five good things

07 may 2013

Tue, 07 May 2013 14:33:13 -0400

i meant to write today and i’ve had sentences floating around my head all day, things like everyone deserves their happinesses and i walk around as if gravity’s the only thing that’s holding me up and this too shall pass live through this and you won’t look back everything will be better in the morning. but really i’m so inexpressibly tired and although i had a day that was…illuminating…precisely because of how wearying and awful it was, i can’t write about it. it used to be i’d make myself happy by putting on nice clothes and red lipstick and going off campus to sit in a cafe, to cry over ya lit, to feel alive in a rainstorm. i did all those things today but it was like a child the year after he’s found out santa claus doesn’t exist, desperately pretending that he still believes. and this made me feel worse than college ending, than hci rejecting me, even; i have lost a kind of belief system. today the cafe was dark and empty and paid bad music and the rain irritated me and i didn’t have that quiet moment of triumph, that little epiphany, when i knew everything was going to be all right.

i did the right thing today: yelled at myself if i got envious or jealous; methodically sent out about fifteen job apps; got myself part-time work at cedele so i stop feeling so fucking restless—i want to do things with my hands, i want to make something concrete, something i can hold on to or a change. i wrote to many companies that are probably mediocre, because i think i would enjoy the luxury of refusing an offer; and, secretly, i am scared that i won’t be proud enough to refuse, that i will meekly and defeatedly take the first thing that comes my way. i’m so — other people are good at life but i’m really honestly not, i was good at academia, and now that’s gone and i have to remind myself to smile, to be happy, to eat, to shower; i don’t want to be the kind of person that falls apart at the first sign of stress but i don’t know how to fix it either. everyone is overwhelmingly kind and positive and i understand rationally that they are right, that things will work out, but that doesn’t make it easier. i am so fragile right now i feel as if i will break if i am touched. and i know — painfully — that this is stupid, there’s no need to be quite so tragic, but my brain can’t conquer my emotions, can’t magic away this listless, purposeless, defeated feeling.

isn’t it funny that i’ve spent my whole day wandering around in the city, holding that phrase about gravity holding me up, but it doesn’t even make sense; gravity pulls you down, doesn’t it? it keeps you grounded — and that’s what i miss — right now i feel immaterial and inconsequential and ghostly. i just want some kind of certainty back; a job, an apartment, a future. and i know that i can’t have any of those without working for them and i’m trying, god, i’m trying so hard, and i don’t know how to end this post except to say that i am probably more okay than i seem and i don’t mean to sound quite so tragic and i know, this too shall pass, live through this and you won’t look back, it’ll all look better in the morning.

04 may 2013

Sat, 04 May 2013 14:14:00 -0400

college is over and it hasn’t sunk in for anyone—dinner today was like a collection of zombies; we’re all done with finals or only have one or two left; some people have jobs and apartments but the rest of us don’t; no one wants to talk about it. dinner at khansama was pleasant nostalgia—we were so sure we wouldn’t enjoy ourselves but even the cliched markers of an evening with this group of friends turned out to be fun. everyone taking too long to order and getting mildly irritated about it. talking over one another, multiple conversations, everyone trying to listen to everything being said. watching the bad hindi music videos on the tvs in the restaurant; talking about favourite hindi movies and actors, about movies our parents made us watch. we should watch hindi movies together. why have we never done this before? sujay saying, mockingly, as the food arrived, you guys eat with your hands here? there is a strange joy to our shared indianness—so much of singapore has become familiar to us now, we no longer feel like the foreigners, the outsiders, and yet with this group there are years and years of common experiences—we discuss the pronunciation of names in tamil and in bengali; laugh about atrocious hindi accents and bad 90s pop songs. we ordered too-sweet, too-milky masala chai and drank it anyway.

at pgp there was another kind of nostalgia—this sudden, stricken knowledge that this really might be the last time we do this, troop into the r3 lounge to look for a place to chill for the evening. i haven’t been to pgp in a year and it was strange—medha and i went to pee and i found myself realising that i’ve never been to a pgp bathroom sober, i can only remember them in a sort of haze of one too many whiskies (sometimes, lazy, we’d go to the boys’ bathroom, giggling and whispering loudly, do you think anyone will see us?). outside the bathroom adithya said something stupid and medha and i laughed till my stomach hurt; i can’t remember the last time i laughed like that. in the lounge we played hilarious and chaotic uno, everyone contributing their own version of the rules; i’d forgotten how funny everyone is—the evening was a constant stream of sarcastic one-liners. we played a ridiculous round of charades (the last time i remember playing charades with this groyp was in clarke quay, somewhere in the outdoors—near brewerkz, maybe? i don’t even know when that was—two years ago? where does the time go?).

there was a lot about this evening that was simple and bittersweet and lovely—walking from khansama to pgp with medha, talking about nothing in particular; the endless stream of do you remember when we were in year one…? recalling things we’d all forgotten: the day we ventured to sit under the weird satellite dish at pgp; the way we ate spicy fried rice every weekend; the vending machines that used to sell coke and now sell pepsi (sacrilege!)—all the things we’ve done in the last four years that didn’t seem important at the time. sitting with samridhi at the town green before dinner, trying to untangle our feelings about being done with college.

when i got back to my room sujay texted me saying ‘thank you for coming’—we never text each other after these evenings, because we’ve always taken it for granted that we’ll meet again, soon, informally, spontaneously. and now that might have changed; here we are, done with college, ready to drift off into jobs, scatter across the country; we were ‘the clan’, the original group; some of these people i never got close to and an unfortunate one or two i’ve grown to actively dislike, but by and large they’re the people who made my college experience—at least the first two years of it. i’m glad we had this night; a night that wasn’t marred by fights or drama or anything negative—a night that was just good food and good friends and laughter and happiness.

year 2 sem 2 in recess week ths semester medha, samridhi and i woke up early every morning and...

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 11:58:41 -0400

year 2 sem 2

in recess week ths semester medha, samridhi and i woke up early every morning and walked to the benches in the central forum to do work. we’d spread our readings all over the table and talk about as much as we studied. we made plans about trips we’d take in the future (one plan, about going to rajasthan, actually materialised). we found a family of cats that lived in the bushes by the stairs and sat for hours trying to get them to come near us. we volunteered to help with the sets for nus stage, out in the sun outside cfa painting cubes, i still have spatters of white paint on my khakhi jacket. we spray-painted a prop gun and the smell made me dizzy. samarth and medha and i also began to go to the starbucks at west coast plaza, taking the free shuttle and staying there all evening, sick with hunger but refusing to buy more than a single cappuccino which we’d nurse, carefully sprinkling cinnamon over the foam, making a cup last an afternoon. sometimes we’d get sushi from cold storage for dinner, eat it with our hands while we waited in the queue for the shuttle back. once we saw sara and her friends playing with two dogs at the park by the bus stop and ran to meet them and to play catch with the puppies too, even though it was raining, even though we had things to do.

i applied for about ten internship programmes in the US for this summer, agonised over each application, didn’t get into any. i tried out for nus resonance, practicing songs in my room for days; singing to ipsita, i remember, in a corridor in yih, and then to samridhi in the area behind mcdonalds, so nervous my voice shook. surprisingly i wasn’t nervous at all in the audition; i remembered to sing the scales in the same tempo as they were played, which worked in my favour; i hit the high notes and sang loudly and, even when i forgot my lyrics, my voice didn’t waver. i got called back for a second audition and failed miserably. we had to learn two songs from scratch, as it were, and i was the only one who couldn’t sight-read; they recorded us and i was so scared of singing the wrong notes that i didn’t sing at all. i was haunted by disappointment after the audition; it was only two years later that i’d realise and take comfort in the fact that one of the people i’d auditioned with was salima.

i feel like i have been neglecting to mention so many things—maybe because i don’t think, twenty years later, i’d want to remember them? all the times i still felt homesick, god, it’s been two years, you should be used to this by now. all the times i panicked so much about essays, tried telling myself it was not a big deal but still ended up freaking out or curling up and crying or just working myself up for no reason; i was always falling sick in my second year, inexplicable colds and fevers, i spent so many hours at the uhc waiting for doctors to tell me there was nothing wrong with me, who simply prescribed me over-the-counter paracetamol which did nothing but make me sleep fitfully; i woke up often with scratch marks on my arms and back from where i’d scratched myself in my sleep. it was probably because i relied so much on doing well academically; it was all i had, really, other people were good at sports or dancing and all i was good at was class. and suddenly here i was, surrounded by people who were undeniably more intelligent than i; it took a while for me to start enjoying this atmosphere rather than being intimidated by it. only once i fell seriously ill; samridhi, medha, madhav and i all caught the same high fever; this was when swine flu was a thing, and so i had to enter my name into a book at the uhc so they could contact me if they thought i was infected; this was the only time i let myself crawl sadly to my aunt’s house, let her tuck me into miel’s bed and make me a cup of tea and baby me a little. i was also strangely lonely this semester; no longer as willing to go clubbing or out for dinner when i knew i wouldn’t have fun, but still not comfortable enough to enjoy my own company. i remember when i refused to go out one night and everybody ended up watching (500) days of summer without me, i was so irrationally furious because this was a movie i’d been dying to watch for months and they didn’t even care about it, they didn’t deserve to watch it before me; so i went, defiantly, and watched it by myself at vivo, and ate an entire bag of popcorn and cried and cried and cried.

en3222 shakespeare

at this time samridhi, medha and i had volunteered to gallery-sit for an exhibition at the architecture department. samridhi and i had duty together; we’d run, generally late, to the engine canteen to grab coffee that we insisted was better than at arts, and then we’d sit in the wide, empty gallery and i would read my shakespeare plays. i read a midsummer night’s dream sitting by myself on a chair in the corner of the upper gallery; it was very quiet, so that even my unconscious foot-tapping echoed strangely. i skipped lots of texts; didn’t do very well in the class. elsa and i did our presentation together. in tutorial i saw kellynn for the first time; self-sufficient and floaty and intimidatingly smart, she sat in the same corner of the classroom every week. i made friends with grace, an exchange student; in lectures we’d chat on facebook about how to pronounce ‘loughborough’ (‘luffbra’, apparently).

