etymology 2

diphthong, it turns out, is a rather polarizing word. people tend to have reactions to it. try this quiz:

what is your first response to the word diphthong?

a. bring it on! sexy gliding vowel!

b. bring it on! sexy female undergarment!

c. eh wot?

etymology

J2 is hopping mad. the design of her latin club t-shirt hangs on the balance because it features the word diphthong. it appears that the second syllable is suggestive. what i say is, i'll never look at a zebra the same way again. it would be wise not to publicize condominium sales too. people might get ideas.

male bonding

HOM tells me about his interlude with J1. they have a good time, he says, with man-talk about military life finances insurance budgets entertainment and plans. they cover much geography running army errands. they pray. J1's back in camp now and HOM misses him.

i am grateful, more than i know how to say, for both of them, and for their weekend together. God does more than i dare to ask for or imagine.

experience

J2 drives herself around more these days. alone. i am torn between exhausted respite and frantic maternal flutters. you would think it would be easier the second time around. however, you would think wrong.

family portrait

the recruits need to return to camp this weekend with family photographs. to better motivate them, apparently. this is difficult for us. we have pictures of birds flowers insects chipmunks buildings the snow and Dog, but the only family ones we have are taken by strangers during our vacations and they are not in focus. to top it off, J1 rejects the one i send of Dog. he wants a happier looking Dog.

din tai fung (again)

J1 books out from boot camp and spends the day with his father. they commemorate his first civilian dinner with a visit to din tai fung. what i say is, we certainly give them a lot of business. 

current affairs

egypt

gaddafi

yemen? saudi? 

oil prices
consumer spending

nz earthquake

but my main question is, will the u.s. government shut down next week? and if it does, will the borders remain open for our house guest to leave and for HOM to return from his trip?

perspective

69 deg, november

40 deg, february

equally cool or warm, depending on you.

guilty as charged

according to the 2010 usda dietary guidelines for americans, the number 1 calorie source in the country is the grain-based dessert, which is a scientific way of saying cake cookies pie cobbler sweet rolls pastries and donuts. well, duh. did you hope it would be salad?

relationship or not

i cull a grocery bag's worth of functionally anonymous name cards from a twenty year accumulation today. why do people bother to get them printed and obsequiously handed over with two hands and a bow to others who will tuck them away in a forgotten stash for decades before their wives discard them in a spring cleaning frenzy?

it's amazing the kind of cards we amass. we have plenty from realtors of saturday afternoon show flats. we have school teachers! and retirees! we have entire departments who attend a presentation and pay their respects en bloc. we have cards of indeterminable provenance.

what i say now is, either get to know the chap better or wave him goodbye. never mind his card. you can always google him later.

snow (again)

the snow shovel makes an unwelcome appearance. all i say is, i miss our young hunk. we may gain dignity with age, but stately wisdom ain't no match for pure brawn when you need to move mass.

army life 2

J1's boot camp is interrupted by fever cough sore throat and an entire carpet bag of pharmaceuticals from the camp doctor. they gave me, like, sixteen tablets. can i not take them all? actually, yes. that's the beauty of management by symptom relief. most of the stuff is to pre-empt patient whining.

reality intrudes.

bananagrams

tax season

HOM does his taxes.

this is akin to shoveling. there is the same unattractive inescapable prospect that you plod step by interminable step through as your mind screams to defer every five minutes. when it's finally over you are enshrouded in a fog of out-of-body exhaustion that takes an entire year to recover from after which the next incarnation cunningly blindsides you.

musssic

there's opera and there's chinese opera. i know, because my mother-in-law has chinese opera yodeling away on the tv. unlike opera, which pretty much utilizes the full register, chinese opera likes its voices and instruments to fraternize exclusively in the upper register. this creates the unfortunate musical equivalent of fingernails screeching across the blackboard. it's enough to send non-habitués running for the hills.

d.c. tour 2

if i understand this correctly, they're chemically identical but physically distinct. huh? exhibits like this bring back convoluted memories of organic chem days. next time i'll just bring the visitor to the diamonds and rubies and be done with it.

