters at Target (I don’t have any matches around and never learned how to light them, in any case – I believe I’ve always been afraid that I would somehow end up burning my fingers). Hilariously/pathetically, aforementioned emergency source of light is a votive candle from Notre-Dame. As in, you know, the very famous cathedral in Paris. It has only functioned as a decorative piece until now, but, if I do in fact end up electricity-less, I will take incandescence wherever I can find it.

And, of course, I have a coterie of stuffed animals and an entire shelf-full of books to keep me company throughout – necessities not merely for extreme meteorological conditions but also the everyday.

Stay safe, friends on the East Coast!

earthquakepocalypse 2011.

2011-08-23T20:45:00.001-04:00

That’s what they’re calling it on Foursquare, anyway (check in now and you can earn an Epic Swarm badge! /social media nerd).

Unless you have been hiding under an especially sturdy rock, you have undoubtedly heard that a 5.9-magnitude earthquake with its epicentre somewhere between Richmond and Washington, DC sent tremors up and down the East Coast and office workers scrambling for their smartphones in a game to see who could tweet the wittiest quake-related witticism fastest. I can only speak for myself & my co-workers, but, after evacuating our building, we stood outside for some time while the engineering powers that be, I suppose, ensured its structural integrity. It was still decided to close the office for the remainder of the day – who knew that half days, a staple of my grade school years, would reappear in the professional world? – at which point those without family obligations organised an impromptu happy hour at the ever classy hour of 3:30pm and those with attended to them. If you were in DC post-earthquake, then, you were either at a bar or stuck in traffic.

When I at last returned to my flat, I was able to survey the damage that the earthquake had wrought upon my material possessions.

→ My beloved Remy stuffed animal (that would be the protagonist from Ratatouille, fyi) had taken an unfortunate tumble from his perch atop my bookshelf – gasp!

→ The meticulously arranged package of toilet paper rolls in my closet had shifted perilously close to the edge of the shelf – horror!

→ And, in the course of dramatically running to safety, i.e., walking with as much speed as I could muster in 3-inch heels, I marred the heretofore unblemished exterior of my dearest, most darling Ann Taylor pumps. (In a disgusting #firstworldproblems kind of way, I am just a little bit genuinely irritated about this, but it is probably best to accept the relationship between a girl and her shoes as being wholly irrational and not enquire any further along these lines.)

Anyway, now that I have gotten that tongue-in-cheek commentary out of the way, I am going to beg forgiveness from my West Coast friends, who are likely scoffing at all of our “OH NOES THE GROUND IS MOVING!!1!!11!!ONE!1” talk, and admit that the moment I fully realised that everything around me was audibly & visibly shaking – that it wasn’t just some angry co-worker who had slammed a door shut harder than intended – was a fairly scary one. Two panicked thoughts immediately came to mind: (1) I work on the sixth floor of a building whose exterior features not a little bit of glass, and (2) oh shit, I think I should hide under my desk! Fortunately, I spotted somebody positively sprinting past my office and realised that leaving the building was likely a better proposition.

And that, my friends, was my first earthquake. I would hate to experience a real one.

mix: mellow like a cup of tea.

2011-08-16T10:00:00.000-04:00

I could rhapsodise about the wonders of tea for many paragraphs, but I will let this succinctly worded poem do it for me:

If you are cold, tea will warm you.
If you are too heated, it will cool you.
If you are depressed, it will cheer you.
If you are exhausted, it will calm you.

– William Gladstone

This poem is featured on the menu of The Rose in Oxford, an establishment I frequented for their delicious cream teas. Although I grew up drinking tea – inevitable in a Chinese household – it was not until my year abroad that I slowly became enamoured with the simple rituals associated with it. There may have been the industrial quantities of Earl Grey downed in the middle of an essay crisis, but there were also the afternoons when, comparatively liberated from academic obligation, my friends and I would come together and partake in this ubiquitous drink, blissfully lost in the flow of our shared stories & laughter.

It is a mundane recollection from that time, but, when confronted with demands of the everyday, which are perhaps equally mundane yet rather great in number, it is a very sweet one to nurse – as one might a cup of tea, snuggled warmly in the hands.

mellow like a cup of tea
♪ download ♪

Miles Davis – Blue In Green

George Gershwin – Concerto in F: Andante con moto

Laura Veirs – July Flame

Stars – This Charming Man

David Arnold – God And Nature

A Fine Frenzy – Come On, Come Out

Ludovico Einaudi – The Snow Prelude No. 2

The xx – Islands

Squarepusher – Tommib Help Buss

Ludwig van Beethoven – Piano Concerto No. 5 in E flat major, Op. 73 (“Emperor”): Adagio un poco mosso

John Mayer – The Heart Of Life

The Paper Raincoat – Safe In The Sound

back to basics.

2011-08-15T09:00:00.000-04:00

I am a packrat of the highest order, filling every place that I occupy with personal effects, and, when it comes to those items I bring around with me on an everyday basis, I generally adhere to the maximalist approach that one can never carry too much. When I was at Oxford, for instance, I would usually throw my DSLR – and it’s a rather large camera, mind – into my bag along with my notebook, econometrics texts, and everything else on walks to the Social Science Library, even well after I had already documented most of the city photographically. Who knows if I might spot something unusual during my stroll? It was a contingency for which I felt obligated to prepare. To use a more pedestrian example, I also have a drawstring bag that contains everything I might need while away from the comforts of home: sewing kit, Tide Pen, blister block, Band-Aids, hair ties, chapstick, etc. Let us not even mention my preference for having reading material on my person, and maybe my journal too, if I find myself with an empty stretch of time and thoughts of this & that drifting through my mind. It all started adding up to quite a lot.

Last month, during a bout of online shopping, my professional wardrobe still being a work in progress, I picked up this adorable purse from Ann Taylor at a rather steep discount. None of the bags I had owned until then were especially suitable for the office, and, besides, look at this delightful shade of red! I wear a lot of neutrals and dark colours, so this adds a nice pop to any look.

Because its dimensions are rather smaller than what I am used to, I had to impose an austerity budget, as it were, on its contents.

Moleskine planner
Soft-cover Moleskine cahier – as the company calls it – for fictional scribblings
Sharpie pen (I am very particular about my writing implements and will only write in the aforementioned notebooks with this)
Cardholder for my SmarTrip card, as demonstrated here
Mobile, utterly indispensible
Trusty iPod Classic
Wallet for cash monies, plastic monies, various business cards, and one London Tube map
Keys with adorable surfing camel keychain from Dubai

There is something surprisingly refreshing about paring those things I carry down to the absolute essentials, the psychological relief that accompanies a rigorous cleaning of my flat or the implementation of some new organisational scheme (and, on a more practical note, my right shoulder is much less sore by the end of the day!). I still supplement them, of course. When I go to work, I cheat by bringing along my sturdy Threadless tote, which usually contains a book, lunch, that day’s copy of the Express , and a pair of heels if I have sensibly decided to commute in flats. If I need my laptop with me for whatever reason, then I resort to my seemingly indestructible laptop tote that I bought years ago. Yet life seems just a little simpler when I need only grab this little bag before heading out the door and know all that I need is already with me.

coming of age in a time of financial folly.

2011-08-11T22:47:00.001-04:00

Oh goodness, how is it essentially the middle of August already? Time flies when you’re not blogging, apparently.

Although I have been quite busy this last week with a visit to Boston over the weekend and then my younger sister staying in DC with me for two nights, the overwhelming majority of my neurons have been preoccupied with recent economic, financial, and political happenings. The mind reels to take everything in: revised GDP numbers that tell us the recession was worse than was thought, debt ceiling shenanigans in the U.S., a reoccurring/seemingly intractable sovereign debt crisis in the Eurozone, a complete absence of balls – and, in some cases, basic economic sense – among politicians on either side of the Atlantic, the S&P downgrade, stock markets worldwide stumbling around like a schizophrenic on a serious bender. These are the times that try men’s souls, and possibly more importantly, provide fodder for amazing Tumblr blogs. Meanwhile, if I am not reading debt-related economic news on my own time, I am working on debt-related matters at the office. Most of my life, then, is consumed by economics.

Every generation, however it may be defined, coalesces around some Formative Moment. I suppose that, for mine, this is 9/11 or the Second Gulf War, but I was still rather young in those years. This Great Recession looms much greater in my overall consciousness, though, and, in a curious twist of fate, its early onset coincides with the beginning of my lengthy & ongoing affair with economics. I still remember my AP Econ teacher, back in either late 2006 or early 2007, mentioning to us an article about the rising cost of rent. He used this as an example of the substitution effect: the demand for owning one’s unit of residence was decreasing, thus the demand for renting it was going up. I had yet to make a habit of visiting the Financial Times’ website everyday, so little did I know that American economic growth since the 1990s had been buoyed by a massive real estate bubble that was either peaking or had already begun to deflate.