en3241 psychoanalysis

this was probably the toughest class i took in nus—i stumbled through twelve weeks without ever really understanding what i was doing. the material we worked with was very, very challenging, often literally lost in translation—freud and lacan talking in neverending sentences about things i could not comprehend. everyone else in class seemed to grasp concepts immediately; i scribbled down half-sentences, trying to follow what our impossibly intelligent professor was saying, but always got lost. our professor was goddess-like in her brilliance, encouraging and lovely, scrawling illegible yet positive comments in pencil all over our assignments. we presented on poe and i recognised an allusion from macbeth, my one noteworthy accomplishment in class, and even then it was only because macbeth was the only text i did in ISC lit. i wrote my final essay from home which was a disaster—my mother wandering into the room to say “it’s only a 3500 paper, right? do you think you could try to finish it tonight, sweetie? then we could all go out for dinner tomorrow!” so i’d stay up late in the hall, all the lights off, mosquitoes ravaging my legs, and scribble about kristeva and frankenstein; elsa kept me company online but the time difference screwed me over, she was always asleep before i was done. when i sent eunice my draft she hated it and i fell apart. in the end i just submitted it, didn’t care that it was mediocre because at least it was over. eunice collected my essay from the office and i never took it from her.

lag2201 german 2

i’m glad i took this class—i had samridhi in my lecture and medha in my tutorial, so both were fun. in lecture we giggled a lot, samridhi and her friend diana and i, but we also worked pretty hard and it was fun, as a class we took ourselves seriously and that felt good. tutorials were late at night which always felt strange, walking through as4 in the dark; it always seemed colder, all those silent, ghostly corridors. this was a nice class because we were all genuinely interested in it, even with the bi-weekly assignments and the vocab lists we had to memorise. we joined the german society; we joined the german society choir, something i literally just remembered. twice a week we’d venture to the music faculty, which was impressively designed and inspired us to walk on tiptoe and talk in whispers; we’d sit at a distance from frau niemann, who was unimaginably gorgeous and who we both secretly worshipped. and we would sing. in german. it was lovely because i hadn’t been in choir in so long, i’d forgotten what it was like, but slowly my voice rearranged myself and remembered that it used to be a soprano, and singing in german was so interesting, we had to learn how to emphasise things differently, had to translate every song so we were singing with the right feeling; and even though it all culminated in something as simple as all of us singing outside the central forum, it was still amazing. i cannot believe i forgot about it till today.

ps3260 politics & the visual

i took this class alone because it interested me; i made friends in tutorial who i’d sit with in lecture and lunch with occasionally. we had to give a five-minute presentation in tutorial without any notes and that was terrifying, i rehearsed for hours in the balcony outside the yih lounge, timing myself, and then in tutorial i managed to mess up anyway, and survived only because i was so nervous that my professor took pity on me. i wrote my final essay on the singapore flyer; probably the only essay i wrote entirely in the yih lounge, sitting with samridhi and samarth and medha and drinking innumerable cups of coffee.

en3268 tragedy

apprehensive about writing about this class because i could go on forever, i’m going to have to make myself stop. i was so nervous about taking a class with dr a; i’d heard horror stories, a girl who’d taken her romanticism class the previous semester had told me she was ‘the miranda priestley of the lit department’. i loved the class and the professor almost instantly; i guess i am like anne hathaway. the prof spoke so fast that you felt breathless just listening to her, but it was the first class that had me completely excited, i couldn’t wait to learn everything. in our first tutorial she made us say one interesting thing about ourselves and i said ‘i collect owls’ (and eunice, sitting next to me, inexplicably heard elves; it’s a wonder she still consented to partner with me for our presentation). we were in tutorial the day diana wynne jones died and when our professor mentioned this sadly i made a little sad sound in response, and she said ‘oh do you like diana wynne jones too?’ and suddenly tutorial was over and we were talking about our favourite dwj books. i didn’t do very well in the class but i absolutely loved it; in the archi gallery i was so entranced by the prose of brand that i insisted on reading it aloud; i forced amadeus onto samridhi and she read it overnight and loved it as much as i did. eunice and i wrote a presentation on madness in hamlet that wasn’t very good, but was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, truly; between her excited, intelligent and ungrammatical writing and my cautious, grammatical prose we knew we could work well together, and it wasn’t long before we were finishing each other’s sentences quite effortlessly.

what else? i messed up; sent dr a a bad essay argument in size 10 font, both of which rankled with her; apologised profusely and spent all night writing a 3500-word essay draft, skyping with hannae along the way. it was the first of many essays in which inspiration only came at about 2am, fuelled by last-minute panic and too many cokes and that sort of surreal dreamlike post-midnight state where you begin to wonder if you’re real. we finished the essay over coffee at the upper deck and sent it in. i remember when i went to pick up the draft she asked me if i was majoring in lit and i said yes and she said i’m glad. you have a nice style and lent me a dwj book, hexwood i think, and it made my day. now i borrowed books from dr a on a near-weekly basis and emailed her about them as i finished (you do read fast, she said, and lent me more). the emails were full of exclamations and smiley faces, it’s a wonder she tolerated it really; but also they became so much about me that it was frightening; we were talking about how i read georgette heyers and my mother’s old chalet schools and sometimes she’d send me emails which were just strings of authors’ names, have you read these books, and my answer was almost always yes. when i went in to collect my essay she gave me a book, the power of three, and i was just so overwhelmed, i didn’t know teachers could do that, and i remember i ran, not walked, back to the gallery to show samridhi and we were both so excited about this. there was probably a final test for the module but i don’t remember writing one. we had a final project, though, the first that hazel and elsa and eunice and hannae and i worked on together. we had such fun with it, reading fairytales and figuring out groupwork; we clicked so instantly, became the kind of inseparable friendgroup that went everywhere together. we’d take up long tables at the deck and talk about our classes and plan for future semesters. and so suddenly i had lit friends; and although i held my two groups so separately at first—almost as if the lit friends were just temporary, not real—this was already changing.

other things

my parents came again this year—they came every year—and we went to f1 rocks again; really what was nice about these visits was the chance to get to know nirica more, as if all these years before i came to college she was just—a sister—and now, suddenly, she was a person, with thoughts and feelings and opinions. samridhi’s friends visited and a strange, slightly surreal drama ensued and escalated and eventually faded out over the summer. i woke up one morning and called medha and she told me siddharth’s father had died in the early morning, a heart attack, completely unexpected it hit me out of nowhere, i was crying before i even hung up the phone; i called my mother and sobbed unintelligibly for a long time, i had never felt so far away from home, so helpless. we went to meet him at the airport when he came back and i have the strangest sense of déjà vu, like i have written about this before, only i don’t think i had started my five good things blog yet so i don’t see how i could have. we went straight from the airport to a party and there was a lot of drinking and crying and extreme emotion, but it felt right for that night; it was a carpe diem kind of night, the kind of night that young blood was probably written for. i don’t really remember anything else noteworthy about this year; towards the end of it i applied to tembusu, not really expecting to get in; when i got in i was so happy and also so devastated because samridhi wouldn’t be moving with us, she was going to be in paraguay, i honestly didn’t think i would be able to survive college without her. and again there were bags packed and moved into storage, strangely teary goodbyes to my aunt even though i’d see her in three months; another year gone, another new start.

year 2 sem 1 moving to rvr was interesting. the building felt dingier; teeny, tiny bathrooms, dark...

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 14:03:00 -0400

year 2 sem 1

moving to rvr was interesting. the building felt dingier; teeny, tiny bathrooms, dark corridors. at least it had a lift. my room was arranged differently, mirror on the wardrobe door, no longer full-length; but i had almost the same amount of storage space and i was able, the first day, to make my room look pretty; i remember taking photos and putting them on facebook, and all my friends back home gushing and demanding to be allowed to visit. no more east-facing window; now my room was dark all day, and coupled with my refusal to turn on white lighting until i absolutely had to, it quickly earned its eventual nickname of ‘batcave’. i could see the src from my room, which was nice; i could see parakeets swoop in the trees right outside my window, raucuous and impolite. medha lived on the same floor, opposite corridor, which was nice; we’d trail across constantly, sometimes barefoot, generally holding cups of tea, as if the people in the rooms in between us didn’t exist—and really, we saw them so rarely it was like they didn’t. bathrooms were small and gross, sometimes i’d have to creep across the corridor in my towel to get to another one; sometimes they’d all be occupied and i’d give up, stumbling to class unshowered and disgruntled. living without meal plans was new, too; after the initial ambitious meals of toast and pasta i gave up, we all gave up, and instead i’d fall into cheers fifteen minutes before class for orange juice (90 cents!) or, if i was more energetic, to yakun for coffee or butter sugar toast. i was probably at my unhealthiest this semester; unfed and unwashed and wearily giving up the fight to be on time for class, no more waking up early to do readings, all illusions of being Good At College and Good At Adulthood shattered.

en3223 nineteenth century

i took the dive this year and did four lit modules, and this was probably the most challenging workload-wise, as if our professor had googled ‘really long and probably boring books’ and inflicted the seven top results upon us. we had to read great expectations and middlemarch and jude the obscure and vanity fair and others that i’ve probably forgotten, and we had to discuss them intelligently in class. i wasn’t ready. i tried my best to keep up and managed, i think, for the most part; i remember reading great expectations while walking from the bus stop at river valley to my aunt’s house (so she had moved by then), reading middlemarch in the yih study lounge, marking important bits with post-it flags and, in the breaks, filling samridhi in on the storyline. i know i gave up on vanity fair and skimmed it hours before the exam.

