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?"