That Brokeback got me good

I finally headed Downtown with Jong today to catch the gay cowboy film, and stole my title from Pajiba, again, but can we say, one of the most lovingly-crafted movies since the LOTR era?
Jay and Heath are entirely too beautiful, of course (has anyone else noticed what gorgeously delicate eyelashes Heath has? Wah now I sound like I am writing for Lime) but both slip into their roles with such nuanced yet ferocious intensity that nervous laughter is not an option here - it speaks of obsession, the main thread of your life, and how much of your heart you're willing to admit someone has.

*semi-spoiler*

When Jack heard his daughter was engaged to a man she'd known for a year, I totally expected him to say, "How much can you know someone - even after twenty?" (He didn't.) Because that's what it says, and yet he wouldn't let go. Yes, that is the point, not Heath Ledger's eyelashes. R21 be damned, sneak in, my friends. It's worth it. Otherwise, you can count on me to shell out for the DVD in March.
I am sensing growing hatred for my Poetries of Asia class, if only because it provides such ample room for the whistle-brained comments like "Soma is a drug? I thought it had something to do with cows. Cows are mentioned a lot" and "the metaphor of honey can also mean, um, sticky, so it's hard to let go of". Although it is shocking how I have close to zero basic background knowledge in any form of religion other than my own.
Chinese New Year pigout at Helen's place on Sunday, where the displaced children have to recreate their holiday without the angbaos!

Directionless mood with inconvenient timing (1am) has interrupted my reading on the Pilgrims of Plymouth Plantation and most of the night besides, and after thinking about the wonderful possibilities and million-and-one messages you can give in emails, I come back here instead for general blabber.
I wonder what it's like to be a naturally nice and considerate person? A lot less exhausting, I'd bet.
Essay on sororities, because this is Rush Week, y'all. What is the point of them? Why do they only exist in America? If they have such bad rep, why the stretched-out drama? I went to Alternative Bid Night yesterday to drop in on the Head Lawn Resident's gorgeous room with snack table of champagne, grapes, iced pretzels, strawberries, and so many of them flicked their hands and said, Greek life just isn't for me. Yet I felt a tinge of sour-grapes in the air, despite their extensive Lawn qualifications. After the over-the-top invitations from Asian-American sororities who generally do not seem to understand the possibilities of online propaganda when they splash badly resized photos of semi-sloshed girls in poor lighting and caption with incredibly cutesy nicknames such as Snow and Raspberry, I gave up. We know the Americans love mingling so much it becomes an acceptable extracurricular activity, but what about of the whole Sisterhood business?
My floor-mate Becca, who is wholesomely, anti-slonce lovely, pledged, so I'm counting on her to reveal these mysteries and drop the stereotypes I have somehow hoped against since tender years of reading Lillian Budd. Incidentally, Becca lived in Singapore when she was 9, in Clementi, and her fellow transfer student Alex visited Singapore in one of those 14-hour chintzy tourist whirlwind tours, and talked about guava juice and orchid gardens. The best part is, they insist that Raffles Hotel is a hideous work of architecture, while I had childhood aspirations of living there and instantly becoming a Princess.

Take it to the top with me

You know how I know I'm back? Hiphop is the only way to express your feelings and in every class I've been in so far, there's been gum on the bottom of every foldable table - UNBELIEVABLY DISGUSTING.
On scrolling through last semester's emails, I realised that there is a paid summer internship in journalism available after all via the Cav Daily mailing list, and I missed the deadline. I am trying to avoid the sour-grape route i.e. convincing myself I'm not overly serious about journalism anymore when I don't actually have any experience with which to speak of, so forget disengagement.
Also, last semester's theme was race relations, this semester's is religion. I find it highly amusing that I don't know shit about the Puritans, Pilgrims and Oliver Cromwell and am now all set to rattle off as if I've loved them all my life. "Has anyone of you never ever read poetry before and are just here to swing it?" says the professor in my Poetries of Asia class, and one guy raises his hand with a complete WTF-am-I-doing-here face on, because this is after people have passionately insisted that poetry is about feelings and abstraction and that the green bamboo shoot springing back into the sky is either a new birth or the release of a man no longer in love. Etc.
"There isn't a particle of you that I don't know, remember and want," said Noel Coward, and I'm waiting for the day I can say that.

Stories to tell that aren't songs

Meeting Sean for breakfast was most certainly a good start to Last Day, even if he kept traumatizing the owner of Peranakan place by pulling terrible faces after tasting my lime juice, making her run anxiously over to us to offer syrup and I had to assure her that I was not being poisoned. Then a last lunch with my family where my grandpa was unusually chipper, running into the kitchen to behold the tiger prawns and of course ending by wringing my hand and telling me to eat my greens.
I've had three colourful weeks, but this has been the best one despite the rain, a drama of three acts. The second one ebbed somewhat due to the mysterious illness, but this one more than made up for it. These are the ones I leave behind and hence am able to take with me. Already I have changed, and people's hearts are more open as a result, and I have been able to hold on as well as grow closer.
London in spring and DC in summer are entirely wonderful motivations, but I know this has been a God-granted idyll and I must be ready to go back to the US where you can shake yourself off, blink, but never forget that there are different rules in this game. I now sound like I've swallowed a Driven guide, and I'm suddenly recalling adding entirely useless details to primary school compositions ("I don't freaking care that she's seen the (fictitious) movie Duel or that she felt the need to wear a pink gingham dress, it doesn't contribute to the plot, girl, the plot"), but I know what I mean to say.
___________________________________