i attended the first few lectures conscientiously and then, bored of her printed-out-slides handouts, began to skip class guiltily. it didn’t help that in the classes i did attend the professor was beady-eyed about reactions, you look sceptical, tara, is that something you’d like to share with the class? tutorials, however, were a blast. my tutorial was a small group of ridiculously amusing people; everybody was always laughing about something, no one took themselves seriously; we spent the first class in our professor’s room comparing our covers of great expectations to see which pip was the hottest. and our professor, so ultra-strict in class, went along with our idiocy: let us compare wuthering heights to twilight, humoured my rant about wuthering heights being a hate story, not a love story; allowed a class on middlemarch to derail into a discussion about how we’d survive the apocalypse if singapore was subject to floods (“we should all live in boats”). there was the historic occasion, the day we still talk about, when she locked eyes with hannae and insisted that arnold’s poetry was good and hannae refused to back down, and they just stared at each other and everybody in the class had a mental image of voldemort and harry at the end of the fourth book. the test was multiple-choice, asked us about lines from the text, about quotes no one had cared about; my ridiculous near-photographic memory came to my aid and i kicked ass, scored 28 on 30 where the average was about 5, didn’t really care that everybody hated me. the essay was more interesting—this was my first real lit essay, not a film one; i did a lot of research and went through a lot of rewrites and, hours before submission, hurriedly edited my paper because the professor had mentioned in class that day that hardy wasn’t pessimistic, and i’d said he was. after the essay was submitted i slept for an entire day, literally—i completely missed saturday—it was my first lit-related all-nighter. and in the end i got an a+, completely unexpected, i didn’t know how to react, i still feel like i don’t deserve it.

en3228 women novelists

outside this classroom the first week i met hannae: this tall girl, piercings and tattoos everywhere, who timidly introduced herself to elsa and me and asked if she could sit with us. i stopped going for these lectures too (wow a+ student) once i realised that everything was in the notes. in tutorial i was intimidated, for the first time, by what seemed like millions of articulate and intelligent classmates, as well as the amount of participation that was expected of us; i sat timidly by myself, speaking only when asked. i remember being completely shocked when a student told our professor he thought the approach she was taking was too simplistic—the idea that our professor could be wrong hadn’t even crossed my mind. on the day of my tutorial presentation i was shaking with fear, and i remember a smiley girl—one of the smart ones—who is in my mind associated with yellow, although goodness knows if she really was wearing yellow—who wished me luck, and i smiled and thanked her and felt relieved, and did not know yet that this was eunice. the professor was a sweetheart, prefaced my essays with a note that began ‘dear tara’, called my first paper a ‘valiant attempt’; i tried much harder for the second assignment on pride and prejudice and knew when i submitted it, for the first time, that it was going to be a good paper.

en3232 american lit ii

this was the class that was a revelation disguised as a train-wreck; everything that felt wrong at the time turned out to be perfect. our professor was so american, so eccentric; turned our attendance-taking into AA-style roll call, made everyone chorus hi, tara after my name had been called. i remember describing him as ‘the mad hatter on uppers’ and it fit, he flitted from topic to topic and made flippant jokes and darted through important topics as if his soundbite remarks were a replacement for actual teaching, but if we listened hard enough sometimes it made sense. he made us read poetry: frost, gertrude stein, ee cummings, dorothy parker, marianne moore. he made us think about how this poetry was written, how it was produced, not received; to make this clearer he divided us into groups of three and we each had to pick an author, imitate their style, themes etc. in an original piece, and then critique each other’s works. i was terrified, hadn’t written creatively in years; i picked cummings by instinct and then, cliché as it might sound, came up with my poem in a dream, stumbling out of a midafternoon nap to write it down. i recorded myself on my phone to figure out line breaks and punctuation. reviewing my partners’ work was easy, i was used to reviews; and then we wrote our reflections and mine came back with the most harsh and yet most constructive criticism i’d ever received. he told me my reviews were some of the best criticism in the class, that my poem was the most successful original attempt; but he also told me to stop being lazy about my prose, to pay attention to word choice, to learn about how to use a semicolon, to care. i read his comments in the yih lounge, isn’t it strange that i remember where i was sitting, i remember that i was drinking coffee from yakun; and fuelled by a kind of rage that he thought my prose lazy, boring, subpar, i rewrote everything in under an hour and sent it in immediately—and he loved it.

en3242 history of film

i did worse in this class but enjoyed it more; even the first few weeks of painfully boring silent movies, even the weird foreign-language propaganda films that confused and unsettled us all. this was the class in which i watched, and fell in love with, bonnie and clyde—i genuinely have no recollection of the other movies we watched (apart from the short film which would, two years later, become the focus of hugo). i wrote my paper on john hughes films and heathers, which was a dream come true; my first experience with independent research. i watched the breakfast club in the library on videotape, those ancient tiny tvs in the ~multimedia room, and was outraged when they censored out the pot-smoking scene. i watched heathers on youtube lying on my bed in rvr.

sc2210 sociology of popular culture

in this class we met an old man, an impossibly cool aged surfer dude, who once met pink floyd and convinced them to give him their music for a video he was making. i don’t think anything could have been cooler. class was a blur of videos and sociological theory i’d already understood; tutorials a slow and laborious process of trying to explain to classmates how to analyse readings critically. i have no recollection of writing any kind of essay for this module, which is strange, because it’s the kind of class in which i would probably have had interesting things to write about.

other things

the yih lounge was my new space; brightly-coloured chairs and its own particular smell. i took five-minute power naps on the sofas often. we’d bring coffee or subs or sometimes both to our table and sit there for hours, doing our work and chatting and watching videos; this was when medha and samridhi and samarth and i really got to know each other, i suppose, between essays and readings. samridhi and i hung out more, too; she was in old kr now, as i walked to class i could hear her sneezing in her room sometimes. we’d hang out in the src with her guitar, she’d play and i’d sing, loudly, for the first time in a long time. sometimes i didn’t know the words so i’d make them up—see the stone set in her eyes, see the i don’t know this line. belting the winner takes it all at 3am in the shadowy area between tennis courts. we jogged sometimes; more often we only ever walked to the src to get a coke from the vending machine. once the four of us watched black swan in samridhi’s room, all of us predictably terrified. medha and i began to watch grey’s anatomy together, i’d wander into her room clutching tea and we’d marathon episodes, one earphone per person because her laptop sound was so lousy; these things were quiet and unexciting but they felt—right—for second-year experiences; the novelty had worn off, now things were more boring but also more comfortable, we had a routine, we had certainties.

year 1 sem 2 i learnt to be alone this semester, i think. the novelty wore off a little, perhaps....

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 03:06:34 -0400

year 1 sem 2

i learnt to be alone this semester, i think. the novelty wore off a little, perhaps. this was the semester i woke up later, started missing breakfasts, noticed that the bread at breakfast was soggy and the rice at dinner was cold. failed attempts at laundry—dryer not working, washing-machine that spun half-heartedly and left my clothes wet and unclean. the honeymoon was over. instead there was the familiar journey to my aunt’s house; she lived in newton then, the one-and-a-half-hour bus-and-train-ride that was all mine, the walk from newton mrt to her lovely, small, modern apartment; weekends with my aunt and uncle and miel, weekends where i could just…be. i don’t remember what i did; i don’t think i slept over often, such a small house, but i remember playing with miel, helping her with spellings for school; and literary dinners with my aunt, and helping her sort out manuscripts or cutlery or shoes, whatever needed organising. this was also the semester i grew to love the library; i’d walk there, get my ipod out and play an album—a fine frenzy’s bomb in a birdcage, usually—and just browse until it was over; nothing but books and music, it was a kind of peace.

EN2113 intro to film

this was it: the class that told me yes you were right to choose lit; all the aha moments i’d been waiting for, all the excitement and exhilaration. the most brilliant professor; she was so kind and gentle and genuinely nice and when she taught it was like she was leaving over your shoulder pointing something out to you, look, there it is, that’s how it works, and then you saw it and your perception shifted and suddenly, just like that, the world had changed. working with film i was strangely confident, in the way i still wasn’t about literature; things felt more concrete, look, she is wearing white and the rest are in black; look, she is speaking english and the others are speaking german. writing the essay on hitchcock’s notorious was the most fun i’d had in nus so far; when i got it back with an a+ i almost cried with happiness, i genuinely had not expected it, i’d written on instinct and it had worked. the class was magnificent—sitting with elsa, newfound friend; watching all those amazing films: hitchcock, nolan. we led the tutorial for scream and i had fun. the second essay was a typical disaster—i thought she’d specified 1cm margins but of course it was 1”, which meant that two hours before the deadline i was about 2000 words over the limit; samridhi had to help me by brutally cutting everything she thought was unnecessary. the class was a joy and i told everyone about it constantly, went home and made my parents buy all the hitchcock movies on dvd, paused films to tell my sister how they worked, trying my best to explain it all—and maybe i succeeded, a little, because here she is now, wanting to study film. and even today—watching stoker, watching the x files, watching any damn thing—i know i am seeing things because i learnt how to see them in this class.

GEM1004 philo

i took this class because samridhi and medha had taken it the previous sem, and because melanie said she’d take it with me. melanie was one of those unexpected friends, the kind who shows up in your life and changes it unobtrusively and never really disappears. she told me about wicked. she told me about glee (which was good, then). she told me about tumblr. in philo lecture we’d sit in the back and watch glee with headphones on. the class was a waste of time; i aced it casually, easily. in tutorial i was startled into speaking up when a girl insinuated that drunk drivers shouldn’t be punished for their actions—suddenly i was angry, something that was new at the time. in the final i finished my paper in an hour, walked out uncaringly to meet samridhi and her sister for the first time; i knew i’d done well. it was an ego-boost of a class; i don’t know what i learnt from it, really.

