Posts (page 2)

On that note, I've also just discovered the Global Nomads Group, which produces short films about life in different parts of the world. It's like the Discovery Channel for people with short attention spans. I wish I had found out about them sooner, because one of their films is...

I don't know why but their audio levels are really low, so you really have to turn up your speakers. In case you still can't hear what the guy is saying while crossing the road, it's "Jesus, oh Jesus, oh Jesus."

Their YouTube channel is here.

I don't know if I'm late in the game (I always assume I'm the last to find out about anything), but there's this international event coming up on May 10 where the people behind Pangea Day will show a series of films worldwide -- you can stream them online on the day itself at 18:00 GMT -- and it's all supposed to be about bringing people together and all those nice things.

There are a few videos up on YouTube of choirs from certain countries singing the national anthem of another country. My favourite is this one, a Japanese troupe performing the Turkish national anthem:

My iMac is now just a few steps away from death. From just one narrow band of white scarring the screen, now the entire right third of the screen is blacked out. On a Mac, that's the part where the icons are.

I'm backing up like crazy now, but I'm sad. Computers are such a personal part of our lives. Oskar knows more about me and my obsessions, my secrets, my desires and my late-night habits than any living person. And a laptop, which is what I am using now, just doesn't have the power, memory, disk space or plain awesomeness of a big iMac.

Goodbye, Oskar. You've been good to me.

On my walk to the train station alone, after standing in the middle of Bras Basah for half an hour with Um.a and Gerr.ie talking about racism, I realised two things: a) we could have been the poster children for "racial harmony", a Chinese, an Indian and a Malay bitching about bigoted comments people had said to/in front of us, and b) the number of people I can be bothered to have a conversation with dwindle rapidly each day.

But that's not very interesting. Racism, though...

I was out to dinner the other night with two people, a male and a female (and I hasten to say not very close friends of mine). I mainly joined them because the male had suspected me of avoiding him. I hadn't been, and to prove that I wasn't avoiding him, I decided to go along. But now I might actually start avoiding him.

As he drove us to our dinner venue, the male made many jokes about his boss, an Indian. I can understand frustrations about bosses as much as the next guy and hell knows I whine a lot about them too, but this went beyond work. All his jokes were personal and just plain distasteful.

"Hey you know if you make love to him he oozes Nutella. Don't you want a lifetime's supply of Nutella?"

"He thinks he looks like the African footballer xxx (I don't remember the footballer's name) but actually we thought he looked like another African footballer. So he started saying, no no I look more like xxx, but I'm like ah, he looks like all of them. How do you tell the difference, they're all dark!"

He thinks thick Indian accents are really funny. When there are no Indians in the vicinity, he and his best male buddy in the newsroom talk to each other in fake Indian accents and call each other "Borss". Apparently that is how Indians pronounce the word "Boss".

We wanted to eat at a sushi place, but the queue was rather long. We found out that it would be another 15 minutes or so before we would get a table. The female said, "Hey maybe we should flash our media passes. Maybe we would get to jump the queue."

And then the male said, "Yeah Yasmine you should do it -- the media pass plus your headscarf, the waiter would probably get scared, like, 'Ok, ok! I'm sorry, I'll get you a table now!'" He even waved his hands in front of his chest as a sign of fear while acting out the part of the waiter who was scared of me, the Muslim journalist.

Besides inviting veiled references to terrorism, the headscarf also says, "Please don't take me seriously." More than a year ago I was out to dinner with a big group of colleagues. I had just joined the business desk then. One of them, let's call him S, asked me, "How's it going so far?"

I said, "It's been good. I wrote my first feature today."
"Oh yeah?" he replied. "What was it about? What headscarves you wore this week?"
Then switching to a higher pitch, he continued: "On Monday I wore a green one, on Tuesday I wore a pink one!"

I'm not even going to wrap all of this up with an attempt at a witticism because, what's the point eh.

- Get moving on my follow-up story ideas and bank them like mad... though this would make my colleagues hate me.
- Exercise everyday.

Things I don't have the drive to do (anymore) and don't really care about having the drive to do:
- Find a house.

Hey Ire.ne! Hope your morning's going well... I left the office at 10 pm last night thanks to BL. And now it is 1 am and for some reason instead of sleeping I decided to think about The Sun Also Rises. Well since only the two of us have read it, I figured I'll just send this to you in case the other two still want to read it and don't want the story to be spoilt (although it's hard to spoil a book in which nothing happens).

So after reading Wikipedia's entry on the book, here are some thoughts:

Although it's all strange and aimless to us, the novel apparently made waves among young people when it was first published. The story is set in the 1920s and it was published in 1926. I'm guessing the people of the time saw themselves in the book, it was a kind of writing they'd never seen before, this was an author who knew what they were going through, and the people in the book reminded them of their own friends (and in fact Hemingway based all the characters on his real life friends and Jake is based on himself). Maybe it was something like how young people felt when MTV first appeared in the 80s? You know like, wow, somebody out there understands us finally. So anyway even if we don't really get why the characters in the book behave the way they do, the novel I think is probably a good snapshot of what life was like for that generation of people, the "lost generation", after the war ended. Just wandering around aimlessly getting drunk trying to get over their war wounds and memories. So even if we can't appreciate it as the best plot ever, we can appreciate it as a historical tome, maybe.

On Brett -- apparently decades' worth of critics are split on whether her character is just an expression of misogyny on Hemingway's part or a depiction of a strong, sexually liberated woman. I just think she's a bitch, and I'm only interested in her character to the extent that her relationship with Jake forms the basis of the story arc, i.e. as the back of the book says, the story is about how Jake has to learn to let her go. I think he does this by pimping her to Romero (I think this is the climax, though honestly I'm not sure). I'm very interested in this quote: "That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right." Sign the wire with love -- how does this relate to his process of letting her go?

