starting over again you've made your mind up let your hard luck end and make it new do it now girl if you're leaving then leave if you need it then i want you to let your thoughts come in dedicated to you stories i've heard like a man on the moon lessons i've learned if you're leaving then leave if you need it then i want you to there's no use thinking why these phases change you you're not waiting here for anyone i'll break down if you come around when you need it i want you to take the past and cut it out let the knife turn to rust make something else up there's majesty in motion you've made your mind up if you're leaving then leave if you need it then i want you to if you want it i want you to if you're leaving then leave if you need it i want you to

follow through / hotel lights

i'm exhausted from thinking. exhausted exhausted exhausted.

German parking garage. How super-efficient is that? Apparently it takes up only 20% of the space that a traditional carpark with the same number of cars would take up. And it's less expensive to build, and everything is mechanical so you don't really need attendants and cars get retrieved really fast. Coolbeeeeeeeeans.



Paper soap by cheeky chimp. So you never have to worry about the public toilet having run out of soap. Just reach for one of these nifty little soap sheets. I think they dissolve in wet hands and get all soapy and clean. Trust the Japanese :)



This is, IMHO, the coolest. Alexandra Neel strappy stiletto with metal-covered heel. Beautiful.

I just received the following sms from my favourite uncle: "I am in Chicago. It is freezing at the end of May. You will enjoy."

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. I like cold very much, but freezing in May? That's a little nuts!

I got this in an email. Email is a constant source of amusement, no? Click on picture to enlarge.


Damn I just realised it's still very small when clicked on. Maybe you could save it and zoom in or something. Or ask me to send it to you.

How I love Daily Candy.

Latest recommendation from them: healthy cooking classes by someone called Megan McCarthy. Cooking classes are not really for me, but the opening line of the email? "Time for your yearly visit with Dr. McFriendly." Hee :)

And "her Quick and Healthy Cooking class, a crash course in nutritious cooking, is a crucial cram session for anyone who’s still living (and eating) like a co-ed on a meal plan." Which I unfortunately will be. And I have figured out that the Freshman Fifteen are quite... inevitable. Unless I become religiously gymtastic. Which I have been for the past couple of weeks, but that's only because I have absolutely nothing else to do in my life. Besides obsess over Grey's Anatomy. I swear I have never been in such a funk over a TV show since season 2 of Alias ended with Vaughn telling Sydney that she'd disappeared for two years and that he'd gone and gotten married to a blonde evil bitch.

A song by a Beatle / The Beatles:
Strawberry Fields Forever :)

A song featuring piano as the main instrument:
The solo piano version of Full Of Grace by Sarah McLachlan

A song with a woman's name in the title:
Where In The World Is Carmen San Diego by Rockapella

A song with a man's name in the title:
World Before Columbus by Suzanne Vega

A song about money:
Sabse Bada Rupaiya from the Bluffmaster soundtrack (title translates to 'money is bigger/more important than everything else')

A song with some form of weather in the title:
Shelter From The Storm by Bob Dylan

A song with parentheses in the title:
I Eat Dinner (When The Hunger's Gone) by Rufus Wainwright and Dido

A song made by a punk band:
I Wanna Be Sedated by The Ramones

A song with the word 'song' in the title:
Your Song by Elton John/Ewan McGregor. I prefer Ewan McGregor's version, incidentally.

A song that you love so much you stop and listen whenever you hear it:
Currently, it would be Let Go by Frou Frou or Grace by Kate Havnevik. However, I have never heard either one except on my ipod or my computer, so maybe Meet Me By The Water by Rachael Yamagata because I did actually stop and listen when it was playing in a Holland V boutique a couple of weeks ago while I was looking at clothes.

I just emptied my bags and one of the various things that came out was the programme booklet for Shifting Gears. I just finished reading it properly, and I have been hit by the strangest, strangest wave of enormous nostalgia. It's kind of... inexplicable.

I'm going to take my freshly-filled-with-workout-playlist ipod and proceed to the gym. Angst and ennui. I need to go shopping.

hello daph! yup i'm excited about chicago :) leaving in early september, and the clothing/packing dilemmas have already begun :/

list twenty people you can think of off the top of your head, answer the questions (don't read them before you make your list!) that follow, and tag five people to do this thing too.

