Suddenly I See! December 8, 2007

I’m not one for posting song lyrics on my blog, just because I used to think I was too proud to have someone else’s words express my feelings. But this song has been my mantra all semester long, it’s the song that plays when I wake up, put my shoes and make-up on, catch the metro to McPherson Square, run to 15th and L, and put on my game face for work. It will always be one of my DC songs, and more than ever, especially at this point of my life, with the work that I’ve enjoyed dedicating myself to for the past 15 weeks, while I figured out who I want to be, came to realise that there is a spot for me in the world, and why the hell busting my butt here in DC means so much to me:

Her face is a map of the world
Is a map of the world
You can see she’s a beautiful girl
She’s a beautiful girl
And everything around her is a silver pool of light
The people who surround her feel the benefit of it
It makes you calm
She holds you captivated in her palm

Suddenly I see (Suddenly I see)
This is what I wanna be
Suddenly I see (Suddenly I see)
Why the hell it means so much to me

I feel like walking the world
Like walking the world
You can hear she’s a beautiful girl
She’s a beautiful girl
She fills up every corner like she’s born in black and white
Makes you feel warmer when you’re trying to remember
What you heard
She likes to leave you hanging on her word

Suddenly I see (Suddenly I see)
This is what I wanna be
Suddenly I see (Suddenly I see)
Why the hell it means so much to me

And she’s taller than most
And she’s looking at me
I can see her eyes looking from a page in a magazine
Oh she makes me feel like I could be a tower
A big strong tower
She got the power to be
The power to give
The power to see

Suddenly I see (Suddenly I see)
This is what I wanna be
Suddenly I see (Suddenly I see)
Why the hell it means so much to me

giving & receiving December 4, 2007

i packed my heart in a bottle and sent it out to sea and it came back to me last weekend in the form of a long-, no actually medium, distance phonecall. a crackling hello?can you hear me? and i was once again connected to rays of sunshine. i didn’t envision the bobbing bottle coming back to my shores with a message attached, i was perfectly happy just to have given my thoughts away–content with watching the proud shiny emblem of unentangled affection swim its way to its own destiny. but the sea had other plans.

alive! November 29, 2007

Riding in Nikki’s car and belting out Summer of 69 and random Def Leppard songs, I realise how much ecstasy I really am in. I work hard all day, love and believe in the work I do–something which I never believed I could feel–, excel in school and still manage to have a kick-ass time discussing Middle East politics over a hookah session. I am here, with the most amazingly talented, diverse people I have ever met in my life having the craziest, most random laugh-out-loud, sing-till-you’re-blue, cry-without-any-remorse time. I am tripping over Tocqueville, relaxing to Rawls, diving my nose into Nozick, getting down to Game Theory and having late night conversations about Serbia, Eastern Europe and being an American-Japanese-Lebanese. I’m coming home with a Kentucky accent, a Californian smile, an Alabaman laugh, a Romanian skepticism, a Lebanese joie-de-vivre, with my heart divided between two little twin babies in Atlanta and a military base in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

precious November 28, 2007

i want to write about you, but nothing seems perfect enough.

Home & Away October 8, 2007

Ths beautiful building houses my delicious self, three fabulous roommates and three other apartments of TFAS-ers.

Our gorgeous rooftop with a breathtaking view of the Capitol–this is the scene of the crime for many parties/dinners.

And of course, the quintessential Washington picture.

too much ewww in the loo October 8, 2007

i don’t understand american toilets, i really don’t. the cubicles are separated from each other by doors that do not actually close– when they are shut there is a sliver of opening between the partition and door. basically, you can see that there is someone in the cubicle, and even make out their general appearance. so whenever i walk into a toilet and the first cubicle is occupied, it’s “WHOAAAAA” ok, I did not need to see that. So now I have learnt not to look, but even if i don’t make an effort to peep or peer closely, walking past is good enough for a cursory glance at too much visual un-stimuli.

Why the heck is it done this way? If it’s to alert people that someone’s in there, why can’t there be a little sign that says “Occupied” which appears when the door is locked? Why subject all and sundry to the stinging terror of seeing too much of your boss, colleague, friend or even some random stranger?

I’ve adapted. I go to the loo very quickly, stand sideways while I get undressed and dressed up again and dash out the door after I’ve washed-and-soaped. It’s funny how in the capital country of the notion of privacy, there is such little space for bathroom decency. Maybe that’s why it’s so important to them, privacy, because there are such tiny little spaces to navigate and claim as yours, without being exposed and vulnerable.

i (heart) DC October 4, 2007

If America is full of bullshit, then Washington, DC is the capital of delusions to drown in and I am revelling in all its mucky, throttling indecisiveness.

I live in the centre of it all. My beautiful brownstone apartment building (in which I have a tiny slice of privacy divided with 3 other wonderful powerful go-getting women ) is 10 seconds from the Library of Congress, 5 minutes from the Capitol Building and down the street from the Senate Offices, not to mention some of the world’s most boastful memorials, standing proud, erect and virile.  There is a thick, invisible smog of power and the irrepressible stench of ego mingling with a waft of hopefulness and optimism. It chokes me every morning as I hop onto the sidewalk, two seconds before a pinstriped, khaki-panted staffer says “hey baby” way too lasciviously for pre-coffee conversation.