"Never trust a performer, performers are the best liars. They lie for a living. You're an actor, in a certain sense. But a writer is not a liar... I remember sitting, listening to my teacher in school talking about the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats. He had a writer's block - there was a period where he couldn't write. I put my hand up and said: "Why didn't he write about that?" - "Don't be stupid. Put your hand down, don't be so cheeky." But I didn't mean it as smart-arse. I have lived off that idea.
It is impossible to meet God with sunglasses on.
[Having a gift] is an end to laziness, it's an end to being a passenger on a train somebody else is driving.
The jungle is never far from the surface of our skin.
I might walk into an important office and people are looking at me as though I'm some sort of exotic plant. But after a few minutes, they don't see me. All they're hearing is the argument, and the argument has some sort of moral force that they cannot deny. It's bigger than you, and it's bigger than them."
- From Bono on Bono: Conversations with Michka Assayas
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Is it getting better
Or do you feel the same
Will it make it easier on you now
You got someone to blame
You say...
One love
One life
When it's one need
In the night
One love
We get to share it
Leaves you baby if you
Don't care for it

Did I disappoint you
Or leave a bad taste in your mouth
You act like you never had love
And you want me to go without
Well it's...
Too late
Tonight
To drag the past out into the light

Did I ask too much
More than a lot
You gave me nothing
Now it's all I got
We're one
But we're not the same
Well we
Hurt each other
Then we do it again
You say
Love is a temple
Love a higher law
Love is a temple
Love the higher law
You ask me to enter
But then you make me crawl
And I can't be holding on
To what you got
When all you got is hurt

One life
But we're not the same
We get to
Carry each other

Today is a clean day, unlike yesterday's twenty-four hour storming. I was sitting atop a pile of umbrellas in the backseat of our car, because my mum probably grabs one every time she gets in, and throws it over her shoulder.
After reading Michelia's horror countdown celebration stories, why was I not surprised to find it splashed across the New Paper! Of course they talked to the Bangledeshi workers to work in the incriminating angle, I can't believe they agreed to babble happily about it being "okay" to molest women in their home country because they are "quiet and will not complain", while of course the females here are screechily indignant if you so much as look at them. Woman Warrior and IPW all over again! And TNP milks the cow for all its worth.
I remember the little old man eating cake by himself when I was out with 1c girls, and while yes Sona it was certainly cute, but at the same time I just felt unbelievably sad. Not pity-sad, but I was just thinking about my grandfather again and how even my mum got annoyed with him, glare-prodding him to talk and he wouldn't, and the werewolf in St. Mungo's (see Order of the Phoenix) who didn't have any visitors at Christmas, and how scared we all are that we will always be alone.
Jack's Place standoff, NUS and SMU tours, Hooligans, meeting Stella who teaches IP brats at NJ this week before I leave, and I promise to get somewhere this year. I think 2005 problem was poking myself in the eye when I failed, and expecting miracles, but this time I will be okay with little steps that make a lot.

Let's never come here again, because it will never be as much fun

The now-familiar Dumbledore right-or-easy dilemma is too applicable to my holiday, where everything is so comfortable it is so right to waltz, threateningly even. No one has expected me to be much more than I already am throughout this busily multi-faceted week, once we first lock eyes, look away awkwardly, and reconnect, saying, "You look the same." To continue the Korean thread, random man at English service today refused to believe I was otherwise and thought it was funny joke to greet me in said language throughout.
Han was saying that it would be a very stupid reason to stop going for salsa because the president's emails were bugging me it sadly, that was one of the reasons. I was looking over them in an attempt to clear my inbox and realised I've probably deleted the most annoying ones. The only remaining signs would be the constant use of "hott" (rather than the infinitely more expressive "hawt").
It is a new year, and New Year = lists. So, after the fifty-odd movies I've seen in 2005 (including rented ones), here would be my TOP FIVE BEST for the year!

1. Almost Famous - a tragicomedy nicely unresolved because neither William nor Russell got the girl, this movie introduced the lovely Zooey Deschanel, celebrated the under-the-radar Patrick Fugit and emphasized Elton as a beautifully delicate commentator for '70s America. While Cameron Crowe came under fire for gorgeous-music-coverup-operation in Elizabethtown, he does no wrong here because this is a movie about music; its titillating potency and ability to redeem.
2. Crash - I found it ironic that UVA chose to screen this movie repeatedly in conjunction with a series of in-school racial incidents, since it is one delightfully tricky beast that ultimately suggests the inevitability of racism. It is easy to get pissed because a character of your race is slighted, but everyone in the audience will be forced to shift uneasily in their seats in this spectacularly circular war of misunderstanding.
3. Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights - while this will certainly be a lot more difficult to explain, this does not mean that I do not enjoy round-robin arguments about the feasibility of Romola Garai's minimal American enunciation or how in Real Life Javier would have stolen the satchel (see post dated Jan 16, 2005). Simply put, this movie started the whole 2005 Latin American love affair and my continued clumsy grasp on their elusive history as presented in film, theatre, academic text and America (because America would be a whole medium in itself).
4. Lost in Translation - a bittersweet solidity of alienation when one's loneliness shrinks into pomposity within a culture you're not expected to understand, and no one expects you to understand, but the worst part, it's "so easy to love a place when you're leaving".
5. Nobody Knows - am lazy to write so see here. Actually I don't really agree with that anymore but no matter! But every small thing - cup noodles being a delicacy, Banana Yoshimoto's easy melancholy, and uncharacteristic gentleness between siblings - reminds me of those children.

I tried to come up with the TOP WORST but realised there aren't all that many, and anyway, I prefer to praise rather than criticize. I do realise that only one of the above actually came out in 2005.
My sister and I are now in love with Stars, trilling "THIS SCAR IS A FLECK ON MY PORCELAIN SKIN" over and over.