1. daph
2. chit
3. kelly
4. nasty
5. andi
6. claud
7. vaish
8. shoojee
9. kitson
10. soph
11. minty
12. jireh
13. shirin
14. wiggy
15. michael
16. zhi an
17. karthik (from bangalore, not my little brother)
18. ramya
19. heather armstrong
20. mcdreamyyyy

how did you meet 14? in RJ, on the first day that we met our classes. I remember not being very thrilled with the class, but quite fascinated by wiggy's musical taste.

what would you do if you never met 1? i'd never have cried my eyes out in an airport, i'd never have been in a band, i'd probably never have fallen in love with BNL. or it would have taken me a longer time to fall in love with them. i would also not have read the two or three trashy romance novels i've read in my life.

what would you do if 20 and 9 dated? i'd have to kill kitson. brutally.

did you ever like 19? yes, oh my god i'm only COMPLETELY in love with her.

would 6 and 17 make a good couple? what a painful thought. claud's eyes would fall out from rolling them so much at karthik.

describe 3. she's a good listener. she repeats things and gets cranky when she's tired. sometimes she talks a lot and sounds drunk when she's really not drunk. she has dirty dreams and then denies that they're dirty. she's a strangely good catholic. my mother wishes i could be more like her, and once told me she'd take me to the moon if i could have grades like kelly's. i like her very much.

do you think 8 is attractive? he's tall and has cute hair and interesting shirts.

tell me something about 7. she's going to berkeley and i'm wondering if her Good Indian Girl-ness will stay with her in that ultra-liberal of a university. i would like to see her high on pot.

do you know any of 12's family? nope. his parents once, many moons ago, gave me a ride from somewhere in simei to mel's house, though.

what is 8's favourite? football team is manchester united, if i'm not wrong. music would be jazz. and jeans would be his apc denims which i hope he's washed.

what would you do if 11 confesses that he likes you? 11 is not a he. i'd tell her to quit smoking first.

what languages does 15 speak? english, chinese, maybe some dialect?

who is 9 going out with? last i heard, nobody. and he only blushed when asked about his love life.

how old is 16 now? eighteen.

when was the last time you talked to 13? it's been a couple of weeks. last conversation i had with her, i remember feeling very sorry for her that she'd be holed up in NTU hosting a Russian physics olympiad delegation for a week in july and therefore unable to attend the coldplay concert. but excited that she's learning russian.

who is 2's favourite band/singer? i know this! the decemberists. i think she now has all their albums and her favouritest song is Grace Cathedral Hill.

would you date 4? my little pumpkin-poo? maybe, if she were a guy and i had to date somebody.

would you date 7? why so many dating questions? probably not, i'd rather date 4 hahahah.

is 15 single? as far as i know, he is.

what is 10's last name? wong.

would you ever be in a serious relationship with 11? haven't i already been asked what i'd do if she confessed that she liked me? anyway, no i wouldn't be in a serious relationship with her. for starters, i'm straight.

which school does 3 go to? currently, she's teaching at RJ. cambridge in a few months :)

where does 6 live? 88 corporation road. 17-15. lakeholmz.

what's your favourite thing about 5? hahahaha she made it possible for me to know weeks in advance that coldplay were coming to town! and she therefore caused much hysteria and happiness in my life and i hope she gets to come for the concert too.

tagging: nasty (because i know she'll never do it), claud, vaish, kelly, heather armstrong (hahaha).

Check this out. Canadians are cool. And so are the French -- downloading for non-commercial use and P2P networks have been legalised in France.

Help!

There is a lizard sitting in the crevice of my door, and much as I hate lizards I can't bring myself to shut the door because it might smush the lizard into... lizard mush. Which firstly is cruel to the lizard which didn't do anything wronger than EXIST and secondly lizard mush is actually more gross than live lizard, in my humble opinion.

I tried rolling towards the door on my trusty rolling chair and the stupid lizard didn't move. I tried rolling faster, as though I was going to crash into the door (although I'm so afraid of being near lizards that I'd never allow myself to crash into a door that is near a lizard). I tried opening the door, hoping that the increased amount of space might convince the stupid reptile to move somewhere else. I tried grabbing a badminton racket (for once, thank god I have been forced to take refuge in The Room That Is Used To Store Junk And Also Happens To Have A Bed) and hitting the racket against the door, but the lizard STILL didn't move and I didn't want to make noise because my grandparents are asleep in the next room.

And if I leave the door OPEN, a) the light will disturb my grandparents anyway b) it'll alert them to the fact that I stay up until disturbing times such as 3am c) the aircon will leak out which is bad because the room is enough of a furnace already d) the aircon will leak out which is bad for the aircon unit e) the aircon will leak out which is bad for the electricity bills f) in the morning, people will wake up before me and make noise and I will hear the noise through the open door and be awoken several hours before I like to be awake g) other pests will enter the room, like the tiny flying insect which is currently trying to eat my fricking knee.

a to g, that's 7 reasons the damn lizard needs to GET A MOVE ON IT ALREADY.