When I started at Georgetown in the fall of 2007, I was chatting with my RA, who was a senior in the business school, about the adverse job prospects facing that year’s batch of graduates. Blithely, I made some sort of remark about how things would surely be better by the time I received my diploma, which, at the time, seemed ages away. Of course, everything that has happened since does not require my efforts at summarising it (here is a very good resource for that), and, almost four years after the fact, I am still sometimes stunned to think that the economy is still mired in a self-perpetuating cycle of high unemployment and low growth and that, for all of our collective hand-wringing over the need get out of it, there is a terrifying unwillingness among our elected officials to be truly audacious in the face of what very well may be America’s lost decade.

Part of me feels at least somewhat hypocritical writing about this. I know that I am one of the lucky ones: I have a college degree from a good university and the fortune to have found a full-time job immediately following. Nevertheless, there is something to be said about the anxiety and uncertainty that seem to gnaw away ever more at the edges of the body politic and civil society itself, and I can only sit here and wallow in inevitably gloomy headlines and statistics.

mix: a moveable feast.

2011-08-03T22:48:00.001-04:00

I finally got around to seeing Midnight in Paris last weekend, for, if there has ever been a film with my name scribbled all over it, I certainly haven’t heard of it yet (just kidding, I have, but let’s allow the hyperbole to stand for now): nostalgia and romance! literary references galore! the opening montage of Paris in day and night, sun and rain, scored to such blatantly emotionally manipulative jazz music that my eyes involuntarily began to water! But, in all seriousness, the wide-eyed wonder of Owen Wilson’s character spoke very directly to a particular time in my life when I wanted nothing more than to write novels like the great artists of old, minus the tuberculosis and syphilis. Although my bohemian dreams have since been replaced by a slavish adherence to the System, Paris still exercises a particular allure over me that no other city can, as evidenced by the many posts I wrote about it when I had the opportunity to visit last year.

As the film emphasises, however, all nostalgia is changeable and treacherous – those times & places that are the object of yearning seem somehow liable to slip away into a space that memory cannot access. I am reminded of this sublime quote from This Side of the Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald, a rather appropriate author to cite for something like this:

I’m not sentimental – I’m as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last – the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won’t.

I have been a fairly avid collector of French music since my teenage days, and, since few things are as potent as music when it comes to evoking the past, whether real, imagined, or some fanciful blend of the two, I was inspired by Midnight in Paris to put together this mix. The first half draws upon the tradition of French chanson, with the necessary dash of jazz sprinkled in, the second features French classical composers c. the late 19th/early 20th centuries, but who is to say where the sentiment ends and the romance begins, that what is most beguiling is often most impermanent?

a moveable feast
♪ download ♪

Camille – Le Festin

Thomas Fersen – Au Café De La Paix

Django Reinhardt – Minor Swing

Paris Combo – Discordance

Feist – La Même Histoire

Maurice Ravel – Daphnis et Chloé Suite No. 2: Lever du Jour

Erik Satie – Gymnopedies Nos. 1 and 3

Claude Debussy – String Quartet in G minor, Op. 10: Andantino (Doucement expressif)

Gabriel Fauré – Requiem, Op. 48: In Paradisium

Camille Saint-Saëns – Valse nonchalante, Op. 110

july 2011 in review.

2011-08-01T22:40:00.001-04:00

The beginning of August has, until now, heralded the opening notes of summer’s swan song: the heat and humidity will simmer for a while yet, but, mentally, I must begin to reconcile myself with the imminent return of academia. Except, this time, academia will not be coming back, and, in a reversal of the traditional pattern, I find myself getting busier as autumn approaches. (Speaking of which: Dear autumn, your presence is requested as promptly as is meteorologically feasible. Love, Malin.)

This Month in Blogging

I mused about my (other) nationality, gave my blog a long-overdue makeover, flagged a curious economics paper, whinged about this & that, saw the wondrous Ellie Goulding live, and waxed rhapsodic about the marvellous substance that is coffee. I also realised, while putting together this little recap graphic, that I didn’t take many photos this month or post any mixes. This should be rectified.

Mind

As alluded to in my previous monthly reflection, I have indeed gotten busier – significantly so! – at work. I shan’t blather on too much about the details (not the least because, on principle, I should not), but it is genuinely wonderful to be given responsibilities of my own, even if I am on the bottom of the organisational hierarchy. It has given me the opportunity to engage with a previously unfamiliar issue and to work with economists in my division, and it is one that I feel very lucky to have. More generally speaking, I am growing increasingly accustomed to the workplace and know that I still have much to learn in the months to come.

Also, I’m not sure where personal finances should fall in this four-part introspective schematic of mine, but, since matters involving money should theoretically primarily concern the mind – sometimes, they end up dominated by that impulse which makes it quite impossible to stop browsing Ann Taylor’s gorgeous fall offerings online, ahem – I shall tack them onto this section. With regular income and rather important bills to pay, I have been using Mint to set a monthly budget and track my every expenditure. While I did an admirable job of setting enough of my monthly salary into both a savings account and a Roth IRA (!), I did make a few too many impulse purchases (BREAKING: Local Area Woman Shops for Clothes). Some of that was defensible: my professional wardrobe does need to be significantly augmented. (And I also really needed new headphones, A Dance with Dragons, and a Bialetti.) Some of it was less so, and I’m going to partially attribute that to an odd need to prove to myself that I had the means of spending money somewhat more thoughtlessly than usual, if I wanted to. Now that I have more or less worn this compulsion down, I believe I can do a better job of sticking to August’s spending targets.

Body

Good news: I went to the gym and discovered the joys of the indoor rowing machine! Bad news: I only went, er, twice, if I still have the ability to count! This is Not Good Enough, Not Even Close. The problem is that the only time I have to work out is after work, which is to say somewhere between 5-6pm, and the problem there is that it interferes quite significantly with a normally scheduled dinner. Alternatively, I could exercise – i.e., go for a quick run – in the mornings, but the obvious drawback is an earlier meeting with my alarm clock, and that is already scheduled to happen every weekday at 6:30am. Some sacrifice is going to have to be made regardless.

Heart

The generally positive mental health status from last month has carried over into this one. If anything, it has improved – my goodness, I sound like an optimist or something – as I have settled into my new circumstances. Not only have I still been guiltlessly chattering away with girlfriends via Skype/mobile, but I have also been seeing more of friends right here in the District. But that is a topic for a later blog post!

Soul

This also merits more discussion than I can currently provide, but, as Infinite Summer continues its lengthy march to the 21 September finish line, I am finding that Infinite Jest has transformed from a novelty of contemporary fiction picked up on a lark (interminable footnotes, stratospheric page count, DFW’s highly idiosyncratic porse, etc.) into the most thought-provoking work of literature I have encountered in quite some time. Meanwhile, I’ve finally gotten back to journalling on a more regular schedule, writing almost every single day, even if some entries are just paraphrases of, “Lots of stuff happened omg bbl.” When individual days of the working life blur quite easily, it becomes ever more critical to slow down and properly think.

the aesthetic and experiential joys of coffee/espresso.

2011-07-30T12:26:00.001-04:00

In my late middle school and early high school years – when I was just, like, so mature, you know? – I started going to Starbucks. I delighted in spending what disposable income I had on vanilla bean frappuchinos and caramel macchiatos because that’s just what we hopelessly suburban, sophisticated adolescents did.

But I did not truly experience coffee until I went to Athens at age 15 for a family holiday guiltily taken during the academic year. It was our first full day in Greece, and we were somewhere near the Acropolis around noon and suffering from the pernicious effects of jetlag. Before beginning touristy activities in earnest, then, we sat down at a small café and enjoyed a quick lunch. The surrounding neighbourhood looked something like this:

After we had finished our sandwiches, my mother asked if I wanted to get some coffee – it was only one euro, after all, or half the price of the can of Coke. Operating under the belief that all coffee must necessarily take the form of frothy, sugary drinks, I took her up on the suggestion. The beverage was served to me in a dainty cup and saucer. It was a dark, rich liquid, simmering with a bitterness ameliorated only by a small pack of sugar, and, quite simply, I fell in love with it.