LAG1201 german 1

i think i did this module the semester before samridhi and medha did it. they were the ones interested in german; i was the one disgruntled because i wasn’t allowed to take french 1. but of course i loved it; i love languages, love how we’re taught to reduce them to a bunch of rules and formulae, and then told that there are exceptions to the rules—you can’t pin down language, can’t ever really understand how it works. my professor was strict, but very good. she’d tell us to count our steps in german to remember our numbers and even now, sometimes, as i am walking, my brain thinks eins, zwei, drei, vier. that first week we had to introduce ourselves and i turned to the girl next to me, said, hi, i’m in year 1, majoring in english lit, and she said me too—and just like that, a friend. elsa, who would be in almost all my classes for the next three years, who’d become one of my closest friends in nus. i was predictably very good at the written tests and very bad at the oral ones. in my tutorial was jamie lai, who in that weird isn’t-the-world-small way would turn out to be one of kel’s best friends, just like neha, who i met at matric fair; links in a chain.

NM1101 new media

i think melanie took this class too, but i never saw her; it was su yee who i sat by that first class, and who said we should be class buddies because she didn’t know anyone either; we were to sit next to each other every week for this module. su yee was smart and funny and very friendly, insisting on taking a photo together after our last class; it was my first friendship with a local student, which meant that sometimes she’d say things like ‘prc’ which i didn’t understand, and i’d just nod. my tutor was an impossibly good-looking young man who was friendly and smart and of course inspired me to impress him with my intelligence, so i said a surprising amount of insightful things despite the big class size. i met sara in this class—we both said the same thing about otaku culture, i remember, and she sought me out after—sara was another extrovert, another ridiculously smart girl, and she liked au revoir simone and paramore and talked me into friendship. i’m so confused now; i know her number was saved on my phone as sara psych which means she was probably (also?) in my psych class—or perhaps she wasn’t even in my nm class?—but it’s in the nm tutorial that i remember her telling me excitedly about paramore coming to singapore, and on a whim one saturday morning i said yes, okay, let’s go stalk them at the airport, and on an even whimmier whim i texted saniya, and then there we were, world’s unlikeliest trio, waiting in vain to see the band. it was probably the first spontaneous thing i’d done so far.

PL1101 psych

i took psych because i was toying with the idea of minoring in it, and because medha took it too. lectures at science were so boring, the lt so large and full, the lecturers droning on about things i already knew. my tutorials were fun—sara was in them—but, again, full of things i knew from ISC psych. the rp component of our module, which sounded so great in theory, turned out to be a lot of filling in of interchangeable and only vaguely interesting surveys. medha and i wrote our one-page paper sitting on the floor of the library, laughing helplessly with stress. i drew careful diagrams of the brain which i never used.

OTHER THINGS

i helped out with my aunt’s event at swf; afterwards i took samridhi with me and we went back to my aunt’s house, it was halloween i remember, for an impromptu party: wine everywhere, ordered-in pizza, my cousin making me try on her lady gaga wig. my parents and nirica visited in september and we went for f1 rocks together, my first concert, the black-eyed peas and beyonce, and we loved every minute. it’s so strange because i can picture it in my head, green grass big stage stumbling on tree-roots, and it is a place completely removed from my mental picture of fort canning, because back then i didn’t know it was fort canning—i can hold the two images separately in my head because to my mind they are different. (i have just realised all this happened in sem 1, not sem 2. i think i watched kelly clarkson in sem 2.)

i don’t know what else happened—i assume things became more familiar, less strange. hall activity dwindled; in sem 1 i played soccer with chu luei and mauli and vasudha, enthusiastic and muddy in bright yellow t shirts, screaming; i went for late-night suppers and dressed up for d&d in the dingy comm. hall and convinced myself it looked like hogwarts (it didn’t). sem 2 was suppers at ameen, navigating the back route through temasek, walking carefully over open drains; supper at sheares with vasudha and raghav and whoever else happened to be there. football matches at pasir panjang, there was a flying cockroach once but there were also cats, we would sneak in instant noodles from cheers and drink cheap beer. movies by myself in my room—the prestige, sixteen candles, things i’d meant to watch for years. friends episodes while i folded my laundry. lays magic masala which i hid in my cupboard and rationed carefully, you can eat half a pack before each exam. the day i went back to my room and there was a lizard on my bed so i knocked on mauli’s door, some godawful time of past-midnight, and asked if i could sleep in her room and she said, without hesitation, of course. clearing out my temasek room at the end of the semester, knowing i’d be moving to rvr to be in the same hostel as samridhi and medha—this was exciting, we were thrilled—one chapter ending, already; how time flies.

so no one should click through unless they’re ready for lots of words — i’m trying...

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 00:15:24 -0400

so no one should click through unless they’re ready for lots of words — i’m trying to cope with being done with college so soon by doing this stupidly long post where i try to write down everything i remember about college; i have no idea how i’m going to do this really but probably some kind of chronological post, semester-wise, class-wise maybe—who knows—i’ll see how it goes—but really it’s going to be incoherent and emotional and probably uninteresting to everyone but me but yeah click through if you’re still up for it i guess

oh also this is going to be a work-in-progress so

LMAO I HAVE TOO MANY WORDS APPARENTLY IMMA HAVE TO DO THIS SEMESTER BY SEMESTER so this is just year 1 sem 1 lolol

yeah disclaimers over

YEAR 1

SEMESTER 1

before i talk about classes there are the things i’ve written about so many times before: the rush of the crowd at matric fair, neha being helpful and friendly, a godsend; the girl in front of me in the line for our student passes whose name was also nayantara, whose major was also english lit—a coincidence i held onto like a lifeline. checking into temasek hall, last room last corridor, my father yelling at me when i couldn’t figure out how the transponder worked (and then, immediately after, taking me to carrefour to buy a pillow, holding it on the mrt back, getting me settled into my room, helping me make my bed. saying, carefully “do some ironing if you’re feeling stressed, it’s therapeutic”. and then leaving me to curl up on my bed and cry.)

mauli wandering in, friendly, to use my computer—i saw this as an affront on my privacy, i was so angry, i didn’t yet understand how communal living worked—that came later, watching mauli and vasudha and their ease, their generosity, come to my room and take my food whenever you want, my door’s never locked. my temasek room: east-facing, sun streaming in to wake me up at 7am; i could see the bus turn in to business from my window; stroll down leisurely to catch it and ride one stop down to arts. waking up early, breakfast in the comm hall at 7.30, i would stroll down in pajamas, braless and uncaring, throwing my towel in the bathroom on the way.and then come back for a shower—the bathrooms were so big and bright, like swimming-pool changing rooms, i could change in the cubicle and go back to my room, fresh and wide-awake, to do readings for about a half-hour before class. i didn’t use the laptop much those days. i remember also the stress of CORS, wandering to the central library to use the computers there for the first time, with medha and samridhi and siddharth; we went to the econs majors in their honours room and they helped us bid and the boy’s name sounded a bit like hymen and ignorantly, childishly, rudely, we laughed about this later, and i am still sorry.

EL1101 Linguistics

as far as I remember this was the first module i took. i was badly-dressed; long shorts (i was too self-conscious to wear anything that revealed more than an inch above my knees), one of three tshirts, all of which were raggedy and ordinary. the world’s most half-assed ponytail. and maybe red lipstick, to show that i Cared About My Appearance. the lt was scary the first week and i think i asked someone permission to sit next to them, but i enjoyed the lecture tremendously: the professor, so bubbly and interesting and fun, so unlike the teachers i was used to. tutorial was scary: i didn’t know of ivle’s existence, didn’t print my worksheet out for class. but soon it got better: standing in front of the class once the prof discovered the britishness of my accent, endlessly repeating ‘it, eat, daaaahnce’. doing well at worksheets, taking some form of leadership with group work. it was the first time i’d worked with powerpoints, with an OHP, anything. everything was new and exciting: i’d highlight notes meticulously, revise my phonetics early in the morning, draw mindmaps, do readings. the midterm was fun. i aced it and i knew it, casual confidence, proof that studying continued to pay off. after week 13 our professor treated us to sushi and i stood outside the LT by myself and ate lots of it and then disappeared quietly.

EN1101 Lit

this was the class i cared about most; the thought that i could switch my major never crossed my mind, i was always convinced that i would do lit and so i needed this class to be good and i needed to do well. neither happened, really. the first lecture was boring and confusing, a mix of professors who were either hideously intelligent or hideously dull, one moment talking about simile and metaphor (duh) and the next postmodernism and psychoanalysis (huh?). i sat next to a girl, the first class, who had impossibly effortless style and the kind of hair that makes you want to cry with envy, as if i could absorb some of her ease by osmosis. she was very friendly that first class and never spoke to me again and semesters later i realised that she was in all my classes and was whip-smart and wrote essays about postmodernism and philosophy that i’d never understand.

lectures were boring; i took diligent notes in the book madhulika gave me before i left for college (the one that had little instructions on random pages:’wear pink today’, ‘call me today!’); i never re-read the notes. my tutorial was taught by a filipino phd student called miguel who swore violently in the first class and immediately earned my approval. i didn’t talk much and was grouped with students who spoke singlish so complex that on msn conversations (msn? who uses msn anymore? i stopped using msn in secondary school and had to go through a ‘recover your password’ process to use it again) i literally understood about one in every ten words. i don’t know that i learnt much in tutorial; i made pithy points about blake and poetry. when it came to our frst midterm i was all right because it was like school exams, but or first essay assigmet left me baffled and terrified. i had no idea how to write an argument, no idea how to construct an essay—i read the guidelines they gave us and it helped not at all, and then i wrote a paper that was pretty much based on instinct, and i got a B+ which on hindsight was pretty damn awesome. i got a B+/A- for the second esay, which was a sign that i was learning, and made me happy. and towards the end of the class when we watched hiroshima mon amour the difference in the level of analysis was startling and exhilarating, and although i was out of my depth it was like the kind of dive into the deep end that energises and awakens; i knew now i wouldn’t sink, i knew i’d make it back up to the surface.