EDIT: There are atleast two small flying things here. One is really tiny like a mosquito or something, and another is about a centimetre long. One of these repulsive creatures just flew into my face!!! I wish the lizard would just eat the stupid insects and leave me alone, pleeeease.

EDIT AGAIN: The lizard disappeared! While I was venting my frustration on the internet :) I just hope it went out of the room instead of coming back in. If it's lying in wait for me near the door in the morning I just might have to stamp on it. Or shut a door on it. Or get escape through the bathroom and get someone to help me do evil things to the lizard because I cannot let any part of my body come into contact with evil reptiles. Did you know there's this Indian book - my brother calls it the Book Of Superstitions - which tells you what your future holds depending on which part of your body comes into contact with lizard? Some parts are actually lucky. Of course, it's not for superstitious reasons that I avoid contact with lizards. It is merely because they're ugly and monster-like and brown and brown only really looks good on Bottega Veneta and Michael Kors runways.

I'm sleepy now. I shall go sleep. I guess I didn't really need to worry about reason (b) after all.

This is a random post about some of the strangest (ie The Poor Man What Were His Parents Thinking?!?!?!) Indian names I encountered during my stint at the bank:

Toshit
Viral
Hardik
Shitin

I will update as I remember more.

Did anybody know that in Sanskrit "Kaavya" means 'literature'? Interesting, yes?

There's a review in the paper today by Whitney Otto, about the whole Kaavya Viswanathan issue, a slightly confusing article because it starts off talking about genre fiction, chick-lit being the latest incarnation of the romance genre, and the fact that the attraction of genre fiction is its predictability, but it has all these bits about young writers not being able to write well, and that writers have to be a certain type of person which Kaavya isn't and therefore she's only a faux-writer. She says that "a chick-lit book comes with such specific requirements to be considered chick lit that enormous similarities to previous books within the genre are almost inevitable. Or you could just write your own book."

So there you go, she's halfway exonerating Kaavya, but there's clearly quite a bit of disdain. Otto talks about other 'real' writers who have managed to transcend their genres -- Margaret Mitchell, Raymond Chandler, James M Cain, among others -- and that Kaavya, by virtue of the fact that she's a serial overachiever, "might have had more success at fiction if she didn't bear the burden of the overachiever". She is not the sort of person one would expect to become a writer. Or rather, she might have wanted to be a writer for the sake of being a writer, but not because she's compelled to write. Because as a writer, failure is unavoidable and she doesn't seem like the sort of person who might want to take that chance. "If you aren't compelled to write, because you're maybe an overachieving future investment banker, then a write-by-numbers approach might be the way to go, book-wise."

So I guess the point is: given that Kaavya chose to write a book in this manner and this genre, maybe it's not so surprising that there are so many similarities to other books. But she could never have expected to be respected as a writer.

I enjoyed the book, but I have to agree with Whitney Otto that Kaavya doesn't seem like the book-writing sort, much less the sort of person who writes this kind of book. She herself admitted in interviews that she's not a very funny person and that she's into fashion but not really into pop culture, so how on earth did she manage to produce a book that's quite hilarious and loaded with pop culture references?

It's sad, really, because what I really liked about Opal Mehta was that it wrote about being an Indian in America without any angst. So many other culture-confusion writers -- Jhumpa Lahiri, Monica Ali, Salman Rushdie, even Zadie Smith -- are full of a sort of angst about their displacement and alienatedness and all sorts of things. I know it's blasphemy to even begin to compare Kaavya Viswanathan to such writers as these, and even if it was ok to compare the writers, it isn't a fair comparison because culture/ethnicity never really took centrestage in the Opal Mehta plot; being Indian never got in Opal's way. The Indian parents, family, friends etc merely provided humour. But it was enjoyable, all the same, to see all the familiarly insane Indian-people behaviour chronicled in a light-hearted manner instead of "oh my god look at my crazy parents I cannot stand my life I need to run away and sleep with a lot of lilywhite boys." I identified with Opal, really, because my mother's a lot like hers. Except she knows better than to wear a Hermes scarf with a sari.