In the years interceding, I entertained a fondness for coffee – without sugar, without milk, without syrups – without ever becoming too dependent on it, extended stretches of duress notwithstanding (exams, senior thesis, Carroll Round, etc.), but, for most of them, I was not a coffee snob (and still mostly am not, although, to be fair, I’m probably a fairly bad judge of my own elitism). I have been content with picking up the occasional tall coffee from Starbucks/The Corp/whatever is on hand, subsiding on the weak brew provided by Georgetown’s dining hall, or downing cups of the instant stuff when I just really needed the caffeine, damn it. It took returning to Europe via study abroad to elevate my enjoyment of coffee to the next level. It was at Oxford that a friend introduced me to the miraculous device that is the French press; for the first time in my life, I could make my own coffee. And it was during my travels on the continent that I was ensnared by an even more bewitching substance still: espresso.

Espresso is the distilled essence of everything I love about coffee delivered in a far more efficient manner, but espresso machines – the good ones, anyway – were decidedly outside of my price range. Fortunately, last year, my friend Katherine introduced me to her Bialetti Moka Express, a stovetop coffeemaker that is able to mimic quite well the taste and consistency of espresso, but it wasn’t until this past week that I finally bought one of my own.

I honestly do not know how I lived without one before.

To further heighten the general loveliness of caffeine consumption, I also purchased a set of Bodum Pavina double-wall glasses. I am usually not one to get overly excited about design, but their construction is just beautiful. The glass is extraordinarily light and provides excellent insulation for the drink, and it creates the illusion the liquid being suspended in mid-air, which I think is fairly nifty.

I wanted to use them right away when they arrived last night, so I made myself a cup of Tazo vanilla rooibus tea, curled up with my copy of Infinite Jest, and listened to Chopin. (I promise you that my most of my Friday nights are, in fact, this boring.)

♪ Frédéric Chopin – Barcarolle in F sharp major, Op. 60: Allegretto

This morning, I made my first ever cup of quasi-espresso. It was heavenly.

Paired with some Virginia Woolf and Mozart, it made for quite a delightful start to my weekend.

♪ Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Oboe Concerto in C major, K. 314: Allegro

ellie goulding at the 9:30 club.

2011-07-28T22:37:00.001-04:00

Sorry for pulling the Great Blogging Disappearing Act again. I’ve been pulling slightly longer hours at work this week than usual or, on one memorable occasion, brought work home to do (it was like, um, homework!) after technological misfortune struck, so blogging has assumed a rather lower priority than normal. I hope to catch up on it soon.

This past Monday, I went to my first concert, adventures in classical music excepted, in about a year and a half; I need to go all the way back to my year in England, when Ingrid Michaelson’s tour swung by London, for the last time I queued outside one of those indie music venues for the privilege of standing on my feet for another few hours. The artist in question this time around: one Ellie Goulding, a singer-songwriter/electronica maven of relatively recent vintage who is definitely more well known on the other side of the pond. I first came across her debut album, Lights – or, to be more specific, Bright Lights, its significantly augmented re-release – during fall term of senior year, and it quickly become one of those records that come to define a particular time in my life. Its staying power, however, has outlasted the relative unhappiness of that period, and I still find myself listening to it quite often.

For those readers who haven’t listened to her songs before, here are the first single off Lights, my favourite track from the album, and an absolutely heart-rending live cover of the Temper Trap’s “Sweet Disposition,” in that order:

Ellie Goulding – Starry Eyed

Ellie Goulding – Your Biggest Mistake

Ellie Goulding – Sweet Disposition (Temper Trap Cover)

Before I proceed to the gig itself, some remarks about the circumstances under which I attended it are in order. I was originally supposed to go with my friend Kat, but a linear algebra exam (boo, maths) precluded her from coming along. I was then going with one of Kat’s friends, but a summer academic obligation forced her to miss it as well! Thus did I show up to the venue by myself, something that initially caused me a bit of trepidation. Among all but the most misanthropic among us, I think there is some pathological horror attached to showing up to inherently social gatherings wholly alone – even as a self-confessed introvert, I find myself struggling to control it – but, when the music starts, decibels and rhythms thumping insistently between skin and ribcage, the surrounding sea of people fades into irrelevance. Except for that irritating fan who just needs to elbow her way to the stage. She is impossible to ignore and a subject of much loathing. Also irritating was the fact that, per the request of the artist, “professional photography” was not allowed, and this directive apparently encompassed my DSLR. I use the ironic quotation marks because there are very clearly DSLR cameras for amateurs on one hand and pros on the other, but it would probably not have been in my best interest to get into a fight about photographic equipment with the venue staff. Therefore, I can only offer low-quality photos courtesy of my mobile; somebody please remind me to buy a point-and-shoot camera at some point in the future so this does not happen again.

Anyway, to the music, finally! The opening act was an Australian DJ duo called Bag Raiders in the mould of Cut Copy, LCD Soundsystem, and other alternative dance artists too hip to have caught my notice. I had never heard of them prior to this gig, but they had great energy and veritably brought the house down. Here is a track of theirs for your listening pleasure, although it is at least a billion times more irresistible when played through proper music venue acoustics.

Bag Raiders – Sunlight

Most fortunately for us impatient fans, Ellie appeared not too long thereafter. Watching an artist perform live should reveal something extraordinary about them. When I saw Imogen Heap live back in high school, I was dazzled how she deconstructed her electronic creations without forgoing any of their original beauty. Ingrid Michaelson revealed herself to be a most charming individual, sprinkling engaging conversation throughout her performance. And Ellie Goulding? What I found most astounding about her was the sheer power of her voice and its Tori Amos/Björk-like elasticity, which do not always come through on her record (you can hear it if you listen to “Sweet Disposition”). She has absolutely electric stage presence as a result and was just really, really fantastic.

Er, right, since I have gotten to the incoherent babbling stage, allow me to share the set list:

Under The Sheets
This Love (Will Be Your Downfall)
Every Time You Go
Human
Guns And Horses
The End
Wish I Stayed
Your Song
The Writer
Home
Salt Skin
Lights
Animal
Little Dreams
Your Biggest Mistake (Encore)
Starry Eyed (Encore)

For a three-song stretch – “The End,” “Wish I Stayed,” and “Your Song,” I believe – she ditched the full band for just a guitar and someone accompanying her on keyboard. Ellie originally started out as the guitar-strumming folk-ish type, and it was an absolute joy to hear that side of her music too.

And here are some pictures! Again, I do apologise for their poor quality. If you cannot tell, she was wearing leather hot pants, a gold lamé cropped top, and a leather jacket that she ultimately took off partway through the gig, much to the general audience’s delight. Just because I would never be caught dead in such an outfit does not mean that Miss Goulding did not absolutely own it.

Last but not least, I tried recording some of her songs with my phone, again with largely inadequate results. I did get about one minute’s worth of “The Writer” in which someone who is familiar with the song can sort of hear the lyrics, but YouTube is being a curmudgeon at the moment. Some other kind soul managed to get the entire track and has already uploaded it, so I hope he/she doesn’t mind if I link to that instead!

the occasional nuisances of adulthood.

2011-07-20T21:25:00.001-04:00

In general, I have taken to the Real World as a fish takes to water at perfect pH. After the unpredictable hours I kept as an undergraduate, operating along the lines of a more or less fixed schedule is a welcome relief. I enjoy residing in the heart of the city, as opposed to a tony enclave (which is not to say that Georgetown is not near & dear to my heart and that I do not return to it fairly frequently). I derive great pleasure from maintaining a ship-shape flat and feel not a little bit of pride at having finally achieved the exalted state of financial independence. I realise that I sound like the world’s biggest square, but I like leading a responsible life.

That said, this responsibility is underpinned by a myriad of daily obligations that require, in the phrase of one particular Auror, constant vigilance, and there are just some days when the thought of attending to all of them induces an irresistible lackadaisicalness within me. Supermarket run? No, this weather is atrocious. Dinner? No, I don’t want to eat those leftovers anymore. Hair littered across the bathroom floor? Damn it, I clean that thing everyday yet my follicles still won’t give me a bloody break. It is during times like these that I find myself missing, in an infantile & fleeting way, the luxuries of university life: a dining hall stocked with provisions (never mind if they were often utterly average), facilities whose cleanliness was not my particular prerogative, the existence of academia as the ultimate excuse for any unkemptness on my part. Can’t somebody just deal with this for me while I curl up in bed and cease all movement and thought?

I am always disappointed in myself with I lapse into such indolence: surely, I think, I should be above such petty grievances. Rather than dwelling upon that disappointment, though, I should remind myself that it can be okay to abdicate the responsibilities of adulthood. I am allowed, every now and then, to simply sit on my bed in front of the TV, nursing a burrito bowl from Chipotle while watching Downton Abbey, as I did tonight and as student-me so often did as well. Four years of rather intense education followed almost immediately by 45-hour work weeks – surely I deserve at least that much license.

adventures in shakespearean punning.

