this morning i go directly from bed to kitchen and fry up a batch of pork and cabbage gyozas from last night (patiently steamed and remorselessly panfried.) they were juicy, and i ate them straight out of the pan. a slightly-scalded tongue was but a small price.***
i am certain i have got some kind of inverted seasonal affective disorder. for the last two weeks part of my mind anticipates snow, even longs for it, and i become increasingly restless and gnawingly unhappy that it does not. this is perverse not only because i’ve been living in singapore for coming to seven years now but because i hate being cold, though von says warmth is for the wimpy. i have been looking over both his and my own cambridge-period blogs: snow, ice, and the idea of north unsurprisingly feature largely in the narrative. i expect that is not why though.
***
(besides, our von is the kind of person who thinks nothing of plunging buck-naked in the deep of winter into the charles river whereas i am the sort of person who puts on her winter coats in october. things do not tally.)
***
it turns out that jared poon and terence poon, neither of whom i have seen for some years, both work in the same office and are frequently mistaken for relations. poons of my life! i cry happily, and with great alacrity a trilateral lunch is arranged for next week. more anon.
***
course registration began yesterday and i hastily pore over the catalogue trying to draw up a ranked list of ten courses for the powers that be. (the course allocation system is mysterious and one suspects, guided by algorithms not unlike the moe system for secondary school placement.) slim pickings, with commercial and intellectual property subjects dominating the offerings. the thought occurs that i might take a course in ‘international carriage of passengers by sea’. in fact i have no intention of working in the public maritime sector or the private cruise industry, and i daresay the course would be rather technical and full of maritime specialists doing their LLMs. i just feel somehow that since i live on an island and am from a historically seafaring nation i should like to know something about oceans. i realise this reason is not compelling to anyone who is not an english major, or who has not been taught that most of renaissance epics of any merit involve some kind of grand navigational project.
***
john dimoia tells me that geoff dyer is in singapore next week and did i want to go? ans: bien sur, also thinking a little sadly that the problem with ebooks is that when admired authors show up you haven’t got anything for them to sign, although not without some relief that the days of cradling your dog-earred tomes and inching forward in a queue and jealously eyeing what other people brought and knowing that when you got to the front you were only going to stammer and blush and then be so embarrassed by your ineptitude (and in my case, having to spell my name about 25 times) you have to leg it quickly after.
Best of the Transparent Hummingbird