herbonestructure

15/5/2013

it seems like things are going to accelerate really quickly in the next couple of days and weeks & so i feel like, if only for myself, i should write down things that have been happening/things i have been thinking about before i forget / also because sometimes i feel like if this blog isn't update i feel like i haven't been doing anything #giantupdate

1. generally speaking

meals i have been eating/cooking for myself: the first picture is one taken on the night of the brainlove festival barbeque of onion rings, chickpea & salad leaves; vine-ripe sliced tomatoes & mozzarella & hard boiled eggs on wheatgerm toast; raw salad box after a 10km run with runner beans, red peppers, spinach, carrots & cucumber; steamed broccoli with grated parmesan & sea salt i had today after my oral exam

in the kitchen the other day i was telling my flatmate kathi i feel like this is the healthiest i have been in my entire life maybe or at least in the past five years or so. and i mean emotionally and physically too. stopped eating meat completely, only eating food that makes me feel good but also not feeling bad about eating shit like ice cream. taking time to prepare really good food for myself and picking out better ingredients in grocery stores that last longer and feeling my body respond to it in ways that we learnt about in textbooks and in psych classes but i never thought really meant anything. kicking out habits that i never thought i would be able to kick letting go of small compulsions that i believed in. there are times i feel like i shouldn't talk about this good streak or name it as a good thing because what if it goes away or i begin to feel something like sadness again or i don't want to fight and then be like haha so much for that peak in positivity so much for filling out mood questionnaires with 'very much looking forward to everything in life' but that's not the point i don't think. for one thing it feels sustainable, not a phase. and i feel like this threads through all of the numbered points and is almost conflated with everything can't really separate it from the rest of the things i want to talk about maybe but also feel like i want to address it for myself individually that this is one thing that has changed since i came back to england after the easter break. 'what has changed', is what i am thinking all the time. what else has contributed to me being able to feel capable of finally taking charge of the situation; living alone, not making plans to do anything else, not having to be accountable to anyone other than myself. i have been back maybe three or four weeks now and sometimes i forget that i even left at all/went back to singapore until someone asks me how long has it been since you went back home and then i remember. in part this involves being open to shit happening and then seeing that shit doesn't happen instead off closing myself off to all shit happening even though it is true that 'shit can still happen'. do you know what happens when you let go of things like this? i mean the compulsive habits that you have? you find that you have SO MUCH TIME to do everything that you want and this contributed i think to being able to study hard and exercise everyday and cook meals that i love and organize my room whenever i wanted to. jesus, it's shit to have taken this long to realize this but better now than never. in that sense things, internally, are getting better

2. housing situation

tea lights/candles in my room

when i think about the housing situation i feel like a plump bird that has been nesting on top of the gumtree website for days now. sometime in february or even earlier maybe rowan emailed to ask if i wanted to live with her and i said yes and then we thought about other people we wanted to live with and for various reasons we either didn't want to live with certain people or other situations didn't seem like it would work out. that has been a source of stress because i have been the person managing the phone calls and i feel like i have memorized all the 2/3 bedroom camden listings that have come out in the last week but there is 'no other way about it' because admittedly i like being in control of things that affect me & anyway have been managing this in an efficient and organized manner. for a while we couldn't make a decision on whether to live with [someone else] & i felt hesitant of living with just rowan because "the more the merrier" & being with just one other person could go down not very well and if it doesn't then it is almost a more painful situation to be in than if you were in a house with other people whose presence could mitigate the potential awkwardness but today i hung out with her again and we did pilates in her room and i am always laughing around her and happy i don't know just reminded of the ease at which i feel when i am around her and you know we've both traveled to norway together when we barely knew each other and that was an amazing trip so we both said 'fuck it let's just do this thing.'also i found a really beautiful flat today with flooding light and large windows around camden that's a thirty minute walk from school near to eve's place and along the picadilly line towards north london. with a late july move-in date, within our budget etc. a place that seems like somewhere we could call home. i feel really good about that. we're going to see it this friday after rowan's exam. thinking about the way things worked out in the end, how i would prefer a quiet home as opposed to one filled with noise all the time, conversations with one other person other than group conversations even if they are a group of people i like and feel comfortable with. i forget i think, how much a place can affect your mood, even though having moved from one place to another and moving from place to place all the time that is one thing that i should remember. this morning i woke up and i felt like i had to get out of my room—that is not a thing i want to feel in the place i live in next year. last saturday rowan and i and a guy we were planning on staying with went to visit a flat in king's cross and the place was alright, nothing special but when i walked out i felt blank, i couldn't imagine a future in which i lived there but wondered if that was something that i could possibly imagine anyway. but now i can i think. sometimes i feel like, i mean i know that my desire for things to be nothing less than perfect gets in the way of things & you wonder if you should lower your standards because it seems easier for other people to attain their version of what makes them happy & also because obviously the way things are can never always be perfect but on the other hand i feel like it helps maybe to not settle for less because when it does work out the way you want it to it is so, so good. not just in terms of flats. friendships & relationships & grades too. i feel glad that this is one thing that is almost settled. i am going to look at panini presses on amazon in a bit