JS1101 Japanese Studies
we took this class together, medha and i, and it was nice to have someone to sit next to every lecture, someone to bitch with about assignments and readings. the coursepack was disastrously dull, all dates and names and details that even ISC history wouldn’t have required you to remember. the professors were iteresting, i suppose; lots of slides and pictures and sometimes i had to fight to stay awake, but all ijn all the novelty of it all, this big class, the style of lecturing, kept me engaged.

tutorial was much, much more interesting—the first class the tutor, who was elegant and haughty and just exuded intelligence, handed out bits of paper and told us to write down what we thought japan meant to us. then she asked us to form groups for our final project and i stood alone till a bubbly girl walked up to me, smile so wide you had to smile back, and asked if i was alone; she was year 1 too, and i said yes immediately. and then a tall, composed girl joined us too—her name was jade and it fit, she just looked—cool, flawless, completely sure of herself. she wore, carelessly, a yellow men’s shirt thrown over her impeccably feminine clothes and it made me want to look like that. she was the best possible group-mate; third-year, she’d done it all before. melanie and i were like her little sheep, or ducklings following her faithfully, and she sheepdogged us wonderfully. taught us that the upper deck was called the upper deck. sat with us at arts and told us how to construct an argument, how to write a paper. one day mel couldn’t make it to a meeting and we sat at upper-deck, clinical a/c and empty chairs, and she made me interrogate her on our paper’s argument, made me ask her the ‘so what?’ question that would come back, four years later, to haunt me when i wrote my thesis. her voice was always cool, controlled, as if she was talking to you from very far away, or from underwater, and needed every word to be enunciated perfectly. she called us ‘girls’ and shared her life with us: ‘girls, i have some good news, i’m going to india next year for NOC’. i think melanie and i were both a little bit in love with her, the way you look at the Big Grown-Up Girls when you’re in primary school, the girls who have it all figured out when you’re still gawky and awkward and stumbling and unsure. she was the promise of what we could be.

GEK1510 physics

i still laugh about this class—i took it because it made sense to clear requirements early; because medha promised to help me, medha the science student; because the module description swore there’d be no math involved. the module was in science, the LT dark; medha was often late, sometimes never showed. lectures were like listening to greek: even if i thought i understood a word, it turned out to be unfamiliar. i was always hungry. i took notes desperately. tutorials were every alternate week; the tutor gave us clickers to answer questions, which was exciting, except i always got the questions wrong. he interchanged his l’s and r’s, said “crock” and “lurer”. we had a group project component; someone called jing joined medha’s and my group on ivle and never showed. we didn’t know if this was a boy or a girl; writing to our TA was a matter of much laughter, as we tried to construct the whole email in gender-neutral terms. in the end we were told to do the essay ourselves—two lost girls writing a 4500-word paper on our own, it was laughable. of course we wrote it in one night, the night before it was due. medha came over to my room, we sat side by side at my desk, bed pulled up to act as a chair, my blessed temasek room with the wide, wide desk and the good wifi signal. medha would write down physics-related things and email them to me, and i’d expand the words, double each paragraph; she wrote down equations and i painstakingly found the symbols on word. in the middle of it all i had an email from marita, i remember vividly; a frantic, helpless email (back then we were still doing badly at being in different countries, it was destabilising): help me tala i think i love my boyfriend, the kind of crisis that wouldn’t be a crisis for anyone except marita. and so i was replying to marita and writing the essay simultaneously—love and physics, equally incomprehensible. we walked down to mcdonalds eventually for ice cream; we were laughing all the way back, the kind of delirium that comes with an all-nighter, our first all-nighter, the first of many. and then, after struggling with double columns and pdf-ing we were done, and medha fell asleep on my bed, i remember, as i left for class. and we both b+ed the module, which probably made me happier than it did her.

SSA2214 singapore studies

this was my lazy module—take the class on singapore and india’s history, at least you’ll know half of what’s being taught. and i did. vasudha was in my tutorial and that was nice; the tutorial was in a conference room in as7, all glass tables and gleaming windows. we did one of the first weeks’ presentations, our groupmate a tall thin singaporean indian called arati (“so, aarthi, then,” vasudha told her; these alternate spellings and pronunciations still baffled and irritated us). the presentation was scary and we put in very little effort; by the end of the module we were shamelessly checking texts under the table. lectures were boring and we stopped going. i wrote my paper on the countries’ independence movements and rocked it, thank you ISC history, i remember sitting in the quiet area of the central library and researching all of this, taking down relevant quotes and noting citation information, goodness wasn’t i diligent back then. the final was in eusoff hall and we stood outside talking and laughing about how much we hadn’t studied, that thick coursepack that we barely skimmed through; of course we all did okay in the end, as we knew we would.

OTHER THINGS

it feels weird that year 1 seems simultaneously so close and so very far away. i want to write everything down, maybe it’s stupid but i am insistent, i just refuse to forget any of it. the smell of the rec room (the “wreck room”) at ke vii hall: stale socks and feet. the sofas had rusty nails sticking out. i’d meet the rest there as soon as we finished class—medha, samridhi, siddharth, adithya, sujay, madhav, samarth. they’d play pool while i’d sit and fiddle with the itunes. jack’s mannequin and coldplay. once we played bluff with cards we saw lying on the floor, a motley collection of packs, samridhi said ’27 Jacks’ and we called her bluff and she wasn’t even lying. we’d eat at pgp (aglio olio and pepsi twist, $2.30) and then grab drinks—oreo spin for the rest, iced lemon tea for me—and head over to the rec room for the rest of the day.

i remember that first awkward photograph of all of us smiling, look at us we’re in college we’re living the dream. i remember the day i fiddled with adithya’s transponder and it fell into the pool table and we had to turn it upside down to retrieve the key. movies in “madhav’s lounge”, the lounge by the rec room, the small room no one ever entered; we watched an IPL match there once and i drank a very tall, very cold rum & coke and then fell resolutely asleep. what else? just—the first semester was so routine—go to class, get back, go to pgp, to hang out in the rec room or to play TT at pgp or to watch a movie in ke vii, how often we fell asleep in samarth’s room, refusing to walk back unless we were walked back; how often he slept at the desk, or cleaned up after our mess because we’d spilt whisky or pizza in his room; how tolerant he was of our undeniable and unforgivable rudeness, and how incredible it is that he has continued to be our friend. walking back late at night with samridhi, and then walking alone, counting steps to keep my mind off the darkness. the first few messy, confusing nights out: hard rock cafe, where we drank two watery martinis and convinced ourselves we were Wild and Drunk, and medha fell asleep on the floor and i had to walk to rvr because i had samridhi’s key in my bag, and the next day we stumbled to engine for coffee and a lizard ran up my bare leg under my skinny jeans. or the time i stayed over at samridhi’s and she was tipsy, calling her friend back home and making me talk to her, who knows why. or even the first day, how can i forget to write about it, the day i first met madhav and sujay and we sat at the subway at yih for hours, talking about nothing at all,as if we had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do (and we didn’t); friendships formed so easily, in the time it takes to eat a sandwich and drink a coke. the night samridhi slept over in my room and we tried to watch movies and fell asleep by the end of a lot like love.

i must be missing so many things that i want to write about, but really this whole year was tinged with our desperate need to Live the College Experience, we were doing things we thought Real College Kids did, what did we know, we were confused and homesick and stumbling through unfamiliar territory, so we played pool and drank alcohol and danced in the cage at zirca, we talked too loud and laughed at things we didn’t understand, we watched movies late at night and slept rarely and went to clarke quay in flip-flops, we hung out constantly, clinging to tenuous bonds, making friendships by sheer force of will. and in the end it all endured; the friendships that lasted, that grew and stretched, and the ones that dimmed but are still sustained by nostalgia, remember year 1, remember the clan, remember those nights outside pillai’s room, remember that first time at rebel. remember. remember.

12 april 2013

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 14:03:24 -0400

today started off great and ended up shitty and just—i don’t know how to deal with adulthood, i don’t know how to deal with people who casually consider nothing except themselves because that’s not how i work, i’m so accommodating i worry i’m a pushover; and everything falls apart because friends are too careless to even think of how their decisions affect me, and i am the only one panicking, everyone else is okay—why is it only me, why am i the only one who can’t hit the ‘send’ button on a job application without shaking; it’s stupid and childish and i must grow out of it because i have no choice; get it together get it together get it together but i don’t know how, i’ve just been so focused on looking Fine Absolutely Fine, i say the right things—something will work out, i’m currently searching for jobs, i’m applying to places, i have potential flatmates—and i’ve been honestly thinking i mean them, but i don’t actually have anything sorted out and it’s the last week of college and what if i can’t actually do this what then

09 march, 2012

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 10:53:15 -0500

01 lazy breakfast; the dry run that didn’t happen; post-breakfast nap.

02 deciding, on the spur of the moment, to go watch a movie. molu and i went for stoker (he is my go-to movie buddy because he is always free) and it was great—even though we were late and had to walk extra-fast to begin with (“i wish i were 6ft tall with long legs so i could walk faster” “you can still walk faster” “shut up!!!”), then all-out running; madly dashing up six flights of escalators. i found myself taking mental photos of everything about the city today, the way i do after a well-shot movie: the elevator doors closing on us, reflecting me, dead centre, with my coke and my frizzy hair (i lost my hair tie on the way there). sunlight reflected on rainy pavements. the way everyone walked in the drizzle, lighthearted and oblivious, boots and heels and $10 rubi shoes all getting ruined in the same puddles. the lady on the mrt with lavender eyeliner describing a trip to bhutan in loud, broken english. the broken shoe lying in a puddle at the bus stop, an ant crawling over it, incongruous and casually eerie.

