no one in yale thinks im 16
I am sufficiently annoyed about certain somepersons in production to blog annoyed-ly here
that I really cannot stand whiny people
who don’t do their work, and can’t be bothered to do anything more than the barest minimum
and interfere with mine,
and who can’t handle criticism
and then tell everyone about own martyrdom described in terms of self-righteous suffering
We’re all grown adults with responsibilities. Seriously grow up
This is me mugging in the Stirling Memorial Library. If it looks to you from the picture like an ancient Gothic monastry, or like something out of Harry Potter, or like the back corner of an old cathedral, then you’re absolutely right.
The library is beautiful and old and ornate and has stained glass everything. Just walking around the lobby makes me feel intellectual. HOWEVER being in Stirling makes me love Central library infinitely more than I ever have.
Firstly, there are no friendly open shelves. They have so many books they put them in different rooms according to their call numbers, and there are like, at least 4 or 5 floors of shelves and you have to climb up and down different sets of stairs to access them
Next, no nice well lit level 3 loking thing for you NUS-ies, nope, long, dark, narrow shelves greet the eye, and it is MUSTy and even DUSTY. The shelving areas are basically unlit, and you have to switch on tiny lights for each shelf that you’re looking at. So basically unlike Central where you can sort of wander into any random area and browse, that is totally not reccomended here.
The studyability of the library…well, there are little seating areas at the far ends of each row of shelves, which seat a person each (as shown). No communal, friendly study groups here. It’s reallya big contrast to any library I’ve known. I think they’ve retained the old idea of libraries as hallowed areas of learning, peopled only by doddery monks and half crazed alchemists and the like. It is *definitely* not your favourite gathering place.
It’s just a book place, really. And its good for the occasional shot of fairytaliea – when i want to feel like i’m walking around in a castle. Apparently the guy who designed it was this person whose lifelong dream was to design a cathedral, but he never got to do it, so when they asked him to design Stirling, he jumped upon the chance and produced a cathedral out of a library.
On a random note aout architecture – we like the ‘stone walls with ivy creeping up theirs sides’ look so much that someone suggested uprooting a weeny building, shipping it back to NUS and planting it somewhere in the new USP residential campus. Then we’d have our very own mini little Yale college in NUS, and in subsequent years, to save the school some money we’d just send students for NUS-in-Yale, in Yale-in-NUS.
hehe.
Yes, a new york special, courtesy of Toys’r’us in Times Square – a photodocumentary entitled “Everything is bigger in New York”
As can be seen, the M&Ms are clearly larger than average – larger, in fact, than the average human, as seen from the conveniently placed human figure which can be used for scaling. I also think its really tragic how the blue M&M looks like it’s on the verge of suicide.
This one, on the other hand, looks just plain terrified.
In fact, as can be seen, most edibe items in New York tend towards largeness.
The lollypops are bigger….and no, its not just me. They make Christina look small too!
(poooof!)
Candy bars are larger too! Imagine the size of bubbles youd get out of that!
It ain’t just the food – its stationary too!
Xingjian, if you’re reading this (which you’re most definitely not im sure you’re hardly aware of this blog’s existence) this is back at ya for your highlight-one-paragrap-at-a-time picture
awwwww. i love the mouse.
hello!
i is sorry for not blogging. having received information about large amounts of distress having arisen as the direct result of my blogging inadequacies i shall attempt to explain myself.
I CAN”T USE MY CAMERA!!!
weepweepsob i think its due to different voltages or something by my rechargeable batteries refuse to charge in Yale,as in New York. I tried and tried to make the batt last and used a multitude of different adaptors..but no. US hates me and my camera. So yeah i got very depressed at the fact that i couldn’t post up pictures in the blog.
But anyhow, this is a super post-dated post with pics from the central park picnic. Yep, we did the new york thing and had a picnic in central park. It was an experience in itself navigating the supermarket and trying to find picnic-y food that would satisfy a vegetarian who doesn’t like vegetables, a carnivore, and a rabbit. We ended up spending 40oddUSD on pita bread wrap mustard mayo saladvegetables cheese cheese salami salami salami ham ham ham (yes, these are indicative of proportions) tuna from the deli salsa chips blueberrymuffins apple grapes.
