Metro, jazz with deep-legged slinky bass, dusky pool-hall, studly alpine-cabin/lurid-diner furniture forcedly strung together with standard French trinkets. Duck rillettes strangely spiked with Arabian spice, onion soup passable, steak au poivre a tad insipid but redeemed by molassessey sauce and exemplary wilted spinach, chocolate souffle emaciated and stiffened, coconut sorbet clingy.

I desperately need to renovate my social strategy. I confess I am loathe to "work" at networking, but enough is enough. More self-determinacy, I say. "All unavoided is the doom of destiny. / True, when avoided grace makes destiny".

Ann Coulter, Liberalism and Terrorism: Two Stages of the Same Disease.
Godard's à bout de souffle.
I think I'll watch Babette's Feast again.

Attributed in the murkiness of my mind to an Argentinian tango instructor, on the pages of Wallpaper no less:

Two bodies come together for an instant, touch, and then part. That is love, life, the world.

And again; this time I'm pretty sure who it is though - Saint-Exupéry:

Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward in the same direction.

I used to visit all the very gay places
Those come-what-may places
Where one relaxes on the axes of the wheel of life
To get the feel of life

Listening to A's shite Everything But The Girl LP, eating Cape Cod potato chips and Hershey's dark choc nuggets, drinking grapefruit juice.

"There is beauty in dodginess". Is there really? Of course I understand the perverse magnetism of pop culture, of "sacramentalized mediocrity". I like Debussy and Mozart, Daft Punk and Jay Chou. "Polarities have become equatorial. There is nothing left in between beauty and crassness".

I must practise placing periods within the quotation marks. Blasted academic writing conventions.

What a curiously self-abasing phenomenon it is to learn a foreign language. To be made to feel like a child again. To prune one's thoughts till they fit into the stilted grammatical configurations which you are capable of forming at the moment. To avoid certain tenses because they have tedious conjugations.

I'm quitting ballroom. I have no poise. And besides, the Smallville girl isn't there anymore.

Things I miss:
1. Familiar people
2. CJLMXLB's Xiao Long Bao
3. The dissonant cadences of guttural Singlish
4. Salut's 25/28/32 (on reflection, a steal even at 32) SGD set lunch
5. Three-course extravaganzas for decent prices
6. Half-price tÊte-a-tÊtes at mezza9 (I can't type a circumflexed non-capital E!)
7. Sprawling expanse of junkspace
8. Cheapness and beauty
9. The period April-August '02 in general
10. Paris and Lyon
11. Hong Kong

"And I have known the eyes already, known them all -
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?"