2011-07-18T09:00:00.000-04:00

By way of background, my friend Praise is working as a tutor this summer.

Praise: we're starting hamlet tomorrow and i haven't it re-read it yet...but i hope having read it like three times in the past will be sufficient
Praise: except when they ask questions, they don't ever ask thematic questions, but about really really minor points in the plot that i don't remember
Praise: annoying students, really
Me: they are young.
Me: give them time.
Me: in a little while, I expect they will simply give up on literature altogether.
Praise: let them brew, shall we say?

My first reaction:

My second reaction: I need to blog this, obvs.

pathologies of this contemporary age.

2011-07-17T17:24:00.001-04:00

Receive an e-mail. Subsequently assaulted by smartphone and two sets of desktop notifications bleeping cheerfully.
Obtain – legally or not – new album by hip-but-not-too-ostentatiously-hipster band. Should its genre in iTunes be “alternative,” “rock,” “indie rock,” “indie pop,” or just “indie”?
Gchat status perpetually set to busy. People ignore it. Not really busy anyway.
Wish to broadcast witty remark across the internets, but, to paraphrase Rebecca Black, which social media platform does one use?
3G network unavailable. Cannot check into Target on Foursquare.

I am also fairly certain that Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” is a veiled treatise against eBook readers.

it’s all about sex and economics.

2011-07-16T12:19:00.000-04:00

At least according to this particular economist from the University in Helsinki. Here is a snippet from the abstract for his paper “Male Organ and Economic Growth: Does Size Matter?” (link courtesy of the ever informative Marginal Revolution):

This paper explores the link between economic development and penile length between 1960 and 1985. It estimates an augmented Solow model utilizing the Mankiw-Romer-Weil 121 country dataset. The size of male organ is found to have an inverse U-shaped relationship with the level of GDP in 1985. It can alone explain over 15% of the variation in GDP. The GDP maximizing size is around 13.5 centimetres, and a collapse in economic development is identified as the size of male organ exceeds 16 centimetres.

…followed by keywords like “economic growth,” “Solow model,” and “penile length.” I’m not sure the AEA recognises the latter as an actual classification, but whatever, as the kids say.

Even those of you who couldn’t care less about the intricacies of cross-country growth regressions – and I concede that is about 99.9 percent of people reading this page, myself sometimes included – should find these choice quotations from the introduction to be rather creatively worded.

“The aim of this paper is to fill the scholarly gap with the male organ.”
“It is argued here that the average size – the erect length, to be precise…”
“Indeed the ‘male organ hypothesis’ put forward here suggests that penises carry economic significance.”
“…the ‘male organ hypothesis’ put forward here is quite penetrating an argument.”

I’m fairly convinced that this author just needed a vaguely acceptable excuse to pen as many sexual innuendos from his seat in the ivory tower, but there is actually a serious point to be made. For me, this paper falls under the Freakonomics school of economics research. Entertaining and unconventional, this kind of work nevertheless banks a little too much on its novelty factor (“Oh, look, something that has never before seen the light of ~~day~~ publishing! Here’s to tenure and/or a New York Times bestseller!”) and prays that the audience forgets two guiding principles of applied economics: (1) correlation does not imply causation, and (2) the existence of correlation itself doesn’t guarantee that said correlation actually has any meaning. Perhaps the correlation only came about because the model has been specified in a particular manner (see: Sala-i-Martin (1997), “I Just Ran Two Million Regressions,” which is one of my favourite econ papers of all time for the title alone). Or maybe the fact that well-endowed men happen to be found in wealthier countries does not, in fact, tell us anything about how those countries became wealthy in the first place.

That said, do enjoy the paper. The discussion section, beginning on page 8, is especially amusing. Try reading the phrase “nature-given, non-disposable groin-area endowments” with a straight face. Just try.

minimalism is not a dinner party.

2011-07-08T17:59:00.001-04:00

Preface: no, I have no idea what this post title is supposed to mean – even though I just wrote it, yes – other than being a blatant rip-off of the Mao Zedong quote, “The Revolution is not a dinner party.” I first came across those words when I was thirteen, and, eight (!) years later, I’m still not entirely sure what they mean either. Was the Great Chairman trying to say that the Revolution is SRS BSNS? Or that it is, in fact, a delectable dessert?

Anyway, for those of you who are reading this via Google Reader (or your RSS aggregator of choice), I would be tickled pink if you could click here to glance at my new blog layout. I had been pondering changing it for quite some time, but it proved quite difficult to find a template that was both minimalist and fresh in appearance. Even after I succeeded in doing so, there were two lengthy evenings of struggling with CSS code. These tussles unfolded something like this, repeated many times over the course of a night:

Me: *uploads stylesheet with bated breath, cheers audibly when aesthetic perfection appears to finally be in reach*
CSS: lol, jokes!
Me: …囧

Working with code actually reminded me a lot of writing .do files for Stata: both contain sets of commands aimed at creating some final product, use the same delimiter in my case (;), and require that I draw upon my considerable reservoir of OCD behaviour. Likewise, my knowledge of CSS and Stata remains woefully incomplete, and working with either invariably involves a lot of learning by doing – or, as I like to think of it, learning by iterative failure and Google searches. The process can be very frustrating, but it nevertheless manages to captivate me utterly until I get exactly what I want.

The previous layout was also minimalist-inspired, but this one, Typominima, really puts the focus back on the content and typography. Gone are the two sidebars; rather, you will find all auxiliary widgets, which have been reduced in number, in the footer. I have also created two new pages, Online Reading and Blogroll, that can be accessed from the navigation bar at the top: the former is an inventory of my favourite destinations on the internet, the latter a list of personal blogs of friends and online affiliates. I am all about mutual promotion – who doesn’t love a wider readership? – so, if you want to exchange links, do drop me a line!

Meanwhile, this update finds me ensnarled in DC rush hour traffic, as I am going home for the weekend. Given my family paid a visit to my flat only two weeks ago, I am on track to see them far more often than I did when I was still in university, and, you know, this is a development that I absolutely love.

june 2011 in review.

2011-07-06T22:07:00.001-04:00

A bit late with this one, but lack of punctuality has never seemed to bother me much, at least where blogging is concerned.

This Month in Blogging

I undertook some sewing projects while at home, shared summer mixes of both an indie and classical variety, reflected on the next stage of my life, provided a virtual tour of my new flat, and cooked – no, really!

Mind

Since I am on a temporary leave of absence from academia, I shall use this space to reflect upon the opportunities and challenges associated with the workplace, as well as germane intellectual endeavours (should there be any, of course). I have been there for not quite a month now and by and large find it very enjoyable. Things are still quite slow on my end, though I have it on good authority that they should be getting busier soon. I think I’m still in the process of adjusting to the tempo of the working life, which is quite different from that of student life, and it is early, after all. Nevertheless, as I grow more comfortable with my new environment, it is important that I avoid passivity. In this regard, perhaps the Real World is not so different from the Ivory Tower?

Body

The more or less intolerable weather that descends upon DC during the summer means that any slight desire I may previously have possessed to exercise outdoors has disappeared. On the other hand, my aggregate desire to work out is actually greater than usual: sitting in an office chair for the better part of the nine hours everyday means that it isn’t uncommon for me to want to shake off the inertia by their end. I recently signed up for a membership at my workplace’s fitness centre, and I hope to make good use of it! And, if it ever decides to get cooler in this blasted city, I look forward to running outside.

Heart

With the stress of university firmly behind me – even if I do, in a Stockholm Syndrome-esque way, miss it – I am hard pressed to think of a time that I have felt this relaxed for this long. The most destabilising thing that happened to me all month was screwing up a lemon basil chicken recipe one night, thereby leaving me with little to eat for dinner. I sleep six and a half hours every night. I can guiltlessly chat with girlfriends on the phone for hours. This all feels quite abnormal, to be completely honest. I am clearly a glutton for misery.

