On The Move…

Nope, this is not another movie review. Instead, I’m currently in Harvard’s Geological Museum building (part of the Harvard Museum of Natural History and Peabody Museum of Archaelogy and Ethnology complex). I’m here after hours, as I sometimes like to be, working at the Harvard University Center for the Environment (HUCE). That’s where my concentration offices are based, so it’s my academic “home” on campus. Taking the efficient, friendly staff as a given, I really like HUCE – it’s a posh, comfortable new space with all the amenities a student looking for a workspace could hope for, including an almost-always-empty computer lab which outranks most of the computer labs I’ve ever used with it’s pitch-perfect mix of aesthetics and functionality. I really should bring my camera with me sometime – I especially like the view of the chemistry labs in the next-door buildings from the meeting room at the Center – very graphic and colorful, plus it’s fun to watch all the grad students in there running experiments late into the night. I’m sure my grad-student friends will relate to this, minus the “fun” part, perhaps.

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So I’m here working on my senior thesis, which is becoming increasingly and delinquently behind schedule. This Intercession period between semesters is really one of the final opportunities to devote substantial, uninterrupted time to the project. Hopefully I’ll make enough progress to ensure that firstly, I don’t become one of the 1-in-6 students who never completes their attempted thesis, and secondly, that I have a good shot for honors.

Although to be honest, graduating with honors somehow no longer seems to matter much to me, despite the fact that I am still hoping for, and working hard towards Latin honors. In truth, while I’ve always somewhat wished that I could be better motivated by extrinsic honors and motivations, somehow the goal of showing a perfect score or having nice things to put on a resume never seemed sufficient to drive me enough to actually memorize multiplication tables, or to give up extracurriculars in order to concentrate on inorganic chemistry. At least that’s what I’m saying now – this could all just be cognitive dissonance trying to rationalize away the foolish recklessness and laziness of years past. Nonetheless, as I’ve reasoned before, in the end I’ve had pretty much everything I’ve ever truly wanted, in essence if not in its originally conceived form. I’m very much thankful for God’s grace in all that, of course. But focusing on what that potentially means about my internal, probably subconscious, mental calculus, perhaps the key thing is to figure out what I really want and why.

It’s probably true that I already tend to perform far too much meta-analysis – what is experience worth; what does this choice mean; how does this development fit into the bigger picture? These questions can be tiring to ponder, especially when few people want to listen to you explore them – of course they have better things to do, and analysis takes time, time which could be spent, easily and profitably (ostensibly) on other scheduled tasks and amusements. Never mind that, for me, much of such analysis leads to a “everything-is-meaningless” or “everything-is-equally-meaningful” (potentially) conclusion that is mainly distinguished from existentialism or nihilism by cheerful optimism and, more importantly, faith in God’s benevolent, omnipotent and active existence.

Coming back to the thesis-writing, this aforementioned general inability to ignore the possible larger implications is hampering my ability to write, among other issues. As I was telling Lorraine today, it’s difficult to think of this as “three longer final papers” or some other more manageable and less intimidating framework. I can’t avoid the sense that what I’m writing about is important, and the end product should actually represent the best possible analysis and recommendations I can produce. It’s easier to be flippant about opinion pieces on ancient history or literary analysis, or even term papers on morality and public policy; in those cases it almost doesn’t matter what you think since the effect on the world will be close to nil, one way or another. But that’s not the case when it’s a piece of work that has a chance (albeit small) of being taken seriously and affecting the world, and shaping your future research and career (considerably larger chance), and will ultimately be a sort of calling card for your beliefs and analytical abilities. Throw in the predictive component of what I think I will write (and everyone knows the pitfalls of trying to soothsay the future), and maybe my apprehension will appear less immediately irrational.

On a happier note, I think I made some good progress today, although I didn’t write anything substantial. And now I shall go read some more.
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Earlier when I went to the bathroom, which is just past the slick “climate change” exhibit , the motion sensor lights didn’t detect me, so I proceeded in near-darkness. You can see how familiar I am with this space. Anyhow, I was especially impressed that both the motion-sensor flush and the motion sensor taps came on, even in the dark, with no special effort on my part. How’d they do that?? Anyone who understands the technology, feel free to enlighten me.

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The problem with having short hair, which I’d completely forgotten about, is that after a mere four weeks it looks straggly and ready for some professional maintenance.

I refuse. No thank you. I told myself I’d wait till after June. Ok, maybe I’ll see about fixing it for graduation. Maybe.

At least the first snow to actually stick around for more than 15 minutes.  Taken by Andrew from our common room window.