my favourite amazon review

3. exams & school

so far exams have been alright. i have maybe already written about this but i feel like i want to again just for the sake of clarifying it in my head. i had german two weeks ago and revising for it was alright. i opened tabs to google translate and searched yahoo answers for the way to say things properly in the language and also talked to ben and other classmates about how i should say certain things. for psychology i made revision notes and studied at the bloomsbury theatre everyday and developed a routine that i felt able to sustain and this is something that i feel good about. looking back on that i don't think i've made it through an exam period without having some form of anxiety attack or relying on emotional support from someone else to get through it or then again not getting through the exams at all. i just had my german oral exam today and i panicked about it last night but the thing is i guess to pick up where you left off and keep going. i think previously i would have thought 'okay a bad night will lead into other bad nights' but another thing i have learnt is that the only person i am doing any harm to is myself and i can turn to other people for help but in the end like the poem from bukowski that goes only you can help yourself something like that. that's true. that my life is my own and in that way, the way you can only help someone this much or tell someone how what you would do were you in that situation, that's the only way out of it. german oral was okay i went to school this morning and sat in the halls listening to a ryan hemsworth mix and not really looking at german then thinking of ways to phrase 'i have not been to munich' which is 'ich habe nich nach München gehen' i think. in the room the tutors seemed to be nodding encouragingly and almost surprised that i could recognize what they were saying during the conversation and was responding accordingly. after my tutor switched off the voice recorder she said will you be learning german next year i hope to see you again and i said yes definitely! and i am glad that i am learning this language at one point i felt annoyed because i think in part my choice to learn this language was because ben spoke it and of course it helps that the person i am and want to keep being closest to speaks the language that i am learning but i don't feel like i want to make choices for anyone other than myself. but then i feel like instead of relying on him to learn the language i did it myself which is a good thing and doing things for yourself is always a good thing. the other night after brainlove festival dan got off the bus with me and we sat in the courtyard of my dorms for a long time and talked about language and linguistics and how language is so natural to someone. when i think about children like when i was talking to diane about her nephew and how he can associate a word with a meaning at sixteen (?) months that is interesting to me something i want to understand. i feel excited about learning, that's one thing that i don't think i'll ever stop feeling excited about. the new york times did an article about the course i'm doing at ucl called "in britain, a return to the idea of the liberal arts". i feel good about the fact that my course keeps things open, and that i get to graft my degree to fit me perfectly. the other day my tutor said that "you are exactly the kind of student that we created this course for" and that made me happy because i had to take an extra year to get to where i am but fuck it! ucl is a great school. and fuck conventional paths anyway, what works for everyone or anyone might not necessarily work for you. and for now at least i don't care or am not worried that i don't know what i want to do when i graduate because i know the person i am in two years time will be different from the person i am now. i have a final series of exams from the 30th of may to the 4th of june and these are a series of experiments/oral presentations to a conference hall that will be a pass/fail grading style and the four that i have opted for are: constructing a python code to calculate the nth decimal of pi; exploring the philosophical question of the processing of measurements in scientific experiments; practical session performing gene/DNA restriction analysis & trip to the british museum to learn to recognize the major rock forming minerals & understanding the sequence of rocks associated with the evolution of a mountain belt. i think maybe at first i felt disappointed that they were more science/math-inclined than leaning towards the humanities but that is the whole point of this course i feel, to expose us to the interdisciplinary aspects & anyway challenge myself to be open to things that might not be immediately natural/easy to understand to me. i've also more or less finalized the modules i will be taking next year: gender & politics, political philosophy (nozick & rawls), intermediate law, philosophy of mind & cognitive science) for my major pathway & [either biological bases in perception and behaviour or language and cognition]. which is grafting my interest in philosophy with language and desire to make meaning out of the things i do with the scientific component of my course which ties the internal to the absolute i think, justifies the search. another thing is that i applied for a position as a transition mentor for my department not being sure if i was suitable for it because at times of course i am not the best at coping with things but i am getting better and then two or three weeks ago i got an email saying that i got the position. and then last week i got another email saying that it's a paid position which is really cool. it involves being responsible for a group of first years and helping them when they first arrive at uni and monitoring their academic progress and because i did tutoring over the past two summers in singapore i feel like that's something i can do and it's also something i can put into the university 'resume' thing so i don't have to worry about graduating having not been involved in school much. i also received an email from my programme director which says 'putting someone in charge of work placements in touch with those who have secured internships in the summer of their first year for and it seems like there are only 8 of us who have done so which is not really an indication of anything but it maybe is a good thing that i have internship plans the summer months ahead. the email from the person says 'following on from Carl’s email I just wanted to say that I am really pleased to be working with such a forward looking group of students. By getting an internship in your first year you have already proved yourselves to be highly motivated, driven, and conscientious – all qualities that employers are looking for' and i would like to be that kind of person i guess those are all things i value not for a career's sake but because the things i do mean something to me. so looking back on my first year i feel like things have gone better than could have been expected and this makes me really happy