drattit

damned if i ask

damned if i don't

*sigh*

d.c. tour

HOM's mother visits. this is how we find ourselves at the museum of natural history looking at deep ocean exhibits. this is an abstract intellectual exercise at best. HOM and i realize that we are unable to relate to ocean creatures that are not edible. 

springing yet?

today is a gorgeous winter's day bursting with birdsong and deliciously ripe with the promise of spring. alas, tomorrow the forecast says we drop twenty degrees.

chinese supermarket

two older  chinese women in the line behind me thrust their money over my shoulder into the nose of the cashier because, one of them explains, they are in a hurry today. a younger woman ahead of me delivers a lecture on the importance of waiting for your turn. there is a poor gentleman in front of me who just looks bewildered. 

on balance, older chinese-looking women dressed in fresh-off-the-boat style and spouting loud dialects make for really frighteningly aggressive co-shoppers. the supermarket teems with them today.

macy's

hihowareyoutoday? the sales assistant chirps. i'm fine thank you. canihelpyouwithanything? no i'm just browsing thanks. everything's on sale today! okay thanks! my name's L, what's yours? GAH.

there is ever increasing justification for amazon.com's existence.

army life

J1 calls home from boot camp. he's getting to run jump work out make new friends get a tan collect dirt and ignore his laundry. they're being very nice to them all, he says. it's like being in summer camp. 

even his grandmother says, it ain't like it used to be.

somethin' missin'

J1, that is.

bananagrams returns!

yowzer!

linguistic mangler

i volunteer to help HOM get a script translated from english to chinese. it should be simple enough, he says. use google translator. much anguish and little success later, this is what i say:

• chinese yoda syntax like is.
• computer generated permutations can boggle the mind.
• not a good project if you are dysfunctional in one of the languages.

and if you think, like i did, that you can paste an essay into the box press a button and voila! get an essay in the new language, you have too much misplaced faith in machines.

flight news (final ed.)

• ANA cattle class seafood choice. scrumptiously satisfying. 
• tetris. it is possible to play this exclusively for in-flight entertainment over twenty hours. i know, obviously.
• over the age of 45, feet swell on long haul flights proportionately with age. 

confession 2

unless i am much mistaken, the rack now holds two white dress shirts sporting just the faintest tinges of pink each. even HOM is beginning to think that his whites appear to come in shades.

la cynique

egypt's populist uprising finally dethrones mubarak. there is much talk of a new hope and a new order. 

i am hard pressed to name a modern nation that successfully reinvents itself after a revolution. the global stage is full of u.n. wannabes limping righteously in the ashes of demagogic idealism. iran. the philippines. png. you could throw in russia and old communist china. the more surefire strategy appears to be an industry based infrastructure dependent economic turnaround. this bodes very ill for people power indeed. they can get things done, but they can't keep it done.

what i say is, plus ça change, etc.

cupidity

i see an amazing number of happy valentine's day! greetings on my facebook wall from random friends to their fb mailing list. the monument to love has jumped the gap from medieval roman catholic calendar to western romantic love to global casual friendship. this is commercial triumph of the highest order.

gamasot

our favorite korean restaurant has undergone a management change. this is disastrous. they have a new posh looking menu and call buttons on each table. the kimchi selection changes and their portion size decreases. the yakult at the end disappears. the food is still good, J2 says. but we don't come just for the food, HOM and i protest. we come for the little frills that make the mom-and-pop feel and especially for the complimentary octopus kimchi and the yakult that comes with the bill!

flight news 2

jeremy clarkson describes a nightmare flight to the caribbeans where a bawling baby wails all the way*. my long haul flight includes a posse of them howling in clamorous asynchrony. what i say is, if you are a crying baby, you had better be pretty. less homely babies inspire fewer desires for active retribution among its haplessly assaulted captive co-passengers.