Yawn.  Lured by the free pizza, I put on my American flag sweater and went to the Quincy JCR (junior common room) an hour ago to see President Bush’s State of the Union Address.  I’m amazed at how quickly that 50 minutes went by – it felt more like a slightly draggy 25 minutes.  He’s certainly gotten a lot better at making speeches, or he was having a really good day, because that was almost certainly the least painful public speaking I’ve seen of the current American president.

While I was listening, in a room full of Quincy residents, it seemed to me that the lame duck President syndrome was already starting to set in.  On the one hand, it was almost surprising to hear the rhetoric about international cooperation and the (albeit passing) mention of climate change as a problem (and plug-in hybrid cars as a part of the solution).  Altogether it sounded as if he had either gained the wisdom to realise his past errors, or perhaps was being forced by reality (or opinon polls) to change his tune, or was now freed up by his limited remaining time in office to highlight (instead of downplaying) the big problems that his successor (and the Democrat-majority Congress and Senate) will have to deal with.  On the other hand, if you listened carefully, there was very little attempt to take credit for the good things America has now (a growing economy) while the longer list of problems to be dealt with (social security, education, foreign policy, military commitments, energy policy, federal deficit) seemed to signal the key shortcomings–to put it mildly–of two presidential terms almost-over.  And I didn’t really get the sense that any of those things were going to be substantially remedied by 2008 – does anyone else?

In the end, the focus seemed to be firmly on the future, rather than on dwelling on the past.  I don’t know what I think about that, given my general dislike of the sort of ahistoric, amnesiac logic I’ve sometimes observed amongst the Republicans I’m most friendly with.  I don’t like the increasingly casual, and still equally meaningless references to the faceless “enemy” that America is at war with, as well as the suspiciously simplistic descriptions of cause and effect, as well as the cartoon beliefs and goals attributed to the “enemy”.  Of course this is all in the context of a compressed speech tailored for general consumption and soundbites, and President Bush is probably not “wrong” in a general sense.  I may think it’s all a little inaccurate, and somewhat jingoistic, and potentially counterproductive, but maybe the only thing left to do is wait another year or two.  As the title of that John Mayer song aptly puts it, we’re “Waiting On the World to Change”.

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Relatedly, listening to the Address reminded me of my speech-writing days back at OCS.  There really is something to be said for the power of an inspiring speech to remind you of your values, your identity and your goals.  Or to insinuate them, at least.

What can I say?  It’s fun to *finally* be able to wear my new long coat, courtesy of Mr Pinky, whose exceptional tailoring services are now available internationally online at www.tailorclothes.com.

Especially since it’s been nearly 7 months since I bought that cloth at my favorite fabric store in London and then proceeded to lug it through another 20 or so cities over the next two months on World Tour.

Today was supposed to be my first day of productivity.  Whoops.  Maybe I can redeem myself a little tonight.

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Don’t worry – no spoilers ahead.

I just saw Children of Men in Boston with Ryan.   Overall the film is worth seeing and is quite moving at times, though not necessarily very pleasant to watch.  I especially liked seeing London reimagined in this dystopic future on the brink of anarchy.  I *heart* London, particularly since my summer there, and not since 28 Days Later have I had the pleasure of seeing the city taken liberties with — London buses girded with protective mesh, electric cars and pedal-carts (a la Bangladesh!) on the street, the Tate Modern as a private residence (or was it a government building?).  And there’s a brilliantly executed set of extremely long-running sequences during a violent uprising in a refugee camp – it was difficult not to feel transported to and caught up in the worst sort of urban warfare as seen in Sarajevo, Beirut or Mogadishu at the height of their civil wars.  I marvelled at how carefully timed and meticulously executed those scenes were – if you see the film, remember to mentally applaud the cameraman (and perhaps other crew) who had to do all that running with a camera and keep it pointed in the right direction.  And what happens to Julianne Moore’s character is cleverly unexpected enough that it sounds an exceptionally jarring and tragic note to reinforce the sense that the world is now a place where there is no real future.

Enough praise – on to the picky bits.  The difficulties of translating a book into a screenplay were well in evidence in the inconsistent treatment of the plot which vacillated between being overly pedantic and being excessively oblique.  Scattered through the film were explanatory “conversations” where characters had awkward monologues to tell the audience things that everyone in the film sould already know and find patently obvious (the midwife’s rambling about the discovery of the mass infertility, for example).  Yet at the same time I got the clear sense that large chunks of information were being brushed aside or skimmed over because they were too unwieldy to delve into properly.  And maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention, but I felt as if key explanatory details were lost in the blink-and-you-miss-it introductions to the more peripheral characters and events (and the mumbly accents didn’t help).  Overall pacing also suffered from plodding sections where nothing seems to happen, but without any compensatory cinematography, intimacy, mood-setting or revelation of information – the film could have lost about 20 minutes and been better for it, or spent that time developing the story more densely or more clearly.