4. 9 days to ben

—ben on skype

the other day someone said 'but when ben is here you'll forget that i'll even exist' and i wanted to say 'that isn't true' but on the way home i was thinking about it and the thing is it is true not in any way because the other person is a bad person but because and this is something i am reminded of whenever i speak to ben that he fits me in a way that i don't think anyone else has before that makes all other kinds of intimacy emotional or otherwise seem trivial and minute in comparison. it's easy to forget especially when i get busy with exams and managing other things and when it gets hard to find time to talk. "at all times anyone can be an open door" is what i was thinking when i thought about him but then you have the choice to close the door whenever you want to and i guess that's something that's not always easy to remember given the distance but it's something i do want to given the fact that reading every poem i've written in the last twelve months since i've met ben every poem i have written has been a poem about him. it's easier to be alone of course because you have less things to manage and the only person you have to be accountable to is yourself but then the things you do out of loneliness also make you want to hurt yourself and if you want to stay alive even if that's not something that's always something you want but if you want to view that as the only choice then yeah that's something to hold onto

5. eve

salted caramel double chocolate cake i baked for eve's birthday over easter break in singapore

last week i went over to eve's house with a spinach and smoked salmon salad & rosemary thyme flatbread that i baked and we brought blankets to the park outside her house and read books in the sunlight and two nights ago after having sat down for a long time outside torrington place i decided to look for eve and then we sat in the park for a long time lying on each other and talking about things. later we met again at the bus stop outside warren street and walked back to my flat and ate a tub of ben & jerry's in bed and i gave her her belated 21st birthday present which was a teapot and a birthday card and she fell asleep in my bed while i edited a video i guess i just wanted to say "happy birthday eve i love you so much" somewhere on the internet

6. internet friends

from the reading we did two months ago before easter break
basically my family in england