However, one thing that bothered me about the book is that a family of Mehtas would never come from Chennai. Chennai is the bastion of all things South Indian, and Mehta is a North Indian name and the food mentioned was all North Indian and calling your child 'beta' is a North Indian habit. Though technically, for a girl, it should be 'beti' -- 'beta' is Hindi for 'son', 'beti' for 'daughter'. So there was clearly some cultural confusion going on in Kaavya's head. Kaavya is South Indian and originally from Chennai, by the way. Also, I watched an interview of Kaavya by Katie Couric and the way Kaavya mispronounced 'Mehta' really got on my nerves. She said something like 'May-da'. The real pronunciation would be 'Meh-tha' where the 'meh' rhymes with 'heh'.

Incidentally, according to Whitney Otto some people have pointed out similarities between Salman Rushdie's work and Opal Mehta. Can somebody please tell me what these similarities are?

I am tremendously upset. My favourite Cookie Monster Junkfood tee has a huge green stain on it. It's like the entire fabric has changed colour or something and it's so ugly. Ok truthfully I hadn't worn the teeshirt in a while and I wasn't really planning to wear it, but I saw the stain when I was looking for something else in my mess of a wardrobe, and I was very upset. Asked my maid if she did something to it, and predictably she started swearing up and down that she didn't do anything and if she had done something she'd have told me immediately and all that. Of course I can't accuse her of lying because I have no proof whatsoever that she is the culprit, besides the fact that she's the only person who could possibly have interacted with it on its way from my body to the laundry bin to the washing machine and back to my cupboard. Unfortunately I cannot remember if the last time I wore it was during the reign of the previous maid, because the last time I remember wearing it was the morning of prom when I went to check into the suite and get my hair done. That was December 7th. So I just have to live with the stupid green stain, which essentially comes to shoving the offensive teeshirt into a dark corner of the wardrobe and forgetting it exists until one day I clear the cupboard up, good sense prevails and I just throw the damn thing away.

Or I might get the maid to wash it again in the (hopefully not vain) hope that the stain will miraculously go away. Pray for me, friends.

Okay I am INCREDIBLY slow. Last week I saw a picture of Rosario Dawson with Jason Lewis, and I said to myself "Hey her boyfriend's HOT. And... he looks very familiar." Then I just forgot about the whole thing, although normally when I think somebody looks familar I can't rest until I figure out why.

And then today i'm reading about the Cosmetic Executive Women Beauty Awards held last week in New York, and then I come across this in one blogger's recap of the people who attended the show: "Jason Lewis...aka Smith Jerrod...swoonworthy!"

Something clicked in this little brain of mine, and then it sort of exploded. People.com etc are always talking about Rosario and her hot boyfriend, but I can't believe it took me THIS LONG to figure out that he's Smith-freaking-Jerrod. Samantha's Smith. Smith The Hotness-Personified. And it's not like I was unaware that Smith was played by a certain Jason Lewis. It's a fairly generic name, I suppose? But I'm slow all the same. And Rosario is one lucky bitch. And I am regretting deleting all the SATC off my computer, and leaving behind the DVDs in Bangkok. Must. Watch. SATC. Again.

That said, scruffy does not work so well for him.



Eyes still very hot though.

He was beyond swoon-worthy when he shaved his hair off. Not least because he did it for Samantha.

Can't find a bald+cleanshaven picture right now, but there's this


Have I mentioned that now I have to hate Rosario Dawson as a matter of principle?

And I leave you with this:


Another random Sex and the City connection that just occurred to me when I visited the SATC website: Mikhail Baryshnikov, who played The Russian Who Took Carrie Away To Paris (Aleksandr Petrovsky) is the guy Miss Patty referred to, in the Gilmore Girls Season 6 Finale, as "pure sex walking". Interesting, yes?

This is funny.

Daily Candy sent me a Mother's Day reminder with a bunch of gift ideas. And then the last paragraph:

"If you can’t see mom because you’re stuck in Singapore (you better have a good excuse), give her the gift that she always loves.

Call. Your. Mother."

I am highly amused because, well, I'm in Singapore and my mom's in Singapore - though I know obviously Daily Candy has no idea. And it's probably not really that funny and doesn't make much sense, but it's another one of those instances where Singapore is used as an example of a really far-away place that people have no rational reason to be in. It made me giggle.

angelina jolie interviewed by ann curry --



and i found a comment on youtube below that video, which sort of astounded me. "every other continent on the planet>africa. so that= blacks being pretty much worthless. all they do is kill each other and spread aids. maybe they should try rising on their own feet with out the help of white people for once."

i didn't think people could have such thoughts without feeling like horrible mean freaks, much less brazenly put them on a website.