Like many of the films I am drawn to watch for their premise (think Poseidon, Flightplan and The Stepford Wives), Children of Men is not bad, but doesn’t necessarily deliver it’s full potential in exploring the implications of the central premise.  Among the best parts of the movie were those which started to take the set-up through to its logical conclusions – such as the scene in the abandoned school, or the successful evocation of the baby’s significance as a momentous, world-changing miracle.  Most of the other parts of the film felt like a (skilful) rehash of scenes from other war or disaster films like The Pianist or Independence Day.

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And to answer the question that’s the title of this post, I also bought a pair of sunglasses (to replace the brown aviators I dropped irretriveably into a latrine in Madagascar last Spring Break), and my very own domain name!  At $7.20 from GoDaddy.com, that’s the best impulse buy ever!  So now you’ll be able to have the pleasure of reading this blog after being redirected from jasonyeo.com – congratulations (to me)! 🙂

PS: I love this video on YouTube – as a very amateur violinist, this video makes me very happy.

I vacuumed the common spaces today, as well as the room Ray vacated when he left for a semester in Paris.  The suite is much cleaner now. 🙂

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I’ve also started the long overdue tidying up of this blog, which suffered major messing-up when the blog server I use was migrated from Manila to WordPress.  Not being very tech-savvy, I’ve had to do most of the changes by hand like re-posted old posts, adding links and starting to categorize old posts.  This will take a while, and perhaps will never be completely finished.

I’ve also added two new essays from last semester – it’s the two final papers I wrote on Salman Rushdie’s very lengthy, but deservedly award-winning Midnight’s Children.  These were essays I wrote for extremely different literature classes.  One was for a class on the postcolonial narrative, so I wrote about issues of agency and control: “Happy Accidents and Snakes-and-Ladders: Fate, Agency and Repeating History in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children“.  The other was for a class on bilingualism and literature, so I focussed on ambiguity, foreigners and gender based on the framework introduced by one of the other course readings: “Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children as a Gothic Democratic Narrative“.

Enjoy.

Today was my microeconomics final exam.  I’m glad that’s over.  Now I have just one left, and it’s in about… 12 hours?  I really should start looking over the lecture notes.

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Instead, here’re my notes on this season’s fashion ads 🙂  As I’ve always enjoyed pointing out to high fashion initiates, the truth is that in any given year, about two-thirds of all the glossy, glamorous, gorgeous pictures you see in magazines, on billboards and in high street stores in fact show the same, small group of top models (lensed by an even smaller group of top photographers).  So if you learn a few names and recognise a few faces you’ll suddenly start seeing them everywhere.

Take the January issue of W magazine, for example…  here’s a list of most of the ads, in the order that they appear, with the female models that appear in them, wherever I could recognize them or find the information somewhere:

Louis Vuitton – Scarlett Johansson
Calvin Klein Collection – Camilla Finn (?)
Gucci – Freja Beha (and several others)
Giorgio Armani – Agyness Deyn
Dior – Lily Donaldson
Dolce & Gabbana – Natasha Poly, Lisa Cant (etc.)
Donna Karen – Hilary Rhoda (also in one of the editorial fashion spreads later in the issue)YSL – Karen Elson
Bottega Veneta – Inguna Butane, Julia Dunstall
Escada – Inguna Butane
Michael Kors – Carmen Kass
D&G – unrecognizable (but I assume Shannon Click is in there somewhere)
Blumarine – Suvi Koponen
Oscar de la Renta – Caroline Trentini
Roberto Cavalli – Giselle Bundchen
Versace – Carolyn Murphy, Carmen Kass, Kate Moss
BCBG Max Azria – Malgosia Bela
Prada – Sasha Pivarova
Jil Sander – Johanna Stickland
Fendi – Raquel Zimmerman
Burberry – Kate Moss, Lily Donaldson
Bedat & Co – Carmen Kass
Givenchy – Hilary Rhoda
Chloé – Raquel Zimmerman, Anja Rubik, (Trish Goff, who’s completely hidden)
Valentino – Iselin Steiro (also in a lengthy only-girl editorial in the Jan W)
Moschino – Leah de Wavrin
Mulberry – Agyness Deyn, Karen Elson