This tree is a tree in central park! There’s this big open space with massive expanses of grass where there are kids playing soccer and hockey and stuff in funny formations cos they’re all trying not to get in each others way.€
i’m really bad at resizing pictures!! But here’s all the food that we bought. The ‘picnic blanket’ displayed in the picture is courtesy of Singapore Airlines, grin. The suspicious looking brown bottle hiding behind the luridly coloured red and green ones is this disgusting drink called Coke Zero. Which basically means CokeLight withno sugar. Or diet Diet Coke. It is bad. I don;t know if its available back home, but if it is, please, i beseech you, avoid, avoid
happy picnicing people!
more happy picnic-ing people! guess which twin this is!! If one looks closely one will also observe a green gypsy skirt I got in someplace on thefringes of Soho for all of 15 bucks 😀
The next day we hit Times Square, and its..I don’t know how to describe it, its straight out of every hollywood disaster movie ever made, its just so larger than life, what with the flashing billboards and incredibly tall, glassy skyscrapers. It’s bewildering, and busy, and its like nothing on earth.
I must have taken a million shots at times square trying to capture the full sense of its muchness. However you’ll have to contend with this one since I’m just too lazy to resize all the pictures that I tok via Christina’s camera.
Lynnette loves the friendly yellow cabs in new york!!
(ps: im too embarassed to put the real date that im blogging so im going to post date this entry 😉
Christina and I woke up at 6 and decided that we would walk out and buy a pre-breakfast breakfast. Thus we left to the peaceful sounds of snores and teh occational grunt emanating from the blanket covered lumps that were suresh and weilong.
We walked down 2 streets in search of toasted bagels and coffee and found (gasp!) none…however we did manage to get them in the cafe next door. Pre-breakfast was black coffee with lots of raw sugar, and a massive toatsted bagel that we shared between us. Out of the goodness of our heart, we bought a bagel back for the sleepy men.
Who were in very much the state that we left them in when we walked out an hour ago. We woke them up, of course, and some very amusing conversation ensued. Here are some classic weilongisms:
Christina: We bought you coffee and bagels!!
Weilong: mmmph
Christina: Come on! Isnt the way to a man’s heart through his stomach? *waves bagel*
Weilong: mmmphhh. The way to a man’s heart is through his pillow. *pause*
If no pillow, bolster also can….*snore*
“the problem with man..and by man i mean men and women…is that they are always travelling half way around the world to experience new things, and they don’t realize that the best things in life are just before them (pause, looks up)…like the underside of the top side of a double bunk bed”
He was eventually awakened by the toxic (quote unquote) fumes of suresh’s cologne. alot a lot alot of cologne.
Yesterday was so exhausting i concussed at about 10 after having been awake since 3 in the morning. I woke up, blogged my uber long and picture-fied entry till about 5, checked mail and other random stuff and by 6 everyone was up and we were out by 7.
Yesterday was the day of walks.
We walked around ground zero, the financial district, city hall and the bay area till 12, then walked to chinatown, through chinatown, to mulberry street and little italy for lunch, then walked down to soho, through Soho (while watching the men shop)…then took a subway down to union square where Weilong had a blast of a time purchasing at filenes while Christina Suresh and myself wilted in the park outside. We also visited the legendary Grand Central Station with its beautiful painted ceiling and its…space,
We also managed to discover that yesterday was one of two days in the year during which a phenomenon called manhattanhenge would occur. In a fashion somewhat similar to Stonehange, on this particular day the movement of the setting sun across the sky would be exactly parallel to the direction of the streets of new york. According to the newspaper, if we found an unobstructed place to stand in we would be able to see the length of the street bathed in a golden light; according to lucas (or joses) we would also be able to see the sun descending in between the buildings.
As a result, after our already long and arduous day of walking, we persuaded our tired feet to make a final pilgrimage to the 34th street, which the paper recommended as having the best view. The plan was to find somewhere, sit down and have dinner while watching the sunset.
Well we were too busy eating. We missed the sunset. Heh the irony.And as we people watched from our cafe window it seemed that absolutely no one was paying any attention whatsoever to the sky.
