And...a Happy July 4th to y'all
Good god. No wonder this country is in shambles. It's run by pot-bellied men who like to do renditions of YMCA...*covers face in hopelessness*
Coming to a cinema near you in fall
CY the potato farmer
My 3.5 ft potato tree [see 3/15] finally gave in and flopped on itself. As I unearthed its roots to give it a quiet burial in the trash can, I found out it had given birth to some baby taterlings at the bottom of the egg nog carton box that I've been growing the plant in.
Perhaps saying goodbye to familiar things isn't always bad.... who know what lies beyond (or under).
How my life can be linked to a Manchurian eunuch's... (or 北京北長街的故事)
Sometimes, my Inbox is like a box of chocolates, as Forrest Gump puts it - you never know whatcha gonna get ;)
Last week I got a mail from my mummy, telling my family about the story of my gran's childhood home in Beijing, a traditional 四合院 (four-home courtyard house) that's quickly disappearing:
My mum asked my uncle how my great-grandfather got the house near the Forbidden City since they were not Manchurian Royalty.
My uncle called my great-uncle Tony for the answer. The story is as follows:
1. My gran's grandfather married a rich family's daughter (Chen family). She is my great-great-grandmother.
2. She bought a piece land from a retired Forbidden City's eunuch to build this house.
3. My great-grandfather married my great-grandmother and my great-great-grandmother's mother also stayed together in this house.
4. My great-grandmother gave birth to all of her 7 children in the house.
5. My great-grandmother died a week after her mother's death when my grandmother visited Shanghai to play basketball.
Both of them passed away in the house.
6. My great-grandfather continued to stay in the house for his rest life.
7. My great-grandfather married again after my great-grandmother passed away.
8. Half of the house was taken by our great-grandfather's wife later.
9. The Communist Government surrendered the house in 1968.
10. The Government assigned a lot of other families to move in the house. It became public housing.
11. My grand-uncle Chonggand (Ambassador of China to the US in the late 80's) spent a lot effort and money to get the house back and moved other people out the house in 1980s.
Another of my gran's awesome story took place in her home in Beijing -
"She once stopped all drainage and fill the square yard with water to make a skating
rink in the winter while her father was away."
Now I know where my princessy genes came from ;D
Why do Englishmen always mess up in the sports they invented??
*Sigh*. England's out of Euro 2004 before I even had a chance to sit down and watch a match. Will have to wait till World Cup 2006 to watch Rooney in action.
For disgruntled footie fans, FlipFlopFlyin's Euro Mini Pops might cheer you up a bit and help recap some national pride....
last but not least - why football frenzy is good for the economy, bad for national psyche.
NYC old favs, new discoveries
Time is compacted and condensed in the Big City - the things one can do in 1.5 days would translate to 1.5 weeks in the outside world. After my blink-and-you'll-miss-it interview, I spent the rest of my day either trotting around the Upper East Side or lying on grass in Central Park looking at the sky, after which I took the ferry to Staten Island to hang out with Jen and Mike one last time before they take off to Seattle.
My interview-turned-city-break, "in brief":
- Checked out my perspective new 'hood around Lexington and 8*th. If I land a job in NYC, that's where I'd most likely be living. My only qualm is that I can't seem to locate a slightly-larger supermarket or a laundromat... ah well, I'll worry about that when I actually get hired by anyone.
- Lied on the grass near the C.P. reservoir and read for a good two hours. It's nice to have time to read non-class reading again. On and off since January, I've been reading Suzanna Chui-Yung Cheung 張翠容's 行過烽火大地 [lit. tr = walking through the land of war beacons], a collection of her journals as a freelance journalist reporting in Afghanistan, Kosovo, East Timor, Tibet and Cambodia. It's a really fascinating and awe-inspiring read, but it isn't until now that I have continuous chunks of time to digest and reflect on the profound significance of her candid words and observations. Her questions on world social injustice, on Western media's journalistic practices and on the practical difficulties that NGOs face make the book a must read for anyone who cares. I found myself streaming in tears as I read about her poignant encounters with East Timorans fighting for independence from the Indonesian government.
- Revisited the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, prolly my fav museum in town. Nothing say grand better than the sumptously carved dark wood , molded plaster and cast iron interiors in the ex-Rockefeller mansion. The Shock of the Old exhibit on William Dresser co-hosted by the V&A was particularly superb. The Victorian industrial designer's work is so ecclectic and ingenious I wonder why I haven't heard of his name before. His work cleverly draws from Art and Crafts / Liberty styles, William Morris-esque botanics, Chinoiserie, Japanese sabi and wabi plus Arabic and pre-Art-Deco geometrics. His ceramics and silverware are so ultra modern for their age, he puts Arne Jacobsen, Joe Colombo and Panton to shame. Some of his later work, like his legged sugarbowls, even look like they have been ripped off by Alessi a century later. Spectacular.