(More interesting quotes from the book highlighted here.

I'm more interested in Robert Cohn than in Brett. Did you notice that Robert Cohn is always Robert Cohn or Cohn, whereas all the other characters are referred to by the first names only? What's the significance behind that? Many people think Hemingway's portrayal of Cohn is anti-semitic and of course a lot of anti-semitic things are said by the characters throughout the whole book. But then Hemingway himself has been quoted as saying that Cohn is the hero of the novel, and his friend Harold Loeb, on whom Cohn's character is based, has defended Hemingway from accusations of anti-semitism. What's it all mean? Did Hemingway really mean it when he said Cohn was the hero or was he just trying to bat off all the critics?

If Cohn is the hero, what makes him admirable? My take -- he's the only one among the men who did not fight in the war, he's the only one uncorrupted by the war and probably because of that he's the only one among them who still has the capacity to love someone whole-heartedly and give himself over to one person. Brett's obviously not worth his time but he still lays himself at her feet. Whereas Mike, her own fiance, lets her sleep around and does nothing about it. When she sleeps with Romero it's Cohn who gets angry like a proper boyfriend, and even beats up the bullfighter but Mike just flails about, gets drunk, whines to Jake and doesn't do anything. Cohn is the one who acts like what a "real man" should in the situation. (And since Hemingway is well-known for his love of all things macho, can we take this as a glorifying moment for Cohn?) Cohn is the only character who's still able to simply have feelings and express them. The other characters (even Brett? I don't know) are all "hard-boiled", as Jake says.

I like that word, and that quote -- "This was Brett that I had felt like crying about. Then I thought of her walking up the street and stepping into the car, as I had last seen her, and of course in a little while I felt like hell again. It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night is another thing." Mike and Jake can't express their jealousies and sadness about Brett because the war has taught them to suppress all their emotions or else go insane. In this they remind me a bit of Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five -- remember how we talked about Billy's inability to connect to people after the war, and how that's reflected in the way he becomes a zoo exhibit on Tralfamador? Soldiers just can't function as human beings in normal society after a war.

And of course Cohn is the first person you meet in the book, even before Jake himself. I still don't understand the significance of the long introduction for Cohn. Do we need to know all about his education and family background? Why does he tell us so much about Cohn? (And leave everything else unsaid?)

I think TIME magazine sums it up really well (and makes the book sound more exciting than it really is): "Meet Jake Barnes: working journalist, expatriate, tough talker, tragic hero. Jake was horribly wounded in the war—in fact, he was effectively gelded—so he spends his time in Paris getting drunk in cafes, nursing his ennui, bantering with his hard-boiled friends, and mooning over his unconsummatable love for a beautiful, aristocratic Englishwoman named Bret Ashley who dines on men three meals a day. This doomed pair, plus a lively cast of romantically reckless expatriates, head to Pamplona for the annual fiesta, where they drink vast amounts of wine, hook up, betray one another, and try to forget the caverns of loss and emptiness that gape inside them. The Sun Also Rises popularized the idea of the "Lost Generation"—but the anomie and disappointment at its heart seem to come around for every generation, sooner or later."

But note that the original TIME review of the book from 1926 wasn't so enthusiastic: "The ironic witticisms are amusing, for a few chapters. There is considerable emotion, consciously restrained quite subtle. Experts may pronounce the book a masterpiece of sex-frustration psychology. But the reader is very much inclined to echo a remark that is one of Jake's favorites and, presumably Author Hemingway's too, "Oh, what the hell!"" (The original review is here.

So basically it went from blah in 1926 to Top 100 Best Books Everrrr in the space of 60 years... I will never understand who decides these things and how.

Ok sorry for writing so long... I hope you still have space to think after reading all this. I want to hear your thoughts too.

"Stop it! Stop IT! NOOOOO!!!"
"I want to smell! I want to smell your flesh! I want to smell your flesh!!"
"YOU FUCKING FREAK OF NATURE!"
Pause.
"You know, that pretty much epitomises our relationship. You vaguely threaten physical harm and I distrust you when you say you're not going to physically harm me."

I won't be wearing a wedding gown for my wedding, but in an alternate universe where I am not only wearing a wedding gown but am also tall, I can sort of see myself killing and/or dying for one of these:

"I'm ok with him as a human being. I'm not ok with him as... a person who talks."

It's just hit me that I've been having a lot of conversations lately about friends and friendships. But I suppose I've been having these conversations all my life, ceaselessly. Forming, strengthening, breaking, re-forming alliances. You never really grow out of it. I suppose you can't.

Friendship really depends on timing. We might have made great friends in primary school but if we met today we wouldn't like each other. Two years ago I thought you were brilliant, today I find you obnoxious and tiresome.

It's probably a good thing that we all drift apart from time to time. In those spaces when our friendship is at rest, you get to be an emo wrist-slasher while I take up an internship at the UN.* And then we'll move on to other pursuits, and by the time we reunite, we'll both have changed enough to once again be perfect company for each other.

Of course not all drifting away is so cloud-like. There are always those harassing moments when one of us is struggling against the drift. I am hurt and don't understand why you don't want to be my friend anymore, or I don't want to be your friend anymore, but I don't know how to break up the relationship without any drama or hurt.

But even these conflicts perhaps we should all be grateful for. Without them to bitch about, what would we talk about to our friends?

To be continued.

* This is, as you know, a hypothetical scenario. In real life, I am more likely to be the one between us slashing my wrist through kohl-stained tears, if anything.

(Also, thanks to Cheow for inspiring the post header, if you're reading this.)