Today we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Its filled with so many beautiful things it would take forever to post up pictures and descriptions of everything so I shall leave it at that. Then to Greenwich Village, where I bought old old Oasis and Tori Amos singles (and I really mean old. it’s the first time i saw wonderwall in a standalone single. like whoa) and a Van Morrison album. Fortunately, food was cheap.
We found a pub-like place called 1849 selling 20cent chicken wings, as featured below and guest starring weilong’s beer. Its 20cents per wing, and we ate 20 between the 5 of us.
Weilong: “I guess this means that the chicks here are cheap”
More pictures another time 😦 i used everyone else’s camera cos i was outta batt.
I’m happily and finally in New York after a harrowing many hour flight, which was uneventful save for the fact that I watched Letters from Iwo Jima, and that the food was really not bad. JFK is massive – 8 terminals! Two unfriendly points: There seem to be washrooms only in the far ends of the building, and they CHARGE for the baggage trolleys, 3USD specifically. We touched down at 10 in the morning, and got out latest 11.15. nice and early.
It seems very essential for travellers to get the right transport – we kept hearing announcements about how we were on no account to accept offers of transport from peoploe not in uniform uinless earlier agreed upon and such. Well upon exiting from the airport we were greeted by a massivly portly uniformed man whos beer belly would put any of you to shame (snort. yes YOU and YOU). That’s his license plate up there! Anyway, he had a mini van type vehicle of sorts and hence carted us off to Brooklyn without much difficulty.
Not much difficulty until we realized how we had, in our ignorance of New York transport planning and map directions, made a fatal error in giving him directions to our hostel. Lesson 1: Use of the word “on”. Saying 4th, 65th Avenue is completely and totally different from saying 4th ON 65th Avenue. What we told the cabbie was apparently the latter, which translates approximately to something like “the intersection between 4th street and 65th avenue”. Upon arriving there it was somewhat disconcerting to learn that we were actually about 500 blocks away from where we were supposed to be. In the attempt to reach block number 65 4th avenue, we had ended up at something like 6151, to quote mr taxi man, “that’s 60 traffic lights away!”.$
There’s the entrance to home! Brooklyn Backpackers is upstairs of this pub place called “The Cherry Tree”. It’s got a pizza sandwich food section out in the back too. To get to the rooms we had to trawl up a flight of pretty steep stairs (Did I carry my baggage up myself? You think?). The room itself isn’t brilliant. It’s small, is slightly ratty (think slight bashed up hole in the door) and we spent ages trying to locate the ight switch, which as it turns out wasn’t even inside the room. BUT it has big big windows that open out onto a rail balcony of sorts, and feels like the srot of place one could climb out onto and sneak away by climbing down the firehose. There’s lots of bright lovely light that shines in in the day, and it also overlooks the bar/pizza place so I get views of peoploe eating lovely, giant pizzas the size of the circle made by Suresh’s arms (suresh has long arms). The bathroom is shared between 4 rooms on our floor, although to date I’ve only seen 2 other people living on the same floor as us. One is some travelling guy named Brad who just got here from Queens and who is in the midst of jobhunting. The other is a Russian girl called Olga who’s here on work and travel. She’s terribly funny and friendly and has no knack for non-English names; she calles WeiLong WIlliam and Suresh RESH. The bathroom spews icy cold water. It makes us all shower faster.
After dumping our stuff and clearing ourselves of 24 hours worth of dirt grime cigarette smoke and such we headed out for a walk through Brooklyn.The roads all run at right angles parallel to one another so its pretty hard to get lost.
We walked through Atlantic and Pacific and wandered through some large suburban looking mall area. I think it seemed pretty hard to orientate ourselves because we had no idea where the city centre was (and as a matter of fact there isn’t one, there are just areas which are more hublike than others) Where we wandered into seemed pretty depressing because 1) there were hardly any friendly faces 2) it didn’t seem like a really nice neighbourhood; there were brownstone walk ups and all but there generally was a dingy, rundown dilapidated feel to it. We didn;t realize it at that time, but I think we had managed to get ourselves into some kind of black area. Not that there’s anything significantly wrong with black people. I think I shall rephrase myself with Weilong’s words – who described the place as having a “migrant feel”. Namely: A sense of transience and slight unease forms the general atmosphere of the place because as much as we’re not at home here, neither are the migrant communities living in th is area. And it did really feel like a black neighbourhood, what with cars blasting hiphoppy tunes with the windows down, and the shop windows displaying teeshirts inscribed with “I love black girls”. The notable lack of welcomingness really did depress us, and though we tried to explain it away by rationalizing that Brooklyn wasn’t really a tourist spot, that it was the wrong time of day, that we were in a suburban neighbourhood so what do you expect, it was pretty clear that we were kind of expecting a little more on our first trip out.