Forecast cloudy
It's only been one week since I graduated, and already the world seems a darker place.
How am I gonna make it through the next 50 years?
(That is, if I'm lucky and don't die of Mad Cow from years of crappy boarding school beef / bio warfare / milk additive hormone overdose / SARS etc etc)
Top-rank university graduate to become coffee-making minion
Sigh. Is THIS the best I can do?
RICHARD MEIER & PARTNERS
-> RECEPTION/OFFICE ASSISTANT <-
Full Time Entry Level
New York, NY.
Company Description
Prestigious International Architecture Firm.
Job Qualifications
College graduate with 1 to 2+ years work experience, preferably with a background in architecture or design. Previous office experience necessary. Required knowledge of MS Word and Excel. Photoshop and other graphic programs a plus.
Job Description
Handle front office reception and diverse general administrative duties including phones, faxes and filing. Assist with marketing, public relations and archives. Reports to the Director of Communications. This is a great opportunity for aspiring architects as you will be exposed to the international culture of this world renown architectural firm including involvement in small and large scale high-profile projects, clients, consultants, publications and art institutions. Studio environment is intellectual and deceptively quiet, yet busy and demanding. While routine responsibilities will take most of your time, you have some flexibility to engage yourself if you demonstrate interest and aptitude. This position has been previously held by two Brown University alumni.
Second round next week, with THE Richard Meier himself. Scary.
To be honest, I'm not all that thrilled about the position, seeing how I'd be mostly doing "film queen" type work - film queen being the HK term for female interns whose reigns are limited to the Xerox machine. And I've heard from another rock-star-caste architect [see May 7th entry] that Mr. M is not exactly the friendliest of people. In fact, I have already been warned about his pet peeves. How charming.
Update [6/16/2004]-
Went to second round and have been rejected for said position. The interview only lasted for 5 mins, where I showed the Eminent Mr. Meier my juvenile artwork. Then he asked me about MIT, CLC and the weather on graduation day. He acted nicer than I expected, but to be honest I can never picture myself in an office where everything is stark white. [see Firm Profile] It's just....so not me.
Graduation Bits and Pieces
"Bruised and battered" as the Commencement speaker puts it, I finally got that piece of paper! (otherwise known as my diploma)
The ordeal started at 7.30 in the morning. Naturally the batteries in my ananlog camera died the night before, hence the limited selection of fuzzy digicam pics.
Love Erich Caulfield, the Grad Student Prez's speech. V. MIT geek-thespian chic, complete with onomatopoeia:
Culminating at this time, at this place, at this junction in the space-time continuum with you, and this august and awe-inspiring assembly of the academically accomplished...
When I take time to consider the significance of this moment, I am compelled to ponder the proclamations of the poet who confessed, "I'm tired of sailing my little boat, far inside the harbor bar, I want to go out where the big ships float, on the deep where the great ones are. And should my frail craft prove too slight, for the waves that sweep those billows o'er, I'd rather go down in a stirring fight than drowse to death by the sheltered shore."
In the purest sense, the poet captures the essence of this experience exactly. For whether you've been here for one year, or two years, or three years, or n years or n+1 years,(everyone claps ;D) in a career that will last nearly a half-century, your greatest deeds have yet to be done.
Now, as you prepare to set sail for the great world outside of MIT, it is my hope that triumph will be your ever-present companion. May passion fuel your every endeavor. May innovation infect your every invention. And may a preternatural propensity for progress pepper your every project. And may a blaze and torch of morality light your path...
...Go ye forth, gentle geniuses. History is waiting to hear from you.
Moi, Stupid@mit.edu
Over the past five years, I've had my fair share of moments like these, which still make me think that Admissions had made a mistake in accepting me.
Check out some of the gob-smacking work by fellow students - Lisa Smith, Brian Chan, Stylianos Dritsas , Saul Griffith and Moneta Ho.
Once upon a time...
Asians Representin' at Cannes... and 2046(!)
What we did witness was, well, a Wong Kar-Wai movie, full of lush, melancholy sensuality and swathed in light as lustrous and supple as the Shantung dresses all of the actresses seem to wear. The title, by the way, refers both to a hotel room in Hong Kong in the late 1960's and a high-speed train racing through the future, and one of the film's themes (aptly enough, given the drama surrounding its arrival) is time. The characters are always falling in and out of love too soon or too late, and the chronology glides forward and backward.
Like other work from this director, "2046" teases the boundary of incomprehensibility. It is a series of moods, nuances and gorgeous moments � seductions, couplings, tearful partings � with the usual connective tissue left out, or implied in title cards and voice-overs. After the two screenings early in the evening, quite a few viewers rushed back to see it again later Thursday night, to experience its intoxicating beauty one more time, and also to figure out what on earth it was about.
