I've been accepted into the Critical Approaches to Children Lit class for next sem I really wanted and sat for a while despairing over dropping my seat in either Japanese or Spanish, exasperated my boss enough to have her drop her scary customer service face and be almost satisfyingly rude, then wrote an Avril review. Three sendoffs all stuffed into one weekend. I don't like sendoffs, or maybe I just don't like the feeling of having to infuse meaning into a single event when the semester has been already wonderful - there's no need to insist on a big and colourful foolstop, especially when the colour doesn't want to come into being. The foolstop needs to exist anyway, in order for things to end.
Here are some shots from an amazing night at X Lounge for the S'pore sendoff. Everyone was a model for the evening.

Maybe it's a familiarly quiet and evil feeling of "with you, it'll never be enough", I know that very well. Our praise team farewell picnic involved a scrapey stone table that gave everybody multiple cuts, wind that blew aluminum foil and songsheets all over the grass, the fact that Colvin had to be on the phone for about fifteen minutes on end even though it wasn't his fault. And love. And home-made pasta with salmon and cream sauce and apple turnovers. Maybe it's why when we huddled football-style for the last time I couldn't think of a prayer because I didn't want it be a Prayer, and it had to be one.
It's enough that we have His love!

"For or against us"

33 dead in Virginia Tech shootings

On April 20, 1999, I picked up the paper and read about the Columbine shootings. I read it cover to cover and cried. I can clearly remember The New Paper's two-page spread detailing the route the gunmen took through their high school. Keeping in mind this blubbering twelve-year-old, I'm currently minoring in Media Studies, a department where Columbine is now a key case study in media violence research - the consideration of whether a link between consuming media violence and subsequent aggressive and violent behavior exists.
On a morning almost exactly eight years later, it's back, this time at my neighbor university (currently this URL is malfunctioning because everyone is unsurprisingly trying to get on the site at the same time) and surpassing Columbine as the deadliest campus shooting in American history.
Just last night I was reading about the self-defeating journalistic stand that "news must essentially be about us... violence and terrorism have long been privileged as key news values, but they remain hostage to the defining news value of cultural proximity." Why should human life in America be valued so much more than in other regions by a relatively neutral bystander like myself, so much as to selectively experience this kind of emotional impact?
Maybe I'm forgetting it's not always to do with neutrality. And also that I am no longer neutral. It's to do with childhood, happenstance, and the fact that I am a uni student in America, have friends in V-Tech and had to facebook them to make sure they were okay.

My unintended

I'm sorry to have to drive knives into a Joseph Gordon-Levitt movie, but it is a must! Joanne liked Joseph, though, so, points.
Happy Easter. CCF went to a Passover dinner at the Hillel Center on Good Friday, crunched unleavened bread, made Jewish friends and saw classmates I didn't in the least expect to be Jewish. One guy from Media Studies looked at me funny, with a "Dear God, the last thing I want is to be seen in a religious environment" face. Ruth was worried about their thinking us a bunch of overzealous Chinese hankering for free food - what else, have you ever seen a Chinese Jew?
I can't decide if I should go watch The Two Towers downstairs with Alice and Jamelle or bathe and go to sleep. I want to work and have some of that taut energy that comes from eating too many Hi-Chews and Starbursts, but my brain is a computer on the blink every Saturday. Huixin called when I was in the library just now and since we haven't talked for what, four months, we talked for two hours.