As you can see, the models especially grabbing the spotlight this season include American Hilary Rhoda (who’s simply everywhere), and Manchester girl Agyness Deyn.  This makes S/S07 the season of the signature eyebrows – which means Italian Mariacarla Boscano’s extensive editorial fashion spread (shot by Jurgen Teller in Venice) in the same issue of W is quite apropos, considering that Mariacarla was one of the first “eyebrow” girls a couple of years back, along with fellow-Brit Stella Tennant (who was also everywhere last year).  At the same time, this season also marks a return to the girls who have been faithfully putting in their time over the past few years and are finally hitting it big, like Freja Beha, Raquel Zimmerman and Lily Donaldson.  Finally, we’re also seeing the return of some of the grandes dames of modelling, so to speak, particularly Carmen Kass (all of 28 years old), Karen Elson (age 31) and the continuing reign of Kate Moss (an astounding 32!).

Noticeably absent from this lineup: Gemma Ward (oh where can she be?), Daria Werbowy, Heather Marks, all of whom were the “it” models of the last two seasons.  Does this mark the end of the fashion obsession with “eyes” (these last three girls having had particularly striking pairs)?  We’ve already seen lips, shoulders and necks quite recently, so I suspect it’s moving on to limbs, especially arms, which would explain such up-and-comers like Iekeliene Stange and Daiane Conterato (whom I have yet to warm up to).

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And now I must start working on tomorrow’s final exam.

Number of hours spent reviewing material for the microeconomic theory final exam on Thursday: 3.

Number of hours spent obsessively re-watching and re-re-watching, re-reading and re-re-reading The Age of Innocence (one of my favorite books and films) and marvelling at the attention to detail, the sly inclusion of so many famous works of art into the interiors and the mannered perfection: 10 and counting.

Number of hours spent reviewing material for my silent cinema final exam on Friday: 0.

Belated new year greetings to everyone!

I’m now back in Cambridge, after some 30 hours of travelling and a solid twelve hours of sleeping off the jetlag.

Being home was good. On the final day I was home, the usual just-in-time swirl of events was particularly enjoyable. I drove my sister to school just after 7am, then went to the dentist with my mother. After that, a quick nap preceeded my hurried trip to town for a series of interviews. I was being interviewed for my dream summer internship, which I will almost certainly accept if they make a good offer. The interview cycle was pretty intense, particularly because I was there for a very compressed interview cycle, where each interviewer would decide whether I qualified to be seen by the next, more senior interviewer. So after every round I was left in the conference room to wait for the result as delivered by the coordinating HR officer. Quite the experience. I passed the time by reading “Le Probleme de l’Opium en Iran”, the bit of thesis-reading I’d brought with me. Thankfully I made it through to the final round, which was very pleasant, although I have yet to learn the final result. As I said during the interviews, I’m not worried regardless. I’m sure something will work out for the summer, whether it’s this internship or something else. After leaving the gleaming office tower, I headed to one of the newest (and largest) mall complexes to pick up a few things and also to meet Charles and Lynn for dinner. I’m glad I got to catch up with them (and also to more extensively explore Vivocity). From there, it was a quick ride home, an almost-quicker packing job and then off to the airport for the 30 hour journey back to my dorm.

And now I shall go unpack, in preparation for the next week of paper-writing and exam preparation.

PS: I’m so very happy for Flora and her engagement – congratulations!!

A belated Merry Christmas to everyone! And a happy new year too 🙂

It’s nice to be home, the interminable torrential rains notwithstanding. I have never before heard of flash floods in well-drained Singapore. Floods!! At least they haven’t threatened any lives or homes yet.

I’ve made my way very quickly through my crave-list of local food. In the mere three days since I’ve been home, I’ve feasted (in moderation!) on well over a dozen varieties of hawker fare. Yum yum yum.

I wish I felt more secure about the direction my thesis is heading in. And I wish I had more time to do research and ruminate. Oooh, I can feel little knots of anxiety and twinges of panic beginning at the very thought of thesis. *shudder* On the upside, I’ve read a bit and written a bit, so the time hasn’t been a complete wash, at any rate.

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I had a bizarre little dream during an earlier nap, where for some inexplicable reason I was tranferring to Yale for my senior year. On the bus over from Harvard with all the other ex-Harvardians who were transferring, I was almost successful in rationalizing this choice, but once we arrived at Yale’s campus and I suddenly realized I would never be part of Harvard’s Class of 2007, I was filled with such violent grief that I woke up. Strange, no? And of course I spent about five minutes pondering the implications of that dream-experience, through the lens of the “identity-prescription” literature we’ve been covering in my cultural economics class. That class is now completely finished with, since I chose to take the final exam on the last day of classes before the break.