Soul

The one unequivocal advantage of working an office job is that, when I come home in the evening, I can indulge in all the free conscious activity – if one wants to approach this in Marxist terms – that I wish until bedtime calls. To maximise the utility and productivity of said activity, I am participating in Infinite Summer, an online “book club,” as such, devoted to reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest over 92 days. I had never read anything of the late author’s but his magisterial essays on tennis (“Roger Federer as Religious Experience” and “The String Theory”) and his 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, which is one of the most perfect things I have ever come across. I therefore felt a bit of trepidation in approaching his magnum opus, which exceeds one thousand pages in length. I am pleased to say that my reading is on schedule, and, although I’m not quite sure what the book is “about” – to the extent that it is about anything – it is a rare and affecting work of literature that I am genuinely enjoying. Otherwise, I have quite taken to cooking, started teaching myself French (and am vaguely serious about it too), and watched a lot of television. The latter is actually starting to become a concern: yesterday, for instance, I literally did nothing after work but cook dinner, eat it, wash the resulting dishes, and watch five episodes of The Good Wife in the meanwhile. This, you see, is the kind of free conscious activity I should keep to a minimum!

on canadianness.

2011-07-04T22:54:00.001-04:00

If you have ever had the misfortune of enduring an icebreaker with me and the powers that be, as they so often do, force us to play that “two truths and a lie” game, then you will have likely learned that I am in possession of U.S.-Canada dual citizenship. This is hardly the most exotic combinations of countries in the world – indeed, having spent the majority of my existence in North America, I would be hard pressed to think of two countries more prosaic (cf. familiarity breeds contempt, etc.) – but is is a fun fact to bandy around.

I was born in Massachusetts – hence the American citizenship – but moved to Toronto at the tender age of six months. I would reside there for the next seven years of my life. About six years into that, my parents underwent the naturalisation process, trading their Chinese citizenship for that of Canada. In the process, I also became a naturalised Canadian citizen. At this point, I would have been six years old. I do not believe that six year-old me had any inkling that the number of nationalities associated with my name had just doubled, and I certainly never begged my parents to get me dual citizenship as a Christmas/birthday present. That I am Canadian at all, then, almost feels like some legal fluke, wholly attributable to some vagary of citizenship law.

View of the Capitol from the Newseum. Said view, incidentally, is obscured by the very nationalistic presence of the Canadian Embassy.

I could wax at great length about Americanness both experiential and metaphysical. Since it is the Fourth of July, I suppose that would be the more appropriate topic, but, around this time of year – I have always found it amusing that the U.S. and Canada, with its shared geographic proximity and colonial past, celebrate their respective national holidays within four days of each other – I find myself preoccupied with the following question: what does it mean to have passed some duration of my life north of the border? Does it mean anything at all, when said duration occurred at a time in my life when I was incapable of contemplating such a thing?

The winters in Toronto were long, even if I cannot remember the cold: the flurries began around Thanksgiving – which falls in October, mind – and the accumulated snow was still melting when my mother would observe her birthday in early March. There was a large hill behind my school, and, during recess, we would all scurry to the top of it before rolling back down, gleefully. The infinitely older fifth and sixth graders would create snowballs that would eventually grow to such a stature that they could no longer be moved, so the snowballs would stand there, strange sculptures in the field. I attended not elementary school but primary school. Even after I had graduated from the car seat, I enjoyed sitting in the middle all by myself (at least until my younger sister arrived on the scene); the bright red button on the buckle read “CENTRE.” I lived in a quiet, peaceful neighbourhood. My school was within walking distance from my house. On the way, I would pass a tennis court, where I first picked up a racquet – I was a Martina Hingis fan because she was so young when she burst onto the tennis scene and I could relate to that – and an adjacent playground, where I would play tag with my friend Kyle. He is the only friend from those days that I remember by name. I had another friend whose family was from Hong Kong, another whose relations originally hailed from Finland.

Beyond this halcyon bubble, my world generally a small one. My parents took me to Quebec for a holiday, but I could not have been more than one or two years old at the time. We went to Ontario Place, where I would eventually brave my first log flume ride. My father drove me to the Yamaha Music School in North York for lessons every week. When I was promoted to private lessons in the evening, we would pick up dinner at a McDonald’s along the way. I always ordered a cheeseburger but took care to remove the pickle from the middle; Dad lectured me about the perils of being picky about food. I knew the names of the cities one would pass by when driving along the edge of Lake Ontario. Among them, I recall only St Catharines because “Catherine” was my favourite name and I wished I could swap my own name for it. My paternal grandparents lived with us for a year, and I passed many a summer’s day watching my grandmother paint by the kitchen sink, hoping that, one day, I might also be able to produce such art.

When I ask myself what I remember of Canada, the memories I dredge up are really quite pedestrian. I cannot produce any lengthy ruminations on Canadianness; to pretend that I can would be to drawn upon a false nostalgia, an exercise in pure sophism. Canada is my childhood as childhood becomes in retrospect, suffused with the usual idyllic innocence but also peculiarly insular, static, an amalgam of people & places arranged as if props on a stage, ever fixed. But such a childhood is also lived in the present, for Canada is where I learned to spell (if not speak, alas) the Queen’s English, made my first acquaintance with the piano, and was altogether privileged enough to be raised amidst a friendly and diverse community. It was happiness, unequivocally so. Perhaps not all discourses about the interchange between nationalities and self need to be wrought with doubt and alienation.

j.m. keynes on british politics.

2011-06-30T11:00:00.000-04:00

I’ve recently been working through a collection of essays by the inestimable John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, that my mother gave to me for Christmas a few years ago. There is a lot of thought-provoking material within – as the title of the work implies, it’s fairly polemical in nature – that I may or may not blog about later, depending on whether I feel a sufficient amount of rigour to tackle a subject other than, er, what I ate for diner last night. In the meanwhile, though, allow me to share this excerpt from an essay called “Liberalism and Labour,” in which Baron Keynes attempts to carve out a place in the British political system for his dear Liberals (emphasis added):

Possibly the Liberal Party cannot serve the state in any better way than by supplying Conservative Governments with Cabinets, and Labour Governments with ideas.

This was written in 1926, mind, when the Liberal Party were in the process of losing more radical members to Labour and more moderate ones to the Conservatives, but I laughed aloud when I read it, for I would like to think that Keynes unintentionally predicted the outcome of a general election that would happen 74 84 (my arithmetic skills are clearly in decline) years later!

culinary adventures: chapters from a chinese cookbook.

2011-06-28T21:41:00.001-04:00

Last weekend, my family drove down to DC to deliver some items to the apartment and, more generally, just to visit. A few days before their arrival, my parents called to ask if there was anything in particular that they could get for me. Given the District of Columbia proper is sadly lacking in Asian supermarkets and I have not yet had a chance to venture out into the suburbs for these venerable institutions, I casually mentioned one or two vegetables that I miss eating on a regular basis and also asked if she could pick up some frozen dumplings from Assi.

Their Chinese minds must have reacted to the request like this: “Well, if it’s one or two vegetables she wants, why not five or six – or ten – additional foodstuffs, including ingredients for a double batch of homemade dumplings that we’ll all make together in her only slightly cramped flat?”

Let it never be said that tiger parents do not feed their cubs.

The result is that I now have a very full fridge indeed, as well as at least a few meals’ worth of dumplings tucked away in the freezer. I will wax rhapsodically about them once I start cooking them, but, for now, I feast on the simple but delicious dishes of my upbringing. In addition to the actual act of consuming them, I am very much enjoying the intuition that goes into their preparation and cooking: my parents left me with no recipes, only guiding principles, but a lifetime of eating these dishes has left me with a fairly good idea of how they ought to turn out, at least. Here’s a quick documentation of tonight’s dinner:

First, 土豆丝炒豆腐干, or shredded potato fried with dried tofu. The potatoes involved are very pedestrian and can be bought anywhere, the dried tofu less so. As the name implies, the consistency of dried tofu is much harder than normal tofu, but that’s why I have always preferred it in stir fry. Also added to the mix are jalapeño peppers, which add a necessary spicy kick to the proceedings. At home, my parents always prepare this with a bit of shredded pork, but that particular ingredient needs to be prepared beforehand. Something to keep in mind the next time I want to make this.

Next up, 韭菜炒鸡蛋, or chives and fried egg: absurdly easy to make but so, so good.

Finally, to supplement the protein in my diet, I heated some 叉烧 that my parents picked up from Ting Wong (天旺), our favourite restaurant in Philadelphia’s Chinatown. My online Chinese-English dictionary tells me that the translation of 叉烧 is “char siu,” but that term is utterly unfamiliar to me, so I shall endeavour to explain it in my own words: it is roast pork cooked in some slightly sweet sauce, which gives it a distinct red colouring on the outside, and, when done right, it is tender and flavourful throughout.

Ting Wong makes the best 叉烧 in the world, as far as I’m concerned; to have some sitting in my fridge is just an absolute delight!

(Also, for those who may have missed it and are potentially interested in this sort of thing, I posted a summery classical music mix last night – do check it out!)

mix: classical summer.