La Boheme, c'est pas pour moi:
Every now and then, it seems like I'm doomed to be uncool no matter how hard I try to appear otherwise. At age 23, you'd think you'd have a better idea of how to meet cool new people. Apparently not in my case - I'm just as awkward as when I was 11, and I'm still absolutly crap at socialising in a group situation.
So I got invited by an acquaintance / pal to a party hosted by him and his roomies at their refurbished converted-Chinatown-restaurant-warehouse apartment. Not knowing who else he invited, I figured I'd prolly bump into someone I know and get to meet my host's other cool bohemian friends. Within 2 minutes of arrival, I said hi to my acquaintance-pal, got a beer (I NEVER drink beer - but then there was only that, whiskey or bourbon), took a sip, looked around, saw no one I knew, then poured beer all over myself and the floor when the plastic cup split. Bloody fantastic. Even though I recognised the DJ, who I think is this ex-Media Lab > Harvard GSD Indian dude that I had fancied a while back, my instinctive reflex was to dive for the exit. Down 3 flights of 80 degree stairs, and I was on my way back to the T station.
Why can't I just be comfortable amongst strangers? Why am I so bloody self-conscious?
Seems like the mistakes I make keep repeating themselves. Urgh.
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Speaking of self-repeating mistakes, I've just heard about Goldfish Memory, a flick about singles in Dublin making the same mistakes in love over and over on different people. Defininitely going on my summer must-see list.
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1000 words between me and graduation. Surely I know something from 12 weeks of avant-garde art film & lit well enough to write a paper on.... *sqeezes brain* >.<
Thoughts on graduating:
In exactly 3 weeks, I'll be officially unemployed, for an indefinite period.
Fuck.
Five years of MIT and I can't even find a job? What's wrong with me???
Was clearing out old notes today, and here's what my five-year education boils down to -
* US$20,000 per semester x 10 = $200,000 (enough to buy a house / a Ferrari)
* 15 or so lever arch files + ring binders
* 1 foot stack of A4 paper (all gone to the recycling bin)
* Dabbled in 10 courses: - some more in-depthly than others
3 (Material Science)
4 (Architecture)
8 (Physics)
11 (Urban Planning)
12 (Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science)
14 (Economics)
17 (Political Science)
18 (Maths)
21 (Humanities)
CMS (Comparative Media Studies)
I found my lever arch of old A Level Geography notes. Tonnes of memories rushing back. Miss Tudge's
handwriting on my old essays still gives me goosebumps.
Then I realise something in me died during these years at MIT - optimism, ideals, direction and self-confidence.
Back when I was a freshman, I wanted to save the world as an urban planner.
Now I still want to save the world, but I don't know how - art and film don't feed hungry people.
All this existential angst when I still have to write three two* more papers.
* I can't believe my French Film prof just said, "You've been doing excellent work this semester, and since you're a senior, why don't you forget about paper 3?"
\^o^/ < ass is now one-third saved. Humanities profs rock!!
Retail pick of the day
What I learned in class today
Was sitting through some presentations for my technical writing class (hm yeah, technical. Moi? *lol*) Some dude talked about his bio paper on anticonvulsants for treating epilepsy and / or bipolar disorder. Half listening and half picking my nails, I stopped in my track when he listed the clinical symptoms of bipolar disorder:
Mania: often begins with an intense burst of energy, creativity, and social ease. People with mania typically deny that anything is wrong, and angrily blame anyone who points out a problem.
In a manic episode, the following symptoms are present for at least one week:
- Feeling unusually "high," euphoric, or irritable [check, even though I have gotten no work done for eons]
- Plus at least 4 of the following symptoms:
> needing little sleep yet having great amounts of energy [ok that never happens]
> talking so fast that others cannot keep up with the thought pattern [only when I've had too much caffeine]
> having racing thoughts
> being so easily distracted that their attention shifts between many topics in just a few minutes
> having an inflated feeling of power, greatness, or importance [a la Tony Blair...]
> doing reckless things without concern about possible bad consequences (eg, spending too much money, engaging in inappropriate sexual activity, or making foolish business investments)
In severe cases, the person may also experience hallucinations or delusions.
Depression:
In a major depressive episode, the following symptoms are present for at least two weeks:
- Feeling sad, blue, or down in the dumps or losing interest in the things one normally enjoys
- Plus at least 4 of the following symptoms:
> changes in appetite or weight
> changes in sleep
> difficulty thinking, concentrating, or making decisions
> feeling slowed down
> feeling worthless or guilty
> thoughts of death or suicide [check all of the above]
Holy cow. That all sounds rather familiar, apart from not sleeping and the sex bit. (Well, looking at the selection of men here it's not surprising)
So now at least I have some sort of medical excuse for being the way I am :P Then what?
"How Hong Kong are you?" Quiz [via Caesium Zone]
I scored 49%. Holy cow, how did that happen? Even my lil' bro, who spends more time in HK than I do, got a lower score. Am I a natural-born Hongkie in denial?