03 sitting outside starbucks with samridhi, the sun warming the back of my neck, and just enjoying her company; procrastinating, online shopping, sharing music, inconsequential conversation. dinner with medha and samridhi at sapore. coming back afterwards to a sudddenly chill evening; staying even after samridhi left, wrapped in my grease jacket, listening to ingrid michaelson and a fine frenzy and tegan & sara and chatting with my sister. looking around at all the other people here; all staring at screens, tapping their feet, nodding their heads, smiling at things no one else can see. wishing i could take a photo of today, or make a video of it, or somehow immortalise it; there is so much that cannot be captured in a list, or even in words: the smell of a hot day after rain; the colour of the trees and the wideness of the roads and the dazzling, dazzling sun, everything fresh and clean and newly-made; the hum of chatter and scattered laughter and college life.

08 march, 2013.

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 23:26:20 -0500

this is late but idc i do what i want

01 waking up early to queue in ikea for 10c meatballs. cat, sarah, cheryl and i, all giggly and happy and triumphant because we managed to wake up early, beat the lines, and buy ONE HUNDRED MEATBALLS. eating in the queue and shamelessly packing the rest into tupperware to take back; talking about sociology and travel and what we’ll all be like in the future when we have kids. such a wonderful way to start the day.

02 evening swim with milli — the joy of a leisure pool literally five minutes away from my room; the forgotten loveliness of lazily floating around and looking at the sky. fried chicken afterwards, and then the concert in the evening — i love watching my friends perform, seeing them come alive on stage; i love being in the audience, lightsticks and cheap beer and arms waving in unison. it was such a lovely, happy, peaceful day.

06 march, 2013.

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 10:36:39 -0500

01 suddenly old insecurities bubbling up. it’s always the same. i am a bad friend. i will disappoint you. i can be a shitty person. i have disappointed you. i am disappointing you. i am disappointing. i make mountains out of molehills; i take things personally; i am oversensitive. i am terrified, mortified, paralysed with guilt and embarrassment if i fail to please friends, if i cause even mild irritation. and the awareness that i am this way does not help at all;it’s stupid and it’s irrational and although i know this i still routinely find myself lying in bed cringing over things i’ve said and done and unable to do anything except replay these scenes endlessly in my mind.

i hate that i ever let myself think like that but it happens and i can’t stop it; i can only hope it passes, and it generally does. today it did because of unexpected hugs in the dining hall, animated conversations with samridhi about rape culture and feminism and statistics and ethnography; my sister texting as she read very bad fanfic; and all my ridiculous friends on twitter being idiotic and funny and wonderful. i have to remember that things happen and people disappoint one another and it is okay to not please everyone all the time, but it’s hard; i hold myself to impossible standards and no good comes of it and i have to keep telling myself that it’s all right to be selfish sometimes; to do what i want or need to do regardless of what others might think or feel or say.

05 march, 2013.

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 09:15:15 -0500

little things—surviving a spontaneous debate; barely surviving it, yes, but also realising how far i’ve come from that gut-wrenching fear that would not let me speak in class. talking to new tumblr friends: how freeing it is, being able to be completely honest and sincere because we are friends but we are also strangers; i am so blown away by all these new friendships, by the things i am learning about these people, by how nice everyone is. the fellow’s tea, which made me remember why i love art and literature; the twinge in my chest when i realised that soon i will no longer be a student of literature, that i will have to make a conscious effort to hold on to it all, because i don’t want to lose it—how often i have said this phrase this semester. . thinking, suddenly, during the tea, of the house we used to pass on the way to my cousin’s house, which was being demolished but which somehow, inexplicably, hung in limbo—bricks and pillars eerily suspended in midair, a house in the process of collapse. it intrigued us; my mother’s friend was unsettled by it, said it felt like it was trapped, stuck. permanently poised in the process of collapse, permanently on the verge of impermanence. this semester has felt like that; nothing feels concrete because everything is on the edge of ending; but it’s been as lovely as it is terrifying.

03 march, 2013.

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 12:09:13 -0500

01 lazy morning; OJ and tumblr; tom yam instant noodles and book one of ‘the fionavar tapestry’ series in bed. it’s a lovely series; maddeningly complex, unbelievably moving fantasy with prose that can verge on poetry and more intertextual references than i actually understand. i’ve gone so long after the thesis in a sort of literary dry spell, not reading anything new because i was so tired of it, but it’s nice to have fallen back into my previous habits.

02 what did i even do today? i don’t know. dinner at edusports instead of the dining hall. one last hurrah, one last ‘treat yourself’ before recess week ends.

03 coffee with samridhi as she told me about her recess week, all wild and exciting—it sounded wonderful, and i’m glad she had fun, and i’m glad she’s back.

04 making a to-do list for next week; this is an anticipatory ‘good thing’ because i’m hoping i’ll stick to it.

05 quiet, and solitude, and peace. it’s been such an uneventful week — my last recess week — and i don’t think i’d have it any other way, really. it’s been good.

01 march, 2013.

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 12:57:00 -0500

01 today was my ‘get off campus and do things’ day; it started off predictably badly, when i overslept and woke up at twelve-thirty, instead of nine, despite setting three alarms. i met medha for lunch at subway and we had a surprisingly intelligent discussion about rape culture (surprising because i’d just woken up); i found myself making sense in an argument for the first time in a long time, which was good. i don’t know at what point i let myself stop being a pushover, stop being acquiescent and agreeable and non-confrontational, and just got angry, but it’s happened, and it’s done wonders for my powers of argumentation, i think.

02 taking the bus to bugis with only vague plans of what i was going to do when i got there; reading wuthering heights on the long, familiar journey, and then talking to my mother on the phone for a while, another predictable routine. getting off at bugis street and wandering around by myself; getting lost in the maze of shops, circling around the same stalls, the same pikachu and cat t-shirts, the same faintly annoying tinny music. i bought a gorgeous graphic printed skirt that the salesgirl (cell phone tucked between her ear and her shoulder) informed me was the first piece to be sold.

03 typically took the wrong exit out of bugis street, walked purposefully towards what i thought was bras basah complex, and ended up first in a dingy durian-smelling mall and then in the open-air market i remember from the first part of last summer, when samridhi and i were still wandering around singapore together. it was one of those life, london, this moment in june moments: the fresh flowers; the bustle from the nearby food courts; incense from the temple; one-dollar ice cream and five-dollar shirts; the pigeons at my feet; the lady at the flower stall who looked disapprovingly at my phone camera; and above it all the sun and the breeze and the trees and the feeling of being alive, of being present.

04 walking around bras basah complex, desperately looking for the bookstore i’d found in the summer which had a wonderful section of yellowing lit classics and surprisingly wonderful children’s lit. i was beginning to think i’d imagined the place, when i decided to stop looking and just go by instinct—and then i found it; the owner smiled, recognising me, somehow, even though it’s been months (or maybe only pretending to know me? it was nice, regardless). i looked, purposefully, at every book on those shelves, and, as usual, found something unexpected: a book by jenny overton which dr a lent me last year and which i’d absolutely loved; it’s no longer in print. they gave me a two-dollar discount on it (later, at dinner, salima asked where i’d been and, when i told her, said, almost pityingly, “the store run by the indian man? you shouldn’t go there, those books are so expensive!” it was weird—i don’t go to secondhand bookstores because they’re cheap; i go because their books are old and in disarray and i am a romantic who likes other people’s marginalia and quaint dedications and yellowing pages. i bought the jenny overton for $5; i would probably have bought it for $10, or $15. i am a rational shopper when it comes to clothes; i can’t bring myself to be anything but emotional over books). on my way out, i stopped at the other children’s bookstore and found, instead, a $2 copy of to the lighthouse—i love the surprises of secondhand shopping.

05 wrapping up the evening with a cappuccino at the cafe opposite the national library; then the quiet bus ride back, reading the jenny overton; dinner with medha and her friends; watching amour alone in my room—painful, intense, impossible to forget or to rewatch. i’ve been very good, this semester, about hanging out with friends, and i’ve loved being so social, but i’ve also missed these days of…recharging. enjoying my own company, making my own plans. it’s been such a wonderful, peaceful, fulfilling day.

22-24 february, 2013.

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 12:51:28 -0500

01 it’s been a lovely couple of days. quiet, peaceful; in many ways reminiscent of my first two years here, before i moved to tembusu. i spent saturday morning asleep, then read pamela c. dean’s the secret country all day—wonderfully complicated and beautifully written YA fantasy—and then i watched, and cried buckets, over the fall. (i’ve been crying over tv a lot these days; i’m not sure why.) today i woke up late and spent the whole day cleaning my room—mopping the floor, adjusting my books; i am not a tidy person by nature but i always feel a little less cluttered in my mind when my room is similarly uncluttered, and so i love these days when i can find the time to detox, to play music loudly while i fold my clothes and rearrange my books and try to find the order in the chaos.

02 calling medha on a whim last night to find that she and samarth were marathoning grey’s anatomy in a lounge; joining them and watching five hours of the show—i’ve missed it, in all its impossible drama. then sitting around; talk turning to politics, to the white paper, to education, to feminism. remembering once again what our friendship consists of—it’s difficult, because friendships in tembusu are so easy—these ones i have to work at, but it doesn’t mean they’re not worth the work. and finding out, even now, new things: that samarth listens to kimbra and ellie goulding (!); that medha is considering teaching. i can’t imagine my college life without these friendships: tv shows marathoned in empty lounges; cup noodles and coke for dinner; staying up till 4am yelling about rape culture and the NUS confessions page.