*flying with the baby from hell (the world according to clarkson, vol. 3)

zzzzzz

i unpack take a deep breath clean the house process the laundry demolish the accumulated mail pick Dog up from the hotel spend two hours at the dmv and settle the marketing. naturally this means i am now exhausted in addition to jet-lagged. but it's good to be home.

chivalry is dead

following a train journey spanning half the length of the island, this is what i say. courtesy is alive, mostly among middle aged women. the men! herein are sorry examples of large unseeing slugs many of whom are draped over one-and-a-half seats each. excuse me sir, i almost say to my neighbor. could you please tuck your elbow in a little? i am needing to draw my breath here.

son of the soil

i get a tour of modern day barracks today as J1 enlists. it's a multi-building multi-story cheerful yellow-and-cream complex with more amenities than i expect. they show me the dormitories the vending machines the cook-house and their obstacle course. i find myself thinking, is it over yet? because really, i just need to know you have a paramount commitment to safety. how they will live is incidental to me.

book hunt

i visit the popular bookstore, singapore's homegrown answer to borders.

half the store sells stationery. half a wall and one table sell paperback fiction. another half a wall sells magazines. one shelf sells self-improvement books. the remainder of the store sells school assessment books guide books children's readers and other paraphernalia of the supplemental education industry.

people, i want to say. what are those kids going to read when they graduate from the main part of the store and hit the last wall? 

new demography 2

time was when passengers on the trains hid behind newspapers books or slumber. these days every man is a desert island huddled up with his earphones smartphone and iPad. plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

new demography

one week in singapore casts up new stereotypes. bus drivers and coffee shop assistants are p.r.c. chinese speaking impeccable mandarin and little else. the girls at the cold storage cashier and in shops are filipina. that helpful guide at the mrt station is foreign too. i miss the staunchly local middle aged men and women who previously populated all these places with their harshly accented ungrammatical endearingly familiar english malay mandarin and hokkien. the final domestic bastion must be the taxicab, whose driver continues to maintain his fierce opinions in unapologetic singlish.

pledged - a robbins (2004)

the blurb says, alexandra robbins rips into the secret, sordid underbelly of sororities. for a graduate, not of a sorority, but of an old school post-colonial university hall in the far east, this book is surreal. 

sororities have pledging. we had orientation.

they have hazing. we had ragging.

initiation. we even called it initiation too!
sorority songs. hall songs.

earning their letters. becoming a keviian.

administration crackdowns on hazing. and ragging.

booze and drugs. booze by the barrel.

elitism and exclusivity. hostelites as a breed apart.

intra-greek competition. inter-hall fights.

chapter meetings & events. hall meetings & events.

philanthropy chair. welfare secretary.

executive board. junior common room committee.

in the years since i have often wondered at the unthinking herd mentality that allows us to inflict unmentionable humiliations on each other, all in the name of cultivating an esprit de corp. pledged brings back too many bad memories of a deformed edifice upon which happily some better memories are built. 

sweet seventeen

J2 turns seventeen. i remember her in her hospital bed, spent from illness. i remember her first words then, after we fear the worst and no longer dare to hope, why are the curtains pink? she amazes me still with her unapologetic enthusiasm and her sunny eagerness to know more to experience more and to be more. she humbles me with the simplicity of her ideals and the richness of her love. you have been a comfort and an inspiration, i need to tell her. i thank my God each time i think of you.

sunday

my first english service in the home church in almost a decade, i think. it is a traditional methodist service with a full order of service opening and closing hymns recitation of the creed and the communion altar. the words of the liturgy wash over me and engage me in a way they did not. i am quietly swept along into faith that is bigger than my faith and into church that is larger than my church. there is a value to ritual and liturgy that one treasures better only after being broken a little. the words are plain shorn of adornment and painfully predictable. they adequately express all i could, and need, to say.

who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, or with the breadth of his hand marked off the heavens? 

-isaiah 40:12

diet sheet

favorites this trip:
xiao long bao from din tai fung
that meat floss bun from breadtalk
xiao long bao from din tai fung
the japanese bread from 7-eleven
xiao long bao from din tai fung

rabbit year

spending my first lunar new year back east in five years, and this is what i say. there is chinese culture, and there is a gagging overdose of popular chinese culture. i've got new year ditties streaming out my ears in crimson ribbons a primordial desire to avoid new year news on tv and an increasing revulsion for the tidal waves of humanity in their new year finery thronging every public nook and cranny. soon i am going to have to flee mandarin orange monsters.

internet withdrawal

my laptop is currently generally blanketed in electronic insulation interspersed with occasional patches of connectivity, like now.