2011-06-27T23:04:00.001-04:00

Apologies for the sparing updates. I think that part of me remains convinced that I am still running on a university student schedule and can therefore get away with only blogging once a week when, really, posting once every two or three days is the desired frequency. I’ll hopefully manage to achieve that in the near future for my own creative necessity, if nothing else!

While I brainstorm & prepare posts for some point in the near future, here is once inspired by something I read over at Deceptive Cadence, NPR’s superb classical music blog. Last week, one of its erstwhile bloggers asked readers, "What are your sounds of summer?" Having already answered this in indie rock/pop form, I decided to take on NPR’s challenge and create a classical music playlist for summer. As there is no shortage of bright, happy, and shiny sounding classical music out there, I wanted to find songs that exude a certain casualness and ease of composition and were, above all else, fun at first listen, even for those who do not spend their waking hours pouring over the minutiae of, say, the Köchel-Verzeichnis (not saying I do that or anything…). This is partially reflected in the names of some of these pieces, which are definitely more descriptive than “Symphony No. 4 in F major” or “Violin Sonata No. 10 in C minor.”

I am incredibly tempted to ramble at length about all twelve tracks, as each was selected with care, but I shall restrict myself to some highlights. Note the youthful ebullience of Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream overture, written when the composer was only seventeen years old. The creative, vibrant instrumentation in the “Russian Dance” from Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Petrouchka follows, and, a little after that, the evocative piano lines of “Jeax d’Eau.” The Boccherini piece, borrowed from the Master and Commander soundtrack, is what I think would happen if a drunk violinist met an equally inebriated cellist at a bar and the two decided to strike up an improvisatory tune. Similarly, the final movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 15 finds the usually weighty German in a surprisingly sunny mood; I love the little musical leaps in both the melody and the harmony. The majestic – and slightly maniacal – overture to Mozart’s The Magic Flute concludes affairs.

I dare you not to feel at least somewhat happier after listening to these pieces!

classical summer
♪ download ♪

Felix Mendelssohn – A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Op. 61: Overture

Igor Stravinsky – Petrouchka: Scene 1: Russian Dance

George Gershwin – An American In Paris

Maurice Ravel – Jeax d’Eau

Léo Delibes – Lakmé: Dome Epais Le Jasmin

Frédéric Chopin – Impromptu No. 1 in A flat major, Op. 29

Luigi Boccherini – La Musica Notturna Delle Strade Di Madrid No. 6, Op. 30

Domenico Scarlatti – Sonata in E major, K. 380: Andante commodo

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Le nozze di Figaro, K. 492: Act 2: ‘Voi, che sapete’

Ludwig van Beethoven – Piano Sonata No. 15 in D major, Op. 28 (“Pastoral”): Rondo: Allegro, ma non troppo; Più allegro quasi presto

Claude Debussy – Fêtes

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Die Zauberflöte, K. 620: Overture

culinary adventures: 骨头汤.

2011-06-21T21:45:00.001-04:00

One week and a half into my Real World existence, my self-education in cooking continues apace. Beyond my existing arsenal of dishes, I managed to make ~~after an epic fail the first time around~~ these lemon and basil chicken breasts – believe it or not, it was actually the first time I had ever handled raw meat – and, a few days after that, a pretty delicious chicken and broccoli alfredo with aid from this recipe (the garlic is absolutely essential). Trawling the blogsophere and the internets at large for new things to make is all quite fun, but I will always feel most comfortable (though comfortable isn’t precisely the word I want to use but, rather, some English equivalent of 对劲) with the culinary traditions of my Chinese background – and, more specifically, the cooking of my parents. To that end, my greatest kitchen coup to date occurred last week, when I successfully recreated a dish that I have eaten for as long as I have been capable of digestion: 骨头汤. (We shall overlook the fact that I required repeated phone calls to my parents to ensure that I wasn’t botching things.)

This literally translates into “bone soup,” except that doesn’t sound particularly appetising, so allow me to elaborate. The soup takes most of an afternoon to prepare, but it is both a simple and versatile dish. One simply takes a few pork loins and places them in boiling water over low heat for about two hours, creating a very flavourful broth in the process.

Once this is done, the broth and the meat can be portioned accordingly, and any combination of vegetables, tofu, and/or noodles, with salt added to taste, can be added for a truly wondrous serving of home-cooked deliciousness. On Sunday, my greens of choice were Napa cabbage and scallions –

– and, to make it a full meal, I added some Shandong noodles.

The result?

Easily the best meal I had eaten since moving in! And, best of all, I am still feasting on the leftover soup and creating variations on the above dish in the evenings, which blessedly means less cooking for me to do when I get home from the office.

i’m still trying to think of a catchy nickname for my flat.

2011-06-18T21:36:00.001-04:00

To the Reader: greetings from the Real World, where I blog from the comforts of my studio apartment in Washington, DC. I have been here for eight days now, but any plans to update this space had to wait until I at last got my internet installed. Although there is much to share, I will resist the temptation to cram everything into one entry.

The actual process of moving in itself occurred without incident. Goodness knows, however, that I would not have been able to do it without my parents, who were infinitely helpful in transporting boxes/furniture up the four stories to my flat, carrying all manner of necessities from the nearby Target, and cleaning the floor with great zeal (well, it was just my father doing the latter…). After everything was in place, I spent most of the following day making the plain white walls appear somewhat less so. Then I took some pictures so that I can give you all a virtual tour of my new premises!

First, here is my kitchen. There is less counter space than I would like, but it is nevertheless still wonderfully functional. I spend a lot of time here, attempting to feed myself, but I’ll save that particular subject for a later post.

Here is one side of the apartment. The Roger Federer photoshoot from the December 2006 issue of Vogue naturally occupies a prominent place on the wall. The chair at the bottom of the picture is where my kitchen table will eventually go. Next to that is my bookshelf – or, to be more accurate, half of the bookshelf that a Georgetown friend kindly gave to me. When my parents were moving it out of my dorm room, the entire thing was altogether too big for the storage capacity of our van, so we had to dismantle it into two pieces and toss one of them. Next to that is a television. This bears mentioning because I have never had a TV in my room until now. With an HDMI cable on hand, I can play any kind of video on my laptop and watch it on a proper flatscreen monitor while lying in bed. With the RemoteDroid app, I can even turn my phone into a de facto remote control, eliminating even the need to get out of bed to, say, queue up the next episode of The Thick of It or The Good Wife. Entertainment and laziness, concurrently: has life ever been so delightful?

My free conscious activity does not solely consist of TV watching, though. For the bibliophiles among you, here are the books that made the journey to DC with me. I do actually mean to read Infinite Jest – I think I’m going to participate in Infinite Summer – but I have a sinking suspicion that I might just jettison all other books in favour of re-reading A Song of Ice and Fire…

Above the TV, I have put up a selection of postcards from my rather extensive collection thereof. Next to that are four cork boards that took at least a few hours to prepare: each one has a particular theme, and then, having decided that, I had to decide how to arrange everything. Times like these leave me feeling very convinced that I do, in fact, suffer from an undiagnosed case of OCD.

On the opposite side of the room, I have my (queen-sized!) bed, with the requisite collection of stuffed animals, and a wicker sofa pushed up against that. The wall decorations here were also very deliberately planned, and I have Katherine to thank for the absolutely wondrous Napoleon poster. As I told her earlier, it adds the right amount of megalomania to any living space.

Finally, I present one of my favourite parts of living here: the massive walk-in closet. It is a far cry from the tiny wardrobes with which I made due while at Georgetown and a luxury in its own right.

All in all, I’m very much enjoying it here so far. With a Giant and Target right around the corner and easy access to both metro and bus lines, I could not have asked for a more convenient place to life. I am finally approaching the exalted ideal of independent living, and, as much as I loved residing in Georgetown for three out of the last four years, learning to call a less tony and more vibrant DC neighbourhood home is an adventure that is only just beginning.

Next up: some notes on my new job. Later: results of my cooking!

mozart he said there’s nothing to composing, and that’s all we do.

2011-06-10T11:00:00.000-04:00

By the time this post goes live, my parents and I ought to be well on our way to Washington, DC – provided I-95 isn’t snarled in traffic – for the Big Move™, as I have taken to calling it in my head. On the eve of my departure (quick refresher: I am beginning my Real Person Job soon, and, by “soon,” I actually mean next Monday), I offer some thoughts, more or less taken verbatim from my journal because, well, it’s more efficient that way! (Aside: title for this post borrowed from Meg & Dia’s “Here, Here and Here,” which remains my go-to song for these sorts of occasions.)