03 making a list of things to do in recess week: i’m going to enjoy the space and time to catch up with work; to do things on my own; to recharge a little. i’ve been neglecting my work this semester and it’s felt weird, but it’s nice to have the time now to annotate abooks and start thinking of essays etc.—another last; another thing i will lose sooner than i want.

04 realising, again, how grateful i am for tembusu friendships. clarence at the dining hall, insisting on giving me his $1 coins even though he had to do his laundry too—and then sitting with him because he was alone, and talking about our majors and our futures and about french and german and latin. the kindness and generosity of my friends here amazes me: the valentines on my door; notes that make me cry; people saying “u can do it!!!” when i complain about bad days; people understanding when i cancel plans.

05 sitting in the lounge with medha, bot doing our work in complete silence, eating vanilla drops (the biscuits that started our friendship back in school). i realise how many times in this post i’ve said the word friendship, but really that’s what these past few days have been about. everything feels slippery now: my last recess week, halfway point, no going back; everything’s disappearing and unsure and i am so terrified about my future that i have avoided thinking about it at all. but these, my friendships, they will not disappear. i won’t let them.

19 february, 2013.

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 11:32:03 -0500

i don’t know when i first listened to stars. it was when i was about fourteen or fifteen; i was sick of blue and busted and the rap music my friends listened to, and to some extent as tired of my parents’ collection of beatles and simon & garfunkel. i wanted new music but i didn’t know how to find it because i didn’t know what i liked. i think in the end it was a combination of watching grey’s anatomy and googling lyrics, getting a last.fm account, and finally learning how to acquire music online, and finally i had new favourite artists: ingrid michaelson, a fine frenzy, stars. i only downloaded one or two songs by each: the way i am, almost lover, midnight coward, elevator love letter. it was weird listening to this music, because it was music no one else i knew listened to—i wasn’t active on the internet; my friends could not care less. so in a way, this music was the first thing that was mine. i’d wait till i had about fifteen new songs downloaded and then burn a CD and listen to it on my discman as i did my daily hour of maths prep in the months leading up to my board exams (i have never written a sentence that has made me feel older, my goodness). and i remember having revelations over these lyrics, writing them down as i heard them, so that interspersed with my algebra and arithmetic you’d have “i can’t always trust as much as you deceive” or “i cannot hold on and i cannot let go”.

i wish i could properly express what the stars concert meant to me. it wasn’t technically perfect—iffy acoustics, tacky lighting, a polarised audience—but it didn’t have to be, because it was more about our memories, i think, than it was about anything else. stars songs don’t remind me about break-ups or boyfriends or even love, but they remind me of myself—that insecure, awkward fifteen-year-old who had no friends who shared her interests; the girl who was scared to express her taste in case she was always laughed at for it. it was almost a life-affirming experience, when they played midnight coward or elevator love letter—a kind of closure, maybe—a sign that it really has gotten better, that i have moved from being that lonely girl who kept her music so guarded, so private, to someone who was watching these musicians live, surrounded by a bunch of wonderful friends. at fifteen, i would never have imagined this would happen; i would have laughed derisively if you’d suggested it.

a few years ago, my father planned a trip to london that coincided with a concert by his favourite band as a teenager, crosby, stills, nash & young—i’d grown up listening to and loving their folk-rock music (which probably explains my taste in music today). we were all so apprehensive for my father, because he idolised them, and now they were old and tired—what if they sucked? what if he was disappointed? but i understood today why he wasn’t disappointed, because they couldn’t have been anything other than perfect to him—even though they were specks in the distance from our seats, even though they didn’t play his favourite songs—when the concert was over he looked so content and satisfied and emotionally…fulfilled, because it was an impossible dream come true, to see this band that defined his teenage years playing live, right in front of him. and that is what it was for me today, and i am emotionally exhausted from the intensity of it all, but also so incredibly grateful for my life, and for these chances, and for how far i have come.

17 february, 2013.

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 12:15:15 -0500

some days my five good things are really deep and some days, like today, they are just simple things, like the fact that i woke up at 1pm and spoke to my father to wish him happy birthday, then ate cup noodles and watched my mad fat diary and cried cathartic tears, and then went right back to blessedly uninterrupted sleep until 5pm, at which point i showered and then headed over to orchard (reading kim on the mrt) to meet marita’s parents for dinner at dtf. they are practically family, and it was lovely to see them and to laugh about our failure to pick up bok choy wth chopsticks and just…talk…the way you talk with a family; the way i never get to talk here anymore. and then we wandered all the way down to emerald hill, for margaritas that we collectively decided were too weak, but still yummy, and then we walked on to dhoby ghaut and i opened the package my mother had sent with them and found two valentines from my sister and, tucked into the chalet school i bought myself for christmas, a maroon envelope containing what my mother calls ‘mad money’—money to be spent, guilt-free, on non-necessities—a little red packet of my own that made me cry a little and call her immediately, for the third time today. and then i had a seat on the train all the way back, and ate a packet of the lays chips that marita sent me because she knows how much i love them, and now i have biomed readings to do but it is all right because i am awake, and alert, and i feel happy, and loved, and uncomplicated. what a wonderful day.

10/11 february, 2013

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 14:36:00 -0500

3am scattered thoughts about festivals and celebrations and family—about how impossible it is to have an annual ‘reunion dinner’ back home, where we are scattered across india and the globe; about how the only time my cousins and i have all been in the same room has been because someone died or is dying. about diwali traditions—waking up stupidly early, stumbling down to my grandmother’s. oil in my hair, new clothes clutched to my chest, eat the prasadam even though you don’t like sweets because they’re your grandparents and you must respect them. hair washed, barefoot on the porch outside my house with a lit sparkler, making hazy smoke circles, the air smelling of burning and dawn. falling asleep, crumpling new clothes, and waking up to buy breakfast and say hello to visitors: no uncomfortably loud extended gathering, just close family and friends who we’ve known for long enough that they are family. everyone serving themselves, milling in the kitchen, running in and out. i’ve never had to serve anything formally—just a casual would you get that? could you refill the olives? card games and drinks for the adults, the children all holed up watching a movie: it used to be beauty and the beast, then power rangers, then parent trap—last year it was chuck, i think. my house is small and celebrations are simple—no guest room, no fancy table settings. we drink coke out of ikea glasses and sit on the floor in my parents’ bedroom and eat bought food, and lately we’ve given up on buying new indian clothes because i never wear them anyway. my two family reunions have been messy and chaotic and full of short tempers and arguments, but they are not really an annual tradition, and really what i missed today is the simplicity of a celebration at home: the dim sound of conversation; everyone slumped in couches holding a drink; the dog trying his best to worm his way into my room; the ac dripping steadily. legs overlapping as we try to nap between waves of visitors, or fit ourselves into my mother’s bed to watch a movie. the stream of people who’ve come to my house every year for twenty years and still can’t remember that the light switch is inside the bathroom. my mother giggling over a glass of choya; my grandmother eating more cake than she should; my father fixing drinks and worrying about whether he will be able to watch the F1 amidst all the chaos. the first year that i was away for diwali, and marita went home anyway, and my mother was so touched she had tears in her voice when she called to tell me (marita, on the phone, said, insulted, what? you thought you were the only person in the family i cared about?)

today i woke up at 3pm and stayed in my pajamas till 7 and ate cup noodles for lunch and pizza with friends for dinner, and i watched two episodes of suits and anna karenina and the sound of music, and i missed my family more than i have in a long, long while. i worry that i will never have these traditions again—i won’t be home for diwali this year; i might not be home for christmas—and i have begun living this semester as a series of lasts (this is your last first day of school; this is your last midterm)—but what about all the things i’ve already done for the last time, without realising? i don’t want to lose anything, but i must; i don’t want to forget anything, but i will; and writing it all down is my furious, desperate attempt to hold all these strands of my life together before they slip away.

2012

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 01:59:19 -0500

i have attempted to write this post three times today, and each time i have angrily backspaced it because it sounds too melodramatic, or too cloying, or too hopelessly cliched. one year ago, i wrote about 2011 so easily—the words just flowed—because it was a year so full of new and distinct experiences, and i didn’t want to forget any of them. it is harder to write about 2012, not because it was a more forgettable year, but because it was filled with so many things that i now take for granted, things that i am so reluctant to record here, as if to record them means that one day i will lose them.

the year has blurred in a way that hasn’t happened before in university, because for the first time there was a constant: tembusu. i can no longer separate my experiences into semesters—when was the first wine & uke night? i remember, fuzzily, sitting with kel and bestlyn in starbucks and discussing diana wynne jones—but did that happen in 2011 or 2012? i know i went to an OMS ukulele session where i fumblingly played a C chord and later sat on the floor outside the PC Commons, singing ‘9 Crimes’ with zimin and cat. and i know that one day we sat in kel’s room, eating tau huey (my first time!) and discussing something—a broadway flashmob? the SPARKZ audition? who knows?—and i cancelled plans with other friends, and felt hopelessly guilty, because for the first time i had absolutely no desire to be anywhere else but right there. i know my room became MY room, became neater, more minimalistic, less cluttered—filled with memories: the note vicky gave us all in the dining hall one day—bright yellow for sunshine—or zimin’s drunken scrawl of the rules for ‘21’, which for some reason i carried back to my room after that hilarious night. and i know that while other things became more complicated—friendships outside tembusu, or even some within—other things became blessedly simpler, because for the first time i had this group of friends who liked the same things i did and felt the same way i felt and were okay if sometimes i cancelled plans because i would rather have a quiet night with a tv show than endure a night of social interaction. this is supposed to be about 2012, but i am thinking of my life in tembusu and already i am catching my breath a little, because this is one thing about last year that i must, inevitably, lose, and god i don’t want to i’m not ready—this routine of breakfast buddies and lazy lunches, of ruthless board game sessions and riotous wine-and-uke nights that came to define, perhaps more than anything, last year.