6. art exhibition—an aesthetic project

several months ago eve and i decided to apply for a London-based art exhibition which is called 'an aesthetic project' headed by singaporeans and putting singaporean 'artists' and 'non-artists' together in pairs to collaborate/produce pieces of art and it is finally coming together. my partner is a girl called sze who i worked and lived with in venice during the venice biennale internship two years ago so that is cool. every three weeks or so we have been meeting up to discuss our project/art thing and we have picked phrases/words/abstract concepts that seem relatable/applicable to anyone/everyone who is alive and experiences things and are both writing about them though stripping the words of anything/names/towns/places that would make it identifiable as a singular experience. interested in how the specific moves towards the general, the idea of the black swan fallacy. it is mostly the idea of twinning experiences expanding over a singular identity and are exploring this in the form of texts which is i guess the way i feel i best express myself, through 'writing'. there is a launch night of sorts on the 31st of may and if you are around it will be nice if you come down. we are getting sponsored by the singapore international foundation and the national youth council wow those are big deals i guess it seems good to be doing things like this at least once in your life

HOUSE GALLERY
70 CAMBERWELL CHURCH STREET
LONDON SE5 8QZ

7. music

here is the vinyl of mat's album 'not even doom music' that stace passed to me when she came over on sundy afternoon. two weekends ago we watched mat play at the clapham zine fest on a saturday night and again last weekend at brainlove festival

in ~2 seconds from mat riviere on Vimeo.

feel genuinely excited that mat's making music like this and then that he is someone that i know "in real life". on twitter today he posted a link to an article he wrote on the quietus which gives you more context about the songs on the album. i really liked reading that article, i feel like that's the kind of thing that's interesting to know or what i am interested in knowing when i look at a piece of art/writing/music. and that's also something i think about/talk to eve about, whether context is important or necessary when approaching a "piece of art". i feel like it definitely helps me to appreciate it more. makes it more personal. but i also feel like his songs stand alone

rowan ben and i are going for field day two weekends from now, the day after ben comes/the weekend when rowan's exams are finally done. really excited to go for a music fest with ben and also with rowan and to listen to mount kimbie / wild nothing / animal collective / how 2 dress well / daphni / everything everything / four tet / king krule / TNGHT / etc

1st june bc ben wants to see juan maclean

4th june ben & i are going for ryan hemsworth (!!!!!!)

wish i could be going for this with stace
on saturday night after most/everyone left we played the slowed summer ryan hemsworth mix and ~4/5 of us danced together in the bar at 1am that was really great

feel like i am going "all out" / going to be financially & physically/emotionally drained but / um i've worked hard this past year and / literally "you only live once"

today i said wow i can't believe we're going to venice together and he said i was just thinking about how we haven't really dated in a traditional way and every time we hang out it's been a kind of insane honeymoon do you think that's weird and i said only if you think it's weird and he said no i don't not really and i said i feel like with anyone else they wouldn't want to do things in a way i wanted to but you do and it's perfect

8. a list of other things/plans in the next few weeks:

cooking for rowan tomorrow so she doesn't need to worry about food while she prepares for her exam, meeting zhuoxuan, spring breakers with eve, flat viewing, cooking for flat with kathi, trap night at the nest, flat f [dinner? picnic?]

24th onwards:
picking ben up at the airport
BASc strawberry picnic

regression sessions with eve/max/rowan
field day music fest seeing mt kimbie
dinner with flat f
british museum
hampstead heath
matilda musical
visit laurens & vicki in brighton
exhibition opening
stu's party
future disco at corsica studios
ryan hemsworth/toro y moi at koko
BASc end of year summer ball
venice for three days biennale (!!!)
melin & marc coming down to london
ben leaving
—
packing up and moving out of dorms
going to rome & vienna at the end of june
leaving london on the 3rd of july
going to bangkok with family after getting back to singapore
starting a seven week internship
three weeks to travel before coming back to london for second year

i don't know how we are ever going to top how perfect this summer is going to be

ps if you're reading this all the way to the bottom congrats and thank you and stace & i are doing something cool together (writing-wise) so there will be more info on that but i am so happy that it's coming together and that if anyone i am doing it with her

it was bright & sunny for two days last week but this week it was all rain again / going to wake up and go to sleep for nine mire nights/get ready to play really hard & then it'll be summer for real when you get here