Some moments I’ve had have reminded me how Fresh Off The Boat I am, albeit in a perfectly legal sense. I’ve had a man stare at me for ten minutes while I ask him, continually, while clutching a bagful of cotton buds and toothpaste at a pharmacy, (”drug store”) if I was in the right queue(line). Suffice to say, I’ve learnt how to say things like “lift” and “trunk”. And, sadly, while I hear twenty-two years of strict English language training flush itself down the drain, how to say “like” and “yeaaaah, kinda.”

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely adore DC. Being in DC is like being in Disneyworld for any political-science-current-affairs nerd, complete with the political sideshows (free protests and spectacles to observe, conventions where I’ve hyperventilated about meeting Jesse Jackson, Hilary Clinton and my hero Barack Obama, bars and pubs to “bump” into important staffers), but I feel my confusion surmounting not only at awkward phrases that are alien to me, but to general conundrum of choice and double-speak that I have to acquaint myself with: why are there 25 different types of chocolate chip cookies in one supermarket? why do people say “shut uppppp!!!” when they really want you to continue with a story? is hanging out really hanging out or is it a goddamn date? i suspect noone really knows. maybe it has something to do with the beauty of democracy, which i obviously have no experience with: overwhelm the public with a barrage of choices, hide what your words mean and be as ambiguous as possible.

i suspect, that with all my cultural escapades and persistent perusal of intricate american life (last sunday, i had a burger and watched football with my “buddies” for two hours) that i will be the next alexander de tocqueville, minus the illusions of grandeur and feverish french glamourisations.  i suspect, also, that the sense of direction in my step–honed by jogs around the National Mall, powerwalks from the Metro to work–will veer me off the path of despondent decisions and sacrificial settlements when i return to the singapura–a thought i refuse to even entertain, for longer than a minute, in this breathless adventure in america.

on being a “Random and Rampant Liberal” August 27, 2007

A friend of mine coined that phrase in 2005 during one of our most heated pre-Worlds debate training sessions. The issue before the house was something about gay marriages, I think, so friend x thought it clever to link homosexuality with the frivolity of randomness and rampant freedom. Being on the opposing team, I took on the prejudice of the semantics very strongly. But didn’t really think about what it meant.

A few years on, I’m beginning to discover the real depth of how incorrect his little phrase is.

Being a liberal isn’t about being random or rampant, or about stampeding, free-wheeling free speech, or about chest-thumping idealism and cripplingly sympathetic welfare mechanisms. Liberals aren’t flower children, anti-capitalists, ganja farmers, or artsy people who eat tofu burgers and date reincarnations of Hare Krishnas, or less dramatically, the bourgeois with working class routes and aspirations to traverse South America, Southeast Asia India.  All of us, the most daring, most outspoken ones included, have fears, prejudices, worry about taxes and jobs as much as equal opportunity and rights and representation.

It takes effort to be a liberal–to reinforce why these values are good, why our prejudices are unfounded, to look for solutions that complement our assumptions. It takes more effort to be a liberal than to shout “small government” in the face of unknown questions where lines between rules and rights get blurred. More effort than saying immigrants shouldn’t exist, or that meritocracy really does.

the honest truth is almost always blemished August 27, 2007

Lately i’ve been getting impatient with people who say “honestly” and “to tell you the truth”. Honestly what? Tell me which truth? When? At the risk of sounding pitifully post-modernist about facts, and without deconstructing the reality of perception, and questioning the basis of our epistemology and other really bullshitty ways of saying “it’s complicated”, I think anyone who says they want to know the truth is lying and anyone who says they are being honest is telling you only one side of the story–the side they perceive to know.  Most folks already have an idea of what the truth is and want a confirmation of it, and “being honest” is probably a way of re-packaging fact into neat little shortcuts of the grand old long story. Noone likes nuance, just like how very few are able to detect the bouquets and textures of wine (myself included)–people want factual chicken mcnuggets. Fast food snippets of occurrences and pancake-mix versions of intricate personalities. Spill the beans and stir it in a pot in 5 minutes, serve while hot. The “truth” is almost 5, 10, 15 years in the making and we only have 30 minutes, and then it’s on to what’s hot in the stock market. Dissect and dice. Next.

Maybe it’s my unequivocally optimistic view of people–I think everyone’s good inside and at the most, have poor ways of managing difficult situations. I’ve always rushed to explain someone’s good side, always rooted for the underdogs. Maybe that’s why one of my favourite characters of all time is Iago–Shakespeare’s villainous traitor. Othello’s dimensions were easy to figure out, but there was always something about Iago–his anger, jealousy, boldness yet also at the same time his insiduous frailty, his skepticism and scheming, his malicious vulnerability. There was something about him I pitied, something I hated vehemently, something I couldn’t help but be captivated with, with copious amounts of guilt. And when the story is over and the audience weeps for Desdemona the dumb (in my opinion) and Othello the insipid (again my opinion), noone wept for Iago who was lost in the pinnacle of destruction he constructed and which consumed him too. Irretrievably.

being on a diet August 21, 2007

sucks, particularly at 11:58pm, when you’re too lazy and it’s too late to go to the shops, and McDonald’s will only arrive in an hour, and all you want to do is tear open that packet of Maggi mee and gulp down that Snickers bar, but self-restraint reaches into your fridge and hands you a slice of cheese instead.