in february my mother and nirica visited and we went for laneway together; watched wicked at MBS; ate our first meal at dtf. i remember ordering the meal and ‘translating’ the waitress’s thickly-accented english for my mother, and feeling proudly…local. i felt even more so when they came back in september, and i could recommend restaurants and weave effortlessly through the crowds at orchard to find all the shops they wanted to visit. it was a little unsettling, feeling like i belong here now, perhaps more than back home. but when i went back to chennai it was all all right again, and i sank comfortably back into familiarity (nayantara, now, not tara), and we went for movies in big groups—my mother’s friends and my sister’s friends and my cousins, all rewatching tasm or the avengers; or my birthday, when we went for the dark knight rises, everyone yelling across the theatre—and i met schoolfriends who hadn’t changed either, and everything felt a bit different precisely because it was all exactly the same. on my birthday, a day that perhaps encapsulated everything of my adolescent experience in chennai, marita and her boyfriend came home to pick me up after the movie, and we went to nikhil’s house—a boy i barely know, who didn’t know it was my birthday and insisted on hugging me awkwardly when he found out—and we hung out on his terrace. the party was every party: a motley collection of we-used-to-be-friends, all in various stages of tipsiness; a phone hooked to a set of speakers; lukewarm beer in dubious glasses that marita and i insisted on washing. everyone else was in dresses and i was in my batman shirt. madhulika snuck in a bottle of wine which she gave me because it was my birthday, and i got the only cold beer, and everybody good-naturedly offered me some weed, and the mosquitoes bit my legs and i could feel my hair frizzing with the humidity, and after a while there was no conversation, only yelling and laughter, and it was surreal and i did not hate it at all.

i know that all my retrospectives always come back to kodi, and i never know how to describe it properly, only that it is always perfect. this year was no exception, and so i will not dwell on it—only how lovely it was that marita and madhulika came down to surprise me, and how we spent the summer lying on mats spread out in the sun, reading children’s literature and drinking tea. and in december, it was utterly different: the biting cold, the company of excitable fifteen-year-olds. we played table tennis and made a video of ourselves doing a 1D mashup to the ‘cups’ video. we watched pitch perfect, sprawled over each other on a bed, and when it came to the ‘party in the usa’ scene we all looked at each other and smiled, because that is us, that is our friendship; i am so much older than these girls and yet they really are my friends, and so much of our friendship is founded on this ridiculousness, the unabashed singing in public places, the way our entire conversations sound like one long inside joke.

this is such a disorganised post but i can’t help it, this year does not sort itself out neatly. everything seems to matter equally, even the little things.

the critical reading class i took in january, which caused me to fall for poetry—the way you fall in love—suddenly and utterly. i became that person who cries over cyril wong’s poetry in public. i spent days dizzy over atwood (screw poetry / it’s you i want) or bukowski (people mutilated / by love / or no love) or siken (tell me we’ll never get used to it). the intelligence in the metafictions class and the way i left feeling not discouraged but energised. one more year of dr a’s constant encouragement and loveliness and perfection. and all the things leading up to the thesis—the summer spent reading things that turned out to be irrelevant; the anxieties over non-important deadlines; the slow and terrifying development of an idea; and finally the writing of it: stress and tea and confusion, as if i were writing this whole thesis in the dark, no idea of where i was going. the weekly thesis meetings, emotionally and intellectually draining, but then—finally—beginning to understand what i was doing, and to do it. days spent crying over drafts and then over draft comments; avoiding my computer because i didn’t want to see thesis-related emails; sitting in dr a’s office shivering in the cold, holding a cup of chinese tea and trying to explain my argument. finally learning to be imperfect—to hand in incomplete, inadequate drafts; to laugh off typos or grammatical errors; to handle criticism of my writing with good grace. the time i wrote a chapter sitting on the floor of blank canvas during the grease photoshoot; the time i stayed home while everyone else went to the f1 concert, waiting desperately for inspiration that never came, and then postponed my submission for the first time. those last few weeks that are stressful to think about, even now—all that furious writing and editing, the mad adrenaline-fuelled rush to proofread and print and bind, and then the anticlimax that came after i’d submitted my thesis—a kind of intellectual exhaustion that still hasn’t worn off.

the summer was not a highlight of my year. it was, in fact, awful at the start—for reasons, i realise now, that have more to do with me than anything that was happening around me. i never told anybody this. i just felt stuck, with all my friends employed or employing their time fruitfully, while i was just…there…in an empty apartment; no job, grease on hold. i started being sad and angry and it didn’t stop. i would set my alarm, sleep through it, and wake up midafternoon, already tired, already upset. an empty apartment full of a mess i’d created. i would grocery-shop meticulously and then make myself instant noodles for dinner, then spend half an hour carefully washing the dishes, because this was something i could do, something i could control. eventually even this stopped, and i would wake up both sad and angry—look at yourself, nayantara, you spend all day in this an apartment that isn’t even yours and you still don’t find the time to cook or clean or do the dishes. i decided that this meant i was a terrible person, and i coped with this realisation by sleeping more and by becoming increasingly frustrated and passive-aggressive. i flinched when samridhi talked to me or opened a packet of food in my presence and hated myself for reacting this way. i began to watch a lot of friends re-runs and stopped laughing at the jokes. i would travel on the circle line all the way to school, meet dr a, and then go to tembusu just to fall asleep in a lounge, and then i would wake up and go to grease rehearsal and the news that someone else had quit. vocal practice with shaun only told me that i couldn’t sing, that this was all a mistake. the neighbour guy used his niceness as a weapon, an obligation, and i felt suffocated in his presence and did not know how to deal with him. the night that samridhi and i agreed to go to clarke quay with him and his friends, and he got handsy with me while we were dancing—nothing entirely inappropriate, just a hand uncomfortably low on my hips, his face too near mine—but i still felt sick and helpless and i did not know what to do, and the next day and ever since then i have just been casually laughing it off. one day i was so tired from everything that i began to shiver on the train back home, and walking back from dhoby ghaut i had to keep stopping, scared i would faint. i began to wonder if i was actually depressed. i toyed idly with the idea of therapy. i was a mess.

i don’t know how it got better. it did. i began to cope by walking. i left home as soon as i woke up. i wore skirts or dresses because i liked the feeling of the breeze buoying me up. i bought coke and sat outside sota and talked to strangers and, once, flirted with a strange boy who melted away into the crowd when the signal changed to green. i walked to bugis to try on clothes i didn’t buy. i walked to bras basah to stand in the aisles of second-hand bookstores and take deep breaths and look for books i didn’t find. i walked to somerset to visit malls i’d never seen before. and eventually, humming city of blinding lights as i crossed the road at near-midnight, or talking to the little boy at the bus stop who offered me biscuit crumbs, i began to be okay again. i cried over children’s literature and it was cathartic. i taught myself how to make gifs. i made plans to be somewhere other than home. zimin stayed over a few days, and those were good days—walking back from clarke quay after sonia’s birthday, or after musical theatre monday (we almost left early, then doubled back when we heard nathan hartono was performing). on the fourth of july i danced to what makes you beautiful in attica with a bunch of leela’s friends and felt nothing except light and free.

i can’t write about grease today, not when the production is so close to being over; i will be a crying snotty mess and i can’t do that because it is bad for my voice. but, god, when i think back to four years ago, when i was still dreaming of going to a university outside of india—any university—i know that my naive seventeen-year-old brain dreamt of a world where i’d find like-minded people, audition for a musical, and miraculously land a role and a solo. when i came to NUS, i told myself that i’d always known that was an impossible dream. i have never been so happy to be wrong.

09 january, 2013.

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 12:06:03 -0500

i am too sleepy to write and, stupidly superstitiously, i want to not write for a while — to live my life a little less self-aware, not always thinking ‘oh, man, i have to write about this in my five good things blog later!’ — but, at the same time, i don’t want to forget what a lovely day this was, and the way rehearsal is scary and exhilarating and exhausting and exciting, and that my voice wavered the first time i sang into the mic but not the second, and how i dance when music plays now without wondering, worriedly, if i look like an idiot. and that we sing as we walk on roads and overturn our glasses at restaurants to play the cups rhythm, in public, with no concern for the people around us (‘pitch perfect?’ a waitress smiled at us as she walked past), and the fact i have somehow found this group of people with the same ridiculously idiotic sense of humour (‘empty spaces, empty tables / now my ducks are dead and gone!’) and the same cutthroat attitude towards board games , and we are all just so comfortable with each other, and while i will not let myself dwell on the terrifying fact that this is my last semester of college, i am glad that i found these friends before i left.

01 november, 2012.

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 11:49:49 -0400

i know i spend a lot of time being grumpy and bitchy about everything, but tonight i just want to remind myself what an amazing semester this has been, working on my thesis and learning how to think in a completely new and focused and detailed way, and then doing all these things i’ve never ever done before: acting and dancing and singing. it’s insane because i always wished, passively, that i could act but also i never ever ever have managed to lose my self-consciousness enough to even do more than sway gently at a club, and suddenly here i am at rehearsals and it’s not 100% comfortable but it’s also surprisingly easy, and sometimes i forget that i am me and i have strange moments of being my character and it’s like a little epiphany every time, and even if it doesn’t come across and i still look awkward and self-conscious to the audience it’s already a really, really big step for me. and then there’s all these people, some of whom i didn’t even know a few months ago, and now we’re all one big mass of people living and breathing the same stressful, exhausting, slightly strange, fun life, and sometimes everything sucks and i want to sleep and i can’t manage my thesis and dance practices without wanting to curl up somewhere and cry, but i wouldn’t have it any other way. and i’m writing this so badly that i probably am not even making sense right now, and hopefully i will write this better some other day, but really i’m just trying to say that it has been such an incredibly wonderful semester and i am so thankful for my life right now.