That was until we had the brilliant idea of walking to Prospect Park, near the Brooklyn Library, the museum of Modern Art and the Botanic Gardens. I think we were in a much better neighbourhood, we walked through 4th, 5th and 6th Avenues along Union Street where the walk ups were oh so pretty There was this old school 40s Truman Capote like feel to the houses, which was very happifying.
MMph the pics don’t do the place justice, but really, there was this sense of such relative peacefulness and serenity just walking through the tree lines streets. Even the weather, which is erratic at its best, seemed more sedate.
Prospect Park itself was lovely, huge expanses of green green and more green. Now I’m going to sound as usual silly and excitable but they were actually doing things like lying on a picnic blanket reading books and playing frisbee with their pet dogs. You know all these things you read about people doing but never actually do because anyone attempting to read a book on the grass in any given park in singapore would risk a severe and sweaty meltdown in the space of 5 minutes? Yes. That’s why, I think, all of us found the place so utterly charming.
Meadowport Arch, one of the several arches in the park. Very LOTR
He’s reading in the park! There was also a very indie looking chick sitting on the grod playing the guitar,as well as some people doing yoga. The park here uber funky la. I is jealous why ecp dunch have this kind of thing
More of the park. Such a nice friendly place. Ok anyway I’m really tired now. To cut a long story short, we walked back to the hostel after walking through the park and planned to go down for dinner, but we ended up all feeling so tired that we concussed immediately. That was at about 8 in the evening. I was the first to wake at around 3am, and so I decided to come on and blog. Its now about 5, and i HAVE blogged. Christina woke up too and between us we finished the remainder of the Famous Amos cookies thank heavens for them. And now I is going to shower and start my day 😀
bye!
Hello hello.
Blogpost was pissing me off so much that I completely wasn’t blogging (that’s an excuse) and I was also getting annoyed with the CSS which somehow was screwing with my links and comments (that’s also an excuse). So anyhow, here I am, after reccomendations about wordpress being easier to use and friendlier to techie idiots like me (its true!), hopping onto the wordpressing bandwagon.
Well, its a metaphorical new begining of sorts. And a little something to commemorate the end of my secod year, and the start of my Yale summer term, yay! I’m leaving on the 28th of May,2350, SQ0026.
And I’ll be back 7 weeks later on 19th July, errrr…sometime.
On a totally different note, here’s the thing that inspired the name of my blog: Its taken from the album sleeve of daniel bedingfield’s album “gotta get through this” : we inhabit a dark universe, one in which we use the few moments of light we are given, as points of reference.
its always struck me as being beautiful somehow true, like a thomas hardy novel turned in on itself. With Hardy happiness and hope are always fleeting and momentary; tiny things set against a backdrop of unreceding darkness and bleakness. I could quote you a line from casterbridge but i’ve forgotten it (grin). And it’s completely believable, this depiction of a predominantly cruel and uncaring world. What I like to think of is the human capacity for hope and renewal amidst all this; the heightened awareness of the moments of light that we do have.Think about it, everyone can’t help but remember happy moments, right?
I’m a self confessed daydream junkie. I believe in the possibility of everything being ok in the end. I believe in the inherent goodness of human nature (though the notable non return of my dear old phone is casting some doubt on this). And above all, I believe in living this life for what its worth; its weight in the precious gold dust of happiness and abandon.
And anyhow, it’s been a long time. shakespeare hates your angsty poetry (and blogposts). cheers to a brilliant summer in New York and Yale, and sunny days beyond 🙂
lynnnnnnnnnnn
moments of light 