Although my post-graduation future has been fixed since the end of February or so, I feel that I have yet to fully internalise the fact that the next great stage of my life is upon me, whether I like it or not. I am leaving the nest again, not unlike that time, nearly four years ago now, I first relocated to the District to begin my studies at Georgetown. Last week, I was reading some of my journal entries from the end of summer 2007 and was stuck by my preoccupation with the idea of dislocation and the perception that there must always necessarily be some incongruity between myself and my surroundings. Before I left for Georgetown, it was the “hallowed land of higher education” (I was a piece of work at seventeen, no?) to the intellectually lax mundaneness of high school. Upon arriving at Georgetown, it was filled with happy, laughing peers who all had friends and social lives when I had neither. When I returned home for the first time, not merely as Malin but Malin the College Student, it seemed alien and unfitting as old friends appeared set on divergent paths.

These emotions were held quite strongly at the time, but, in retrospect, I suspect they were largely just adolescent histrionics. The critical knowledge and skills I gained from high school (or at least during my high school years – I daresay I learned as much, if not more, from reading and writing done beyond academia proper) become more apparent with time. We are all of us, at our core, fearful of some unshakeable loneliness that winds itself around our veins. And, as for home and its associations, they have become my deepest reservoir of comfort, strength, and love.

Thus, as I commence the next great stage of my life, I cannot deny my trepidations, but, compared to those that possessed me the last time I did this, they are positively dull in substance: where to buy Chinese groceries, what internet service provider to choose, managing my personal finances (with added hard budget constraint) prudently, hoping that my employer does not find me completely hapless. I am sure that my worries will be in abundance because they are, I have learned, an inseparable part of my story. Yet I must believe that the interceding four years have left me more mature, more resilient, and perhaps even more at peace – with myself, with all that I have seen and felt and lived, with the turning of the page, and the next, and the next.

mix: vaguely pretentious songs for breezy summer days.

2011-06-09T07:00:00.000-04:00

It has been a while since I’ve inflicted the internets with my taste in music, so I have quite a backlog of mixes to share at some point or another. First, allow me to present a collection of tracks that is appropriate for the Northeast’s current meteorological situation (read: hot and humid). I posted a summer-themed mix two years ago inspired by a driving-induced rush of blood to the head. This time, I come bearing a summertime mix of a more mellow nature, inspired by late afternoons spent lying in the backyard with a book, iPod, and sunglasses for company. Special attention was paid to maintaining a sense of continuous tempo & sound throughout – the aural equivalent to watching the idle drifting of clouds.

One artist to whom I should like to draw your attention is Foster the People. A friend of mine introduced me to them within the last month, and, as soon as their debut album leaked, I snatched it up immediately. Their sound reminds me not a little bit of Phoenix’s magnum opus of an album, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix: the music is fun, brash, and, most importantly, effortless, while the lyrics are much darker in nature. If there is one song that you must download, it is their impossibly catchy “Houdini.”

But enough rambling. Here is the music!

vaguely pretentious songs for breezy summer days
♪ download ♪

Rose Elinor Dougall – Another Version Of Pop Song

Metric – Soft Rock Star

Foster the People – Houdini

Milo Greene – 1957

Broken Social Scene – All To All

Andrew Belle – Static Waves (featuring Katie Herzig)

Mumm-Ra – She’s Got You High

Patrick Wolf – Bermondsey Street

The Shins – Phantom Limb

Phoenix – Fences

Vampire Weekend – White Sky

The Decemberists – The Crane Wife 3

sewing projects galore!

2011-06-06T16:42:00.001-04:00

Because, yes, I use my holiday to fiddle around with a sewing machine. While I’ve yet to attempt any of the projects I linked to here, mostly because I am quite good at wasting hours looking at crafting blogs for more things to make, I have undertaken a few smaller, simpler projects. They have also been a good way of using up leftover fabric from previous projects.

First, I turned to one of my favourite blogs, Purl Bee, for ideas. Per my mother’s exhortation to make something that has nothing to do with rabbits for once, I decided to make a Purl Frog with some cheerful polka-dot green fabric. The beads were from a collection thereof that I discovered in my closet – last time I must have used them was elementary school!

Little froggy also found where our pet goldfish resides. Nothing good can come of this!

Second, I adapted Rosey Corner Creation’s Too Cute Card Keeper to suit the materials at hand. Given I did not have any vinyl with which to make the pockets, I just used the lining fabric instead. I also added a button enclosure to give the piece a bit more polish.

I plan on using this to carry my DC Metro SmarTrip card around with me. This not only frees me from having to pull out my wallet every time I need to enter/exit a station but will also, hopefully, make it less likely that I will lose said card. Which I may or may not have done a few months ago, much to my eternal annoyance.

Finally, some of you may recall my blogging about punting in Oxford last year. The boathouse at Magdalen Bridge sells cheap, charming, and only slightly ridiculous straw hats to accompany the experience of drifting down the River Cherwell. I could not bear to leave the hat behind when I dragged all of my things back to the States, so it has been sitting, sadly neglected, in my room ever since. But I decided on a whim today to spruce it up a bit. Using a template from Wise Craft, I made an adorable fabric flower to attach to the hat. Instead of using a button for the centre of the flower, though, I used some pearl-shaped beads. I wish I had been able to give the “petals” more volume, but the end result was pleasing nonetheless.

My fashion challenge for the summer, then: find an excuse to wear this hat.

may 2011 in review.

2011-06-05T23:28:00.001-04:00

After a month of substantial blogging (finally!), I am bringing this feature back to life. I meant to get to it sooner, but the French Open and A Song of Ice and Fire have thus far conspired to monopolise the bulk of my time.

This Month in Blogging

I, at long last, recapped my trips to New Orleans and Yosemite National Park and found time to nerd out about the Carroll Round too. I reached a rather big milestone in my relatively young life – namely, graduating from Georgetown with with Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service degree. And, thus far during my truncated-by-the-demands-of-Real-Adulthood summer holiday, I disparaged the intelligence of the broader American populace, started learning how to cook, and flailed over Roland Garros.

And, since I haven’t done these more introspective reflections for a while, a quick refresher: the four following categories roughly correspond to my New Year's resolutions – no point in making them if I do not mean to keep them, after all!

Mind

I can officially cross resolution #2 off my list, as I inexplicably had my best term ever at Georgetown just as I was about to leave the place. I am more or less satisfied with my overall academic performance as an undergraduate, a handful of course marks here and there notwithstanding. Simply because formal education has concluded for the time being does not mean that learning ends, though: I am quite sure that my impending research assistant position will put me through the wringer on that account…

Body

My diet and exercise declined precipitously with the onset of thesis/Carroll Round/exams-stress; I both envy and admire people who are able to stay on top of academics and health-related things simultaneously. I have been much better since returning home, though. Chinese food – by which I mean the proper home-cooked stuff – always seems healthier to me than the alternative, and I have actually left the house every now and then to work out. A few sessions on the tennis court, biking in Valley Forge National Park, and even running: how exciting! I hope to keep this up when I move to DC for good. At least I won’t have to worry about coursework interfering.

Heart

Mental health status: absolutely buoyed by graduation, followed by much-needed summer holiday relaxation. The waning days of my undergraduate years were an ideal opportunity to reflect on the many wonderful things that Georgetown has brought to my life, and it is an emotional high from which I’ve still yet to come down.

Soul

Leisure reading is in full swing with George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire keeping me company. I’ve read 16 books since the beginning of the year, which means that I am on pace to meet my goal of 30. Other activities, such as journaling and piano, suffer while I remain engrossed in ASOIAF, but summer’s possibilities are boundless.

GO ROG GO.

2011-06-03T17:13:00.001-04:00

That is all.

inchoate endeavours in cooking.

2011-05-31T14:09:00.001-04:00

Unlike many people I know – my friend Rosemary (and her lovely blog) comes to mind – I do not especially enjoy cooking. I can put dishes together well enough to survive, but I don’t have any particular talent at the art. However, with life as a young professional beckoning, it occurs to me that I can no longer count on being fed (by a university dining hall, parents, foodie of a sister, etc.) but must instead learn how to feed myself. Given I was bumming around the kitchen and watching the French Open, I figured today was as good a day as any to begin my culinary education.

Best to start simple, I figured – possibly ridiculously simple. I created an impromptu sauce with grape tomatoes, basil, and garlic, threw it together with some fettuccine, and sprinkled some shredded parmesan on top for a perfectly pleasant bowl of pasta:

To supplement this, I cut up some fresh strawberries and mixed them into a massive dollop of plain yoghurt for just the right mixture of tart and sweet. Since the end of the academic year, the last month of which involved far too much indulging in what I call the preservatarian diet, I have had a constant craving for fresh fruit and desired strawberries most of all.

This also reminds me of the 90p yoghurt pots I used to buy from the café in the Social Science Library in Oxford as snacks during my lengthy coursework sessions there. But enough of the nostalgia.

Speaking of the French Open, nothing says “summer” to me like Grand Slam tennis. There have been some absolutely delightful matches so far with even better ones to come, not the least a Roger Federer-Novak Djokovic semifinal that will leave me positively wracked with anxiety, I am sure.

plebeians. sigh.

2011-05-26T12:45:00.001-04:00

I was engaging in the time-honoured tradition of flipping through the Philadelphia Inquirer while eating a late breakfast when I came across the following sentence in a letter to the editor (“Strauss-Kahn sheds light on bureaucracy”):

The Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair has served to shine a light on the little-known international bureaucracies such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Bank for International Standards, and the United Nations.

I realise that I am going to sound like the greatest intellectual elitist prick of all time, but hear me out: the International Whaling Commission can be safely considered a “little-known international bureaucracy,” as can the Council of the Baltic Sea States or even, say, the Asian Development Bank.

But the IMF? The World Bank? The United Nations, which I am quite sure every Republican (and quite a few Democrats) to ever run for any kind of political office has shat upon in a stump speech? World, you make me despair.

georgetown forever.

2011-05-24T20:48:00.001-04:00

On May 21, 2011, I officially became an alumna of Georgetown University. I have been thinking a lot, as people are wont to do in such situations, about what the last four years ultimately were, yet such contemplation is premature. Their true worth will only become apparent with time. But I can say with full confidence now that commencement weekend – beginning with senior convocation, running through Tropaia (which is fancy Greek for “awards ceremony,”) and senior ball, and culminating with graduation itself – will not be easily forgotten, for both the memories themselves and what they represent.

The last four years have been so enriching at both a personal and intellectual level, even if they were, at times, difficult – because all worthwhile things in this world should be difficult. It is staggering, to behold all that I have experienced; it is humbling, to count so many wonderful people among my friends, mentors, and inspiration; and it is bittersweet, truly, to know that, although Georgetown is indeed forever, this particular chapter of my life has reached its end.

what are men compared to rocks and mountains?

2011-05-19T09:58:00.001-04:00

A few opening remarks upon Yosemite National Park, which I visited during my Easter holiday with my family:

→ Even during late April, massive swathes of the park are still covered by not an insignificant amount of snow. This is me, standing outside our accommodations in the park:

As you can see, I clearly did not do a good job of packing weather-appropriate clothing.

→ In spite of this sudden return to winter -- or, in some cases, because -- the vistas offered at Yosemite were actually as stunningly beautiful as people had told me. Immersing myself in the internet-free world of nature was exactly what I needed after thesis/Carroll Round.

On the drive back to Los Angeles, we stopped at Malibu Beach for a bit of proper California sunshine. I'm not terribly fond of the beach, personally, but it does afford some fun opportunities for photography.

In particular, the ever-shifting shoreline is like a Salvador Dalí-inspired painting, if you look at it closely enough.

I also insisted on doing an impromptu photoshoot of my sister, whose heart and university aspirations belong to SoCal. These photos are so incredibly trite, but that doesn't mean they weren't fun to take! They should additionally leave no doubt as to to who between us is the cooler sibling (hint: not me).

a gaggle of econ nerds walk into a bar, or, why i love the carroll round.

2011-05-19T00:06:00.001-04:00

First order of business: as kids these days say, GPOY --

If I look vaguely discomfited in this picture, that would be because I picked up my official graduation regalia yesterday afternoon. Although I was already fully aware of the fact that I will receive my Georgetown diploma in exactly three days' time, there is nothing quite like awkwardly trying to figure out just how exactly one wears an academic hood to drive that point home. (Necessary disclaimer: I am actually wearing my mortarboard from my Oxford days in this picture, not the graduation cap proper, which can hardly compare, and you have no idea how tempted I am to just show up to commencement in full sub-fusc.)

Anyway, back to the subject at hand as I continue my effort to finish catch-up blogging before this undergraduate business is over. If you spent so much as ten minutes talking to me during the last year -- assuming you would ever want to subject yourself to such a thing -- you probably heard something or another about the Carroll Round, which, as our website proudly proclaims, is a premier undergraduate international economics conference here at Georgetown. I first heard of it near the end of my freshman year, when my dean sent out his customary e-mail encouraging students to apply for the conference's Steering Committee. Though my interest was very much piqued, I ultimately did not apply, believing that I did not have the requisite academic track record in economics -- or any useful skills, really -- to deserve such a position. On the list of things I regret about my four years at Georgetown, the decision to let this opportunity go ranks quite highly.

A year later, as a sophomore, I knew that I was Oxford-bound and much more dedicated to the subject of economics. I paid the ongoing Carroll Round a visit and sat in on a presentation in which terms like "vector autoregression" and "lags" were bandied around with ease -- with so much ease, in fact, that they went right over my head. My junior year abroad at Oxford thus marked the true beginning of a gradual, if occasionally arduous, acclimation with the economic lexicon, even as I found myself enduring a string of existential hang wringing sessions regarding econ's role in my post-Georgetown plans. Nevertheless, when the application for this year's Carroll Round Steering Committee was made available, my desire to be involved with this conference was still there. I thus found myself on said committee and was given the position of Recruitment Chair, i.e., the person who sends e-mails, reads applications, and sends more e-mails.

There are many ways to slice and dice an academic year, when looking back on it, but this last one at Georgetown was, in many important respects, defined by economics. I began it still uncertain if economics was what I truly wanted to do. When it seemed that almost all of my classmates were landing jobs at this investment bank or that consulting firm, my aspirations to postgraduate study in econ -- as if I could handle the rigour of such a thing! as if any of these universities would ever want me! -- felt flimsy indeed. I also had my first experience with real empirical research (though writ very small) around this time, and I would be lying if I did not say that struggling to learn the syntax of the language that is Stata was frustrating at the outset. As for Carroll Round, I discovered that Recruitment Chair could quite a labour -- the number of headaches that mail merge caused, honestly...

Yet I am pleased to say that, when all was said & done, the end of this year found me -- surprisingly and happily (plus or minus some margin of error) -- reconciled with economics. My round of PhD applications may not have been terribly successful, but, starting in mid-June, I will be a research assistant at a certain international financial institution. Stata and I ended up getting along quite swimmingly, and, after writing two empirical papers and a thesis, I ended up discovering that I do, in fact, enjoy playing around with data. And, through the never-ending correspondence with universities/applicants/participants, careful management of Excel spreadsheets, late-night Gchat conversations, meetings, papers and more papers and oh dear God above why so many papers, I felt my love for the Carroll Round, rather than diminish. So much of what I have done as a student is because, in some sense or another, I "have" to do it (which is not to say that obligation and enjoyment are inversely related; "Do your duty until it becomes your joy," said one Friedrich Nietzsche). This conference became the rare enterprise that I would look at and think, "This is good work, what we're doing. Really good work."

Because, truly, what could be more fantastic than gathering about thirty undergraduates who all, in some way or another, love economics in the same place --

(Photo credit: Stephanie Joyal)

-- and having them present their original research on topics as diverse as price discovery in Baltic stock markets, tuition fees and student enrolment in German universities, and the modelling of subjective well-being --

-- while inviting well-known academics and policymakers in the field (this year: Joseph Stiglitz and Jagdish Bhagwati), who lecture from on high and then find us all so infinitely engaging that they stay to chat --

-- and even landing the one and only stand-up economist and my personal hero, Yoram Bauman, for a comedy routine at a local bar (hence my tenuous rationale for this post's title)?

Perhaps it is simply my overly contemplative mindset, brought on by the end of four years of uni, that is speaking, but what will always be most amazing about the entire Carroll Round experience is the very singular quality of the community that it convenes. When I think of this year's participants, with whom I corresponded for so long, it is with the utmost affection and hope that I will see them soon. When I think of the alumni, I am pleasantly surprised to remember that the awkwardness I always expect to accompany my attempts at interpersonal communication does not seem nearly as pronounced when around them. And, of course, when I think of fellow Steering Committee members and our awesome-beyond-words faculty advisor, I know that I will cherish the friendships that I have developed with them. It really is one big happy Carroll Round family, and what is this thing called life if not a series of journeys in search of that place where we are not alienated?